Flashback Friday - The Girls Are Back In Town

I've planned for a long time to write about the Pet Shop Boys on Flashback Friday, but I just couldn't figure out where to start. There's so much to write about those two guys that it would fill pages and pages of this blog. So instead, I'm gonna do something else. I will review some of their best songs, and there's no better one to start with than their first smash-hit West End Girls.

Written in the early 80ies by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe aka Pet Shop Boys, West End Girls was all about London's divide between working-class East End and the more cosmopolitan West End. Some claim that it's not about London at all, rather about Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, where Tennant attended a boys school in the East End, and talked a lot about the girls school located in the West End. Thruth is... I don't know!

There are some historical references in the lyrics; for example "From Lake Geneva To The Finland Station" refers to the train route that Vladimir Lenin took when he was smuggled to Russia in World War I. Neil Tennant, who has a degree in history, later showed more interest in Russian history when the boys recorded a new soundtrack to silent film Battleship Potemkin.

West End Girls was first released in 1984 through Bobby Orlando's label, and was not that big a hit in the UK by then. In the Netherlands, Belgium, France and USA, it became a minor dance hit. When the band later signed to Parlophone and after their first major label single Opportunities was released, but hardly acknowledged, they decided to re-release West End Girls. Producer Stephen Hague gave the track a rework, slowing it down from its faster 1984 version. It hit No. 1 in the UK and stayed there for two weeks, and was also No. 1 on Billboard for one week. Even in Norway and New Zealand, it hit the top spot, and it was a top-5 hit in other European countries and Australia; this also helped the album Please to climb the top-10 in various countries.

Here's some trivia about the song:

- the inspiration for West End Girls came from Grandmaster Flash's song The Message; influences were also taken from TS Eliot's poem The Wasteland
- it won the 1987 BRIT Award for Best Single
- just a few seconds into the song, you can hear a women's voice say "...is that Sting?". This refers to Stephen Hague who was just outside the studio during the recording, and he apparently looked a bit like Mr. Sumner
- the song was planned to appear in a scene of cult-movie Donnie Darko, but was ditched because of budget troubles
- it was used in an epsiode of Moonlighting (1986) and The Simpsons (2003)
- Robbie Williams used the line "From Lake Geneva To The Finland Station" on his 2006 song Viva Life On Mars

Finally, here are some of the various mixes for West End Girls:

West End Girls (Original Epic 7 Inch) 4:09
West End Girls (Original Extended Version) 7:50 Min.
West End Girls (Bobby O Version) 5:31
West End Girls (Dance Mix) 6:29 Min.
West End Girls (Razormaid 10" Version) 7:02 Min.
West End Girls (Shep Pettibone Remix) 9:04 Min.
West End Girls (Remix 86 Single Version) 3:25
Pet Shop Boys (Extended) (B-Side from West End Girls 12") 5:16
West End Girls (DJ Hell 2003 Remix) 8:39

http://www.petshopboys.co.uk/

And here's the video:

And a live performance from 1986:

Hope you liked this first installment. A Flashback Friday about Opportunities (Let's Make Lots Of Money) will follow in the near future. Let me know what you think about it.