West End Girls – Pet Shop Boys

Yes I know! Not seemingly a natural fit for The Sturgeons right?

I remember listening to this on the radio one day and thinking : we could knock that out in one rehearsal.
I took it to band and they all looked at me like I was having some sort of episode, but within 15 minutes we were all over it, and within an hour we’d got all the way through. That doesn’t happen often.

Lyrics

I hear this song as a bittersweet homage to inner city living, particularly London.
I’m really a towny myself. I like the smell of fresh rain on concrete, it smells like… home.
They say that Neil Tennant was inspired by Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”. If you haven’t heard that song, stop what you’re doing, and listen to it.
But while ‘The Message’ paints a pretty clear picture, it’s not one I recognise. It smells like a run down community centre full of kids with no hope. I’m more a ‘baggy trousers’ kind of kid. There is hope, and there is joy, we’re British you know.

It might be the video for West End Girls, but the song leaves me with the image of the inside of a quiet motorway cafe at 3AM. Brightly lit, but empty.

We imagine the West End Girl’s in their Jimmy Choo’s. Shoulder straps deliberately slipping as they try to catch the eye of one of the East End boys. In her mind she hears the delicious admonishment of her city banking parents and plays it over, along with the vivid visions of his rough hands on her thighs. Tonights the night Sophia, I’m on a mission, hold my clutch bag.

He on the other hand is too dumb to know that he could play this well, and his whole life might be different. Instead he just wonders whether she’s had a Brazilian or not because you know what they say about posh girls? They go like a Subaru Impreza!

The stand out lyric for me is ‘from Lake Geneva to The Finland Station’.
The Finland Station is a bit like Checkpoint Charlie. A place that stood on the border in the cold war. Spies and double agents were smuggled through there at the dead of night in the boots of rusty Tranbant’s. It adds a nice Le Carre glamour to the whole thing.

Neil Tennant sort of does a camp William Shatner on this. But it’s actually deceptively difficult to do. He is actually singing it. Sort of how Morrisey is hard to copy. It’s a certain style that you don’t fully appreciate until you try and do it yourself.
Not a bit of vibrato in his voice in the whole song, just ‘character’.

Music

Not much to see here.. that’s why we knocked it out in one rehearsal.
That’s not a disparaging remark really.. I mean I prefer chip butties to Coq-Au-Vin.

The song itself is in Em, which is strange for a keyboard song.
But this being the case, it gives me a great opportunity to throw in a completely improvised guitar solo. Because I mean you know, it’s E minor.

It’s disguised nicely with minor 7ths and what not, but it’s basically a i, iv, v. There’s a little turnaround bit (west.. end.. girls) which is kind of chromatic, but that’s it.

One nice bit to mention is the backing vocals that have been put in the distance with reverb. I think she’s singing ‘how much do you need’, but there’s a bit that I always thought was question and answer.
Neil Tennant sings “Which do you choose A hard or soft option” and I always thought the backing singer was saying ‘Hard Option Please!’.. Shows where my mind goes.