‘It’s all gone Pete Tong’ is a piece of modern rhyming slang, with Tong rhyming with ‘wrong’. It’s used when something has gone badly wrong, whether that’s a night out, a plan, or just about any situation that has fallen apart. It grew up around British club culture in the 1980s and has since spread well beyond it, said by people who have never set foot in a nightclub and may not even know who Pete Tong is. As Cockney rhyming slang goes, it’s unusual in naming a living, still-working person rather than a historical figure or fictional character.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘its all gone pete tong’?
Pete Tong is a real DJ, long associated with BBC Radio 1’s dance music output, and the phrase began as a joke made at his expense rather than one he coined himself. By his own account, it came from the Boys Own fanzine crowd, Gary Haisman, Terry Farley and Andrew Weatherall, during the mid-1980s at the Wag Club’s ‘Raid’ nights in London, where Tong was DJing alongside Paul Oakenfold. Tong has said, “Terry had this fanzine and the whole idea was to send people up, so they came up with this. It was allegedly an insult but it turned into this legendary saying,” and described the wider scene as one where “they always used to take the piss out of me.”
A separate, competing account credits the singer Gary Haisman alone as the person behind the phrase, without the rest of the Boys Own group. The two versions agree that Haisman was central to it, but disagree on whether it was a group effort or his alone, and there’s no way now to settle which is more accurate.
What is clear is how the joke turned into settled slang. Tong has pointed to its appearance in the Penguin Dictionary of Black Cabbies’ Cockney Rhyming Slang as the moment it became “official” and “went to another level.” Green’s Dictionary of Slang now lists it simply as rhyming slang derived from the DJ’s name, glossed as ‘wrong’. The phrase later gave its title to a 2004 British-Canadian mockumentary about a DJ’s career unravelling, in which Pete Tong himself appears in a cameo role, a nod back to the joke that had by then outgrown him.