From Brit Awards To Pretty Woman: Peter Cox Looks Back At 40 Years Of Go West

It’s a transatlantic 80s double header when British supergroup GO WEST and American Sweetheart DEBBIE GIBSON come together for a national Australian tour in August 2026. Audiences can expect a night packed with era-defining hits. Go West will deliver classics including We Close Our Eyes, King Of Wishful Thinking, and Call Me.

Peter Cox and Richard Drummie formed Go West in the early 80s. Their debut single We Close Our Eyes reached #5 on the UK singles chart in the spring of 1985. Their self-titled debut album sold over 2 million copies worldwide and remained on the UK chart for 83 weeks, establishing them as one of the finest song-writing partnerships to emerge in the 80s. Go West have enjoyed numerous chart singles worldwide, notably King Of Wishful Thinking, the opening song in the extremely successful film Pretty Woman. The film’s soundtrack has sold over ten million copies. King Of Wishful Thinking received ASCAP Awards in 1991 and 1992 as one of the most played songs on American radio. It is still a radio staple on playlists across the world. In Australia, Go West reached the ARIA top 10 with We Close Our Eyes (1985) and King of Wishful Thinking (1990). Peter Cox talks to Hi Fi Way about forty spectacular years as Go West and returning to Australian this August.

Great to be talking. It almost seems like 2026 is perfect timing for Go West to come back for another tour?
I’m glad you think so, yeah. We’re really looking forward to it, I can’t tell you how much.

The partnership with Debbie Gibson is a good one. Last time it was with Nick Kershaw, but what is it about Debbie that made her a standout as the main support on this tour?
Well, I have to be honest and say that was the promoter’s idea. So, obviously, he’s thinking about ticket sales, and I know that Debbie hasn’t been in Australia for decades, and I know she’s really looking forward to it too, so hopefully it’s going to be a good combination.

Australia always one of those sort of special places for you to keep touring? It must hold so many great tour memories and stories.
It absolutely does. I feel very, very lucky to be still doing this thing that I love to do all these years later, and flying all the way around the world to do it. Obviously, when you are trading on your past, to some extent, it has to be in a territory where people actually bought the records. We don’t play very much in Europe, because despite doing some promo there, we didn’t really sell any records, so… Yeah, I’m very grateful to Australian audiences for buying the records and making us a success there in the first place, and then buying tickets to come and see us forty years later.

Are there any particular cities or venues here in Australia that always hold those special memories every time you come back?
Well, honestly, the cities in Australia are far apart. It’s a lot of flying, and the trips generally tend to be pretty short, for obvious reasons. The first time I came to Australia to tour, we played with a brilliant Australian pickup band and our rehearsal was organized… we arrived in Australia, got off the plane, came through customs, got in a car and went to a rehearsal room. That was a baptism of fire, and that experience taught me that I was never going to do that again. I couldn’t even have told you my middle name at that point. But since then, in order to make things, certainly for my own head, to get my head on straight, get over the time difference, a couple of times now I have come out to Australia ten days, two weeks earlier, and had a holiday, so that by the time the tour arrived, I was a bit more fully functional. Those occasions, I’ve spent those couple of weeks in Sydney, so as much as I love all the other cities, that’s the city that I’ve spent most time in, let’s put it that way.

Do you find that the songs keep evolving in a live sense over the years?
They do to some extent. Obviously, the band members have changed, we’ve been doing this now for forty-plus years, and I’m always surprised that other artists don’t talk about their bands as much as I seem to, because I couldn’t do it without these guys, and these musicians are people that I have personally chosen. They don’t just arrive, you choose people that you think will play the songs and suit the songs well. Even so, to your point, yes, different players bring different things to the songs, but having said that, I think that when audiences come to see a band whose success was, initial success, anyway, was forty years ago, and they want to relive the memories of their childhood, first time they fell in love, started a family maybe… when they come to see a band like Go West, I think that they want to hear the songs in a recognisable form. I personally take it as a huge compliment that many people seem to think that we sound the same as we ever did. That’s what I’m aiming for. I don’t want people to come to the show and say, oh, they changed the arrangement, or they’ve made it more swing, or he doesn’t sing the way he used to. I’m trying to recreate those records as much as I possibly can.

Playing somewhere like The Gov, it almost felt like an arena kind of theatre-type show. I couldn’t believe I was seeing Go West in intimate surrounds like The Gov. It just must be really cool to be going back and playing, being up close and personal with the fans in venues like this?
That’s absolutely right. I love The Gov, and you know, in the 70s in the UK… I think it’s probably more recognisable in Australia than it would be now, by which I mean that there was a circuit of venues, we would call them the pub rock circuit, and The Gov has that flavour about it. What’s great about The Gov, from my point of view, is, as you say, you’re up close and very personal, or very up close and personal. But it’s a standing venue, and there’s a different energy about playing to a standing crowd. Playing in a theatre is great, obviously, happy to do that, but when people are sitting down when the show starts, obviously the energy in the room is very different. That’s one of the things that’s great about playing The Gov.

With such a strong back catalogue, obviously there are the set staples, but deciding which ones to potentially leave out or leave in that must be a really tough choice.
Yeah, I mean, there are obviously certain songs that we will play that the audience, I imagine, would like to hear us play, expect us to play. But yeah, this is… being arguably the headlining act gives us an opportunity to play one or two deeper cuts, don’t be scared, kids, and also to just throw in a surprise or two, which is always fun.

But do you feel like fans connect differently with the songs today compared to maybe in the 80s or 90s? Is that a completely different sort of fan experience now?
That’s a tricky question. All I can say to you is, remembering writing this or that song, I can obviously remember where I was, what that process was, and to be celebrating our fortieth anniversary… when you stand in front of a crowd and you play a song that they recognise, when the chorus arrives, if the audience is singing that song back at you, there really isn’t much better feeling. That’s when my job is… you know, if I’m standing on the stage and the audience is doing the work, it’s all good.

Celebrating forty years is an incredible achievement and milestone, but what’s the secret to keep it going, especially in such an algorithm-driven world, where you see so many younger bands who have got the goods, but they just can’t break through?
Well, I think part of it is coming from the end of what we might call the golden age of the recording industry, when physical product meant something and was worth money, and you sold at least in the UK, the 7-inch single. Possibly some of your audience may not even know what I’m talking about, but a little bit of plastic, 7-inch single of We Close Our Eyes sold three hundred thousand copies of that. Where I’m going with this is that you’re right. In this modern era, there are any number of talented people out there, and of course social media, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok gives you a platform where you can publish your work. The trick is getting noticed and with such a flood of creativity out there, you can have a great song, and it will go by. Whereas we had the questionable advantage of being signed to a record label in an era when, for the record label to be successful, they needed to sell records, they needed to promote their artists. Although we may not have been the most promotable artists, we had that going for us. Also, it was the era of the video when people were throwing money around to make pop videos to get their artists noticed, in a way that happens much less now. It’s all very much more homemade, by which I don’t mean that it can’t be good, of course it can be good. But labels, to my understanding these days, if you’re eighteen, nineteen, twenty and you’re trying to get noticed, you have to do everything yourself. Everything! Not just writing the songs, but recording the songs, filming yourself recording the songs, making your own promotion… a typical record company reaction to a young artist who’s trying to break through is, if you can even get someone on the phone or someone to talk to you about your project, the first question will be, how many TikTok followers have you got? Which is a different universe, and that’s one reason why I feel so fortunate to be able to have songs that seem to have stood the test of time, which make it possible for me to fly around the world and play shows to an audience that want to hear those songs.

When you even reflect on forty years, what are some of the real significant moments that stand out proudly for yourself?
Well, I know it’s a UK thing, but Richard and I won the Best British Newcomer Brit Award in 1986 after our first album. That’s an award that’s voted for by the public, rather than the record industry. So that was an affirmation that people liked what we were doing, even for those of us like myself who are a little less confident about these things. We had a difficult second album, that’s a tired old story that’s happened to many, many bands. So when we were in the right place at the right time with The King of Wishful Thinking, and that song was included in the soundtrack to Pretty Woman, which, as politically incorrect as it is, again, it almost has its own TV channel now. Whenever you turn the TV on, you can probably find Pretty Woman playing somewhere, which means that wherever we go and play, even if there are people in the audience who don’t know who we are, when we play that song, the chances are they’re going to go, oh, I know this song, because of Pretty Woman. But when I’m asked about the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, that’s the thing. I think, you can have a great song, but you still need an element of luck, and if we had written The King of Wishful Thinking three months later, then that soundtrack album would have been and gone, and we would have missed that boat, so you have to be in the right place at the right time, even if you have a commercial song.

I guess it must have felt a bit like winning the lottery in some ways, just like you said, right time and that you couldn’t time it any better?
Exactly right, and because we had had a year in the wilderness after the failure of our second album. When we wrote The King of Wishful Thinking, Richard, with his customary confidence, said, well, that’s a hit record, and I’m not wired that way, so I didn’t necessarily feel that he was right. Fortunately, our record label did feel that we had a commercial song. But when they announced that they wanted to include it in the soundtrack to Pretty Woman, Richard was dead set against it. From his point of view, we’d had a year in the wilderness, we didn’t know if we were going to get to make another record. Now we were finally back on track with a record company behind us, and he didn’t want to interrupt the writing process for what would become our Indian Summer album to promote this film. Fortunately, he was persuaded that it was a good idea, and the rest is history, as I say.

Has your partnership with Richard changed over the years? Is it still important to be creative and keep working on new songs, or is the focus very much different now?
Well, Richard’s been very unwell for quite some time there, so I don’t really see very much of him. Certainly, over the years, our social interaction became less and less until I only really saw him when we were working. We certainly bonded in the early days over a shared love of music, obviously, but particular influences. We both really enjoyed the same music, and then, because my horizons were quite narrow, Richard’s much broader with a love of American West Coast music. Todd Rundgren, particularly, is a hero of Richard’s, and because we didn’t have very much money, we spent most of our time at his tiny flat listening to music, and he would introduce me to music that I hadn’t heard before.

The point I want to make is that we were much on the same page, but then, like any relationship over forty five-plus years, you kind of go in different directions. And certainly, more recently, my taste in music has been quite different from Richard’s. Richard’s much more drawn to rough edges and quirkier kinds of things, whereas perhaps as a side effect of always wanting to write a commercial song, I’m drawn to, or at least my analytical mind hears, a contemporary pop record by a female singer who’s nineteen years old. While that music might not necessarily be written with someone of my age in mind, I can appreciate it. I can appreciate what’s gone into making that song commercial. So certainly, I’ve made many more records as a solo artist than we have as Go West, which I think reflects Richard’s attitude to writing and recording in the modern day. I think the last album that he and I wrote and recorded together was called Future Now. You may not be familiar with it. It certainly didn’t set the charts alight, and when we were met with a certain degree of indifference with that record, I think that cemented Richard’s view that he didn’t really feel that there was much point in writing and recording. I know that Richard feels very much that being in a band isn’t all there is to Richard Drummie, whereas it kind of is for me. This is what I’ve always wanted to do, it’s the only thing I have any talent for, and I still love it. So we are quite different people now.

So he’s not touring this time around?
We don’t know if he’s going to be well enough. He’s been very unwell, so it is possible that he may not be with me when I come to Australia.

Best wishes to Richard, and I hope he’s on the mend soon. So where to next? Once the tour’s done, is there just more touring everywhere else, to keep the celebrations going?
Yes, obviously, I love to play live, I’ve had a broad experience in forty years, travelled all over the world to places I never imagined I would see, and that’s all been amazing. But in this modern era, when, as we’ve discussed, music is available on streaming platforms, the album experience isn’t the same as it once was. People don’t buy a product and an album and listen to it from start to finish. Spotify and the like, you can pick and choose the single from the album, or one track at a time, so in order to keep a career going financially, playing live is where it’s at and because you have to make certain compromises and I don’t want to do that with the band, with the musicians that I’ve chosen to play the Go West songs. I’m waffling, aren’t I? What I want to say is, I’ve realised, belatedly, that standing in front of a fantastic band, singing songs that I’ve had a hand in writing, is really all I’ve ever wanted to do. I still feel so lucky to be doing that. Much more important to me personally than making a pop video, or being, in inverted commas, famous. It’s never been about that for me. It’s about standing in front of a wicked band, singing songs, and hopefully entertaining an audience. That’s all I’ve ever really wanted to do.

There’s got to be a gold watch in there for forty years, surely?
Well, that’s very kind of you to say. I think that reflects your age!

It does. I agree!
I think maybe the gold watch, or many hundreds, thousands of gold watches should be given to those people who’ve stood by us and make it possible for me to come out to Australia and play shows forty years on. I don’t take that for granted.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Go West on tour with Debbie Gibson on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…