Gary Kemp Interview 4
NM – Excellent! Now we have a question here from a fan and she wants to know whether you are a Morrissey fan.
GK – Yeah, I love Morrissey.  I am more a Morrissey fan than a Smiths fan.  I think ‘Vauxhall and I’ is a superb album. He is our generation’s John Betjerman.   He invited me to a show a couple of years ago that he did in London.  He invited me backstage.  I was ushered through to this little room and I thought the usual backstage thing - people drinking, roadies, and it wasn’t like that at all.  The door opened and someone asked me in and I went in. Morrissey had changed into a really smart suit and he was sitting on the sofa and ushered me into a chair and we drank tea together. It was the most un-Rock and Roll thing I had ever done, within a Rock and Roll gig. He is an intelligent, sensitive man.  I think he is a quiet genius.
NM – What do you think of his recent outings.  He has finally come back over to the States, not with a new album, but just to tour for the first time in five years.
GK – I had no idea that he was doing the old stuff.
NM – He is doing the old stuff.  He does toss a couple of Smiths tunes in for fans and then he tosses in a couple of new compositions.
GK – I’d love to see it.  I’d love to come and see that.  If I’m in town at any time and he is on, I’ll always be at a Morrissey gig.
NM – You know he still does the whole thing, down to taking off the sweat ridden shirt and throwing it to some lucky guy in the audience.
GK – Yes, kind of our Oscar Wilde, and he brings romance and decadence at the same time to Pop music. I think he is a rare animal.
NM – As well as of course, his stunning sense of celibacy.
GK – (Laughs) Well I don’t go completely along with all of that.
NM -I’ve been passed an email from a girl who simply asks, ‘Any regrets?’
GK – Well, I guess part of me regrets that we didn’t spend more time than we did in America. We were home boys really and we like Europe and we like the UK.  I absolutely love America but Duran committed a lot of time to being over there. For one reason or another we didn’t seem to commit that kind of time and so I do regret that, absolutely, because I think there comes a time when you have got to just… I mean, America is the centre of that music, and you have got to spend more time there.  I suppose also I slightly regret the fact that for one reason or another, we are not getting on anymore and we don’t talk anymore.  It’s like a marriage when it breaks up, and we can’t go and make that music tomorrow in a studio, even in the privacy of our own studio.  I sort of regret that, but I’m hoping that this album will, to use sort of an American phrase, ‘heal’.
NM – How did you guys meet and are there any funny stories associated to that?
GK – No really funny stories. We were all at the same school, apart from my brother who went to a different school for some reason. It was really seeing the Sex Pistols play in 1976.  We were all 16 years old and I think that was the moment.  I decided to leave the jazz funk band I was doodling with and we were all hooked up in the school music room. Tony Hadley was asked to sing because he was the only guy we knew with a leather jacket and he was also the tallest guy in the school and the one that everyone couldn’t help but look at in the playground. So he was chosen. We had another bass player from the school and at first we were like a sub-generation X, sub-power pop band. Eventually when it got into the late 70s we were coming into a style we were excited about. Steve Dagger, who was also in our school and who was managing us - that’s his real name by the way - told me that we had to get rid of the bass player because he didn’t look right. I said, ‘Why, who am I going to get?’ He said, “You’ve got to ask your brother to do it.”  Now, my brother is 2 years younger than me, and it was sort of scary having to look after my brother in a band.  I said, ‘My brother doesn’t even play guitar.’ And he said, ‘Well teach him’. I said, ‘But why should I get my brother in the band?’ He said ‘Because he is a pop star. He is a born pop star.  Look at him!’ I looked down at this bar and I could see my brother surrounded by about four girls, and he was easily the best looking guy that we knew. So I sat up all night and taught him the bass and now he is a star. If you really want to read the story, he’s got his autobiography out which has been a huge success here because my brother is a massive TV star, post Spandau Ballet, in a running series here called Eastenders, which I think you can get over there on cable. His autobiography came out which is called, funnily enough, ‘True’, which was No 1 here in the best selling non-fiction charts for a while.
NM – Do you get along with your brother well?
GK – Yeah, very well.
NM – You still get along with your brother. It’s just that there is a little bit of acrimony between the rest of the band.
GK – There was a bit of political trouble between myself and the members of the band.  It’s not unusual for that sort of thing to happen in a group, it seems to me. It was a long while after we had split up and it was a shame, a real shame. But it hasn’t affected my feelings and memories of the time when we made that music and we were together.
Continued