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"King's Cross" | |
---|---|
Song by Pet Shop Boys | |
from the album Actually | |
Released | 1987 |
Genre | Synth-pop |
Length | 5:10 |
Label | |
Songwriter(s) | |
Producer(s) | Stephen Hague |
"King's Cross" is a Pet Shop Boys song, written by Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant, [1] and is a track on their 1987 album Actually .
In 2007, it was recorded and released as a single by Tracey Thorn.
Two months after the release of Actually, 31 people were killed in the King's Cross fire. Lines such as "dead and wounded on either side, you know it's only a matter of time" could be seen as prophetic of the disaster. [2] In reality, the lyric is described by Tennant as "a metaphor for Britain" because "King's Cross is the station you come to when you come down to London looking for opportunity from the Northeast, the most depressed part of England [...] And there's lots of crime around King's Cross - prostitution, drug addicts, and a lot of tramps come up to you there" [3]
Pet Shop Boys' own version of this song remained an album-only track, but The Sun newspaper campaigned for it to be released as a charity single. [3]
The song featured in the 1988 film It Couldn't Happen Here in a scene where a man heads out to work engulfed in flames. [4] Director Jack Bond was going to delete the scene but it remained after he consulted with families of some of the victims. [3]
"King's Cross" | ||||
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Single by Tracey Thorn | ||||
from the album Out of the Woods | ||||
Released | December 2007 (Worldwide) | |||
Genre | Pop/Dance | |||
Label | Virgin Records | |||
Songwriter(s) | Neil Tennant, Chris Lowe | |||
Tracey Thorn singles chronology | ||||
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On 9 December 2007, Tracey Thorn released "King's Cross" as the final single from her Out of the Woods album. The single version was remixed by Hot Chip.
Her version of "King's Cross" had first appeared as an iTunes exclusive bonus track to Thorn's album Out of the Woods. This stripped back version had been recorded for inclusion on the main album, but at the time Thorn said in a blog post on Myspace there was not enough room to include it, so it remained a bonus for digital versions of the album only. [5]
Neil Tennant from Pet Shop Boys was also thanked in the sleeve-notes to Out of the Woods as he gave her motivation to record and release a new solo album twenty-five years after her first solo album.
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Pet Shop Boys are an English synth-pop duo formed in London in 1981. Consisting of primary vocalist Neil Tennant and keyboardist Chris Lowe, they have sold more than 100 million records worldwide, and were listed as the most successful duo in UK music history in the 1999 edition of The Guinness Book of Records.
Neil Francis Tennant is an English singer, songwriter and music journalist, and co-founder of the synth-pop duo the Pet Shop Boys, which he formed with Chris Lowe in 1981. He was a journalist for Smash Hits, and assistant editor for the magazine in the mid-1980s.
Bilingual is the sixth studio album by English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys, released in the United Kingdom on 2 September 1996 by Parlophone and in the United States on 10 September 1996 by Atlantic Records. The album reached number four on the UK Albums Chart, lower than their previous five studio albums which had all reached the top three. It yielded five successful singles, with three of them—"Before", "Se a vida é " and "A Red Letter Day"—reaching the UK top 10; the fourth one, the English/Spanish-language composition "Single-Bilingual", peaked within the top 20.
Please is the debut studio album by English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys, released on 24 March 1986 by Parlophone in the United Kingdom and by EMI America Records in the United States. According to the duo, the album's title was chosen so that people had to go into a record shop and say "Can I have the Pet Shop Boys album, 'Please'?". Please spawned four singles: "West End Girls", "Opportunities ", "Suburbia", and "Love Comes Quickly"; "West End Girls" reached number one in both the UK and the US.
Actually is the second studio album by English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys, released on 7 September 1987 by Parlophone in the United Kingdom and by EMI Manhattan in North America. According to Neil Tennant and music historian Wayne Studer, Actually loosely critiques Thatcherism, the political zeitgeist of the 1980s, and was recorded in anticipation of Margaret Thatcher's re-election.
Behaviour is the fourth studio album by the English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys, released on 22 October 1990 by Parlophone. A Japanese special edition included a bonus mini CD, exclusive artwork and printed lyrics in a white velvet-like box.
PopArt: The Hits is a greatest hits album by English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys. It was released on 24 November 2003 by Parlophone. The album consists of Pet Shop Boys' top 20 UK singles along with two new tracks, "Miracles" and "Flamboyant", which were also released as singles.
It Couldn't Happen Here is a 1988 musical film starring the British synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys and based on the music from their first two studio albums Please and Actually. It was originally conceived as an hour-long video based on Actually, but it evolved into a surreal, full-scale feature film directed by Jack Bond and co-starring Barbara Windsor, Joss Ackland, Neil Dickson, and Gareth Hunt.
"Getting Away with It" is the first single by the English band Electronic, which comprised Bernard Sumner of New Order, ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, and guesting vocalist Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. It was first released in 1989.
"It's a Sin" is a song by English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys from their second studio album, Actually (1987). Written by Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant, the song was released on 15 June 1987 as the album's lead single. It became the duo's second number-one single on the UK Singles Chart, spending three weeks atop the chart. Additionally, the single topped the charts in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, while reaching number nine on the US Billboard Hot 100. It remains one of Pet Shop Boys' most popular songs with 40 million streams in the UK.
"Heart" is a song by English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys from their second studio album, Actually (1987). It was released as the album's fourth and final single on 21 March 1988 by Parlophone. The song topped the UK Singles Chart for three weeks in April 1988, becoming the duo's fourth and final chart-topper to date in the United Kingdom. Its music video was directed by Jack Bond and filmed in Yugoslavia. The group had initially written the song for Madonna, though they never asked her to record it, instead keeping it for themselves.
"Jealousy" is a song originally written in 1982 by English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys, recorded for their fourth studio album, Behaviour (1990). It was released on 28 May 1991 as the album's fourth and final single in a slightly remixed form, which appears on the Pet Shop Boys' greatest hits albums. It reached number 12 on the UK singles chart. The song was performed by Robbie Williams at the Pet Shop Boys' 2006 BBC Radio 2 concert at the Mermaid Theatre, a recording of which was released on the Pet Shop Boys' live album Concrete.
Out of the Woods is the second solo album by Tracey Thorn. It was released on 5 March 2007 on Virgin Records. The album charted on the Billboard 200, peaking at number 172 on 7 April 2007.
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"Somewhere", sometimes referred to as "Somewhere (There's a Place for Us)" or simply "There's a Place for Us", is a song from the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story that was made into films in 1961 and 2021. The music is composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
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