Neil Tennant, half of the most successful British duo in the history of pop music, arrives alone to lunch with the FT. “We call this the Coldest Table In London,” he announces, gesturing at the bare windows of J Sheekey in Covent Garden and the wind tunnel that is St Martin’s Court, in front of which I have nobly placed myself. “On a cold day, you can freeze to death here.”
“I’ve kept my layers,” I say reassuringly. “You can put your scarf on if you need it,” Tennant predicts. Reader, I will. As with so many things, the Pet Shop Boys are prescient.
They have chosen this celebrity fish restaurant for our lunch à trois because they’ve been coming here for decades, mostly pre-theatre. They like the wood panelling and the walls of black-and-white photos of the starry clientele. I suspect Tennant, a remarkably generous and experienced interviewee who, as a former journalist, will interrogate himself if the questioner dries up, has worked out that the venue must be in the West End, for we are here in part to mark 40 years since the release of “West End Girls”, a song ranked by one critics’ poll as the greatest UK number one single of all time.