The 1980s File Feature
We Close Our Eyes
We Close Our Eyes — Go West and the Ache of 1985New Faces in a Crowded Pop MomentImagine Britain in the winter and spring of 1985. The charts were glutted wi…
01 The Story
We Close Our Eyes — Go West and the Ache of 1985
New Faces in a Crowded Pop Moment
Imagine Britain in the winter and spring of 1985. The charts were glutted with synth-pop, post-punk's glossier descendants, and the first flush of the charity-pop era. Wham! were preparing for their American breakthrough. Howard Jones was on his second album. And somewhere in that extraordinarily competitive landscape, a duo called Go West was trying to make their mark with a debut single that seemed to distill something essential about how that era felt: the yearning, the sonic brightness, the sense of possibility wrapped in minor-key emotion.
Peter Cox and Richard Drummie had been working toward that moment for years, refining the blend of Cox's soaring tenor and Drummie's songwriting and guitar work into something that felt both of its moment and slightly apart from it. We Close Our Eyes was the opening statement, and it landed with a quality that separates debut singles from nearly everything else: it sounded immediately, inarguably correct.
The Sound That Defined Their Introduction
The production on We Close Our Eyes has the sheen and the scale that characterized the best British pop of the mid-1980s: synthesizers deployed not for coldness but for warmth, a rhythm track built for dancing without ever sacrificing emotional weight, and Cox's voice riding above it all with a combination of technical power and apparent vulnerability that is genuinely difficult to achieve.
The song's sonic profile sits somewhere between the more theatrical arm of new wave and the classic pop song tradition: you can hear the hooks working at every level, the verse building anticipation, the pre-chorus releasing tension toward a chorus that feels, on first listen, as though you have already known it for years. That quality of instantaneous familiarity is what radio programmers of the era were looking for and what audiences responded to.
Making Ground on the American Chart
Go West's debut campaign was primarily a British phenomenon, where the duo scored significantly higher on the UK charts than across the Atlantic. In the United States, We Close Our Eyes debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on February 23, 1985, entering at number 95 and beginning a steady, patient climb over the following weeks. The track reached its peak position of number 41, arriving at that high-water mark on April 27, 1985, and spent 15 weeks on the chart in total.
Those are solid numbers for a debut from a new British act navigating an American market that was simultaneously being asked to absorb an extraordinary volume of UK pop talent during the second British Invasion of the early 1980s. Holding the chart for 15 weeks required consistent radio support rather than just opening-week momentum.
A Career in Miniature
The success of We Close Our Eyes established the template for what Go West would go on to do across their career: polished, emotionally resonant pop with Cox's voice as the central instrument and Drummie's structural intelligence giving it shape. The duo's subsequent output, including their later hit King of Wishful Thinking, demonstrated the durability of that combination.
The fact that the YouTube video for this song has now accumulated over 100 million views is its own kind of argument about longevity. Forty years on, the record is still finding new listeners, which is the measure that matters more than any chart position.
The Endurance of a First Impression
First singles rarely age as gracefully as We Close Our Eyes has. The song's emotional landscape, all yearning and restraint and the hope that comes from allowing yourself to feel something fully, speaks to something that 1985 and the present share. The production has enough period character to anchor it in its era without ever making it feel dated; Cox's voice, the constant in the equation, floats above any timestamp.
Put it on and let 1985 come back in all its synthesizer-glossed, emotionally urgent glory. It will justify the investment within the first eight bars.
“We Close Our Eyes” — Go West's singular moment on the 1980s charts.
02 Song Meaning
We Close Our Eyes — Surrender as Strength
The Emotional Proposition
The title of We Close Our Eyes is deceptively simple. On its surface it suggests romantic escape, the closing of the eyes against a world too complicated or too painful to face with them open. But the song's emotional logic is more interesting than mere escapism: closing your eyes, in Drummie and Cox's telling, is an act of trust rather than avoidance, a willingness to be fully present in a moment of connection by shutting out everything that isn't it.
That distinction gives the song more depth than its polished, radio-friendly surface might initially suggest. The vulnerability being described is chosen vulnerability, which is a different and more meaningful thing than vulnerability that simply arrives uninvited.
The Ache of Mid-1980s Longing
Go West's debut arrived at a moment when British pop was extraordinarily skilled at the emotional register the song inhabits: the precise blend of desire, uncertainty, and hope that characterizes young love at its most intense. The mid-1980s pop landscape was populated by songs that understood yearning as both subject and structure, building tension into the music itself so that the release in a chorus felt physically satisfying.
We Close Our Eyes participates in that tradition while also containing something that made it stand apart from the period's more synthetic offerings: a genuine warmth in the writing and in Cox's delivery that gave the emotion texture rather than just volume.
Intimacy and the Dream of Escape
The lyrical imagery in the song moves between the desire for private connection and the world pressing in from outside. The couple at the center of the song are, in some sense, constructing their own space by choosing to see only each other; the closed eyes are a way of building walls around something precious and temporary.
This is a theme with wide and lasting resonance, which helps explain why the song continued to find listeners for decades after its release. The experience of wanting to make a private world with another person, to close out everything else even briefly, is neither period-specific nor culturally particular. It is simply human.
Peter Cox's Voice as the Carrier of Meaning
A significant part of what the song means to listeners is inseparable from how Cox delivers it. His tenor has a quality that is rare in pop singing: it sounds genuinely moved even when executing technically difficult passages, so the vulnerability in the lyrics is embodied rather than merely gestured at. Many pop singers of the era could match his range; few could match the sense that the emotion was real rather than performed.
When a voice communicates that kind of authenticity, listeners extend trust. The meaning they project onto the song is amplified because they believe the person singing it. We Close Our Eyes accumulated over 100 million YouTube views largely on the strength of that belief, passed from listener to listener across four decades.
Why the Song Has Lasted
There is a conversation happening in popular culture about which 1980s songs have aged and which have not, and We Close Our Eyes lands firmly in the former category. The production has period character without being imprisoned by its period; the emotion in the writing is specific enough to feel real and universal enough to feel personal to anyone who has experienced the kind of love it describes.
Songs like this survive because they are doing something true. The form changes; the feeling doesn't.
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