These posts are about the songs that fell just short of crossing the key line of chart success, entering the Billboard Top 40. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 41.

London lads Peter Cox and Richard Drummie met when they were teenagers and initially spent their time together in a layabout manner typical of that age group. In their case, lazing about in a boozy haze and playing records actually led to a career.

“Richard and I got together because we both loved music and we had similar musical tastes,” Cox later recalled. “We spent a long time drinking beer and cheap wine, and listening to music because we didn’t really have very much money, and we spent what we had on buying new albums and pouring over the liner notes to see which musicians were playing on which albums, and eventually that led to us trying to write some songs together.”

After they had a a few promising songs, an acquaintance of the duo connected them with ATV Music, a music publishing house that signed them to a deal. The publishing house’s expectation was that a label would snap Cox and Drummie up soon enough, but the pair instead spent the next three years or so on the receiving end of rejections. Fed up with the common refrain “We don’t hear a single,” Cox and Drummie set out, somewhat cynically, to write a hit.

At around the same time, Cox and Drummie started working with producer Gary Peterson, who urged them to pick up the tempos on their songs. Because it was the middle of the nineteen-eighties, Peterson also suggested they incorporate strong synthesizer lines into the tracks. Suddenly, the act had pop songs with more pop to them, including the one they’d created with the upper reaches of chart specifically in mind. That song was titled “Call Me,” and it was instrumental in getting them a record deal, with Chrysalis Records.

Using the band name Go West, Cox and Drummie quickly recorded their debut album with Peterson behind the boards. Chrysalis execs were certain that “Call Me” was destined to be the breakthrough hit and were reluctant to release it as the first single, figuring Go West would benefit from a slower build. Introduce the band first and build a little familiarity before hitting the masses with the destined smash, the reasoning went. Basically indifferent to what the sacrificial song would be, the label let Cox and Drummie pick the album track to serve as their debut single. They opted for “We Close Our Eyes,” a song they’d had for a while and that had been one of the clearest beneficiaries of Peterson’s enhancements.

To everyone’s surprise, “We Close Our Eyes” was a big hit. Boosted by a music video directed by Godley & Creme, the single soared into the Top 5 of the U.K. charts and hit similarly impressive peaks all over the world. In the U.S., “We Close Our Eyes” got constant airplay on MTV and just missed crossing the threshold of the Billboard Top 40. When “Call Me” was released as the follow-up single, it was also a decent hit for the band at home in the U.K., but it underperformed by comparison.

Although Go West had a string of modest hits in the U.K. over the course of the next few years, they never took another single to the same chart heights. It was a different situation in the U.S. After making their first appearance in the Billboard Top 40 with the 1987 single “Don’t Look Down – The Sequel,” a remix of a track that originally appeared on their self-titled debut album, Go West wedged their way onto the soundtrack for a 1990 Touchstone Pictures romantic comedy that was being release in March, then a box office dead zone on the movie release calendar. The film was Pretty Woman, and it was an enormous hit that made Julia Roberts a star, as big of a movie star as there was in the early nineteen-nineties.

As the film crossed into sensation levels of popularity, its mish-mash soundtrack was tugged along with it. The Pretty Woman soundtrack sold more than three million copies in the U.S. and pushed Roxette to the top of the Billboard chart with the power ballad “It Must Have Been Love.” Go West’s contribution, “King of Wishful Thinking,” served as the soundtrack’s follow-up single, and it made the Top 10 in the U.S.

Other entries in this series can be found by clicking on the “Top 40 Smash Near Misses” tag.