| Gary Kemp Interview 3 |
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| NM – Who you co-starred with in The Bodyguard GK – That wasn’t a hint. I wasn’t trying to give you a kind of … NM – You weren’t trying to give me the ‘in’ for the full cycle. GK – No NM – Let’s take another question who wants to follow up on a comment you made earlier about making music professionally and where can people get hold of it. GK – About 4 or 5 years ago I released a solo album through Sony Records called ‘Little Bruises’ which is a whole mixture of music that I love, mostly Irish music. I went over to Dublin and recorded my songs with some of the best Irish musicians and then came back to England. I am probably more pleased with those songs than anything I ever wrote, lyrically especially. I don’t know how easy it is to get a copy of all that because I’m not sure it actually came out in the States. I did that and then recently I have been working with the guy who wrote the script for a film called ‘My Left Foot’, whose name is Shane Connaughton and also with the bass player of Pink Floyd, a man called Guy Pratt. We have been working together on a musical for the stage based on a relationship between the poet Yeats and a revolutionary called Maud Gonne and that has taken up a lot of my time. I have done some producing for various artists,especially in Europe. I’ve been recently writing for other artists, and this is a new thing for me. But I’m starting to enjoy it because a lot of artists now don’t want to write their own material, and I like to write pop songs so I’ve got back into that. I’ve been working with Tina Arena and I’m working with a lot of English artists,and musically that is most of what I’ve been doing. I spent the first half of the 90s trying to escape music. I tried to pretend to myself that I didn’t need music, that after 10 years working with Spandau Ballet I could grow old gracefully as an actor. But the truth is I can’t do that because I really need to do music, otherwise I just get incredibly depressed. It’s a shame. I think that what you have to accept is that you can’t outrun the shadow of a band like Spandau Ballet. If you have been in a successful band and you have done that well, it is very difficult to do anything without being called Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp. I don’t think any of us will ever achieve anything musically that surpasses what we achieved with Spandau Ballet. I just have to accept that as being a great thing that we did it, that we made a song like ‘True’ that was that successful, plus other albums, for 10 years. Apparently, releasing this album and going out and doing interviews about that period and about us as a band, is me accepting that I am no longer in competition with myself. This was a great time and I am proud of it, very proud of it. But you never know, we are the only five guys who have licence to get up on stage and play that music again and even though at the moment that doesn’t look possible, I’d like to think that there was a chance of it happening in the near future. NM – Well that of course leads into my next question: “Why did you guys at this point decide to put out ‘Gold – The Best of Spandau Ballet’?” GK – I partly answered it just now, but there were a couple of other reasons. It was 20 years ago we released our first single and it was 10 years ago that we released our last album and so that seemed like a good reason. There was also something else, in that the 90s seemed to be in deep competition with the 80s, and we wanted to prove that this was the better decade, like the 70s hated the 80s – that’s kind of normal. That always happens, and so when we turned into the new decade it seemed like now we can look back on some of that other music of the 80s more fairly. So I think it was the right time to release The Greatest Hits – Spandau’s Greatest Hits, and put it together in this package that also contained a written history of the band which has never been there before. |
| NM – My next question is: “Who picked the songs and which is your favourite?” GK – Actually, the album is basically all the UK singles. Those were the most popular of the singles released. I got the old boxes out and re-mastered all the tracks. It was kind of weird even getting all the old boxes out because inside the songs like Through The Barricades, Only When You Leave and Gold there would be little snippets of lyrics that were scribbled, of little drawings that we would doodle at the time, and questions about the production of what we should do on the track. It was so nostalgic for me to dig through these old boxes, some of them going in Compass Point in 1983 where we went off to do the album ‘True’ and the first time we had left London. You know, we couldn’t stay a London cult band forever, and so we went to Compass Point, a place that had spawned so much good for the blue eyed soul, if you like. The music of Talking Heads that was coming out of there, and Robert Palmer. We made the ‘True’ album there, and you see this label with a palm tree stuck on the box – very nostalgic for me. And the order of the tracks, I didn’t want it to be chronological order. I wanted it to be more in a musical order, so that is why it is the way it is. NM – Now could you possibly pick a favourite out of all of that? GK – Yeah, I am forever grateful for ‘True’. It crossed over in America, which also Chant No 1 did, a song which is also called ‘I Don’t Need This Pressure On’. I remember it getting played when it came out in 1982. It was Kiss FM that picked up on it and they had no idea we were a white band until the day I walked into the studio. It was Frankie Crocker and he was, absolutely shocked that we were a bunch of white guys. Then of course when True came out, the same thing happened. True was being played on white radio and black radio. I picked up an award 5 years ago for 2 million airplays of the song on American radio alone and I know it is just under 3 million at the moment. So I am eternally grateful. PM Dawn did a version as did Backstreet Boys, and its now on the Charlie’s Angels movie. But in saying all of that, I actually think my favourite is a song called ‘Through The Barricades’, which is a song that was written in Ireland and it is a kind of Romeo and Juliet set in Belfast. That, I think, was probably the best marriage of lyrics and music on the record. |
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