One Nil
Pet Shop Boys - 'Go West' (Very, 1993)
In 1979, everyone’s favourite White House crooners, Village People, released ‘Go West’ as a song resolutely about San Francisco. Go west, where the skies are blue. Go west, to a mythical-sounding, but maybe real, promised land. The disco era gave us many anthems of liberation, and this one was unambiguous in its joy and pointed to a city that had become a beacon for gay men across America. Fourteen years later, Pet Shop Boys closed Very with it, and the geography had changed utterly.
By 1993, San Francisco was certainly not that same promised land. It was a city that, by then, many defined by what it had lost. The AIDS crisis had torn through the community that Village People’s song had celebrated, and the lyrics, unchanged, word for word, now carried a weight their original authors never intended. The words hit differently when you know how many people didn’t make it. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe understood this. They had already written the definitive song about AIDS and survival in ‘Being Boring’ three years earlier, a track so devastating precisely because it buries its grief inside a pop song about going to parties. Their version of ‘Go West’ operates on the same principle, only it chants where the other whispers. The grief cocooned inside someone else’s anthem.
That flex, using the words of another songwriter to say something too personal for your own, is pure Pet Shop Boys. Tennant has spent four decades hiding behind structures. Be they pop formulas, Ennio Morricone lifts, arch literary references, and deploying deadpan so committedly that it doubles up as armour. Closing your most openly queer album with a Village People cover permits you to be sincere without ever technically dropping the mask. Is it earnest? Is it camp?1 Is it an elaborate joke performed with a straight face and a sixty-piece orchestra? With Tennant and Lowe, those have never been mutually exclusive options. The sincerity is ironic. The irony is sincere. If you feel the need to pick a lane, that’s probably missing the point.
And Very is an aggressively, defiantly queer record. The lurid orange Lego sleeve. ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ as an opener. ‘Dreaming of the Queen’, in which Princess Diana appears in a dream to announce that there is no more love, a sentence that only hits fully when you clock the AIDS subtext beneath it. To close that album with ‘Go West’, released as the anchor single,2 a reclaimed anthem pointing towards an earthly garden that was ravaged. I can’t speak for the artists directly, but it feels like a sequencing decision as deliberate as anything we have covered in this newsletter. The promised land is still worth travelling to, even if you know what you will find when you arrive. Especially if you know, in fact.
The video turns away from the subtext. Directed by Howard Greenhalgh, it stages a Soviet-to-Western exodus, imagery drawn from the fall of the Berlin Wall four years earlier, crowds surging towards freedom through monumental architecture that looks like socialist realism reimagined by someone who had spent too long looking at little smiley faces in their hand. The message is as subtle as a hammer (and sickle): To go west means escape, liberation, a new world. But the slightly plastic sheen of the production (audio and video) leaves you guessing about how much of this is pure celebration and how much is elegy for a utopia better remembered than experienced.
Then the football terraces got hold of it and stripped the ambiguity clean off. “One-nil to the Arsenal” is not a complicated lyrical adaptation. The chord progression, Pachelbel’s Canon, give or take, the same sequence played at every church wedding in England for the last three hundred years3, lends itself to communal singing the way few pop melodies do. It is built for volume and unison. That a song rooted in queer liberation became one of the most bellowed chants in European football is a cultural migration worth reflecting on.
The sincerity survived even if the meaning did not. Or perhaps it did, just as Chris and Neil took someone else’s words and spun them into something with a different meaning, thousands of people did something similar, singing about being in a state of one-upmanship and feeling they too are going somewhere better, together, arms aloft, quite a few of them not knowing or caring where the chant came from. Tennant would probably appreciate that.
What strikes me most is what happened next. Pet Shop Boys have now spent roughly three decades in the shadow of their first ten years; those releases at the end of the 1980s were regarded as such an imperial phase that the phrase was coined in the first place. They have released ten studio albums since Very. Some are excellent. Most are ignored by a culture that, sometime around 1994, decided they had already made their statement. And yet they have kept going, touring and recording, refusing to become a heritage act - even when given 90 mins on the Other Stage at Glastonbury in 2022, clashing with Kendrick Lamar.
Yes.
I’ve just made this phrase up. It means not the lead single (the first one from the record) but the one closest to the record’s release date.
Our wedding wasn’t in England, but it did jump this cliche by using Spiritualized’s ‘Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space’ instead.