| Spandau Ballet 2 |
| SD – In May of 1980 we played at the show at the Scala cinema, which was filmed for the Janet Street Porter show, 20th Century Box. A half an hour documentary about a group which was at that point was not signed, was very unusual at that point. The programme portrayed very well the fact that this group was very different to what was in the charts. We had a phone call from a person representing a club in St. Tropez, he said you know, we hear that Spandau Ballet is the hottest group in London and I said yes, and he said we would like the band to come and play in St Tropez for 2 weeks. There will be accommodation; we have apartments for you there. St Tropez really was at that time another planet, somewhere that the people from the UK never went to. I remember phoning round and telling the group, I said look you know we have got this gig in St Tropez, and they said well hold on a minute, wait, they pay us! It was while we were in St Tropez that the TV documentary was broadcast, and when we came back my mother said there has been a lot of phone calls for you while you have been away, and I said really, she said yes I have written them all down on the note pad and there was every single record company, there was CBS, Polydor, everybody had phoned up. A lot of these people had seen the documentary but they hadn’t seen the band, so we really needed one more gig. So I was trying to think of a venue for the band to play and my dad said, who’s an old sailor, he said ‘What about the HMS Belfast, son’. We went down to HMS Belfast, and some guy met us there who was in charge of bookings, we just lied to him, look I said, we are a bunch of students from Oxford and we want to have a coming down party, he said, oh marvellous, marvellous. Now what are you gonna do about food, you’ll have to have some food he said I’m afraid we have to do that we’ve got caterers here and I said look you know everyone is a bit strapped for cash. He said, well, he said, look, he said, tell you what I’ll do, he said, I’ll do you a cheese dip, how do you think about that ,so I said fine and then just before we left I said to him, would it be alright if we have a quintet playing, he said, fine yes, absolutely fine, marvellous, yes, yes, yes, and so this huge crowd came to the Belfast, all of them dressed up to the nines, people wearing spacesuits, vicars outfits, the whole pageant of street fashion, one guy turned up dressed in a wedding dress with fairy lights on it, and he said can you tell me where there is a plug, and he sat down and plugged it in. This was swinging London in 1980 and there we were right in front of the Tower of London which was a thousand years old on this battle ship. Of course the guy who had booked the event went absolutely spastic. We had to keep giving him money to keep him happy and somehow the figure of £15 was hit on, so every half hour he went spastic again and we gave him £15 again. The cheese dip was produced and a lot of people that were on the boat had actually taken acid. The cheese dip inevitably ended up all over the place. Chrysalis records attended that gig and as a result of it wanted to sign the band so I suppose it all ended well apart from the carpet cleaning bill. GK – Our first single was To Cut A Long Story Short and it went to No 5 in the BBC charts. MK - 1980 has to be the most exciting, the most frightening and also the most wonderful year of all of our lives. It’s every schoolboy’s dream to be in a band that actually happened and actually have a hit record, that’s a dream come true, it was the start of a lovely career. GK – I love the way you could play around with the sound of the board in the control room, it became another instrument. We did this really long version which took us to 61/2 minutes and we said this is us, we are gonna put this out to clubs as a white label, coz the club scene was changing, the whole extended dance mix was becoming more and more the norm. We were very much a London band, we were very much a club band based in Soho. Eventually a new club started which was organised by Chris Sullivan, Rob Elms, and it was the Beatroute. Electronic music was now being played by Gary Numan and Classix Nouveaux and we were trying to move away from it, we had been doing it for a year. So we decided in a way to really entrench ourselves in our roots. We got a tag ‘The New Romantics’ and in a way we were, we were against the kind of dourness of punk. Our clothes were outrageous, strange mix of baroque and futurist. We went to Birmingham, of course we don’t play our normal rock gig, we play the botanical gardens, we get a band asking us if they can support us and we say no we never have supports. We all got to sleep on this guys floor that night, a whole load of us, and I remember sitting next to this other guy who said we wanted to support you tonight but you didn’t want us to but you know the show was great, we really enjoyed it, and he was the lead singer with a band called Duran Duran. I think really you have got to look at the music that was coming out from bands like ourselves and Duran Duran in 1980 to really to start to see the bridge between white music and dance music - a big influence from Chic. There is only so long you can be the hippest group in London, before people say well hang on they are on Top of the Pops a lot, I don’t know whether they are very culty anymore. It was really time, if we were gonna stay in this business to start to broaden out, to start to let go of that cult urban club thing. We had a track on the album called Instinction but we were sort of unhappy with the production, we felt that it could sound better. We took the track to Trevor Horne who was making an album at the time with ABC and we thought that the sound he was making was fantastic. He remixed the track and Instinction was our first real pop record. It made me realise that I could actually sit down and maybe just write some pop tunes. I wanted to make basically a blue-eyed song album and along with that and some wonderful unrequited love which always suits writers I wrote the True album. We decided that we would leave London and we would go and record it in another country. We wanted to go to a studio called Compass Point in Nassau. Out of Compass Point comes some really interesting music, Talking Heads, Grace Jones, Slime Robbie, Robert Palmer, people who were trying to make bridges between black music and white music. Parade started to write itself in about 84. It was really us knowing the sound that Spandau had made with True, it said, you know, that wasn’t a one record wonder and this band are gonna be around for a while longer. But by then the thing that we seemed to be doing half the time was travelling to exotic countries to shoot videos. In the early 80s videos weren’t so important until MTV started. Video is the perfect media to blend fashion and music, my name is Simon Warner and I teach popular music at the University of Leeds. MTV had arrived in America at this time, would soon spread its tentacles around the world. These artists were video friendly, they looked good they looked stylish whereas the punk artists had been rough and ready and raucous and would never had been photogenic or telegenic in quite that way. |
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