Gary Kemp Interview 5
NM – (Advert for Gold – The Best of Spandau Ballet)
GK – Nice black and white pics inside that I don’t think have been used before.  Lots of stuff that we really scoured the archives to find. Some stuff that was more unusual as well. A lot of really early stuff when we were looking weird as Blitz Kids.
NM – Yeah there is a great cover shot of you all.
GK – That was actually the last photograph of us that we ever had taken.
NM – Really! You were all in your Bee Gees type black turtle necks.
GK – Yeah, that was like ten years ago. But if you look inside there is stuff from when we were teenagers which is pretty bizarre.  My brother looks amazing and there is one where he looks like, you know that movie, ‘The Fly’, and he goes in the transporter, you put Elvis and The Scots Dragoon Guard in and my brother popped out the other side.
NM – On a slightly lighter note, a fan wants to know what five CDs are in your CD player right now.
GK – A Ryan Adams CD, a Wyclef Jean album – ‘The Ecleftic’, Dido – ‘No Angel’, and what else is there? I put a new stock in the other day. A old album which is Mick Ronson. It’s a kind of compilation of Mick Ronson solo stuff. He used to be the guitarist with David Bowie years ago. The U2 album  has just left my CD not because of me, but mostly because my son really digs it, and I got him an electric guitar for Christmas and he’s mad about it. What else in my listings? I’m still pretty heavily into the David Gray stuff as well, and I think that is five.  Although I have been playing some old stuff.  I tell you what I was playing the other day, I have to tell you… Japan, ‘Tin Drum’ album, which I think is an extraordinary album. And then I also dug out ‘The Idiot’ by Iggy Pop which is really worth another listen to.
NM – Just don’t tell me you pulled out like the David Sylvain Quadruple disc “Best of…”
GK – Brilliant Trees
NM – That man definitely went off the deep end at some point in the 90s.
GK - Yeah, but ‘Tin Drum’ was a pretty seminal album.
NM – Oh definitely for Japan, that was.
GK – Listen, if you are talking about seminal albums from that period, which is sort of early electronic, which you can see a few of on the early Spandau stuff, the first 2 albums were electronic, then you have got to look at Yellow Magic Orchestra and also if you ever get an album by a woman called Gina X, and Nina Hagan and obviously Kraftwerk and Cannes.
NM – Wasn’t Yellow Magic Orchestra actually a project of Ryuichi Sakamoto?
GK – It was his first band - a couple of very cool albums there.
NM – And now he does great - I don’t know what it is called – ‘21st Classical’?
GK – That’s right, Gavin Bryers type – Hey how’s the stenographer doing with all the spelling?
NM – I think she stumbled a bit on Sakamoto  but other than that she did pretty well. Let me see here, we got another question.  I didn’t know this. How did you handle the news of your brain tumour in 1995?
GK – Right – It wasn’t my brain tumour, it was my brother’s brain tumour.  My brother was diagnosed with two brain tumours actually, which was pretty devastating. They were not malignant, they weren’t cancerous.  He got through it, he survived it, and extraordinarily, he went on to get this job in TV. Just before Christmas in a big televised ceremony in London, he got voted most popular actor on British TV. I’m an atheist but I still prayed a lot during that time.  But he’s doing really well. It changed his life - he is also writing you know. So my brother just looks at the positive stuff that comes out of it.  It made him more directional and it made him in a way, discover more about his own creativity.
NM – Do you have any plans for any collaborations in the future, kind of on any part of your artistic field, be it music, film, writing, aside from the music you talked about?
GK – No, I haven’t got any big plans. I’m always messing around .  Quite a lot of my friends are musicians that have done well over the past few years. I often hook up with John Taylor and we talk about doing something - you know, the old Duranie? We actually wrote a track once together for a movie. I see Bob Geldof occasionally, and we always talk about writing a song together. You know how these things are.  You kind of get a bit shy of sitting in a room with someone else like that and trying to start something off.  I am starting to write more and more with different people, but part of me would love to get on stage and do something with someone. I think if I had to pick a fantasy hero to write with and to play with, it would probably be Pete Townsend. But I think that out of everyone, I think that he is the most sublime writer of pop music.
NM – He is definitely the man, even if he can’t hear himself anymore, unfortunately.
GK – Well I just saw the gig they did in London. I thought it was the best he had ever played.  He’s out of the plastic box now.  He’s stopped being embarrassed by about being in ‘The Who’. He’s thrown away the acoustic guitar and he was rocking.
NM – It’s always kind of great to see older artists come into their own, and there was definitely a spontaneity and vigour and energy to ‘The Who’ back in the 70s, but you know the performance wasn’t everything, that today you see that they are much more seasoned musicians.
GK – Well I think that Townsend has realised that.  Like I was saying earlier about not being in competition with yourself.  He’s realised that. He’s admitted that on stage. He said I kind of kicked myself for not just playing in ‘The Who’ for years and years.  He suddenly realised that he is the only person who is allowed to do it. So he should keep doing it.  But you know, in saying that, I am contradicting myself because earlier I said that part of me thinks that bands are like gangs and shouldn’t go on into middle age.  It’s a tough one!
NM – It’s hard to point at a single band in Rock and Roll history who really has left at the top and just let it be.  Everyone always returns to it.
GK – The Beatles.
NM – Well they didn’t have a choice.  That is like saying Led Zepplin didn’t return to it after Bonzo died.
GK – Yeah, but you know Plant and Page go out, and fundamentally it is Led Zepplin and they can do Led Zepplin songs. But all they got to do is call themselves Led Zepplin and they can go to Madison Square Gardens to playing Shea Stadium.  So it’s like just having a brand name, a label and for some reason it’s that label that people want to go and see him under.
NM – And plus no one wants to go and hear any of the Plant-Page solo compositions when they play.  That’s great anyway, where’s Black Dog?  I’ve just been told that we have time for 2 or 3 more questions.
GK – Okay, then I may have to go to bed. My Director will wonder why I am tired. I’m kidding, I’m kidding…
Continued