Neil  Derek Jarman was having an exhibition for local Aids charities in Manchester and asked us to do a concert for him at the Hacienda. 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 dolt 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 V~llage People, and I thought 'Go West' would suit Neil's voice. Md 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 V~llage People's words. I copied them off the record once, and the first time we performed it, at the Hacienda, 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! WewilI...aIl haveto sing!' At that point Ithink, 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 lyncs 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 [CD2, track 1], which has never been released, is pretty good. It's dominated by this  sy~th rift 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 fonner 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.