GK – The Parade album was the time when we spent as much making videos probably as we did the record. We went to Hong Kong to shoot Highly Strung and my brother was the star of that video. This whole sort of weird story about him being a popstar pushed to the brink of nervous exhaustion. We just found ourselves doing a lot of travelling with film crews course the budget went completely out of hand. It became, well this is another thing that we can make, we don’t just make records and then just perform live and shoot it with a camera. We make records and we make mini films. This to me was a medium that was as exciting as making the record. Right in the apex of the 80s there was a feeling of, yeah we can change more than just pop music, we can change the minds of government. We can even stop countries from starving.
We lived in Dublin for 6/7 months, as tax exiles, going to Ireland was a great inspiration and for me spending some time up in the north of Ireland with a friend who lost a brother in the troubles. I thought the Romeo and Juliet possibilities of the streets of Belfast was the only way I could really capture the troubles and I remember waking up about 2 in the morning and just writing these lyrics constantly. I remember John Keeble sleeping in these leather trousers in the bedroom next door, he had just come in from a club. I woke him up and I said I’ve got a song that I think would really work, but it’s really different from what we’ve done before and I sat at the end of his bed and I played him Through The Barricades. I was very nervous when we came back to Belfast for the tour, these rich kids on stage, playing a song about this town, what do we know about this town. I remember 2 guys in the front row and one was on the top of the other ones shoulders and we were singing TTB and the whole of the crowd were singing along and I remember this guy crying. To this day I am pleased with that song most of all. I think it was the best marriage of lyrics and music that the band ever did. As a writer the songs that were more personal to me, I was finding harder to pass over to another singer. Not that I could ever have performed a song like Tony. And it was time to do another album as it always is time to do another album. Our method up until then was always the same. Pretty much me writing the song on my own and presenting it to the band and at that time computers had started to come out and I started to demo the songs for the Heart Like a Sky album, until virtually they were complete, played by computers. The guys would come in and they would hear the tracks with drums on and keyboards and even some little sample saxophone, bass, and quite understandably this was not really making the others feel as involved or feel happy about the situation. My kind of slightly controlling approach to the music, which really came out of my own frustration of really wanting to use other instruments I guess and other musicians I suppose, maybe not be in a band at all. We had been playing together now for 10 years, really made the making of HLAS not an enjoyable job. Even though I think there are 2 or3 really good songs on that record, there was a lack of truth on that album as a band and a lack of identity and a lack of heart really ironically. The other thing that was getting in the way was that Martin and I had been asked to do a movie about the Kray twins. Some of the guys in the band were nervous about that, fearful I guess, there was a sense of these guys are gonna go off and do something else and maybe it is gonna come to an end. What we really should have done is taken a long break. When it came out, we had really what was our first flop with a single which I really like called Be Free With Your Love which didn’t even enter the Top 30. And I was upset coz the songs were mine but I guess at the same time excited that I was just about to go off and work in a movie.
My brother and I went off for 7/8 weeks to shoot The Krays, came back, no one said a word, we carried on rehearsing and we went off on a world tour. There was a real split in the camp between, my brother and myself, and the other three members. But in saying that once we were on stage it was amazing. The HLAS tour, which we took all over Europe was playing in great big venues to fantastic crowds, we had by now a whole repertoire of songs that stretched back 10 years. So it was a fantastic show, the trouble is, is that when we weren’t on stage, we didn’t really know how to behave. Coz we didn’t know where we were going and even though the records were a success in some countries, if you are not a success in your own country, it doesn’t feel like you are doing it. At the end of that tour, there was a sense of , are we just gonna take a break or are we splitting up. The Krays came out, it was a successful movie, we went to America to promote it and there was a feeling I know certainly with Martin that a new career was starting. I think he saw that he had more control as an actor than he did as a musician. It became quite obvious that we weren’t gonna make another album in the short term. There was a feeling that maybe Spandau Ballet wasn’t right anymore that maybe we were a band very much associated with the decade of the 80s. We had in a way spawned dance music and 87 was the summer of love, kids weren’t looking to bands anymore they were looking to DJs. The culture that was the 80s, that became so successful through video, through playing live, through selling records, through visuals was finishing. Even now I see my name printed in the press and it says Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp, well SB haven’t made a record for 11 years. SB are over and you try to outrun the shadow that has been thrown by this group and then you realise that you can’t. You realise that you have to be proud of what you did coz not many people get the chance to have made a band, that have made a mark, that have been successful whose music won't go away. |
