PINK FLOYD SAY RULE BRITANNIA WITH SOMETHING PERKY IN ISLINGTON
Posted by STEVE M on
Well what an advert, bet that made you sit up and take notice in 1975!!!! Once you get past the strategically placed thongs and cards you wonder what the advert is for, well, if you're sitting comfortably, then I'll tell you!
First though, I will say that I bet that the lady pictured turns heads these days at the Post Office as she stands in the Pension encashment queue! Anyhow, I digress, as Britannia Row Audio Ltd was an offshoot of Britannia Row Studios and was created to hire out Pink Floyd's tour equipment and keep the skills of its crew together. Early events that it provided sound for included Queen's 1976 Hyde Park Open Air Show. Eventually the hire arm was sold in a management buyout in 1985 and then moved to Twickenham for cheaper rates and more space to grow.
Britannia Row Studios was built by the British rock band Pink Floyd in a three-story block, predictably at 35 Britannia Row, Islington and this advert was placed to get them noticed!!. After their 1975 album, Wish You Were Here was released, Pink Floyd used the studio to record their album Animals and The Wall including the school chorus on Another Brick In The Wall.
Pink Floyd's drummer, Nick Mason assumed ownership of the studio in 1982 with the business being sold to Kate Koumi, who had been managing it since the mid-1980s. In 1995, Koumi relocated the studio to Wandsworth Bridge Road in Fulham, where it operated for the next 20 years until it closed in September 2015 and was converted into flats - this was a pretty good investment as a £200K recording studio was turned into a two £1,000,000 flats of 900 ft square size!
Mason retained the original building in Britannia Row, until 2016 when Islington Council granted permission for an extension and conversion of the building into flats.
Here's an interesting aside, the ethnic demographic diagram for Islington looks like a Christmas tree, isn't that nice?
Here's another interesting aside, some say that Britannia Studios was one of the best things to come out of Islington and others say that Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North and formally of the Labour Party and Her Majesty's Opposition between 2015 and 2020 is the best. Many of these people are amongst us courtesy of the "care in the community" programme and may be easily identified by their predilection for bargee caps, unkempt beards and brown suits from C&A.