“West End Girls” by Pet Shop Boys

Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls" first crept out in April 1984, with Bobby Orlando producing, on Bobcat Records, an imprint of Columbia. That version became a club hit in the United States and parts of Europe, but Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe weren't finished with it. Once they signed to EMI they cut it again with Stephen Hague for their first album, Please, and the new take, out in October 1985, went to number one in both Britain and America in 1986.

What made it stick was that strange, cool voice. The vocal half-talks its way through the verses over slinking synths, closer to rap than to crooning, and it was among the very first records built on spoken-word delivery to top the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, though whether it counts as rap still starts arguments. The words deal with class and the grind of inner-city London life, with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land hovering somewhere in the background.

The honors piled up: Best Single at the 1987 Brit Awards, an Ivor Novello award, Song of the Decade from the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters in 2005, and a Guardian critics' poll in 2020 that crowned it the greatest UK number one. In 2012 the duo played it at the closing ceremony of the Summer Olympics.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.