Spandau Ballet
In September 1976, having just left school in Islington, North
London, Gary Kemp formed powerpop band The Makers with friends
Tony Hadley, John Keeble, Steve Norman and Richard Miller.
Three years later, after Miller left, Kemp's brother Martin
joined the band on bass and they renamed themselves Spandau Ballet
- taking their name from the grim German prison where the
notorious Nazi Rudolph Hess was jailed. They also took their lead
from the emerging New Romantic
movement - an anti-punk, elaborately dressed, elite London
nightclub scene.
In December, after playing a series of highly publicised but
strictly exclusive London shows, they turned down an offer from
Island Records boss Chris Blackwell in favour of starting their
own label, which they called Reformation.
Their powerful debut, the harrowing To Cut A Long Story
Short reached the UK Top 5. With their kilts and synthesizers,
it was easy to assume that the band were just part of a passing
fashion and over the next year their singles The Freeze
and Musclebound were average rather than exceptional.
The insistent Chant Number 1 (I Don't Need This
Pressure On) revealed a more interesting soul/funk direction,
complete with added brass and a new image. The single reached the
UK Top 3, but again was followed by a relatively fallow period
with Paint Me Down and She Loved Like Diamond
barely scraping into the charts.
The band completed a couple of albums and employed various
producers, including Trevor Horn for Instinction and
Tony Swain and Steve Jolley for Communication. By
1983, the band had begun to pursue a more straightforward pop
direction and pushed their lead singer as a junior Frank
Sinatra.
The new approach was demonstrated most forcibly on the
irresistibly melodic True, which topped the UK charts
for several weeks. The album of the same name repeated the feat,
while the follow-up Gold reached Number 2. The obvious
international appeal of a potential standard like True
was underlined when the song belatedly climbed into the US Top 5
the same year.
During the mid-80s, Spandau Ballet continued to chart regularly
with such hits as Only When You Leave, I'll Fly For
You, Highly Strung, Round And Round, Fight
For Ourselves, and Through The Barricades. A
long-running legal dispute with Chrysalis forestalled the band's
progress until they signed to CBS Records in 1986.
The politically conscious Through The Barricades
and its attendant hit singles, Fight For Yourselves
and the title track, partly re-established their standing. Their
later work, however, was overshadowed by the acting ambitions of
the Kemp brothers, who appeared to considerable acclaim in the
London gangster film, The
Krays. Martin Kemp later found greater fame with the role
of Steve Owen in the long-running UK television soap opera, EastEnders.
Hadley embarked on a largely low-key solo career, and although
his voice remained as strong as ever, his material has lacked any
distinction. In May 1999, Hadley, Norman, and Keeble lost their
fight to reclaim a share of £1 million in royalties from the
band's songwriter Gary Kemp.
They continue to tour although they are unable to use the
Spandau Ballet name, and people have since managed to answer Tony
Hadley's heartfelt question in True, "Why do I
find it hard to write the next line?" - Because you don't
write the bloody songs you wazzock!
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