West End Girls - 2018 Remaster

"West End Girls" is a journey through the club scene in London, where Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe spent many evenings. The glamorous West End is where the action was, contrasting with the rougher East End. There are a number of themes running through the lyric, which Tennant wrote, but a key idea is nightlife escape, the same thing Earth, Wind & Fire sing about in "Boogie Wonderland." In 2020, Tennant told The Guardian: "It's about the city at night. It's about boys and girls meeting to have fun and presumably to bond. It's about sex. It's paranoid."

One of the group's favorite hangouts gets a mention in the lines: There's a madman around Running down underground to a dive bar in a West End town The Kings Head and Dive Bar was the Chinatown section of London; upstairs was The Kings Head, and in the basement was the Dive Bar, which Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe haunted. "It was a very funny place where they used to play soundtracks or Barbra Streisand on a vinyl record player," Tennant told Phil Marriott. "There would be just a few guys singing. Then it got quite trendy when students started to go there because it was such a funny and unusual place." The place closed in 2004.

This was the breakout hit for Pet Shop Boys, a global smash that went to #1 in both America and their native UK. The hit version, thought, wasn't released until a year after the original. The group wrote the song in 1983 before they had a record deal. Neil Tennant was a writer for the UK music magazine Smash Hits, and used his position to get an audience with the American producer Bobby O (Bobby Orlando), who was on the cutting edge of synthesizer-based dance music - the kind Tennant wanted to make. Bobby O agreed to produce the group; they recorded "West End Girls" and got a deal with Epic Records to release it as a single. Issued in 1984, it did well in France and Belgium, but had little impact elsewhere. They parted ways with Bobby O on acrimonious terms and had to honor their contract by sitting out a year. In 1985, they signed with EMI and released "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots Of Money)" as their first single on the label. It stiffed, but they still had hopes for "West End Girls" and re-recorded the song with producer Stephen Hague, who made it less clubby and gave it a slow build that added some depth and made the song more foreboding. This version was a huge hit, topping the UK chart in January 1986, and reaching #1 in America in May. The group went on to become one of the most successful and enduring British pop groups of their time.