It became one of the defining British pop songs of the 1980s, topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and turned the Pet Shop Boys into stars. But the story of ‘West End Girls’ apparently begins somewhere rather less glamorous: in a tiny single bed outside Nottingham.

It sounds like one of those claims the East Midlands has quietly forgotten to shout about.

Long before West End Girls became an international number one, Neil Tennant was staying with his cousin Richard at a house outside Nottingham back in 1983. One night, after the pair had stayed up watching what Tennant remembered as “some kind of James Cagney gangster film”, the germ of the song suddenly arrived.

Afterwards, around 1AM, while trying to get to sleep in a single bed in a small room, those now-iconic words came to Tennant…

‘Sometimes you’re better off dead,
There’s a gun in your hand,
And its pointing to your head’

He quickly scribbled down the results of this flash of inspiration onto a piece of paper; they would become they were the opening lines to a rap he would complete on the floor of his King’s Road flat back in London.

The rest would eventually become pop history.

So perhaps the fairest East Midlands boast is that ‘West End Girls’ was conceived in Nottinghamshire and finished in London.

Still, that’s quite a claim to fame.

From a Nottinghamshire bedroom to New York

At the time, Neil Tennant wasn’t an international pop star. He was working as a music journalist at Smash Hits and writing songs with Chris Lowe, whom he’d met in 1981.

The next important stop in the song’s journey was New York.

While there on a Smash Hits assignment in 1983, Tennant met American producer Bobby Orlando. Tennant played him demos of material he and Lowe had been working on and Orlando subsequently agreed to record with them.

An early version of West End Girls was recorded in New York and released in April 1984. It attracted attention in clubs in America and parts of Europe, but failed to turn the Pet Shop Boys into stars back home.

That could easily have been the end of the story.

It wasn’t.

Second time lucky

Following the end of their association with Orlando, Tennant and Lowe signed to EMI and returned to West End Girls, recording a new version with producer Stephen Hague in 1985.

This time, everything clicked.

Released in October 1985, the new version climbed all the way to number one in the UK. It then achieved the considerably rarer feat for a British act of reaching number one on America’s Billboard Hot 100 too.

Pet Shop Boys had arrived.

With Tennant’s cool, almost spoken vocal set against Lowe’s electronic backdrop, the song sounded unlike much else in mainstream British pop. Its depiction of London was similarly distinctive, concerned with class, city life and the contrasts contained within the capital. Tennant’s writing was also partly influenced by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

The track went on to win Best Single at the 1987 Brit Awards and Best International Hit at the Ivor Novello Awards.

Its reputation has hardly diminished with age. In 2020, a critics’ poll assembled by The Guardian ranked West End Girls the greatest UK number-one single.

Not bad for something that started with a sleepless night in Nottinghamshire.