You should have been on the ground years ago. But the flight was cancelled after takeoff and now you’re off-charter – adrift in unclaimed airspace with your impossible course abandoned, the light dim and the beach balls gone. You feel like part of a forgotten generation.
You can’t really remember anything before the aeroplane but you suppose there were long hours and short days, high-rises and weak sunlight and nowhere you belonged. The future was an invitation circled speculatively on the calendar; it seemed bright because it wasn’t here yet.
Now the sun never sets and the identical men are gone. The staircase on the horizon never seems to get any nearer; you doubt it leads anywhere you’d be let into, anyway. You’re wondering whether you made a mistake. When we spoke of forever, this isn’t what we meant.
Here we are at the end of the record. And before we go any further. . .
Sending ourselves back to September 1993 is impossible, just as it was then for the Pet Shop Boys to reanimate the dreams the Village People had buried at the beach fourteen years earlier.
Turn the hands anticlockwise and the first decade and a half is easy. But once we squeeze into the 20th century, once Green-wich is reclaimed from the Dome and Blair walks backwards out of Downing Street and Blur are yet to be v Oasis and Radiohead still haven’t gone round The Bends, the light is too bright to see clearly. ‘Go West’, now, is obscured from vision by hazy sunshine, by cold, bright car journeys, by flyovers and shopping centres that no longer exist – by the fact the world is not built to be seen from the height of a child.
Singles were meant to be played and forgotten. The best we can do is the work of an archeologist – to wipe the dirt off the cassette cover and discover Chris Lowe’s expressionless face looking up at us from beneath a hemispherical hat.
Load the tape into the machine and ask yourself how it was that the hiss never mattered before. As the wheels turn you realise this modernism, like the Village People’s, has dated; the song has taken on a layer of meaning it did not possess twenty-three years ago.
If ‘Go West’ in 1993 was about the memory of 1979 being tarnished by the fresher recollection of the Eighties, it is now also involuntarily about the fact that an even longer period has slipped by unnoticed.
This hymn to an unfulfilled dream would of course become the Pet Shop Boys’ signature track, somehow even more their own composition than if they’d actually written it.
The crashing wave that opens the song is the sound of hopes being dashed against the Golden Gate Bridge, like the train samples in ‘King’s Cross’ turned transatlantic. And while the synth-pop rapture that follows is poisoned, we don’t care; it is the sound of unity and isolation, the Pet Shop Boys’ ultimate statement of what it means to be up and down at the same time. This is what we spent our life looking for, this blissful validation, a reassurance to our friend in the orange room and the man making Diana tea that no, they are not and never were alone, even though to say so in as many words would be a lie.
It is far too much for a boy to take in but twenty-three years later it will still be drip-feeding his dreams, a shining rectangle on the horizon, a doomed but rhapsodic flight over the clouds, acceptance and love and death and spectacular, indulgent sorrow.
Which is remarkable because, at ground level, things just look depressing. The Village People’s lyrics remain basically intact but their meaning is reversed: what had been a breathless register of plans and promises becomes a catalogue of failure.
‘Go West’ in 1979 had functioned as a to-do list for the “gay flight” to California, apparently urging young homosexual men to abandon their dull, intolerant surroundings and head en masse to San Francisco. There they would discover a fraternity bathed in eternal sunshine among whom they could be themselves without fear of abuse or rejection. A promised land of emotional, sexual and political liberation was as close as the airport.
The Village People had thus collected a baton grasped by a litany of sweaty palms over hundreds of years: Byrne R. S. Fone 127 finds paradisical images of a homosexual “other Eden” in Western literature at least as far back as the 16th century. Fone believes pastoral visions of a gay paradise exist in the works of Virgil, Marlowe and Bayard Taylor, whose characters barely conceal their longing for a place where
gay men can be free from the outlaw status society confers upon us, where homosexuality can be revealed and spoken of without reprisal, and where homosexual love can be consummated without concern for the punishment or scorn of the world.128
Neither was it a brand new idea that this paradise might be found on the West Coast. California, says Connell O’Donovan, has “long been the focus of the homosexual imagination – [. . .] a locus where the ideal of Arcadia could perhaps be finally and fully reali[s]ed.” 129 He finds depictions of California-as-Eden in 1970s pornography and Walt Whitman verses, in underground gay films and Beat poetry.
Like ‘Go West’, most of the stories on Fone’s bookshelf only allude (albeit heavily) to homosexuality rather than explicitly discussing it, as though the meaning of these tales is itself a secret garden we need a special key to access. That absent “G” word again.
Some of this Arcadian canon is ancient, but it was still remarkably relevant in the late Seventies; the pull of “a place where it is safe to be gay” 130 was just as strong when Harvey Milk was elected as it had been 400 years earlier. The cop, the biker, the Native American, the cowboy, the builder and the sailor were so desperate for freedom they were prepared to “tell all our friends goodbye,” ditch their old lives and begin a new existence from first principles.
Leaving New York was the bit everyone agreed on, but things began to go wrong once the Village People tried to sketch out the place they were headed. Fone tells us gay men long to be free from “outlaw status,” but in most of his examples paradise is temporary – an idyllic garden, say, to which homosexuals can retreat for hours rather than years. The Village People, unlike Marlowe, were planning a one-way trip to a brand new city.
And there lay the problem. Transgression is exciting as well as dangerous. Tell me you didn’t feel sparks in the air as you stepped into the orange room, the aeroplane, the smoke-filled bar. Outlaw status is a free pass out of dull conformity; we don’t want to lose our otherness, we just don’t want to get beaten up at the bus stop.
So the first hint that something was amiss came long before the Pet Shop Boys got their hands on ‘Go West’. In its original form, the song erased the transgressive component of gay culture entirely and replaced it with the not-so-implicit misogyny of a specifically homosexual, male paradise.
Fact is, the Village People were never afforded the chance to thrash out the details. ‘Go West’ was supposed to be the first draft, not the last rites. This imperfect rendering of heaven was four short minutes of what should have been eternity.
Ironically, this gay flight described and prescribed by the song brought thousands and thousands more queer folks to urban, coastal areas, who then participated in the intense sexual freedom [that] was so conducive to the spread of HIV beginning in the late 1970s.131
Aids tore the wings off the gay flight; the Village People came to know that as well as anyone. Their creator Jacques Morali died of the illness in 1991, a couple of years too early to see the Pet Shop Boys turn his anthem into an elegy.
And now, instead of finding themselves free, gay men find themselves under siege from their own bodies and their own country. Their immune systems are systematically shut down from within while large swaths of America continue to criminalise homosexuality way beyond the Village People’s heyday.
But it wouldn’t be fair to call the Pet Shop Boys’ version of ‘Go West’ cynical. In Tennant’s plaintive vocal we hear the longing for “a place where it is safe to be gay” even more keenly than in the Village People’s misplaced bravado.
No, it’s more that he modifies the demands of the original song. Crucially, we might now add “a place where it is safe to have gay sex” to the list of conditions for homosexual freedom, the constant danger of HIV having become even more inescapable than the world’s disapproving gaze. At least we can lock the door, pull the blinds down, against that.
I wonder how many layers of meaning Lowe has already ascribed to the Village People’s version of ‘Go West’ when he digs it out of his record collection in 1992. Does he hear victory or tragedy – Morali’s life or death – as the 12" spins?
For Lowe, pretty much single-handedly, turns out to be the architect of the Pet Shop Boys’ defining moment. Neil Tennant doesn’t even know the song when Lowe fatefully suggests they cover it for a one-off show at Manchester’s Hacienda club.
He will tell Chris Heath in 2001:
[‘Go West’ is] 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.132
It’s an astonishingly bleak ending for the LP. For eleven tracks Very has dealt in both dark and light, shame and exuberance, at the same time – but now the waveform collapses and this most escapist of records tells us there is nowhere to run after all. It slams on the brakes not only for the gay flight, but for the excitement of lust (‘ Young Offender’); the thrill of being part of a subculture (‘ To Speak Is a Sin’); the hope that as gay men we might find romantic fulfilment just like everyone else (‘One in a Million’). We dared to dream, Tennant says in the album’s final minutes, and look where we ended up. You guys were right about us all along.
The media’s coverage of Aids in the Eighties merely confirmed all our (non-Californians’) worst fears. It seemed to be a California disease (although remotely a New York one as well) brought on by selfish decadence and the abandonment of all social strictures and mores [. . .]. California epitomi[s]es the paradox of paradise; that the human search for Utopia leads us to destroy it when we find it.133
The Pet Shop Boys’ knowing reprise of ‘Go West’ rightly stops well short of assigning blame; after all, as the waves broke, there was no way of knowing love could kill. But that doesn’t mean Morali’s troupe shouldn’t have known better. There was something far more innately hopeless about ‘Go West’ from the offset: its call to find paradise sounded doomed to failure by virtue of the fact no one had ever succeeded. We have no template for Arcadia besides our dreams. Even in 1979, what did the Village People really think was going to happen? ‘Go West’ seemed to predict catastrophe because it asked its listeners to run away.
And yet some – statistically, most – gay men do survive the Eighties and Nineties. Tennant’s trauma is that of being left behind, condemned to life, watching his friends sicken and die and never really knowing if he might be next. He had been twenty-four, on the verge of his own homosexual awakening, in 1979, and the first two or three Pet Shop Boys albums bear witness to the violence, claustrophobia and uncertainty of the decade that followed for gay men. He isn’t approaching ‘Go West’ with the cold distance of a historian, but as someone who knows he would have gone the way of Morali but for the disgrace of God.
Maybe another message buried in the zeroes and ones of the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Go West’ is that Tennant and millions like him are still standing. The Nineties are here – less idyllic than we imagined, but look at the calendar if you don’t believe me. Like the pilot in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, upon which the ‘Go West’ video is based, Tennant gets a second chance. Now he, and we, must live with it.
A huge staircase stretches out of a grim digital city into the sky. Armed with what might be the arrow of Apollo, Tennant and Lowe lead a uniformed collective of young, muscled athletes up these impossible steps while beach balls spin temptingly just beyond its edges.
Things get even stranger when Tennant turns to his left and walks straight off the side. Instead of falling, he takes a few paces on air before opening a door and tentatively stepping into. . . what?
In A Matter of Life and Death, the staircase really does lead to heaven. But the place in which the Pet Shop Boys now find them-selves looks more like outer space – the secular version of “up there” instead of the sacred one. After all, this is a song about a fictitious paradise awaiting the wearied, and religion peddles that particular myth par excellence.
In this story, at least, there is no disco in the sky – only a dank hospital bed. As Wayne Studer points out, the west is where the sun sets; the vanishing point on the horizon was associated with death long before anyone said the words “go west, young man.” 134 The Grim Reaper, it turns out, haunted the Village People’s lyrics before the Pet Shop Boys had even heard them.
Now go down the steps and take another look at that foreboding grey city.
Outside the computer, it’s four years since the Berlin Wall fell, a timely reminder that gay men aren’t the only ones seeking escape. Suspend all we know about ‘Go West’ and for a moment it sounds like an exhortation for eastern Europeans to head to the supposedly more prosperous realm of capitalism beyond the border. When the Village People wrote the song, the Cold War was still smouldering – but in 1993, two years on from the dissolution of the Communist Party, the occident beckons.
The Bloc’s demise tampered with the meaning of all kinds of political art created before 1989; the Pet Shop Boys had realised this as early as 1990. ‘My October Symphony’, track six on Behaviour, imagined a Russian musician standing amid the ruins of the USSR trying to decide whether to “rewrite or revise” his propagandist opus.
Oddly, Tennant and Lowe will later claim the choice of Soviet imagery in a song about going w/West had been a “coincidence,” 135 explaining they were already in Moscow for the launch of Russian MTV and just fancied whipping out the cameras.
But it’s kind of hard to believe the lingering shots on Soviet monuments and iconography are cut into the video just for the hell of it when every other aspect of Very’s appearance is so meticulous.
Liberty is even mounted on a plinth immediately to the west of the staircase, where she stares down Yuri Gagarin as he silently bids the athletes to leave the stage in the opposite direction.
Yet paradoxically the utopian vision the Village People gifted Tennant and Lowe itself sounds half like communist propaganda – a land of brotherhood without capitalism’s ruthless “hustling” or “pace” where people “learn and teach,” “work and strive.” This gives the Pet Shop Boys’ cover the unlikely air of a call to re-establish the USSR even at the same time as it encourages other listeners to quit the Bloc altogether. Dim the lights and it becomes an expansionist Soviet anthem, a dose of nostalgia for a different sort of promised land – which, of course, it isn’t really, but this is apparently enough to panic a small number of Polish fans.136 Paradise is in the eye of the beholder.
And what of the Pet Shop Boys’ intended meaning? They, not the Village People, inherited the future. The task that now befalls Tennant and Lowe – newly anointed as the liberation’s undertakers – is precisely the one that the composer in ‘My October Symphony’ contemplates. They must “change the dedication from revolution to revelation.”
This reinscription happens as much on screen as on record. Turn on Top of the Pops (which, incredibly, broadcasts the ‘Go West’ video in full) and at first the muscular athletes follow Tennant and Lowe out of that monochrome metropolis in patient formation. But in a later shot they are shown running, as though time is short, and we never see them get anywhere.
Tennant, we discover, must do more than climb the staircase to get West: he has to take a leap of faith (or madness) and walk across the obviously computer-generated clouds to access that Truman Show door in the sky. And once he’s in, no one follows. The men further down the steps never reappear.
Maybe the athletes start running because they realise the gate to heaven is shutting too early. These are the men who won’t make it into the Nineties to tell their own story – they’ve already burnt their bridges in New York, but they don’t have anything like enough provisions for forty years in the desert. If they look back they’ll be turned into pillars of salt, but the stairs will end sooner or later, and what should they do then – jump from the top? There is no plan B.
Then there’s Tennant himself. Whenever he is shown close up, the Pet Shop Boys’ frontman appears to be marching on the spot. Rather than leading the athletes to freedom he isn’t going anywhere at all. And despite the song’s aspirational, optimistic lyrics, he doesn’t look excited or happy – if anything there might even be tears in his eyes as he delivers the song’s final chorus, a faithless Moses who knows he is leading these men to their death because he sneaked a look at the final chapter.
“I kind of think the message of the Pet Shop Boys is that it’s not going to be all right,” Lowe had said four years earlier. “You know it’s not going to be all right.” 137
But unlike Morrissey thrashing about in alleyways and school-yards as he bemoans the injustice of the universe, the Pet Shop Boys disseminate this message through songs with titles like ‘It’s Alright’ and ‘Happiness Is an Option’. Their modus operandi is to send extremely mixed messages about whether or not the future is bright. And that’s the thing that keeps us on the edge of our seat, hoping we might one day solve the puzzle.
It’s more than Tennant’s vocal, which hardly sounds like Braveheart as he calls the gay masses to follow him; more, too, than the video of endless stairs and eternal return to a grey city. ‘Go West’ does such a thorough job of rubbishing heaven that even at the mixing desk the song ends with a whimper: what seems to be Very’s final moment consists of a strange techno breakdown that drowns out the choir’s big finale but then itself fades out within forty seconds.
For this inconclusive conclusion, backing singer Sylvia Mason-James has been unceremoniously sped up, chirping the words “do you feel it?” with what sounds very much like desperation as ‘Go West’ evaporates into silence. We don’t feel it.
There is a sense that instead of Utopia we got nightclubs; we found Sunset Strip when we were dreamin’ of California, chasing the goldrush.
And not feeling at all ready, we have to carry on with our lives.
We must now be living in the days after the apocalypse. You imagine nothing but cold, damaged earth thousands of feet below. We might have won or lost or both. But did we tape over the important bit? Shouldn’t we be able to remember the end of history? Is ‘Go West’ a requiem for the 21st century or a premonition of the late Seventies?
Fossilised vapour trails stretch across the weak blue sky, taunting you with the memory that you were once headed somewhere.
But suddenly a man’s voice fills the aeroplane – a different voice from before, deeper, warmer; somehow you know it belongs to the visored superhero in yellow from the final page of the CD booklet. You look outside and the light is blinding; the clouds, glimpsed for a split-second before you accelerate, might even be actual clouds.
And this otherworldly rescuer seems to be telling you as you touch down: no one but our generation will ever know what it truly felt like, but this all happened; every second of it was real, even the graphics.
The monitor hits zero after five minutes; Very flatlines and we are alone with our ghosts and our grievances.
And then something strange happens.
5.01
5.02
5.03
In silence, the CD carries on spinning. Is it broken?
6.03
6.04
6.05
We look again at the tracklisting to check whether we’ve missed anything, already knowing we haven’t. What’s going on?
7.05
7.06
7.0
The Pet Shop Boys manage in 127 seconds what took Christ three days. This thirteenth song blossoming out of Very’s broken heart is ‘Postscript’, unlisted on the CD cover and not even included on the LP or cassette editions of the album. And this second vocalist is Chris Lowe, his singing voice making its debut appearance on a Pet Shop Boys record.
While it’s barely a minute long, ‘Postscript’ – just about – rewrites Very’s narrative.
It doesn’t undo any of the record’s injustices. Our friends and lovers stay dead; in fact, the song is all about death. But previously Very’s dead characters had been little more than quick allusions: you who walk through the door ahead of the Queen and Princess Diana; you whose love is mentioned fleetingly in the final verse of ‘Go West’.
Now, finally, Lowe addresses an entire song to the person he has lost.
Very is a pretty secular affair from the word “go.” It opens with aliens and science fiction and closes with a dismissal of heaven. And this is understandable; Tennant knows he and many like him have been betrayed by the religious right-wing, or at least by politicians countenancing it. He tells Paul Burston in 1994 that his sexual awakening as a teenager had more or less spelt the end of his relationship with the Church,138 and when he does revisit his Christian upbringing he sounds defiant – as on ‘It’s a Sin’ or ‘This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave’.
But at the eleventh hour, this “hidden track” tells us almost in passing: see you on the other side, mate.
It certainly isn’t theistic in any conventional sense. Most of the song fixates on the earthly pleasures Lowe has shared with this nameless figure: the ecstasy they have found in music, dance and perhaps love; the parties they have been to; their friends; their memories. And then, without warning, the fifth line and I know we’ll meet again cuts the song into a shot of the sky that seems to zoom in forever.
Is Lowe simply trying to comfort a dying friend, or does he genuinely believe his own words? Either way, the chord never resolves. There is no cadence at the end of Very; for posterity, at least, Lowe’s goodbye is not final.
And we feel again that we might be inside a videogame. Like the moment during a dream when you realise you don’t know how you got somewhere, try to remember – did you actually put down the controller?
We played all the levels in the right order, then tottered off the edge of the cliff just as we thought we would ascend into the heavenly leaderboard. But the black screen was a trick: there was more, and ‘Postscript’ is the cut scene to end all cut scenes. You – alone – made it through the door in the sky after all, and a minute and fourteen seconds of lonely paradise is your reward. It’s a lot to process, especially in less time than it takes to make a cup of tea.
Spoiler alert: there are a couple of other Easter eggs on Very, both buried in the artwork – one alternate photograph each of Tennant and Lowe hidden among the grid of identical faces, and an additional page of pictures concealed beneath the opaque orange CD tray. But ‘Postscript’ is a different sort of “extra” – it alters the album’s course. It’s not part of the main gameplay, but strictly speaking this isn’t a bonus at all: it’s essential. You won’t make it out without it.
We can’t really do more than speculate about what inspired ‘Postscript’. Unlike his bandmate, Lowe isn’t one to dissect his songs or his past in public; he will prove fiercely protective of this track in particular, saying only that it is “personal” when interviewed in 1993 and 2001.
The Pet Shop Boys’ assistant and close friend Peter Andreas – who according to newspapers in the mid-Nineties at one time shared Lowe’s flat for five years – dies of an Aids-related illness the year after Very’s release. The Alternative B-sides collection will be dedicated to his memory, and both Pet Shop Boys will speak frequently and fondly about him in sleevenotes and interviews.
But there’s more besides. Studer reminds us that two minutes’ silence is often used as a mark of respect for those struck down in large-scale tragedies, as when offices go quiet on Remembrance Day.139 Is the gap between ‘Go West’ and ‘Postscript’, then, some ritual silence for the Aids fatalities briefly reincarnated through this new version of Morali’s yearning love song? Could the entire suite that ends the album be seen as a three-piece requiem, two parts song and one part nothing? It’s certainly tempting to fold ‘Postscript’ into the storyline of ‘Go West’, if only so it isn’t so brutal.
We could go even further and say: Very falls silent so we can remember the characters we have met over the last fifty minutes. Shut your eyes – no, they’re already shut – and count the victims: the closeted homosexual; the drinkers frightened into silence; the lonely widower and his lost love; the homeless kids; the athletes who never made it through the portal in the sky. So ‘Postscript’ is the album’s liebestod, bolting through a closing door, finally reconciling in death the parts of its narrator that life has torn apart.
And as you ponder this the disc stops spinning and you no longer recall which memories, if any, are yours. Can you tell where you end and it begins? No, I can’t. It’s September 1993 and there are beach balls suspended in the heavens.