After completing a degree in history at the Polytechnic of North London, Neil takes a job at Marvel Comics, anglicizing spellings and indicating where over-risque woman needed to be redrawn decently. While there he interviews comic fan Marc Bolan, who politely points out that his tape recorder wasn’t working. In 1977 he works at Macdonald Educational Publishing, later moving to ITV Books. In June 1982, he joins Smash Hits.
The Pet Shop Boys’ first single—the original ‘Bobby O’ version of ‘West End Girls’—is released.
‘Heart’ hits #1 in the U.K.
The Boys bring their Performance tour show to Radio City Music Hall in New York City. (A reviewer for the New York Post so detests it that he would go on to suggest, infamously, that Radio City Music Hall needed be ‘fumigated’ as a result.)
The Boys are traveling by Winnebago between their southwestern U.S. venues on the current leg of their Electric Tour. Today, in transit from the San Francisco Bay area to southern California, they stop and spend the night at San Simeon, site of the famed Hearst Castle.