BELIEVE IT OR DON’T DEPT.: If you...

BELIEVE IT OR DON’T DEPT.: If you want to win a barroom bet this week, just ask your pop-fan friends what new hit single was the No. 2 record of the year on KROQ-FM’s 1984 year-end hit parade. (That’s right-- 1984 ) . The answer: “West End Girls” by the Pet Shop Boys, which now, nearly two years after being a huge KROQ hit, has become one of the hottest records in the country.

Currently No. 5 on the Billboard charts, the melodramatic novelty song languished in obscurity for ages (at least by rock standards). The big question--what took so long?

“It really is a phenomenon,” said Colin Stewart, vice president of marketing at EMI Records, which signed the group last summer and is releasing its debut album, “Please,” later this month. Even Stewart is a bit baffled by the complicated events that led to the pop duo’s chart success. From the start, the Pet Shop Boys--Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe--were an unusual pop outfit. Tennant was a British rock journalist (who worked for Smash Hits magazine), while Lowe was a self-styled “weird architect” and graphic designer.

In 1984, they teamed up with disco producer Bobby (O) Orlando and cut the original version of “West End Girls,” which was distributed here by Epic Records. While the song got scattered airplay in America, it flopped in England, largely due to a legal dispute between the duo and Orlando.

When the duo were available again in early 1985, EMI signed them and released a new single, “Opportunity,” which also failed. Undeterred, the group went back into the studio with a new producer (Stephen Hague) and rerecorded “West End Girls.” By this January, it was at the top of the British charts. EMI rushed the group back into the studio to cut an entire album, then released “West End Girls” again in the States this spring.

“It’s a much more polished, definitive version of the song,” Stewart explained, though he admits having lost track of how many different versions are in circulation. KROQ Program Director Rick Carroll (who’s already touting another PSB song, “Lover Come Quickly”) is convinced there are four alternative takes; Stewart thinks there might be as many as five.

Whatever the amount, EMI thinks the band is loaded with potential, especially with a former journalist to handle the publicity and a graphic designer to help map out the album covers. “Chris (the designer) has had considerable input into our marketing and advertising campaign. He’s very much into minimalism,” Stewart said with a laugh. “Which is probably why all the print on the album jacket is so small and impossible to read.”