| Smash 3 |
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| Adrian Thrills: I think one of the faults that a lot of people found with the New Romantics thing was that fashion seemed to be elevated above music. The initial hostile reaction to Spandau was on that level. Gary Kemp: I think that pop music is 60% visual, maybe even more. Robert Elms: You must understand that this is a time when most British people thought that design and fashion was something rather like homosexuality that the French did. I still think that To Cut A Long Story Short is an absolute object lesson into how to write a pop song. It sticks in your head, it's pop music. It's what pop music is supposed to be. Early Video Footage - Gary Kemp: For years people have been dancing in the clubs, in the soul clubs, stuff like that, to black music – I mean there's nothing wrong with black music, I like black music, I buy it. But it's about time that something over this side is done. Robert Elms: Gary had come out of a soul boy dance music tradition and he would always love the Marvin Gaye's and the great crafted soul music and he wanted to write that, there's absolutely no doubt about that. Gary Kemp: There was a desire in a way to get back to our roots, again, it was rubbing up the music press the wrong way - funk, dance music, not a thing that was really loved by the middle-class music press. [Chant No.1 - video] Never mind what the critics' thought, Spandau's excursion into black dance music went straight to no. 3 in the charts. The video was shot on location at Soho's furiously trendy Beat Route club. Gary Kemp: The Beat Route was a club that turned into this mad phenomenon, people were queuing round the block. You know, there was a feeling that something was going on in this little club that was making social history. Actually, all that was going on was people getting completely off their faces! |
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| Martin Kemp: There were lots of soul bands around, lots of black groups but we were the first white group to turn up and say, "Yeah, we make dance music." Richard James Burgess (Producer): At this point the band had progressed so much because they’d been out on the road, they’d played live and I was astonished. John Keeble was you know, a thousand times the drummer he was a year prior. Everybody was playing differently. Steve Norman moved from playing just guitar to playing percussion. There was a whole different sort of attitude within the band. Adrian Thrills: In a way that was their farewell to that club scene. It was their ultimate club record and it was a homage to the club scene in the Beat Route and those clubs of that time. Gary Kemp: The first two albums were a time when the band were still cult status even though we were now on five hit singles and been on Top Of The Pops five times. Obviously we couldn't keep doing that, you know, we couldn't just be the hippest band in London. Martin Kemp: We wanted to play at Wembley Stadium and be the biggest band ever and that's what our aim was, we wanted to take over from the Rolling Stones. Gary Kemp: We decided to record outside of London, outside of England in Nassau in the Bahamas in this studio called Compass Point. Steve Dagger: The Grace Jones album had been done there, the house rhythm section with Sly & Robbie, Robert Palmer lived there. That was the cool studio in the world at the time. Gary Kemp: Sort of by osmosis we took in the ambience of the place and created a sound in that album that really became the sound of Spandau Ballet for the next seven years. |
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