The 100 greatest UK No 1s: No 1, Pet Shop Boys – West End Girls

West End Girls is a lens on to a glamorous demimonde. Primped young women and hungry young men meet in a corner of London that is starting to gentrify, although still seedy enough to expose the transactions behind the flirtation. You can almost hear their egos rattle as they use each other for sex and drugs, second-hand cool and sly oneupmanship, parsing the social codes in a suspicious, cinematic rush: “Have you got it? Do you get it? If so, how often? Which do you choose, a hard or soft option?” But a scene’s beautiful people are rarely as captivating as the wallflower at the orgy. After all, the West End girls and East End boys are doomed to a dead-end world. The real glamorous demimonde opened up by West End Girls is that of the Pet Shop Boys, perceptive night owls who make a virtue of being outsiders yet understand the allure of the charade.

Thirty-six years on, their debut single still pulses with that beguiling ambiguity; the exact emotion of Chris Lowe’s glacial chords and abrupt beat, and of Neil Tennant’s alternately wry and rhapsodic observations, impossible to pinpoint. Although Tennant cited Grandmaster Flash’s The Message as an influence on the rapped verses, West End Girls isn’t so much social commentary on London’s burgeoning yuppie class as it is an impressionist marvel, in which lust, naivety, disco and opaque references to Lenin rush by as if caught in the reflection of a bus window. TS Eliot’s The Waste Land was another influence. Years later, Tennant said he had never understood the poem, “but the poetry of it, the different voices talking about strange and disparate and even exotic things, is completely riveting and makes you want to read it again and again … hoping to find new meaning”. Some urbane listeners may have recognised themselves in the song, whether the flirtatious insider or worldly observer. But it is kids who send songs to No 1, and West End Girls was an aperture on to a mysterious adult world, the Pet Shop Boys’ distanced framing as captivating as the picture.

Once West End Girls had topped charts from Finland to New Zealand, Tennant said his favourite question to be asked was: “Did you always dream of being a star?” He loved the idealism of it. It was a question straight out of the 1950s music press, and a funny reading of what the Pet Shop Boys actually were. Although they quickly settled into their distinct roles, Tennant the wit and Lowe his sulky foil, they presented a disarmingly blank canvas: sombre where their synth-pop peers were outrageous; hi-NRG’s lowest-energy ambassadors. (The press swiftly pegged their reserve as rudeness.) Tennant was a Bowie fan, and fluent in pop-star image from working as an editor at Smash Hits. Yet the Pet Shop Boys cultivated an interior mythology, one that stoked their alien appeal.

It took a few years for them to arrive at it, although Tennant and Lowe’s first meeting, in a hi-fi shop on Kings Road in 1981, suggests a perfect situational determinism, foreshadowing the band’s sophistication and their perpetual “utterly contemporary” spirit. (Tennant once said the Pet Shop Boys could only exist thanks to the invention of the Fairlight II synthesiser.) At the time, Lowe was still an architecture student, Tennant popping pop star egos at “ver Hits” with a withering “purlease” and an art for sticky nicknames. Curiously, for someone at pop culture’s coal face (he had previously worked at Marvel Comics), he also had a failed career as a bedroom folkie. This was conclusively extinguished when he met Lowe, his “hatred and detestation” for such music, said Tennant, “quite beyond belief”.

Lowe told Tennant to make his lyrics “more sexy, more current”, and for his part wrote as if Tchaikovsky “could compose through me”. Despite that grandiose spirit-summoning, their only aim was to make a record that could be bought on import at the Record Shack, the Berwick Street institution where they bought singles by Lime and Sharon Redd, and absolutely anything produced by Bobby Orlando. When Tennant was sent to New York to interview Sting, he arranged to meet Orlando in person, and the producer offered to work with the duo. It should have been the perfect match: recording with their hero in the city that turned out other core Pet Shop Boys influences like Afrika Bambaataa and Patrick Cowley. A first version of West End Girls was released in spring 1984. It became a minor hit in the US in west coast clubs and on east coast student radio, and in Ibiza (to Lowe’s delight). It was stocked at Record Shack, on Canadian import. But it flopped at home.

They were lucky it did. Alternate versions of established hits always sound jarring, but the “UHH!” vocal stabs (possibly lifted from a James Brown track) that puncture the middle eight thrust unbecomingly, while Tennant’s otherwise weedy delivery jars against the brittle production. It gives too much away. In their debut TV appearance, on Luxembourg’s Hit des Clubs in 1984, Tennant wears a baggy jumper over an untucked shirt and pumps his fist to the beat, a sight as incongruous as the Queen in a grass-stained football strip. They both move far too much, which is to say at all. Failure saved them from serving up an undercooked classic.

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Back in England, they hired a new manager. The imposing Tom Watkins extricated them from an expensive arrangement with Orlando and signed them to EMI. Alongside American producer Stephen Hague (chosen for his work on Malcolm McLaren’s Madame Butterfly), Tennant and Lowe transformed the song into its stately, shivering final form. The seams of their influences no longer showed, and their limitations were galvanised. Tennant’s voice, plumped with backing vocals from Helena Springs, was now as potent as triple-distilled gin; he purrs “West End girls” as if lowering a fur coat on to bare shoulders. The “UHH!” stabs were replaced with gothic vocal samples and an ersatz trumpet solo that gleamed with desolation. They refined their strait-laced take on loose-limbed funk, though kept enough bounce to earn a spot on legendary black music show Soul Train.

The result is perfect pop equilibrium that almost made Dusty Springfield crash her car the first time she heard it. The singular West End Girls runs on intoxicating sobriety; the promise of thrill coupled with an implacable sense of tragedy; the sumptuous pleasure of being right where you ought to be and the paranoia that everyone knows you don’t belong there at all. It casts an outsider eye on heterosexual desire, how self-consciousness complicates innocent lust; the fine line between punishment and pleasure (“Just you wait till I get you home”), and the limits of tastefulness. Unlike his outre synth-pop peers, Tennant never winks. He doesn’t so much as blink. Here, he says, you look, opening a window on to an ever-renewing view.