Nineteen hundred and eighty-five was a tricky, transitional year in pop music. Despite Live Aid being positioned slap bang in the middle, all the premier league pop acts who electrified the charts in 1983 and 1984 – Wham!, Duran, Frankie, Spandau, Culture Club – effectively took the year off or opted to spend time consolidating their success in overseas “territories”.
Not one of those Brit bands released an album in ’85. Mind you, neither did solo heavy hitters like Bowie and Madonna, or Bruce Springsteen and Tina Turner.
The result all sorts of tedious balladeers and B-list artists squeaked through, to plug the gap in their absence. Mentioning no names whatsoever Nik Kershaw, Howard Jones, Jennifer Rush and King.
Like I said, it was a funny old year. Not least of which was one Neil Tennant, a thirtysomething journalist chucking in his assistant editorship at Smash Hits magazine to try his hand at this pop combo lark, as one half of Pet Shop Boys.
Rewind to the spring of 1984 when the duo’s first go at West End Girls was lost in the ether, sandwiched between Soft Cell’s swansong This Last Night In Sodom in March and Bronski Beat’s era-defining Smalltown Boy that May.
In PSB it’s hard to imagine an act less like the aforementioned big hitters. Tennant and Lowe wanted to be distantly enigmatic, exuding a Northern contrariness that was the complete antithesis of the shiny bouncy personality pop of those Neil wrote about.
Without further ado, let’s rewind to one of Neil Tennant’s last payroll interviews, from Smash Hits, issue dated 31 January 1985, a few weeks after the plodding snooze fest of Round And Round peaked at No. 18, and, crucially, less than a year before the Tyneside scribe’s own superstardom beckoned.
Marking Gary Kemp’s 65th, this is Spandau Ballet: Shout To The Top.
When they started out, at the dawn of the ’80s, Spandau Ballet were determined “to do something different”. They said they’d never end up like the pop stars of the ’70s – endless tours in huge arenas, limousines, meeting royalty, collecting antiques, making pots of money and no bones about it. But they have. “I don’t know how to escape that,” says Gary Kemp. Neil Tennant’s saying nothing.
CHRISTMAS, 1984. It was, as Paul Weller once complained, as though “punk never happened”. Pop stars queuing up to play at Wembley Arena, acting like stars, driving round in limousines, dressed in satin and pearls, throwing parties for each other to attend, displaying their wealth unashamedly.
Take Spandau Ballet, for instance.
In those brave, early New Romantic days of 1980-81, they were determined not to get sucked into the boring and predictable music business syndrome of endless touring; they were always going to “do something different”.
By the end of 1984 they seemed to have ended up as conventional a rock band as you could ever imagine. Releasing one LP a year, skimming a handful of singles off it and touring to promote it. In the process they’ve made lots of money and are not ashamed to show it off.
Think back to the video of the ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ recording. Paul Weller arriving at the studio on foot. Sting climbing out of his Range Rover. Bananarama piling out of an unimpressive little car. Then a huge limousine drives up and various members of Spandau Ballet spill out, grinning arrogantly, like a bunch of pre-punk rock stars.
Is this how Gary Kemp sees Spandau Ballet these days and does it worry him?
“We don’t like those kind of cars!” he splutters indignantly.
Oh, yeah?
“We fly in to the airport and cars are arranged for us. We normally have Rovers or Granadas, just cars to take us around. Somebody thought they would be very clever to impress the cameramen by getting us these cars. We just got shoved in them and then we were off. It was unfortunate but you can see how it gets out of your control sometimes.”
He looks a little agitated, clutching a mug of tea.
“We’re five working-class lads from North London who enjoy every second of what we do and having a good laugh at the same time. We have no guilt complexes to worry about – it’s mainly the middle-class lads who have the guilt complexes.”
But don’t you think that you, and Duran Duran and Wham!, for instance, are guilty of setting up a new star system?
“There’s a real dilemma here for me as a person,” he admits, “because I don’t know how to escape that. You try silly things, you always sign as many autographs as you can, you sign autographs for kids outside your front door that are there every day, but then you’ve got to be whisked through an airport ’cause you’ll never get on the bloody plane. You’ve got to do all those sort of things. You turn up at a pop party then you get pictures in the papers the next day. You’re protected by people all the time and that’s real dilemma ’cause you don’t want to get that distant, it naturally happens.”
At the moment Spandau Ballet are about one-third through their enormous Parade World Tour. They’re in Europe with the Far East, Australia and maybe America to follow.
Are you disappointed that you’ve ended up touring all the time when you set out to become a “different” kind of group?
“No, because I don’t think you can be subversive all the time because sooner or later you will rise to the top.”
Can’t you be “subversive” at the top?
“Maybe that’s the wrong word, maybe I mean a cult – you can’t be a cult thing all the time, sooner or later if you become successful you create a kind of establishment.
“See what worried me is that the band last year who was considered subversive was one of the most produced pieces of subversiveness since the Sex Pistols, but even more than them because they were produced by someone who already had money and success. I’m talking about Frankie.
“They attempted some sort of political song that wasn’t really that at all- it was just a piece of jingoism to sell the record. It was done completely to make money. These things worry me because you think, well, how do you become subversive and not look a hypocrite, which I think the whole Frankie thing tended to do. You know, Trevor Horn creating everything, as much as the band might say the opposite.”
Does that matter?
“Yes it matters because it’s not real, it’s not coming from young people. Pop music should always have a direct link with youth culture with no middle men. When someone buys a record, they buy a chunk of lifestyle, something that they feel represents them. When I was a teenager I thought Bowie really represented the way I felt. Pop culture should represent a young way of life.”
Away from public life, Gary lives in a flat in North London, just down the road from Sade. It’s Victorian and “quite big actually. I like spacey rooms.” He delights in the fact it’s in the “posh, private part of Islington” because when he was a young kid, he and his friends would run over there from their “council area” and “all the doctors or lawyers would lean out of their windows and chuck us back and we’d throw a few stones and spit on their doorstep. Now I can throw stones, spit on my doorstep, swear in my house, play my music and it doesn’t matter ‘cos I’ve bought it.”
Are you dead rich then?
“I wouldn’t say that.”
Are you a millionaire or anything like that?
“I don’t think I’m a millionaire, I don’t know if I am. Obviously, I have an amazingly comfortable amount of money, I don’t deny it, but I have discovered that material things don’t make you a better person. I’m much more of spiritual kind of person in the sense that I’ve discovered the most important thing is how comfortable you are as yourself and being in a band and having the opportunity to say what you think and do what you like. That is more satisfying than all the money.
“I still get depressed about things. I’m happier when I’m creating and when I’m writing music. I’m happy when I’m in love.”
He does, however, enjoy being able to buy “antique ceramics. I like art.” And he loves driving his “fast car”. But the fact of the matter is that he doesn’t see much of his flat, car or antique ceramics because he’s normally away.
As far as personal relationships go, he has a girlfriend, a “very successful” hairdresser with “a very powerful personality so she’s not the kind of girl that relies on me being there”. And he’s very close to his family.
“It’s a typical working-class family, very close, do anything for your Mum. We are close as a family, especially since my Dad’s illness, because they don’t have to cater for any other sprogs that are not successful. There’s only me and Martin.”
When Spandau played at Ingliston in Scotland before Prince Charles in December, Gary and Martin flew their Mum and Dad up to witness the occasion, and they were “thrilled” because Spandau were given the keys to the city of Edinburgh, the castle was specially lit up and they met Prince Charles.
“He’d obviously read up on his homework the day before. He never really commented on the music. I asked him what he thought of the Ethiopian record [’Do They Know It’s Christmas?‘] and he said: ‘Oh, very good, were you on that? I won’t mention VAT then!’ So he was aware of what was going on. Then he spoke to Steve Dagger (Spandau’s manager) and said: ‘How many people do you need for an organisation of this kind?’ Steve said a lot of people. And he said: ‘I bet you don’t have sniffer dogs!’ Because before the show there were sniffer dogs everywhere. So he’s quite witty.”
Gary Kemp is 25 years old, rich, successful, still votes Labour, isn’t a “royalist” in spite of meeting Prince Charles and loves more than anything else the camaraderie of being in Spandau Ballet. But is there anything he still longs for? Anything he worries about? There is.
“You worry if your name is ever going to be remembered, ’cause what we’re all after as artists is immortality and I don’t think anyone can deny that. You’re after some kind of immortality and that’s why you write songs because, when you write a song, you take a little chunk of yourself out that has a date stamped on and will live at that age for ever.
“That’s what I like about these ceramics I collect because someone made them thousands and thousands of years ago and that person has rotted in a grave now, and I’ve got them now.
“And when I’m rotting in a grave, they’ll still be as beautiful as they are now.”
Edited by Steve Pafford
