3 October 1993
You can write songs as brilliant as ‘West End Girls’, ‘Suburbia’, ‘Love Comes Quickly’, ‘Rent’, ‘Being Boring’ and ‘What Have I Done To Deserve This?’, but wear designer traffic cones as hats (for ‘Can You Forgive Her?’) and then cover a Village People hit and all that gets forgotten. ‘Go West’, for which the headgear of choice is a sort of upturned patterned salad bowl, didn’t fully kill their career—they still have UK top ten hits after this, though ‘Go West’ is the Pet Shop Boys’ last ever Irish top ten hit, let alone number one. What it did kill was their relevancy and supremacy: never again will a new Pet Shop Boys track be an event release or automatic contender for the UK number one spot. If there’s such a thing as a Pyrrhic hit single, this is it.
It might seem unfair to judge a record by its hats, and ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ was actually a strong, acerbic track about someone seemingly conflicted in their sexuality, but ‘Go West’ really has the inescapable whiff of gimmickry about it. True, there’s something surprisingly and inexplicably lovely about a male voice choir barking out “I LOVE YOU!” and “I WANT YOU!” followed by Neil Tennant’s gleefully arch “How could I disagree?” But the music is the sort of techno-lite keyboard burbling of a ’90s computer game, the competing voices of the male choir and soul diva (representing a sort of East meets West) get wearying, and any potential for classic PSB wry observation—which a song about social and sexual liberation clearly allows—is overwhelmed long before the key change rolls in like a tank division. Sadly, here’s where my interest in the Pet Shop Boys, at their peak one of the great British pop acts, goes south.
