London Food & Culture

Pet Shop Boys: Top 5 locations in Camden

Where was It's a Sin recorded? Which late night haunt did the Boys frequent in the 1980s? What was King's Cross actually about?

 Pelle Crépin
Pet Shop Boys, 2016. Photo: Pelle Crépin
To celebrate 30 years of the UK’s best-selling duo – and the release of their 13th album Super – we decided to take a look at how the borough of Camden has helped Pet Shop Boys’ career take shape. Did you know, for example, that in 1975 Neil Tennant graduated with a history degree from the North London poly on Prince Of Wales Road? And that more than twenty years later he performed Rent with Suede at the Roundhouse? Here are some more fascinating facts…

1. THE STUDIO THAT SPAWNED THE HITS: Murray Street, Camden Square

Early hits.
The duo as they looked in the 1980s. Photo: PR
Run by musician and producer Ray Roberts, the little parade off leafy Camden Square was where, in the early 80s, Pet Shop Boys wrote almost all their early classics like It’s a Sin, West End Girls, Love Comes Quickly, Jealousy and Rent.

“I got the phone number of the studio out of the Melody Maker small ads and called [Ray] up,” said Neil Tennant in an interview with Literally (the official PSB magazine) in 2010. “He said he’d record a four-hour session, mix it afterwards and give us one metal cassette and three normal cassettes or something like that. He thought we had something about us, and he said we could use his studio for free if he could have a share of our publishing, and so that’s when we started going into his studio in Camden Town regularly.”

Anti-Thatcherite satire Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money) was released as a single in 1985 and again in 1986, when it finally hit the charts. But the main lyrical concept came in the Murray Street studio when Chris Lowe asked Tennant to make up a lyric based around the line “let’s make lots of money”.


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Once the Boys signed to Parlophone, they never saw Roberts again, but were notified by a friend of his death in 2010. “We bought him out,” said Tennant, “and in fact he was very pleased, because he got a sum of money. That was probably the end of 1984, or the beginning of 1985. When the first album came out we gave him a credit, and a gold disc for Please.”

Interviewed in 1996, Roberts said: “I don’t think any of us in their heart of hearts believed that we would make a big splash.” But deep down in that basement studio in Camden Town, Neil and Chris must have.

2. THE KENTISH TOWN ALBUM SHOOT: Spring Studios for YES cover

Spring Studios
Spring Studios: where Lowe
In January 2009, in Studio B, Spring Studios, Kentish Town, Pet Shop Boys were photographed for the inside artwork of their tenth album Yes by Alasdair McLellan.

The Yes Cover.
The Yes Cover.
But Chris Lowe’s cab driver couldn’t, it seems, navigate the winding streets of industrial west Kentish Town. “He got lost on the way here,” reported Literally at the time, “but Chris was able to direct him using the real-time map on his iPhone. He seems to have found the whole experience quite invigorating.”

Isn’t it amazing how only seven years ago, GPS on a phone was considered exciting? Anyway, the duo settled on a rack of clothes by the designer Gareth Pugh – and the resulting pictures are, of course, a small piece in the thirty year jigsaw puzzle of PSB history.

3. INTIMATE CAMDEN GIG: Barfly, 2004

Barfly: scene of a cosy gig a decade back. Photo: SE
Barfly: scene of a cosy gig a decade back. Photo: SE
It was the first time in twenty years that Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe had performed without the aid of dancers, costume changes or short films, relying instead on two keyboards and a laptop.

The room throbbed with diehard fans, with “one woman virtually trembling as she mouths every lyric,” said The Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey. “Tennant and Lowe are free to tour the side streets of their remarkable back catalogue. There’s Jealousy, the first song the pair ever wrote together; In Private, originally produced for Dusty Springfield and never played live before; and Tonight Is Forever, their first album’s hymn to metropolitan hedonism.”

4. THE 1980s HAUNT: Camden Palace (KOKO)

Formerly Camden Palace
Formerly Camden Palace. Photo: KOKO
The infamous venue down near Mornington Crescent tube has featured several times in the Boys’ careers. In a 2006 interview with rock critic Will Hodgkinson, Neil Tennant recalls regular visits to Camden Palace clubbing with Chris Lowe.

“We were both living in bedsits in London. I was working at a book publishers and we were totally outside of everything: we hardly knew anyone, and we would go clubbing to Camden Palace just to look at people from the side of the dancefloor, which is a much better place to be than in the VIP area sipping champagne.”

First ever release: Opportunities sleeve.
First ever release: Opportunities sleeve.
Then, in 1985, just before their first hit, Pet Shop Boys appeared at Camden Palace to mime West End Girls for the Alternative Top Of The Pops on a bill with Curiosity Killed The Cat and Swing Out Sister.

Finally, more than twenty years later, in 2007, Neil Tennant was special guest with Scissor Sisters at a charity gig at what was now firmly called KOKO. He performed Love Comes Quickly with Jake Shears during the encore.

5. THE TRACK NAMED AFTER THE STATION: King’s Cross

Actually
Actually
Like Being Boring, the song King’s Cross, which appeared on their second album Actually, is a real fan favourite. Although it’s widely believed that the lyrics refer to the tragic King’s Cross fire of November 1987, the album on which it appeared was released two months earlier.

Instead, the track is a thoughtful and elegiac work about unemployment, containing the poignant observation: “Good luck and bad luck waiting in line.”

Tracey Thorn recorded her own version twenty years later in 2007. If you haven’t heard it, the Hot Chip remix is highly recommended. 

Nearly as much, in fact, as the haunting original.

Super is out on x2 this month. Info here


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