21.
Impossible for me to rate.
not the greatest thing they've ever done
Very iconic.
Dire cover sing that is far too camp
Come on come on come on come on
21. Go West
Second single off Very
Average: 7.6871428571
Highest score: 11x1 (@Farnaby), 10x5 (@SmashHitter, @One Stop Candy Shop, @etienne, @GhettoPrincess, @Sally_Harper)
Lowest score: 0x3 (@Sweet Music, @idratherjack, @Bleu Noir)
OZ #10 AUS #2 BEL #2 CAN Dance #8 DEN #5 EUR (Eurochart) #2 FIN #1 FRA #2 GER #1 ICE #1 IRE #1 ITA #7 JPN #9 NLD #5 NZ #13 NOR #5 SPA #4 SWE #2 SWI #2 UK #2 US Dance #1 US Billboard #106 RAY 8x#1, 20 weeks, #30 all-time
This is such a difficult song to rate. It's a lot of my childhood. It's the first time I heard someone – that someone being NEIL TENNANT – openly talk about homosexuality on Polish TV. (I think, in hindsight, that the segment got aired because it talked about AIDS and death, rather than being happy.) It's their last massive hit. It's a football anthem. It's an AIDS anthem. It's also overplayed as hell, especially live. It gave birth to 'New York City boy'. I got my life to it, and I had enough of it forever, and MTV banned the video for being too gay. It most probably marked the point in their career when Pet Shop Boys transitioned from 'aloof British pop band known for being deadpan and ironic' to 'gay dance'. It changed lives, football, PSB's career, gave them their only UK #1 album, rejuvenated their career for a few more years before the era of diminishing returns truly started.
Perhaps it's fitting for 'Go West' to drop at #21, although it would have been very ironic if it ended second. The songs that stopped 'Go West' from reaching #1 on the UK chart have been 'Mr. Vain' by Culture Beat (later sort of covered by PSB for the Discovery tour), and... uh... something by Will Smith. Out of those three songs, one survived, the one that's been number one in midweeks twice, only to be beaten at the last moment twice. It is a classic. Is it a good classic? Greatest achievement of a band that gave us 'King's Cross' and 'Being Boring' and 'Dreaming of the Queen' and 'West End girls' and 'Euroboy'? Is this something one can objectively measure? It never is, and that's how art works.
I won't be commenting on commentaries this time. I just finished reading Porochista Khakpour's memoir, 'Sick', which is about living with a long-term, potentially fatal disease, but it's also about living. How does one rate that? 'Thank you for telling us about your life. I rate your life 3/5.' Some of you listen to 'Go West' and hear an anthem. Some hear an overplayed cheesy song. I scored it 7.5.
@WhipperSnapper (5): I never liked it, even before it got chanted at football matches. The new middle section was a serious upgrade on the original, however.
@mrdonut (9): A hymn for the dancefloor that’s as camp-as-tits of course but deceptively erudite. The new verse the Boys added is perfect and the Soviet-esque male chorus never gets old
@GhettoPrincess (10): A classic. Love it!
@One Stop Candy Shop (10): Very iconic. For me at least. Seeing that video on MTV was my first encounter with PSB. It's over-the-top-pop and great closer of their best album. Some heathens will vote this out of the top-10 like they did to Always On My Mind. They are wrong and need to see the Light of Our Saviours Neil And Chris and Saint Sylvia.
@Sweet Music (0): Dire cover sing that is far too camp and needs throwing into Pop’s garbage bin.
@JakeMagnus (9.5): Another great and iconic video. It's very sad that this is the tune most people associate with them. That being said, while the song itself has been played to death, it's undeniably great and the lyrics are poignant still.
@TrendyMüller (9): So this is the one I could give zero or ten points. I had actually deleted it from all of my PSB playlists and acted like it didn´t even exist. BUT we should not let the reputation and the aftermath detract us from seeing the song for what it is: A bloody perfect pop song that works on so many levels, it´s ridiculous. It´s a testament to Chris´s genius that he realised how the passing of time had turned the optimistic, escapist lyrics into a bitter AIDS escpapist dream on one side, and an epitaph to the Soviet Union on the other.
I once „heard“ it being sung in a stadium by thousands of voices (while I was outside) and it gave me a real perverse sense of excitement!
@OspreyQueen (6): It’s not bad by any means, but I never listen to it outside of an album or playlist. They’ve applied the same formula to other songs since and done it way better.
@Jóga (8): It is a great version, just not as good as half of the album
@ohnoitisnathan (9): Uplifting. The male chorus backing vocals are a bit over the top though - I guess that was the point.
@Carsten (8.75): I could very happily live on without ever hearing this live again, but this is just out of over-exposure. the song itself is duly lifted into a much cooler and multi-layered meaning(s) by the way Neil delivering his best ambiguous-but-clearly-hopeless-vocal. The fact that the hopelessness of never finding the promised land is bypassing many listeners, and the fact that it entered the Hall of Shame (football stadiums) only adds to his twisted charm.
And the video is possibly their last great and all singing and dancing (and expensive looking) video. Especially in grungy early 90s land, this is and incredibly confident and brave move.
@MidnightCity (5): Can't decide if it's a jumping the shark moment. It irritates me slightly they still feel the need to play it live. Let's just say of the 4 cover versions they've released as singles, only was was excellent and its not this. Best bit of this record is the last 30 seconds when it threatens to go into some cool club tune but then disappears...love the "do you feel it" in the fade.
@Sally_Harper (10): I unashamedly love Go West, it’s so happy and optimistic on the surface yet somehow so poignant at the same time. I love that it’s somehow become a football song because my brother watches a LOT of football on TV and it always cheers me up no end to hear it in the background at the end of matches. COMEONCOMEONCOMEONCOMEON.
@tylerc904 (9): I always think I don’t like this (maybe the PSB fandom’s hatred of it persuades me??), but damn if I didn’t just love every last second during my revisit.
@DominoDancing (7.5): Impossible for me to rate. On one hand, this is the first PSB song I ever consciously heard. It's the reason my ten year old self put Very on his Christmas wishlist and it became the fist PSB album I owned. Who knows if I'd be a fan without it. It was a huge hit, and every single person in the universe knows the chorus.
It's also probably the campiest thing they ever recorded. It basically destroyed their reputation for the rest of the 90s, turning them into a shorthand for gay eurotrash. And its success overshadowed other, better singles from this album.
It's not the greatest thing they've ever done. It's not as bad as some of scores/comments here will indicate. But it's role in their discography makes it pretty controversial.
For a fun five minutes, check out the demo on YouTube, which has Neil not hitting a single note throughout the whole song.
Official 'Ming's Gone West First and Second Movement' Brothers in Rhythm remix video:
Live in Rio:
Brythoniaid Male Voice Choir:
Pandemonium Tour live in Roskilde:
Impossible for me to rate.
not the greatest thing they've ever done
Very iconic.
Dire cover sing that is far too camp
Come on come on come on come on
21. Go West
Second single off Very
Average: 7.6871428571
Highest score: 11x1 (@Farnaby), 10x5 (@SmashHitter, @One Stop Candy Shop, @etienne, @GhettoPrincess, @Sally_Harper)
Lowest score: 0x3 (@Sweet Music, @idratherjack, @Bleu Noir)
OZ #10 AUS #2 BEL #2 CAN Dance #8 DEN #5 EUR (Eurochart) #2 FIN #1 FRA #2 GER #1 ICE #1 IRE #1 ITA #7 JPN #9 NLD #5 NZ #13 NOR #5 SPA #4 SWE #2 SWI #2 UK #2 US Dance #1 US Billboard #106 RAY 8x#1, 20 weeks, #30 all-time
Neil: Derek Jarman was having an exhibition for local Aids charities in Manchester and asked us to do a concert for him at the Haçienda. We were rehearsing in Nomis and we wanted to do a cover version. We were going to do 'The Fool On The Hill' by The Beatles, and then Chris came in the next morning and said, 'I've looked through my records and decided we'll do this song called "Go West".'
Chris: Which Neil didn't know.
Neil: He played it to me and I said, 'This is ghastly.' I thought it was ghastly beyond belief. Awful. Anyway, Chris just carried on regardless.
Chris: Neil just couldn't hear it.
Neil: Then Chris enticed me into it by pointing out that it was the same chord change as Pachelbel's Canon. And that indeed worked.
Chris: I knew that would swing over Neil to my way of thinking.
Neil: Actually he just brushed me aside and said, 'I'm going to do it anyway.' He said, 'You're going to like this, you know - you're going to like this.'
Chris: I've always liked it. I've always been a huge fan of the Village People, and I thought 'Go West' would suit Neil's voice. And I thought it would be a good song to play at a Derek Jarman event - a song about an idealistic gay utopia. I knew that the way Neil would sing it would make it sound hopeless - you've got these inspiring lyrics but it sounds like it is never going to be achieved. And that fitted what had happened. When the Village People sung about a gay utopia it seemed for real, but looking back in hindsight it wasn't the utopia they all thought it would be.
Neil: When Chris put the chords in and played the tune on the French horn, that's when I was sold on it. To be perfectly honest, I didn't even bother to learn the Village People's words. I copied them off the record once, and the first time we performed it, at the Haçienda, I had the words written out and I put them down and the wind machine blew them away and I had to improvise the words all the way through the song. 'Together! We will...do something! Together! We will...all have to sing!' At that point I think, as usual, we imagined it might be a b-side at some point.
Chris: Then we performed it again in America for a Lifebeat charity concert in New York, and the Indian from the Village People came along.
Neil: And for the second time running the words blew away, but by that time I was vaguely more familiar with them. From the beginning we had put in the whole new middle bit - 'there where the air is free...' - which doesn't exist in the Village People's version. Chris wrote the chords, I think, and I wrote the new words. I don't think they're very good. '...where the air is free...' - what does that mean?
Chris: It's good.
Neil: I think 'the promised land' bit is good, because I'd isolated what the core of the song is - it's about finding a promised land. Some of the other lyrics are mine, only because I could never be bothered to work out what the Village People were singing. The weird line - 'rustling, just to feed' - I'm sure that's not what they sing. I've no idea what they sing. We first recorded our version in 1992 as a one-off single. Chris had just had a studio built in his house and we wanted to do a track to try it out, so we did 'Go West'. We also went to America and recorded a choir - I liked the idea of doing vocals like 'There Is Nothing Like A Dame' from South Pacific on a pop record, a big choir of butch men, so we got a group of Broadway singers in New York arranged by Richard Niles to perform it in that style. We also put on seagulls from a sample CD, because of the beach...'Go West'...California. I also, being a kind of Guinness Book Of Hit Singles type of person, realised that 1992 would be the first year we wouldn't have had a top ten single since we started having hits, and that it would ruin our run. So, to be perfectly honest, that was my main reason for wanting to release it before Christmas that year. We mixed it with Mark 'Spike' Stent, and did b-sides, and then I spoke to Tony Wadsworth, who was the managing director at Parlophone. He phoned me up and said, 'What do you expect to achieve by releasing this now?' And I thought, 'you're right - I don't know'. I couldn't say the truth. If we'd been a hundred per cent happy with it we would have gone ahead and released it anyway, but secretly between the two of us we weren't happy with the mix of it. So we thought, let's not do it. I now think the original twelve-inch, which has never been released, is pretty good. It's dominated by this synth riff of Chris's which isn't even in the final version. The version on this album is actually even longer than the twelve-inch we were going to release in 1992 - we were going to fade it out much earlier. After we decided not to release it, we asked Brothers In Rhythm to work on the track.
Chris: We thought the rhythm track wasn't good enough.
Neil: They re-did the bassline, and Steve Anderson put in some piano at the beginning. We just kept on working on it. We took stuff away and put some back. On the 'Spike' Stent version of it there's no brass in the instrumental section after the first chorus because we'd taken it out. We'd already got Richard Niles to do the brass arrangement you can hear in the final version but when we first heard we absolutely hated it. We thought it was too cheesy.
Chris: Brothers In Rhythm put it back in.
Neil: And we realised it was perfect for the song. Then Stephen Hague mixed it, and that was basically it. Then, after it came out, we had the whole how-we-changed-Russia thing.
Chris: It does sound surprisingly like the former Soviet anthem, we have subsequently discovered. It's remarkably similar.
Neil: We did bits in Moscow for the 'Go West' video simply because we were going to Moscow for the launch of Russian MTV. It was just a coincidence, and we thought, 'Where do you go when you're East? You go West', so we did some filming in Red Square, pointing. But according to this artist we know in Russia, people thought that we had done a song that was based on the Soviet national anthem, and these Hungarian fans wrote to us and said, 'I hear this song and I am frightened', because they thought it was suggesting that the Russians should invade Eastern Europe again, because they would go west. Maybe that's why the Russians like it.
Chris: It's also incredible that it ended up as such a big football anthem. Who would have thought that an obscure Village People song covered by the Pet Shop Boys would become the song of football. It's fantastic. I think it's our greatest achievement.
Chris: Which Neil didn't know.
Neil: He played it to me and I said, 'This is ghastly.' I thought it was ghastly beyond belief. Awful. Anyway, Chris just carried on regardless.
Chris: Neil just couldn't hear it.
Neil: Then Chris enticed me into it by pointing out that it was the same chord change as Pachelbel's Canon. And that indeed worked.
Chris: I knew that would swing over Neil to my way of thinking.
Neil: Actually he just brushed me aside and said, 'I'm going to do it anyway.' He said, 'You're going to like this, you know - you're going to like this.'
Chris: I've always liked it. I've always been a huge fan of the Village People, and I thought 'Go West' would suit Neil's voice. And I thought it would be a good song to play at a Derek Jarman event - a song about an idealistic gay utopia. I knew that the way Neil would sing it would make it sound hopeless - you've got these inspiring lyrics but it sounds like it is never going to be achieved. And that fitted what had happened. When the Village People sung about a gay utopia it seemed for real, but looking back in hindsight it wasn't the utopia they all thought it would be.
Neil: When Chris put the chords in and played the tune on the French horn, that's when I was sold on it. To be perfectly honest, I didn't even bother to learn the Village People's words. I copied them off the record once, and the first time we performed it, at the Haçienda, I had the words written out and I put them down and the wind machine blew them away and I had to improvise the words all the way through the song. 'Together! We will...do something! Together! We will...all have to sing!' At that point I think, as usual, we imagined it might be a b-side at some point.
Chris: Then we performed it again in America for a Lifebeat charity concert in New York, and the Indian from the Village People came along.
Neil: And for the second time running the words blew away, but by that time I was vaguely more familiar with them. From the beginning we had put in the whole new middle bit - 'there where the air is free...' - which doesn't exist in the Village People's version. Chris wrote the chords, I think, and I wrote the new words. I don't think they're very good. '...where the air is free...' - what does that mean?
Chris: It's good.
Neil: I think 'the promised land' bit is good, because I'd isolated what the core of the song is - it's about finding a promised land. Some of the other lyrics are mine, only because I could never be bothered to work out what the Village People were singing. The weird line - 'rustling, just to feed' - I'm sure that's not what they sing. I've no idea what they sing. We first recorded our version in 1992 as a one-off single. Chris had just had a studio built in his house and we wanted to do a track to try it out, so we did 'Go West'. We also went to America and recorded a choir - I liked the idea of doing vocals like 'There Is Nothing Like A Dame' from South Pacific on a pop record, a big choir of butch men, so we got a group of Broadway singers in New York arranged by Richard Niles to perform it in that style. We also put on seagulls from a sample CD, because of the beach...'Go West'...California. I also, being a kind of Guinness Book Of Hit Singles type of person, realised that 1992 would be the first year we wouldn't have had a top ten single since we started having hits, and that it would ruin our run. So, to be perfectly honest, that was my main reason for wanting to release it before Christmas that year. We mixed it with Mark 'Spike' Stent, and did b-sides, and then I spoke to Tony Wadsworth, who was the managing director at Parlophone. He phoned me up and said, 'What do you expect to achieve by releasing this now?' And I thought, 'you're right - I don't know'. I couldn't say the truth. If we'd been a hundred per cent happy with it we would have gone ahead and released it anyway, but secretly between the two of us we weren't happy with the mix of it. So we thought, let's not do it. I now think the original twelve-inch, which has never been released, is pretty good. It's dominated by this synth riff of Chris's which isn't even in the final version. The version on this album is actually even longer than the twelve-inch we were going to release in 1992 - we were going to fade it out much earlier. After we decided not to release it, we asked Brothers In Rhythm to work on the track.
Chris: We thought the rhythm track wasn't good enough.
Neil: They re-did the bassline, and Steve Anderson put in some piano at the beginning. We just kept on working on it. We took stuff away and put some back. On the 'Spike' Stent version of it there's no brass in the instrumental section after the first chorus because we'd taken it out. We'd already got Richard Niles to do the brass arrangement you can hear in the final version but when we first heard we absolutely hated it. We thought it was too cheesy.
Chris: Brothers In Rhythm put it back in.
Neil: And we realised it was perfect for the song. Then Stephen Hague mixed it, and that was basically it. Then, after it came out, we had the whole how-we-changed-Russia thing.
Chris: It does sound surprisingly like the former Soviet anthem, we have subsequently discovered. It's remarkably similar.
Neil: We did bits in Moscow for the 'Go West' video simply because we were going to Moscow for the launch of Russian MTV. It was just a coincidence, and we thought, 'Where do you go when you're East? You go West', so we did some filming in Red Square, pointing. But according to this artist we know in Russia, people thought that we had done a song that was based on the Soviet national anthem, and these Hungarian fans wrote to us and said, 'I hear this song and I am frightened', because they thought it was suggesting that the Russians should invade Eastern Europe again, because they would go west. Maybe that's why the Russians like it.
Chris: It's also incredible that it ended up as such a big football anthem. Who would have thought that an obscure Village People song covered by the Pet Shop Boys would become the song of football. It's fantastic. I think it's our greatest achievement.
This is such a difficult song to rate. It's a lot of my childhood. It's the first time I heard someone – that someone being NEIL TENNANT – openly talk about homosexuality on Polish TV. (I think, in hindsight, that the segment got aired because it talked about AIDS and death, rather than being happy.) It's their last massive hit. It's a football anthem. It's an AIDS anthem. It's also overplayed as hell, especially live. It gave birth to 'New York City boy'. I got my life to it, and I had enough of it forever, and MTV banned the video for being too gay. It most probably marked the point in their career when Pet Shop Boys transitioned from 'aloof British pop band known for being deadpan and ironic' to 'gay dance'. It changed lives, football, PSB's career, gave them their only UK #1 album, rejuvenated their career for a few more years before the era of diminishing returns truly started.
Perhaps it's fitting for 'Go West' to drop at #21, although it would have been very ironic if it ended second. The songs that stopped 'Go West' from reaching #1 on the UK chart have been 'Mr. Vain' by Culture Beat (later sort of covered by PSB for the Discovery tour), and... uh... something by Will Smith. Out of those three songs, one survived, the one that's been number one in midweeks twice, only to be beaten at the last moment twice. It is a classic. Is it a good classic? Greatest achievement of a band that gave us 'King's Cross' and 'Being Boring' and 'Dreaming of the Queen' and 'West End girls' and 'Euroboy'? Is this something one can objectively measure? It never is, and that's how art works.
I won't be commenting on commentaries this time. I just finished reading Porochista Khakpour's memoir, 'Sick', which is about living with a long-term, potentially fatal disease, but it's also about living. How does one rate that? 'Thank you for telling us about your life. I rate your life 3/5.' Some of you listen to 'Go West' and hear an anthem. Some hear an overplayed cheesy song. I scored it 7.5.
@Farnaby (11): Go West, independently of its own merits, which are immense and begin with a sublime chorus and amazingly moving harmonies, was released in a period where people and especially gays were actually dying of Aids. And I can tell you that in the heart of a 23 years old man whose friends were ill, this anthem meant the world.
(Go West) Life is peaceful there / (Go West) In the open air / (Go West) Where the skies are blue / (Go West) This is what we're gonna do
To this day, I cannot pronounce this words without feeling the need to cry.
The fact the song later became some football anthem just show the basic power of its harmonies. Same reason, I guess, Jia Zankhe chose this song to close his film with one of the most hearbreaking movie shot of the decade. (already posted in the song’s defense some years ago on the PJ forum).
@westendgirl (8.8): it’s definitely a brilliant song, I’ve just listened to it too often – partly because it’s one of the few PSB songs constantly played on the radio(Go West) Life is peaceful there / (Go West) In the open air / (Go West) Where the skies are blue / (Go West) This is what we're gonna do
To this day, I cannot pronounce this words without feeling the need to cry.
The fact the song later became some football anthem just show the basic power of its harmonies. Same reason, I guess, Jia Zankhe chose this song to close his film with one of the most hearbreaking movie shot of the decade. (already posted in the song’s defense some years ago on the PJ forum).
@WhipperSnapper (5): I never liked it, even before it got chanted at football matches. The new middle section was a serious upgrade on the original, however.
@mrdonut (9): A hymn for the dancefloor that’s as camp-as-tits of course but deceptively erudite. The new verse the Boys added is perfect and the Soviet-esque male chorus never gets old
@GhettoPrincess (10): A classic. Love it!
@One Stop Candy Shop (10): Very iconic. For me at least. Seeing that video on MTV was my first encounter with PSB. It's over-the-top-pop and great closer of their best album. Some heathens will vote this out of the top-10 like they did to Always On My Mind. They are wrong and need to see the Light of Our Saviours Neil And Chris and Saint Sylvia.
@Sweet Music (0): Dire cover sing that is far too camp and needs throwing into Pop’s garbage bin.
@JakeMagnus (9.5): Another great and iconic video. It's very sad that this is the tune most people associate with them. That being said, while the song itself has been played to death, it's undeniably great and the lyrics are poignant still.
@TrendyMüller (9): So this is the one I could give zero or ten points. I had actually deleted it from all of my PSB playlists and acted like it didn´t even exist. BUT we should not let the reputation and the aftermath detract us from seeing the song for what it is: A bloody perfect pop song that works on so many levels, it´s ridiculous. It´s a testament to Chris´s genius that he realised how the passing of time had turned the optimistic, escapist lyrics into a bitter AIDS escpapist dream on one side, and an epitaph to the Soviet Union on the other.
I once „heard“ it being sung in a stadium by thousands of voices (while I was outside) and it gave me a real perverse sense of excitement!
@OspreyQueen (6): It’s not bad by any means, but I never listen to it outside of an album or playlist. They’ve applied the same formula to other songs since and done it way better.
@Jóga (8): It is a great version, just not as good as half of the album
@ohnoitisnathan (9): Uplifting. The male chorus backing vocals are a bit over the top though - I guess that was the point.
@Carsten (8.75): I could very happily live on without ever hearing this live again, but this is just out of over-exposure. the song itself is duly lifted into a much cooler and multi-layered meaning(s) by the way Neil delivering his best ambiguous-but-clearly-hopeless-vocal. The fact that the hopelessness of never finding the promised land is bypassing many listeners, and the fact that it entered the Hall of Shame (football stadiums) only adds to his twisted charm.
And the video is possibly their last great and all singing and dancing (and expensive looking) video. Especially in grungy early 90s land, this is and incredibly confident and brave move.
@MidnightCity (5): Can't decide if it's a jumping the shark moment. It irritates me slightly they still feel the need to play it live. Let's just say of the 4 cover versions they've released as singles, only was was excellent and its not this. Best bit of this record is the last 30 seconds when it threatens to go into some cool club tune but then disappears...love the "do you feel it" in the fade.
@Sally_Harper (10): I unashamedly love Go West, it’s so happy and optimistic on the surface yet somehow so poignant at the same time. I love that it’s somehow become a football song because my brother watches a LOT of football on TV and it always cheers me up no end to hear it in the background at the end of matches. COMEONCOMEONCOMEONCOMEON.
@tylerc904 (9): I always think I don’t like this (maybe the PSB fandom’s hatred of it persuades me??), but damn if I didn’t just love every last second during my revisit.
@DominoDancing (7.5): Impossible for me to rate. On one hand, this is the first PSB song I ever consciously heard. It's the reason my ten year old self put Very on his Christmas wishlist and it became the fist PSB album I owned. Who knows if I'd be a fan without it. It was a huge hit, and every single person in the universe knows the chorus.
It's also probably the campiest thing they ever recorded. It basically destroyed their reputation for the rest of the 90s, turning them into a shorthand for gay eurotrash. And its success overshadowed other, better singles from this album.
It's not the greatest thing they've ever done. It's not as bad as some of scores/comments here will indicate. But it's role in their discography makes it pretty controversial.
For a fun five minutes, check out the demo on YouTube, which has Neil not hitting a single note throughout the whole song.
Official 'Ming's Gone West First and Second Movement' Brothers in Rhythm remix video:
Live in Rio:
Brythoniaid Male Voice Choir:
Pandemonium Tour live in Roskilde:
