Sex, escape and the single that launched the Pet Shop Boys
The Pet Shop Boys didn’t quite meet in a pet shop, nor did they bond over friendly, furry animals, but on the contrary, architecture student Chris Lowe and music journalist Neil Tennant met in Chelsea Electrical on King’s Road.
Surrounded by synths and electronic equipment, the unlikely pair quickly recognised a shared affinity for the likes of Kraftwerk and Soft Cell, and only a year later, started making music together. Though their origin was a little geeky, with Tennant searching high and low for a cable for his Korg MS-10 synthesiser and finding a life-long collaborator instead, their first huge single was anything but.
The pair had such faith in their single ‘West End Girls’ that they released it twice, the first version, produced by Bobby Orlando, on Columbia Records’ Bobcat Records imprint in April 1984, with the lyrics painting a divided London experiencing class-inflicted struggle in scuzzy bars and revelling in neon lights.
When the duo signed with EMI, they re-recorded the song with producer Stephen Hague for inclusion on their first album, 1986’s Please, making it a synth-pop anthem, influenced by hip-hop rhythms and jazz-inflected melody, for a snaky, salacious, and gritty product that, according to Tennant, was “actually written to be a rap record, back in the day”.
Over the propulsive bass, the pair plunge us into the night-time economy, a shadow realm of the capital’s exuberant excess: “Too many shadows, whispering voice, faces on posters, too many choices,” Tennant hisses.
Explaining the intermingling of pleasure and paranoia, Tennant added, “It’s a moody soundscape. It’s about the city at night. It’s about boys and girls meeting to have fun and presumably to bond [laughs]. It’s about sex. It’s paranoid. At the same time, its message is sort of like ‘Dancing in the Streets’, it’s about escape into the city at night, which is emblematic of pleasure.”
Like many good relationships, the success of the single was a slow build, with the first release a club hit in the States, as well as in some European countries, but after moving to EMI and noting a disappointing reception to their first official single, ‘Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)’, the re-release of ‘West End Girls’ slipped into the UK Singles Chart at number 80.
The haunting, phantasmagorical melody was perfect for an October release, when the short days and dark, dreary nights leave much to the imagination, and within eight weeks, the re-release reached the top of the chart, maintaining the golden ticket for two weeks.
The bubbling inner-city pressure in the thick, spinning tune can also be attributed to the famous TS Eliot poem, The Waste Land, which rings with a similiar haunting disillusionment and despair imbued by the anonymity of the metropolis: “Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many”.
Inflect this with that good-for-nothing, moody 1980s sensibility, and what do you get? “Sometimes you’re better off dead, there’s a gun in your hand, and it’s pointing at your head”; sex and escape indeed.
