Guardian Interview - August 2002
23rd August 2002

Spandau Ballet did more than provide a soundtrack for XR3i-driving Essex casuals in the 1980s. At least that's what Gary Kemp, the band's creative force, tells Paul Lester  (Photo - Eammon McCabe)
Gary Kemp is a man on a mission. He wants to force a reappraisal of Spandau Ballet, to rescue them from retro-kitsch hell and show that they were more than the sum of their recent appearances on I Love The 1980s TV nostalgia-fests and School Disco compilations.
The former guitarist and songwriter for the band that epitomised that decade has just assembled a three-CD anthology called Reformation. It will, he hopes, challenge the assumption that Spandau Ballet were establishment-toadying clothes horses who served as prototypes for today's anodyne pop idols Gareth Gates and Will Young.

Kemp proudly recalls the period covered by Reformation, when the group he led were the toast of London's fringe cognoscenti. "We were the hippest band in Soho," he says with disarming bluntness at EMI's London HQ. "We helped instigate the 1980s." Later, he describes the era ushered in by Spandau Ballet as "one of the last hurrahs of British youth culture".

He was always synonymous with hubris, but Kemp is not too wide of the mark here. Spandau are remembered as quintessential lad-Yuppies whose beige neo-soul (True, Gold, I'll Fly for You) provided the soundtrack for XR3i-driving Essex casuals in loafers and white socks. They probably linger in the memory less for their music than because Gary and younger brother Martin starred in The Krays, or because Kemp Jr went on to play Steve Owen in EastEnders.

Few acknowledge the part the group - the Kemps plus Tony Hadley (vocals), Steve Norman (saxophone) and John Keeble (drums) - played in the development of dance music and club culture. Fewer still know that Princess Diana's second favourite New Romantics (after arch- rivals Duran Duran) started life as exotic dandies from the back streets of Islington sporting kilts and eyeliner, and playing brutal, minimalist electronic pop informed by 1920s futurism and 1970s German synthesiser music. "I wish there were more wild, mad creatures roaming around that I could be afraid of now," he sighs.

Like many of his peers, Kemp, born in 1959, grew up with glam and was galvanised by punk: being garish and provocative were a given. Spandau Ballet, along with Steve Strange, Boy George and others, were Bowiephiles who reacted to the monochrome drabness of punk by revolting into style - this at least partly explains the evolution in British music, between the late 1970s and early 1980s, from the Clash to Culture Club.

Style magazines such as iD and The Face were born. The nightclub, more than the concert hall, became the primary site for performance. Spandau Ballet were the house band of this new scene. DJs spun records between their sets in botanical gardens or battleships - or warehouses, years before acid house (the distance between the Kemp brothers and the Chemical Brothers is not so great). They put extended versions of their songs, a blend of rock energy and dance elegance - or "Chic meets the Sex Pistols," as Kemp puts it - on to 12-inch singles, then unheard of outside reggae and funk.

This was audacious stuff for a couple of likely lads and their mates from north London. "We had arty aspirations," explains Kemp, who soon found himself despised by certain sections of the music press for the vague air of Nietzschean self-glorification about him and his bandmates, made more palpable by 1981's notorious Musclebound video. Not for nothing did they title their debut album Journeys to Glory. "We'd all been taught at the school of [Malcolm] McLaren, and we were into creating myth and legend. We read Sartre. We played clubs in St Tropez surrounded by mime artists. We had our own lighting guy who knew about German expressionism and wanted to light us from underneath - you know, like Fritz Lang."

Spandau even had their own resident poet-cum-philosopher in Robert Elms, now a broadcaster, then an aspiring music journalist with an agenda to push. You can read Elms on the inner sleeve of Journeys to Glory ("Hear the sublime glow of music for heroes"), and you can hear him in all his determined young pseudy pomp on the very first track of the Reformation box set, announcing the group's arrival onstage at the Scala cinema in London's King's Cross, in May 1980, with this verse, uttered, à la Kemp himself, in fairly broad cockney: "From half-spoken shadows emerges a canvas. A kiss of light breaks to reveal a moment when all mirrors are redundant. Listen to the portrait of the dance of perfection: the Spandau Ballet."

The contrast between the Kemps and today's working-class siblings the Gallaghers is stark. Noel and Liam have made a virtue out of adopting the dressed-down look and stance of the masses, while Gary and Martin paraded their individuality. "Martin was a great stylist," says his elder brother, "right from the age of 11 when he painted his football boots silver, or lined them with fur. He was always fanatical about clothes. I remember going out with him when he was 14 and he was wearing pyjamas with hair he'd chopped himself. And for jewellery he had on a steel coathanger round his neck. He was always a great-looking guy."

Then there was the peacock flamboyance of the band's camp followers, many of whom went to St Martin's art college in London and would go on to become renowned designers or performers themselves - among them Steve Strange and Helen Folasade Adu, alias Sade. "I can remember when we played HMS Belfast, Philip Salon [renowned entrepreneur and transvestite] turning up in a wedding dress covered in lightbulbs and saying, 'Where can I plug myself in?' There were all these wild cards in the most outrageous quiffs and pirate clothes and God knows what else." Did the brothers who would achieve cinematic fame playing London's most famous hard-cases meet with hostile reactions to their outlandish appearance? "No, because we were pretty much geezers ourselves," argues Kemp. "I mean, Rusty Egan [DJ and prime mover] had 'Love' and 'Hate' tattooed on his knuckles! I've always loved that mix - when gay boys and straight boys get together, it's fantastic; there's so much excitement and creativity."

Kemp acknowledges the purity of the early moment for Spandau in his choice of tracks for Reformation: although the band released records until 1989, the collection stops at 1984, with their last LP for EMI, Parade. This is partly for contractual reasons - but mainly because Kemp accepts that, by that point, his work was done. Spandau had enormous worldwide success with the True and Parade albums, and in 1985 the band appeared at Live Aid.
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