Neil and Chris have said that the band’s name was taken from friends who worked in a pet shop in Ealing who were known as the ‘pet shop boys’
Neil Tennant was always dreaming of escape. As a boy his favourite toy was a train set. When he grew up he’d watch the real ones pulling out of Newcastle station down to King’s Cross. “Newcastle was quite a rough place…quite scary. I was always thinking I would leave,” he’d say years later. But before he departed for London in 1972 to read History at North London Poly, Tennant sought refuge in “secret worlds”, places of romantic imagination at odds with Geordie reality.
Born Neil Francis Tennant on 10 July 1954, he was raised comfortably middle class in North Gosworth, on Newcastle’s edges, cows grazing in fields just beyond the family home, with siblings Susan, Simon and Phillip, his housewife mum, and dad who sold industrial rubber goods. Happy at St. Oswald’s primary school, he struggled to fit in at St. Cuthbert’s Catholic Grammar. Nicknamed ‘poshy’, he was insufficiently athletic for the ‘sporty’ school and his report card suggested a mercurial pupil: “Neil attends when he chooses to and writes what he wishes – on what does he base his claim to superiority?”