West End Girls, 40 years on
I thought about trying to find a technology angle to this post. Maybe a droll commentary on algorithmic music selections, or AI-penned pop songs, or some such whimsy. But then I decided to cool my boots and just write about something I love.
It's been in draft for a while, so I was slightly miffed when The Guardian's Laura Snapes got her own Pet Shop Boys 40th anniversary piece in early [shakes fist at proper writer]. It's a splendid interview though, full of the sort of wit and wry observations you'd expect (if you're a PSB obsessive like me).
Electronic drum roll...
The original version of the Pet Shop Boys' groundbreaking debut single 'West End Girls' was released on this very day, 40 years ago.
The initial release, produced by Bobby Orlando, is rawer and flows less smoothly than the better-known Stephen Hague produced version that topped the UK and US charts in 1986. But the main ingredients are all there: Neil Tennant's spoken word vocal and rhyming couplets, Chris Lowe's haunting, minimalist synthesiser backdrop.
To me, 'West End Girls' is one of those rare timeless songs; it sounds simultaneously like a product of its era and as if it could have been written yesterday.
It slightly blows my mind to think that in 1984, if you were to cast back forty years, you'd be listening to songs from the Second World War. And while 1944 may have produced enduring classics like 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas' and 'The Trolley Song' they were hardly bothering the pop charts of 1984.
Yet here we are in 2024 and 'West End Girls' continues to have contemporary relevance. Last year Sleaford Mods released a cover version, and Drake sampled it on his song 'All the Parties'. It's impossible to listen to Olly Alexander's 'Dizzy' – this year's UK Eurovision entry – and not think of the Pet Shop Boys.
Is 'West End Girls' pop? Is it hip-hop? Is it art? To some it was the first rap record to top the US charts (even with Tennant referencing Grandmaster Flash's 'The Message' as an influence, this particular angle feels a bit appropriate-y), to others it has offered ripe parody fodder.
To celebrate 'West End Girls' 40th birthday 🎂 I've picked out a few PSB vignettes to chew on.
Guns N' actual Roses
One of the more unexpected snippets in Chris Heath's superlative book Pet Shop Boys Versus America – an in-depth account of their 1991 tour of the States – is the fact that Guns N' Roses' lead singer Axl Rose turns up at one of their shows, professes his sadness that 'Being Boring' wasn't part of the set, and sends flowers and champagne the next day.
Not only is this surprising given the difference in musical styles, but the homophobic lyrics on GNR's Appetite for Destruction suggest Rose might not have been comfortable at a gig with two gay men centre stage. Testament to the transformational power of art?
Rose even cites 'My October Symphony', from PSB's 1990 album Behaviour, as helping shape the never-ending power ballad 'November Rain'.
PSB join the MCU
It's fairly well known that Neil Tennant was assistant editor at Smash Hits before pop superstardom beckoned. Less well known is the fact he was Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics in the UK in the 1970s.
You can see every comic he edited on this extensive Marvel database and according to Wikipedia was responsible for "...anglicising the dialogue of the comics to suit British readers, and for indicating where women needed to be redrawn more decently for the British editions."
When I used to collect comics as a teenager I had a few of the Tennant-edited UK editions. They were a strange mix of a British-style comic (with a Beano-like collection of stories in each issue, as opposed to the one hero/one story format of US comics) and a magazine format. Tennant even managed to feature interviews with Marc Bolan and Alex Harvey.
Soundtracking The Clothes Show
In the 1980s and 90s, one of the more regular places to hear PSB was as the theme to BBC's The Clothes Show. The long-running fashion programme used an instrumental version of In the Night, the b-side of 'Opportunities', as its opening credits.
The full version is a much more interesting listen, its subject matter being the relatively obscure subculture from 1940s occupied France known as les Zazous.
Here's Neil Tennant's explainer from his book One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem, describing les Zazous as:
"young jazz and swing music fans in Nazi-occupied France who dressed in loud clothes and wore their hair long, attracting the disapproval of not only the Vichy and German authorities, but also members of the resistance for their rejection of the serious issues of the day in favour of dancing in clubs and other dissolute behaviour. There was something both admirable and despicable about them, which intrigued me."
I'm sure there *must* be other TV shows that took their themes from songs about Parisian life under the Third Reich, but I'm struggling to think of any.
Pop and politics
I've written previously about pop music not always getting the credit it deserves, often pigeonholed as frivolous or lightweight.
I didn't talk much about my passion for PSB while I was at university as I'd probably have been divebombed by (yawn) Nirvana fans, or scolded for not referencing something more "serious".
But the Pet Shop Boys have always been political. They took a stand against Section 28 while it was still unsafe to do so, and petitioned for Alan Turing's pardon long before it was mainstream.
Whether it's the quiet devastation of 'Being Boring' highlighting the AIDS epidemic ("All the people I was kissing, Some are here and some are missing, In the nineteen-nineties"), protesting ID cards on 'Integral', commenting on the first Gulf War on 'DJ Culture' and the second on 'I'm With Stupid', there's been a steady stream of subversion in much of their output.
See you in 2064
So much about music has changed since 1984. Different formats, different technology, different consumer habits, never mind the ways in which culture and society has shifted.
Without a Top of the Pops equivalent, I don’t know where today’s 10-year-olds get their musical water cooler moments, as I did when two stern men with a synthesiser appeared on a screen in my living room in the mid-80s. It’s not TikTok or YouTube.
While I'm very much looking forward to Nonetheless, PSB's imminently-arriving new album, it's difficult to imagine it having the impact, or matching the success and longevity, of 'West End Girls'.
To round off, I'll quote the closing words from another Laura Snapes penned piece, when The Guardian crowned 'West End Girls' the greatest UK No.1 of all time in 2020.
And I thought I was a fan.
The result is perfect pop equilibrium that almost made Dusty Springfield crash her car the first time she heard it. The singular West End Girls runs on intoxicating sobriety; the promise of thrill coupled with an implacable sense of tragedy; the sumptuous pleasure of being right where you ought to be and the paranoia that everyone knows you don’t belong there at all. It casts an outsider eye on heterosexual desire, how self-consciousness complicates innocent lust; the fine line between punishment and pleasure (“Just you wait till I get you home”), and the limits of tastefulness. Unlike his outre synth-pop peers, Tennant never winks. He doesn’t so much as blink. Here, he says, you look, opening a window on to an ever-renewing view.
💿 Thank you for reading