has also been described as dance-pop, disco, and new wave. The song's socially conscious streak, as well as the propulsive bass line, derives from Grandmaster Flash's protest rap song "The Message". Lowe and Hague created a "snaky, obsessive rhythm punch" for the music, replacing the song's previously sparse beats and minimal keyboard lines. Tennant started to write the song when he was staying at his cousin's house in Nottingham while watching a gangster film. Just when he was going to sleep he came up with the lines: "Sometimes you're better off dead, there's a gun in your hand and it's pointing at your head". The lyrics were inspired by T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, particularly in the use of different narrative voices and arcane references. The song's lyrics are largely concerned with class, inner-city pressure. Tennant later said that some listeners had assumed the song referred to prostitutes, but was actually, "about rough boys getting a bit of posh." Sound-wise, the 1985 version also features a considerably smoother arrangement than the 1984 version, trading out the collage of disjointed samples (such as glass breaking and Tennant shouting the word "I") in favour of soft synth pads and Hague's Emulator trumpet solo. At the same time, however, the 1985 version “starts off like a film noir", opening with ambient traffic sounds not heard in the 1984 version. In the liner notes to the 2001 reissue of Please, Tennant noted that this was born out a desire for "filmic" music. In 2022, Tennant changed the line "From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station" in the last verse to "From Mariupol to Kyiv Station" during their co-headline Unity Tour with New Order and at their Glastonbury Festival 2022 Sunday night headline appearance. The change was done in solidarity for Ukraine in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (also because Finland Station is located in Russia). Critical reception "West End Girls" has been generally well received by music critics. Stephen Thomas Erlewine from AllMusic in a review of the album Please called the song "hypnotic", adding that "it's not only a classic dance single, it's a classic pop single". In a review for the group's second studio album Actually, Rob Hoerburger from Rolling Stone magazine commented that "West End Girls" was "as catchy as anything on the radio in 1986", praising "its enticing bass line and foreboding synth riffs", but felt that it