Djo, the musician and Stranger Things actor better known as Joe Keery, is a student of the classics. So the opportunity to tour a famed west London studio – arguably the most famous in the world, although the name can’t be printed here as they technically don’t allow tours – is equal parts awe-inspiring and terrifying. As we wander around the cavernous studios and cosy control rooms on a chilly March morning, Keery, wearing a black woollen coat with a houndstooth beanie pulled low over his forehead, is mostly quiet and reverential. Given the opportunity to have a plink on a piano that Paul McCartney wrote one of the Beatles’ hits on, he keeps a healthy distance. His awestruck visage barely slips until we step into one of the studio’s most famous rooms, and a quizzical look flashes across his face: “This smells like my school!”
It’s not like Keery is any stranger to rarefied spaces. Since breaking out in 2016 as foppish bad-boy-done-good Steve Harrington on Stranger Things, he’s done all the award ceremonies and the talkshows and the fashion parties. His second album as Djo, 2022’s Decide, was a profoundly DIY affair – “five days in the studio, due to time and money constraints” – but his forthcoming third album was made at New York’s hallowed Electric Lady. “So many legends have recorded at that place, like Erykah Badu and D’Angelo, and then back in the day obviously Hendrix and the Rolling Stones and AC/DC,” he says. “So, so crazy.”
