Spandau Ballet
SD – Image? - Of course it’s important!

GK – A band that represented a particular era which were the 1980s.
(They looked good, they looked stylish).
Our clothes were outrageous, a strange mix of baroque and futurist. In the mid 80s no-one spent money on anything other than pop music.

Spandau Ballet, 5 lary lads out of the Angel Islington who utilised there arty arrogance to take on the world. As the driving force of the so called New Romantics Spandau Ballet forged a new musical direction that took them from the dance clubs of London to the world’s biggest arenas, and along the way they sold millions of albums, notched up dozens of hits and lived there dreams to the full.

GK – I’m a working class kid in London in 1971, I’m not really listening to much music but it’s there, it’s in my life, I’m aware of my parent’s thrill of the Beatles, and hatred for the Rolling Stones. I wake up one Christmas morning and they had bought me a guitar, which took me by surprise really as it was the first time I didn’t get a toy for Christmas. It became suddenly a means of expression, a way of escaping. I remember learning 3 chords from a Bert Weedon play in a day book, and I immediately wrote a song, and then I learned another chord and then I wrote another song, I didn’t really need to learn much more about the guitar because with those 4 chords I could keep writing and by the time I was 14 I was in a band playing with 30 year olds. I took these 2 songs that I had written and precociously played them at a prize giving at my Junior School when I was 11, and a wonderful man called Trevor Huddleston who was the Bishop of Stepney was there and he was intrigued by me writing these songs. One Thursday evening, and I won’t forget it was a Thursday, ‘cause Top of The Pops was on, he knocked at the door in his purple robe much to my Mum’s shock, and he appeared in the house and he gave me a cassette recorder and they had only just come out, and he said every time I write a song I want you to sing it to me. So this was a great gift and it inspired me and I kept sending him songs for quite a few years. So, you know, Trevor Huddleston was a great man and he planted some seeds, and then he watched them grow, I owe him a lot. By then music had really taken over my life. All the kids in my block were all into Bowie, watching him doing Star Man on Top of the Pops wanting to go to that planet that he came from. I was fascinated by punk, I saw the Sex Pistols play at Screen on the Green (?) in Islington where we all grew up and it gave me goose bumps, and it did change my life, I knew that I wanted to form a band that was obviously inspired by the energy that was going on with punk. At the school we went to, there were a bunch of kids hanging out in the music room after school, there were John Keeble, playing the school drum kit, Steve Norman who had a guitar, there was a kid who had a bass guitar and a little sort of PA, and then we needed a singer and I thought, you know, this big tall kid called Tony Hadley, he’s got a leather jacket, maybe we should ask him, and everyone in the year above hated him, so that seemed like good credentials to be in the band. And so we got this band together and basically for a while we were playing thrash pop really, but we were too young for punk, we were only 16. In 1978, we were still a school band and we had this Bass player, and I remember Steve Dagger who was managing us ‘cause he was a friend at school, he was getting us gigs and he said:

SD – Look, what about getting your brother in the group.

GK – I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Well look at him’, and I remember looking down at this bar we were in, and he was surrounded by girls.

SD – Martin Kemp was the roadie for the group. He didn’t look like a roadie at all, he looked like he should be in the band, there was as much interest in him as there were in some of the band members from the female members of the audience. The band was a handsome line-up, but if we could get Martin in the line-up as well playing bass, then it really would be an exceptionally good looking bunch of guys, and he said he can’t play bass! I said well you could teach him.

GK – I remember sitting up all night teaching him the bass lines. He was so happy to be in this group that he learned everything and he became our new bass player. I think he was 16 then. After a couple of years, we gradually sort of dissipated really. I found myself clubbing a lot in London, I was dancing to disco. These are times you have got to remember when dance was such a dirty word. It was working class, it was non-intellectual. And one day I walked into a club called Billies, in Soho, 1979, I was taken down by Steve Dagger, and on this Tuesday night, it was being run by a couple of guys called Steve Strange and Rusty Egan, very hedonistic. People dancing to this strange electronic music that I’ve never heard before and when I say people I mean 20 people, looking very odd in sort of frills and girls with their heads shaved and guys with make-up on dancing holding hands. This music from Germany, Kraftwerk, the odd bits of Bowie, tracks like Epoch and it was decadent, it felt like, maybe this was like Germany in the 20s, this was Moulin Rouge. There were people like Robert Elms and Steve Strange, Marilyn, Boy George, all looking for something new. It was a nice mix of middle-class kids who were doing fashion at St Martins and kids like myself – ordinary working class kids who liked to dance, and I think that lovely coming together of the different cultures, made them very creative. I can’t help than be inspired by it. We decided to all chip in and buy a synthesizer. So I sat at home and I wrote the whole of what became the Journeys to Glory album, on this little monophonic synth. Suddenly John was like, don’t play rock, don’t play punk, just go ‘bump cat, bump cat ’. it’s dance music. Tony was doing his best Bowie impersonation I guess, but with a much stronger European influence, very anti-American. We played the Club later to be called Browns and took over a night there a week. We held a little party one Saturday morning, people sort of came straight from being out all night down to watch us play. Afterwards we all went to the pub, and I remember Bob Elms coming up to me and saying, you know, you have got to get a name, cause at that point we didn’t really know who we were, and what we were called, and he said I think I’ve got one. And he had just come back from a trip to Berlin, and Berlin was a hip place to go at that time. There were a lot of very cool clubs, and Bowie had made it very hip, he did the Low album over there.
There were wonderful names like Cabaret Voltaire and we wanted something obscure and Bob just said ‘Spandau Ballet’. He later told me that he had seen it written on a toilet wall in a club in Berlin. We were never gonna play Rock n Roll venues that everyone else was playing, cause the crowd that we had would never go to them, and suddenly we got this elitist tag. Well it was elitist coz it was sold out and it was sold out with all the people that we knew, who looked in a way like no one else looked and so the rock press thought that this is odd, I don’t like the look of this.
Continued
Transcript of BBC Radio 2 interview broadcast 6th October 2001.
Spandau Ballet - In Their Own Words
(Gary Kemp, Steve Dagger (Manager) and Martin Kemp)