One Essex school has the laid the strongest claim to the crown of Britain’s most gifted and talented class after four international music stars spent their formative years there.

For a brief stretch in the 1970s, one class in Essex was graced with a collection of the most iconic pop icons that Britain has ever seen and can count them among its glittering alumni.

Imagine rubbing shoulders with a young Alison Moyet in the playground. Perhaps you’d have asked to borrow Perry Bamonte’s pencil. Or sitting down next to a teenage Martin Gore and Andy Fletcher during lunch.

For pupils at the former St Nicholas secondary school, in Basildon’s colourful Laindon estate, that was the reality more than forty years ago. 

And as of 2022, that hugely successful quartet had collectively sold more than 150million albums worldwide. 

Emotional tributes this week flooded in after the death of Fletcher, the co-founder and keyboardist of legendary electronic band Depeche Mode who died at the age of 60.

The group, which was founded by Fletcher in Basildon, Essex, in 1980, shared a statement confirming his death, describing the keyboardist as a ‘dear friend’ with ‘a heart of gold’.

The band said Fletch died at home from ‘natural causes’, weeks after pictures were shared online showing him on holiday with his family in Spain and attending Chelsea’s FA Cup Final clash with Liverpool. 

Grammy-nominated singer songwriter Alison Moyet, who is also from Essex and went to school with Fletcher, said they had gone ‘from classmates to label mates’, adding that she was had ‘no words’.

She shot to international stardom with a string of hits both with Yazoo and as a solo artist in the 1980s and previously recalled her encounters with her fellow musicians as they all attended the same Essex school.

Moyet and…