In 1962, Holloway Road was a bustling thoroughfare that connected Islington with Highgate, not exactly the center of London, but no longer the outskirts of town it had been two centuries prior. Redbrick Victorian row buildings crowded the busy street, filled with news agents, greengrocers, and chemists. The storefront at 304 Holloway, in fact, was a leather-goods shop operated by Violet Shenton, who owned the building and rented the three-floor flat upstairs to Joe Meek.

These inauspicious, unlikely quarters would be the birthplace of one of the greatest hits of British pop and the scene of one of its most shocking, violent crimes.