Neil    'West End girls' started off as a rap I'd written which was completely inspired by 'The Message' by Grandmaster Flash, which was released in 1982.1 loved the whole idea of the pressure of living in a modern city, and I decided to write a rap which could be done in an English accent over this piece of music

Chris and I had written in Ray Roberts' Camden studio where we used to work. The original music wasn't great, though there was a fantastic bit at the end where

Chris went into a Rhodes piano solo, which we really liked at the time. I started writing the rap when I was staying at my cousin Richard's house outside Nottingham. He and I had stayed up watching some kind of James Carney gangster film on the television, and I went to bed at about one o'clock. I was sleeping in one of his kid's bedrooms in this tiny single bed and for some reason the line 'sometimes you're better off dead/there's a gun in your hand and it's pointing at your head' came into my head, so I got out of bed and wrote it down on a bit of paper with the next two lines. Then when I got back to my flat in the King's Road, I lay on my floor one night and wrote the whole thing, apart from the last verse. The following day we were in Ray Roberts' studio and I said, 'I think we should do this rap record I’ve got an idea' and I spoke the whole thing to

Chris and Ray Roberts, banging my knee. Then, literally two or three days before we went to New York to record with Bobby '0' for the first time, we wrote an instrumental with me playing the piano and

Chris playing keyboards. It started off with this chord change that I'd written years ago, and

Chris came up with the baseline- our first bouncy baseline. I took the tape home and I realised that you could say the rap I'd written over it, and that you could sing a tune over the chorus and then have 'west.. . End...girls...' following the baseline. And I wrote the last verse, sitting on the floor again, and made a little tape of it. When we went into the studio with Bobby '0' he just stood us behind two keyboards and I said to

Chris, 'you know that rap...' and I did it then -that was the first time I'd ever sung it, apart from muttering it to myself.

Chris The engineer had made 'Popcorn'...

Neil   The first ever synthesiser hit, before Giorgio Moroder or kraftwerk. Steve Jerome, he was called. The following day Bobby '0' did these overdubs where he got the drum sounds from David Bowie's 'Let's Dance' and played them live on the Emulator and he played the choir thing on the Emulator. When we first heard an Emulator at Bobby 'O"s we loved the sound of this male Gregorian choir.

Chris New Order had already used it on 'Blue Monday'. Very annoying.

Neil    I remember the engineer saying, 'oh, wow, your voice is so easy to listen to...'.

Chris When we wanted to release 'West End girls' again after we signed to Parlophone, we had to re-record it, because we didn't own the original recording. Stephen Hague decided we should slow it down - he wanted to make it more moody. It's very similar to the original, but slower.

Neil    We added a lot more incidental noises - we had a general theory at this point that we wanted to make music that sounded filmic. We wanted to bring real sounds into the music, so our suggestion was to record people walking down the street at the start. We recorded traffic as well. At the start you can hear what Stephen Hague recorded walking down the street outside Advision studios with a DAT.

Chris Luckily a girl was walking down the street in stilettos.

Neil  If you listen very carefully you can hear a girl saying, at 0.05, something like 'it's Sting'.

Chris Because Stephen Hague looks a bit like Sting.

Neil The original version had four verses, but we decided to reduce it to three: I joined the beginning of the fourth verse to the rest of the third verse, skipping I've said it all before and I'll say it again/we're all modern men' from the third verse and 'All your stopping, stalling and starting/who do you think you are-Joe Stalin?' from the fourth verse. Md the way it worked in this version, it left a gap at the end of the verses, apart from the first verse, so either we or Stephen Hague suggested having someone sing there, and Stephen Hague suggested Helena Springs.

Helena Springs has got one of my favourite female backing voices of all time. I told her what words to sing and suggested the tune to her. She's got a fantastic, magisterial voice. Then we added the trumpet solo, which is played by Stephen Hague on an Emulator trumpet sample. He spent ages doing it. It's a really good solo. A lot better than most trumpet players. All the Emulator choirs come from Bobby 'O"s original version - Bobby '0' played them originally.

Chris and I foolishly didn't want to keep them because we wanted it to not sound like Bobby '0' but Stephen Hague quite rightly said, 'No, that's so good it has to stay in'. The new version also has a different beginning and end to the original. The whole record took exactly one week, five days from Monday to Friday, on Friday evening it was finished and we thought that it was absolutely completely brilliant. And famously we took it to EMI and they were all a bit worried about it, and we really had to say, 'No, it's great'. And it went to number one in Britain and then, in 1986, to number one in America. Arguably, 'West End girls' was the first rap number one in America. Chris and I did our twelve-inch mix [CD2, track 6] with Frank Rozak, an engineer from New York - we went in at night because the studio time was cheaper. We

weren't that happy with it at the time, but that mix became the number one dance record in America. A lot of people assumed the song was about prostitutes and of course, typically, it didn't even enter my head. It was meant to be about class, about rough boys getting a bit of posh. It's opposites- west east, lower class/upper class, rich/poor, work/play. And it's about the idea of escape. There is a huge thing about escaping in our songs. I put in the bit about Russia because I've always been interested in Russian history, and the idea was that the song went from west to east - 'from Lake Geneva to The Finland Station', which is the historic journey Lenin made in a sealed train.

Chris and I used to love the West End of London near Leicester Square because you'd get a lot of skinheads, and you'd get posh girls. We used to go out nightclubbing a lot, and we'd go to The Dive Bar in Gerrard Street, which is mentioned in the song. It was in a basement, and it was damp down there, and there was no one in it apart from a couple of queenly guys talking to the barman - but it used to fascinate us. The barman used to play Shirley Basset or Barbra Streisand or Barry Manilow. We used to really like going there.