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Bobby Orlando’s tracks weren’t exactly trans-Atlantic hits, and he was happy to meet a British writer who was enthusiastic about his music. Orlando agreed to supply the Pet Shop Boys, and so Tennant and Lowe returned to New York shortly thereafter to report some songs with Lowe. One of those songs was “West End Girls,” an impressionistic free-floating account of urban London glamor and squalor. Tennant’s East End boys are the brutish young men of working-class London; his West End women are the monied younger women drawn to those boys. For a few years, the Pet Shop Boys weren’t actually a band; they have been more of a theoretical proposition. Tennant and Lowe would put track ideas to tape, however they weren’t out performing. In 1983, Smash Hits sent Tennant to New York to interview the Police, a bunch whose music he didn’t much like.
But Tennant is also clearly a lover and a connoisseur of pop music — someone who thinks and feels long and exhausting concerning the sounds he’s listening to in the world, who processes those sounds and translates them into one thing else. It’s interesting that every one three of those PSB songs are from the identical album, 1987’s Actually. I wonder whether that album was especially popular in India.
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In its final kind, “West End Girls” is a wealthy, layered pop track that also retains a few of its strange, stilted otherness of the original. Neil Tennant … Read More
