King's Cross

"King's Cross" is a Pet Shop Boys song, written by Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant, and is a track on their 1987 album Actually. 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. 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" 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. The song featured in the 1987 film It Couldn't Happen Here in a scene where a man heads out to work engulfed in flames. Director Jack Bond was going to be delete the scene but it remained after he consulted with families of some of the victims.