Wanted: Rights for Boybands

The website for No. 33 Portland Place, one of London’s grandest eighteenth century townhouses, has a section dedicated to the music videos which have been filmed there.

There’s Amy Winehouse’s Rehab and Orson with their one hit wonder No Tomorrow. There’s also Kate Moss dancing in stockings and suspenders for upmarket lingerie label Agent Provocateur.

But, there’s one music video the website haven’t listed. Gold Forever, this year’s Comic Relief charity single from boyband The Wanted, has been written out of Portland Place history.

It would take a devoted boyband fan with a passion for eighteenth century architectural mouldings to ever connect the two.

It took this stucco and boyband fan a morning of sleuthing to match the Robert Adam mouldings in the opening shots of the video with those of the Portland Place staircase.

Built by Robert Adam in 1775, No. 33 Portland Place is one of London’s few surviving Adam townhouses. The website proudly inventories those bits of the original Adam design which still survive and advises that the Adam interiors offer ‘a unique backdrop opportunity for shoots.’ You can take your pick from:

2 x Robert Adam Drawing Rooms

1 x Robert Adam Ballroom

1 x Robert Adam Music Room

1 x Robert Adam Dining Room

1 x Robert Adam Entrance Hall

1 x Robert Adam Inner Hall and Sweeping Staircase

If you are very keen-eyed you might have spotted Portland Place’s starring role in the King’s Speech. Lionel Logue’s Harley Street consulting room is really the top-lit ‘Distressed Room’ at Portland Place and the upper-landing of the Portland Place staircase moon-lighted as the King’s Piccadilly apartments.



Boybands are much maligned. Not as sexy as Kate Moss, not as rebellious as Amy Winehouse, boybands suffer the music industry's greatest indignities: fronting the 'Make Mine a Milk' campaign, sporting rubber noses for Comic Relief, representing their country at Eurovision, and being denied their rightful place in the Portland Place pantheon.