The Pet Shop Boys have announced an exclusive show at the Camden venue where they went clubbing in the years before they were famous.

The 1980s superstars will celebrate the release of their eagerly- anticipated album Nonetheless with a show at 1,500-capacity Koko in Mornington Crescent.

Breaking off from the 2024 leg of their Dreamworld world tour, they will play a 90-minute set at 6.30pm on May 26.
 
The show is presented in association with Rough Trade and tickets go on sale on April 15 with general admission costing £55.

It's a busy time for the six-time Grammy winners, who have notched up 22 top ten singles - including four number ones - since debuting in 1984 with West End Girls.

Their new single Dancing Star is available now, and on April 26 - the day the album is released on Parlophone - the band will appear in a special ‘in conversation’ event in Manchester, chaired by writer Jon Savage.

Four days earlier, the duo will participate in a similar event in London, chaired by Guardian writer Alexis Petridis.
 
Pet Shop Boys also play five sold-out shows at London’s Royal Opera House from July 23 to 27 and before that they continue their Dreamworld; Greatest Hits live tour with dates starting at the end of May.

In addition, Alan Yentob's Imagine documentary about how Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe formed and went on to success, Pet Shop Boys: Then and Now will be aired on BBC1 on April 16.

The Koko gig will bring the band back to their pre-fame days, when they were both living in bedsits. As Tennant revealed in a 2006 interview with rock critic Will Hodgkinson, they would go clubbing at Camden Palace - now Koko.

He said: "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.”

The band's first demos were also recorded in Ray Roberts' basement studio in Murray Street off Camden Square in the early 1980s. Tennant has described in interviews how it was there they wrote West End Girls, Rent, Love Comes Quickly and It's A Sin:

He said the latter is "all about Catholic guilt. Not necessarily something I’ve ever suffered from to be honest.

"This song was written very quickly. Oh, in about 1983 Chris started playing this melody. We used to write in this little studio in Camden Town. Chris started this little melody and for some reason I thought of ‘When I look back on my life it’s always with a sense of shame.’

"Don’t know where it came from but 15 minutes later it was written and that was that really."