PET SHOP BOYS – “West End Girls”
Talk about intelligence in pop and you quickly find yourself on slippery ground. Behind every successful record there’s someone, somewhere with a good brain but the smarts required vary by case: initiative, speed of thought, low cunning, political skill, not to mention a host of effects and reactions so canny and quick we handwave them away as “instinct”. And that’s without even touching on composition, studio skill, technique…
So if I said something – and I very well might – like “Neil Tennant is the most intelligent man in pop”, let’s be clear that what I’m talking about is a kind of intelligence critics like me are comfortable with, understand, perhaps envy: an unshowy, wide-ranging sort of brain that in another life would have ended up writing minor novels or maybe reviewing them. An intelligence nurtured and to an extent measured by education: “West End Girls”, for instance, is apparently inspired by T S Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Now, writing a song inspired by The Waste Land is not an inherently noble endeavour. What matters is the use the inspiration’s put to: how well the one aspect of intelligence meshes with all the others. Which in Tennant’s case are highly developed and probably a lot more relevant. With one flop single (whose B-Side was, naturellement, about fashion and politics in Vichy France) he and Chris Lowe needed to get this one right.
So “West End Girls” in its Steven Hague incarnation hits a number of bases. It was a novelty record if you wanted it to be (hitting the top in January, the kindest month for such things). At another angle it was a single like “Ghost Town” or “Mouldy Old Dough”, sunk deep into its times. At yet another it was one of the most cryptically affecting pop songs you’d ever hear.
Novelty first: the Pet Shop Boys’ approach to becoming pop stars was like some kind of record industry martial arts. They took the things they knew would prevent them from being successful and emphasised them as much as they possibly could. They aren’t natural performers, so they turned it into a barely-moving, never-smiling gimmick and announced – before anyone would have cared one way or the other – that they wouldn’t play live. Tennant’s reedy, punctilious singing voice was an absurd vehicle for pop, so on “West End Girls” he makes it still more so by rapping the verses. And while the mid-80s were a good time to be a thirtysomething performer, Tennant carried himself like a man still older, walking through the video in a black overcoat like a dispassionate phantom.
If the “East End”, “West End” stuff could be a lot of places that video puts us squarely in London, and I hear “West End Girls” as a London song. But not any London and not just London. “In a West End town”, after all, suggests “West End” as a stand-in for a state of mind, working like uptown and downtown do in pop. But what kind of state? The phrase also brings to mind the Wild West, and the chaos and hustle in the lyrics point to a city where things are breaking down, structures and meaning replaced with an endless sell.
The city’s dissolution is mirrored in the lyric’s fracture – and this is where The Waste Land comes in, Tennant supposedly borrowing its juggling of narrative voices. It’s a trick he’s fully absorbed, and pulled quite often – most effectively on “Kings Cross” and “DJ Culture” – and what it does is thicken a song with ambiguity as well as make it seem broader in scope. I called Tennant’s vocals on the verses “rapping” but they work like a cross between commentary and patter, now detached from the story they’re selling, now leaning into it – “How much have YOU got?” (The contemporary track “West End Girls” is most like is Murray Head’s “One Night In Bangkok”, which walks a similar, knowing line to a fraction of the effect.)
“West End Girls” mood is emotional dislocation, a sense of being a stranger somewhere you thought you knew – a city, a culture, your own head. The music isn’t so dramatic – synthpop taken at walking pace, drum machines and electro bassline low-key but insistent, synths rolling coldly out across snatches of footfalls and street chatter. And a reminder of when we are – a horn solo and gospel backing vox, the trimmings of modern pop turned into just more found city sound.
And yes this can be every city in every nation at every time – the flux of emergent consequences when you pack people together – but it also specifically is London in the mid-80s, the years of Big Bang, wine bars, braces, Canary Wharf, all that Thatcher boom iconography. 1986 was her zenith: political opposition in civil war, unions routed, privatisation program in full commercial swing, and now the old press and banking establishments in retreat. The Pet Shop Boys would write a whole album that reflected and dissected those times better than any other pop: “West End Girls”, written years before, still catches something of their glassy hunger.
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Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 3,098 views • Share/Save
It seems to be one of the stranger taboos of pop to show fondness for music which is only 3 or 4 years in the past whereas harking back 20 years is considered fair enough.
Even if West End Girls seemed to be a 1982 song in 1986 I don’t see why that’s bothersome. Was it not also slightly ahead of time? There are several samples on the track also Tennant and Lowe like New Order were among the first to pick up on how cutting edge dance music would soon merge with mainstream pop.
I would say one of PSBs attributes is that they took the template of song-based electro at a time when it was falling out of use and ran with it. Surely of all artists PSB have fully harnessed that template and made records that are dancable, poigniant, symphonic, filmic.
The groups who got there first meanwhile moved towards transatlantic R&B (The Human League) second-rate stadium rock (Depeche Mode) yuppie pomp (Heaven 17).
PSB simply realised the sound of 1981/82 had wider possibilities.
I say good for them.
Re 59, 64: There’s also the “…bought you drinks and brought you flowers…” part on “What Have I Done To Deserve This?” which may be the best one of all!
The first band I ever really loved, even if my tastes are somewhat different now!
Can’t fault this, and the only possible reason for me not giving it 10 is that there’s another PSB song which deserves that accolade more…
I just missed “getting” this by about 3 years but TBH I don’t rate it as a choon.
It pisses all over the dross we’ve had to plough through recently but it’s just not tuneful enough for me. “Rent” is an absolute classic, and I reckon “Suburbia” and “Opportunities” were better than this.
Whenever I think of this song, I remember the first time I heard it – just before Christmas in 1984, when I was working on the yearbook after school and had the radio with me as company…this song emanated and surrounded me, this hypnotic thing that wasn’t like anything I had heard before. It certainly wasn’t British rap (that would be Captain Sensible, Wham! or Adam Ant first anyway); it was more spoken word poetry, with very subtle rhymes and long mysterious pauses.
The city is violent, or at least our narrator sees it as so – ‘call the police there’s a *madman* around’ he says, about a real madman, about a pop star? ‘Running down, underground‘ (there I was thinking the dive bar was a basement bar and for all I know it is – now I *know* it means into the subway to escape)…to a west end town. Now there was a problem for me – where was the west end? East end I understood immediately – Cockney territory, rough, especially rough if maybe you don’t fit in…but the west end? Wasn’t that where all the movie and stage shows were? What makes the narrator want to (cough) go west anyway?
Because it’s not the east, of course. The east is male, the west is female, or at least feminine. When he sings/says ‘West end girls’ it feels cosy, as if he is at home, whereas with ‘east end boys’ it’s a case of the raw as opposed to the cooked. Too many choices, too many whispering voices, too much of The City and The Man if I can put it that way. The song see-saws between the two sides, two directions, in a way that no Londoner (that I know of) could – this song could only have been written by someone new to the city, who has seen the east and west and definitely chosen the west.
When I first heard this, if anyone had told me I one day would be living in that very west end town he mentions (Fulham, where the video was shot) I would have been amazed, astounded. Yet I have been here for nearly a year and understand the song much better now – and I still like it in its original version, though both are great. When I think of this song it is like a movie, however, that expands from one city to the whole of Europe, the whole world – and so it gets to #1 in the U.S., to the equal astonishment of the PSBs as to me. New Pop is reborn and it’s a 10…
OMG I am watching the video right now and they’re walking down North End Road at the start!
Almost my first exposure to the East End/West End tension was a passage in The Story of Pop magazine describing the Small Faces’ sound as “the cocky pillhead swagger of East End boys “up West” for a Saturday night at the Flamingo Club”. A resounding phrase!
Oh, and possibly not unconnected to the appeal of this song in late ‘85/early 86: by this time the BBC’s new soap EastEnders had become a national obsession in its first year. Someone ran the London marathon carrying a banner reading “Dirty Den for Number Ten”, and by summer they had the mad idea of incorporating hit records into the storyline – so mad that I’m bunny-embargoed from going any further!
I’m sure it was around this time that Dirty Den was front page news in a certain tabloid newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch. Possibly because he’d been shot (Den that is, not Murdoch). Even though I’d only just started senior school, I can distinctly remember thinking ‘This is ridiculous. He’s a fictional character. Why is he on the front page?’.
Much as I love the group and the song, its only slight drawback for me is that it’s just a bit too redolent of its time. I’d give it 8, not least because there are stronger PSB songs that didn’t make it to number one.
Re #81 You sure that’s the North End Road? I grew up in Fulham and, despite lots of freeze framing, I’m having a hard time locating that shot with the road I know/knew.
Hmm – according to Wiki it’s Berwick Street. Oh well…
First rule of pop visual direction spike: if in doubt, it’s Berwick Street
The same Berwick St, Ian Brown rides his bicycle in the F.E.A.R. video.
#83 No it was the revelation that he was the father of Susan Tully’s character’s baby that was making the headlines. It was around this time that I vowed never to watch a full episode of the wretched programme and I’ve not yet succumbed despite a formidable Eve in my wife.
Of course we’re only a few months away from “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster” at this point.
It looks more like North End Road to me than Berwick St.; but then I sometimes have an allergic reaction to Berwick St. Certainly Tennant lived in the area soon after this was a hit…
“The weirdest thing though was when, on the escalator on Fulham Broadway station, someone had written my name and address on stickers and stuck them all the way down. Printed labels.” – Neil Tennant on strange stalkers, Guardian 19 October 2003
ah, so C*rter USM’s “you took me to a restaurant, FULHAM BROADWAY” in their version of rent wasn’t just another bad pun, but actually where Mr Tennants hung out.
The seminal Thai restaurant, The Blue Elephant was in Fulham Broadway IIRC. Pretty expensive as well. On my jaunts to Stamford Bridge, I would eat at the Wimpy in North End Road, later I switched to Ronald’s Golden Arches.
The Blue Elephant is still there. The Wimpy is long gone alas, put out of business by the McDonald’s over the road.
Just popping in to say that, although as with many of the number ones around this time I’d never knowingly heard it before, in this case I think it’s terrific. Not 10 terrific but a well-deserved 9.
#92 but Wimpy and McDonalds co-existed for years! I blame gastropubs.
Going off-topic somewhat, but my first experience of Wimpy must have been around 1971. My Dad was stationed at RAF Waddington, and my Mum would take me into nearby Lincoln to have regular support shoe fittings (weak ankles). After the fittings, she would take me to Wimpy for a hamburger and chips with a milkshake. Served on a plate, with a knife and fork. The milkshake was served in a tall glass with a paper straw. By a waitress! The table was glass-topped with white plastic salt and pepper shakers with snowflakes on and those tomato-shaped squeezy ketchup dispensers. It certainly felt like an event to go to Wimpy back then. Mum even cut what seemed to my 5 year old eyes, this enormous hamburger in half. I would have one half and she, the other with her cup of “frothy coffee”. The word “cappuchino” still must have only been bandied about in That London in those days. Tell kids that now and they’d scarcely believe you.
The Wimpy on North End Road was like that with food on plates and (rather shabby-looking) waiters. Then McDonald’s paraded into town across the road with their polystyrene boxes and not-serving-tea and our world changed.
the thought of Wimpy always brings a smile to my face with memories of the ‘Bender in a bun’
Our Wimpy in Coulsdon just got replaced by “Valley Burger”, which promises “the altarnative takeaway”. I felt a bit sad even though I would never in a hundred years have actually visited the Wimpy.
Dad started taking my brother and I to Wimpy now and then (whenever my Grandad wasn’t cooking Sunday lunch which was rare) around this time I think so I visited 3 or 4 in the Middx. area by the end of the 80s. iirc he always had the International Grill. I did love their strawberry sundaes.
Sad to hear about the Wimpy in Coulsdon. There’s still one on George Street in Croydon, with both waiter service and bender brunch (iirc).
My favourite pop Wimpy reference: “We went to a Wimpy bar but it wasn’t all that nice” from Television Personalities’ Smashing Time.
Lex at 55: for what it’s worth I found West End Girls to be far too pleased with itself (especially ‘from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station’ ie “I studied history, dontcha know!”) when it arrived – Love Comes Quickly was the PSB hit that tuned me into them, with the warmth of its minor chords (best since Architecture And Morality), and “just when you least expect it, just what you least expect” which is a killer line.
Tom, Suburbia never sounded like the suburbia I knew either, which I’m guessing is much the same as yours. It probably means something else entirely in the north east. Without googling it, the lyric sounds a lot like Suede (bad thing) in my head.
Oh no, I love that line, it scans superbly – and it made me laugh when I read (was it here?) that ‘Lake Geneva’ and ‘The Finland Station’ were also bars on Gerrard Street, 1985.
I did get the too-pleased-with-itself feeling from the ‘All your stopping, stalling and starting, who d’you think you are? Joe Stalin?’ line though, but fortunately that was excised when it counted.
#101 “the lyric sounds a lot like suede” i.e. it’s about dogs!
i think the reason ’suburbia’ doesn’t really sound like suburbia is that it was apparently inspired by ’suburbia’ – penolope spheeris’ (pretty great) film about punks in suburban los angeles. the suburbia of the film is half abandoned tract developments falling into the desert rather than 30’s semis and being a bit bored. the odd lyrical tone of the film seems to have made it into the music but (apart from the “run with the dogs” line) not the lyrics, which are a bit sub-weller (and yes, also suede-y) – (“where’s a policeman when you need one to blame the colour tv” is particularly awful – the word “colour” is so obviously in there just to make it scan that it annoys me every time). anyway, that’s why the song feels a bit disjoined I think, though i do really like it nonetheless.
@95
Going to a Wimpy seemed very exotic to me as well we went to one a few years running in the early 70s on the way to our week’s holiday in Weymouth – I used to have a to me unbelievably exciting cocktail type thing for pudding which I thought was about as good as food got as a 6 year old.
I think there was one in High Wycombe too which we went in for a treat a couple of times when we went shopping there and then didnt go back for about 10 years or so started till I started frequenting another Wimpy in my late teens for a bit and realised just how unglamourous these places really were!
I’ll never forget my mum complaining to the waiter in the Wimpy on North End Road that her Shanty Brunch tasted bad and she wanted another one instead. It was mortifying, English people just didn’t do that sort of thing.