It is the radical extended dance remixes of tracks such as To Cut a Long Story Short, Glow and Chant No 1 (I Don't Need This Pressure On) that fit in superbly with today's so-called electroclash movement, of which Kemp remains most proud. And it is Spandau's long nights playing the Ku club in Ibiza, or dropping tabs of MDMA in New York with Andy Warhol, which he remembers most fondly. Those three Reformation CDs, he says, "tell a great story. There's a narrative arc; you can see how these five mates experienced the most amazing journey."
It's a story with a sad ending. Or rather, two sad endings. In 1999, Gary won a high-court action, brought against him by Tony Hadley, Steve Norman and John Keeble, who were seeking a six-figure sum in publishing royalties dating back to the 1980s, claiming the songwriter made an unwritten promise to share money accrued from his music with the whole band for, as Kemp puts it today with a bemused shrug, "the rest of their lives". In January of this year, Hadley, Norman and Keeble lost a further legal battle over the right to perform under the name Spandau Ballet.
The box set, says Kemp, has been a way of "putting the record straight and embracing the past after having it sullied by pissing on our own doorstep so publicly. I still have too much pride in what we did to let it be destroyed." This, not money, was his motivation for seeking legal redress. He certainly bears no malice towards his former colleagues. "I have no anger towards them. I just think this is part of the story of our lives."
He is equally sanguine about the end of his marriage to actress Sadie Frost, the mother of his 11-year-old son, now married to actor Jude Law. "The first failure in my life was divorce," he says, although he, his ex and her new partner are all now good friends - they even go on holiday together. In 1995, Kemp released Little Bruises, his first solo album. It was a way of "purging the relationship", and was full of darkly vivid confessionals with titles such as Ophelia Drowning and Wasted: "Wasted all my energy on you/Wasted all this synergy on you/Wasted all my poetry and rhymes/ Wasted all my party tricks and lines".
Since dissolving Spandau, Kemp has spent his time acting in films (Killing Zoe, The Bodyguard), appearing on TV (an episode of The Larry Sanders Show) and onstage (in the West End play, Art), as well as writing for and producing young musicians. Not that he needs the money (True alone has received three million radio plays in the US); just that "it would be awful" not to work. But he realises that he may have peaked with Spandau: "I have to be honest and say, yeah, it's very unlikely that in my life I'm going to have something quite as exhilarating as that."
However, greater even than the thrill of audience worship, he says, was earning several mentions in a recent book on British social history. "We were part of this mad period, this strange movement, that helped forge multimedia changes," he says, and before you can raise a quizzical eyebrow, he's decrying the middle-class vision of proletariat culture that was punk, emphasising his lifelong commitment to the Labour party and proclaiming that "the electric guitar was the greatest weapon ever given to the working classes". As the man who once appeared on the cover of the NME with his brother Martin - under the heading Playboys of the Western World dressed like something out of The Great Gatsby - says: "You don't have to wear an Orwellian cap to be working-class, you know." |
