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| The Sound of Spandau's Soul by William Leith Talking about his time as the guitarist and songwriter of Spandau Ballet, Gary Kemp says: "Maybe I've got to admit that what I did here was enough. I can make some more films. Maybe I'll direct a film. Maybe I'll have my musical put on stage. But nothing, really, to be absolutely honest, competes with making a very successful pop band for 10 years of my life." "Pop music should be about young people," says Gary Kemp, 40 Kemp, who is articulate and thoughtful, and a little inclined to melancholy, says:"For 24 hours a day, for 10 years, all I thought about was being in a band. That's all I did. I had no other social life. I don't want my life to be like that now. I've spent the past 10 years having a real life as well. But Spandau Ballet is such a difficult shadow to outrun." We are in Kemp's Georgian terrace house in Parliament Hill. The kitchen, on the basement floor, is spanking new, with metallic fittings, but the rest of the house is full of 19th-century Arts and Crafts furniture. There are William Morris chairs and curtain fabrics, a hanging cabinet by Godwin, first editions of books illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. The walls and ceiling are deep antique yellow. It's like being in a heritage display. Kemp sits on the sofa; I sit on a William Morris chair he bought in 1982, when Spandau Ballet became famous. "Listen," he says, "if it sounds like I'm going to go into a big rant about how great it was then and how bad it is now, stop me." He is talking to me to mark the release of Gold, an album of Spandau Ballet's greatest hits. Being interviewed, he says, gives him a sense of closure. It helps "tie up the knots. It's a Faustian pact to be in a band. The pact is you're going to go all around the world and have everything you want. But afterwards, it's going to be really hard, because nothing can compete with that. And it's going to be hard to buy a pint of milk, because you haven't done that for years.". Even though he'd had success as a child actor, having played the lead, as an 11-year-old, in the children's film Hide and Seek, Kemp had always wanted to be in a band. He wrote songs even as a small boy. He recalls seeing David Bowie performing Starman on Top of the Pops: "He had these painted fingernails, and he hung his arm over Mick Ronson. Now that made me heady. It was very androgynous. There was a sexual thing tied up there. I was very scared of girls and women, maybe, in those early days." He grew up in Islington, in council houses around the Essex Road, and says that this, and the fact that he went to school at Dame Alice Owen, with middle-class kids who had books in their houses, made him aspirational. At home, the Kemps had an outside lavatory. At school, he was in a punky band called The Makers. This was Spandau Ballet without Gary's brother Martin, who was, as a teenager, "into Bruce Lee and football". Spandau Ballet formed in 1980, in the early period of New Romanticism. Spandau Ballet in their heyday. "We were taking the baton from the Seventies, from glam rock and punk. And our thing, whatever it was, was different. It wasn't retro. It wasn't looking back." It was, in fact, a lush, dreamy cross between soul music and synthetic pop, played by boys wearing kilts and berets. It was camp, and included grand gestures. The first time the band played in New York, "We were on the cover of Women's Wear Daily, which was hardly rock 'n' roll, but it pleased me". There were high points. Kemp refers me to a picture of Martin, wearing a kilt and a tartan poncho, his hair a severely oiled quiff, guitar worn high. "I probably still get the same tingle looking at that picture as I do seeing that image of Bowie on stage doing Starman. That's pop music. I suppose the guitar is a substitute for the gun. It's the phallic symbol of our generation. I miss it in boy bands." He also remembers singing True in the studio at Compass Point, Nassau, and everybody in wanting to sing along. He says he adapted the line "With a thrill in my heart and a pill on my tongue" from Nabokov's Lolita. But touring around the world palls after a while: "Your life is the same wherever you go." Kemp found himself walking into branches of McDonald's in the Far East, seeking comfort. The only difference between one concert and another, he says, is the braces on the teeth of the fans in the front row. The Kemps took time out to play Ronnie and Reggie in The Krays. They were convincing gangsters as well as convincing brothers. For a while, Gary decided to be an actor. He was in The Bodyguard, with Kevin Costner, and Roger Avery's Killing Zoe. "But when you're an actor, you're a very small part in a machine. They're not your words. It's almost like being a session musician." He married and divorced actress Sadie Frost, with whom he had one son. Kemp is now trying to make up for all the things he missed out on during the Eighties. He spends time with his son. He climbs mountains. In 1998, he was the musical director of Still Crazy, a film about old rockers. Last year he won a court battle with Tony Hadley, John Keeble and Steve Norman over the copyright to the Spandau Ballet canon. They wanted to re-form the band; he does not. "Pop music should be about young people," he says. He is 40. He talks to Martin, but not to the other three. "It's a shame," he says, "because we experienced probably the greatest thing - in art, in pop - we'll ever do. And it would be good to sit around and talk about it." © Associated Newspapers Ltd., 06 September 2000 Terms and Conditions This Is London |
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