Mad World

by Lori Majewski

  “TRUE”

  rom half-spoken shadows emerges a canvas. A kiss of light breaks to reveal a moment when all mirrors are redundant. Listen to the portrait of the dance of perfection: the Spandau Ballet.” Thusly did scenester journalist Robert Elms announce the group’s arrival, circa 1980. London’s painfully exclusive, agonizingly fashionable Scala club served as the backdrop for their debut gig, quickly sealing their reputation as the most despised—and discussed—band in Britain. Inviting envy, derision, and open antagonism, Spandau Ballet (their name a term used by Nazi guards to describe the twitches made by Jewish hanging victims at Berlin’s Spandau Prison) stretched an invisible velvet rope between themselves and a music media still infatuated with Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten. As members of the notorious Blitz Club clique, the Spands positioned themselves as an androgynous fraternity, sneering down at the ripped T-shirts, dirty sneakers, and beer-soaked jeans worn by the nation’s sheeplike, style-free rock audience. And their clannish demeanor proved a cunningly effective marketing tool. After initial success with a few chilly, Teutonic hits, Spandau started smiling and wearing sensible suits, and by the time they’d released the international number-one “True” in 1983, they were embracing a mass audience who would’ve never passed the rigid dress codes at the nightclubs the band once frequented.

  JB: One of the youthful pleasures of punk was the opportunity to tell your elders and betters, “You’re a dirty hippie—you don’t get it!” Ever the sharp operator, Spandau songwriter Gary Kemp flipped the script, addressing his detractors with a sneering, “You’re a middle-class wannabe; we’re working-class royalty—you don’t get it.” In the post-punk environment of the early eighties, hurling that “middle class” label was an insult tantamount to sinking a shiv between an opponent’s shoulder blades. It meant you were inauthentic, that you were culturally blinkered, that you couldn’t dance. It hurt. But Spandau Ballet weren’t in the class-war business. Once they’d wedged an elegant boot in the door, they were all about transitioning from exclusive to inclusive. And there’s no better way to win over the masses on whom you’d once looked down than with a sincere, hand-on-heart, “I’m just a poor boy” ballad. “True” is a classic end-of-thedance song. It’s one of the few legitimate examples of British baby-making music.

  LM: Like the rest of America, my love affair with Spandau Ballet began with “True.” Unlike the rest of America, my relationship didn’t end there. Thanks to the glorious Newark, New Jersey–based video channel U68—a mid-decade, UHF alternative to MTV—I retroactively learned that Spandau had been New Romantics. There was their synthy 1980 debut, “To Cut a Long Story Short,” and 1981’s funky disco jam “Chant No. 1.” But my favorite had to be 1982’s artsy “She Loved like Diamond,” a melodramatic mini-movie in which a black-veiled ghost of a woman drifts through dry ice and falls to the floor with blood pooling out of her mouth. “She loved like diamond,” Tony Hadley crooned, “and cut so hard she died.” (Even then I struggled to find meaning in Gary Kemp’s lyrics.) Watching that today is like unearthing an ancient artifact, yet nothing about “True” feels like it belongs inside a time capsule—not the sharp, double-breasted suits they wear in the video, and certainly not the music. With that song, Spandau Ballet went from New Romantic to just plain romantic and, as a result, ended up with arguably the most timeless song in this book.

  GARY KEMP: In 1978 we found this wonderful little club called Billy’s, which had a Bowie Night. It was put on by a guy called Steve Strange and another one called Rusty Egan, and they were playing records that they had found in Berlin—Kraftwerk, Gina X, Nina Hagen—mixed up with Bowie, Iggy, Lou Reed, and Roxy Music. It was the first time that a youth cult had begun without a band. It’s really almost going back to the mod time, when they were dancing to Motown. They weren’t interested in watching bands; they just wanted to dress up cool and watch each other. And suddenly a manager thought, I’ll make sure there is a band for them, and the Who were formed.

  In a way, we did that too. These kids were down in Billy’s in Soho, dancing this extraordinary slow jive to this electronica music. We arrived and we thought, This is our time. This is our generation. We have a responsibility.

  We already had a band, but we were on a sort of post–power pop hiatus. The band that we liked up to that point, who we all wanted to be, was Generation X. We thought Billy Idol was the best thing we’d ever seen. Ironically, after Billy saw our first gig at the Blitz, he went up to Steve Dagger, our manager, and said, “This is the future of rock ’n’ roll, man.”

  We decided we’d do a private gig for these kids in Billy’s. By then we’d rewritten our entire set list. We’d bought a synthesizer, and we had a bunch of electronic songs—all four-on-the-floor drums, dance-y, groove-y, but with this very white, European sound to them. It was a mixture of Kraftwerk and what David Bowie had done in Berlin—that sort of extraordinary amalgamation of Iggy Pop and Edith Piaf.

  Then we started playing these gigs in extraordinary places for our friends. We knew that they would not go to some rock ’n’ roll pub. We did one on the HMS Belfast; we did one in a cinema. They were events. No record company had seen us at this point, and they all wanted to sign us. Record companies weren’t allowed into our gigs.

  The only way they could see us was through this documentary that Janet Street-Porter filmed in black and white. Nowadays you can’t have a mystique. Somebody videos you on a phone, they put it up on YouTube, and someone else writes “bollocks” underneath.

  When the club moved from Billy’s to the Blitz in Covent Garden, our mantra to the press was that we are a movement; we’re not just interested in being in a band. There are people in this club who will be photographers, filmmakers, clothes designers, and dancers—which is to say, you had Stephen Jones, the milliner; Michael Clark, the dancer; John Maybury, the filmmaker; Dylan Jones, the magazine editor; Robert Elms, the journalist; and it goes on. Boy George was there, Steve and Rusty. There was a sense that there was going to be a multimedia success, and I don’t think that had happened since the sixties. A lot of the kids who became successes in the sixties had stayed in charge all the way up to the eighties. I remember that suddenly, in about 1980, everybody wanted to have someone with colored hair come and work for them. It was like media companies were just recruiting people as they walked out of the Blitz.

  I clearly remember going up to Birmingham on our first gig ever outside London. It was December 1980, and our first single, “To Cut a Long Story Short,” was out. We decided to play in this place called the Botanical Gardens. It wasn’t even a venue—it was, literally, a botanical garden. We knew that there was a club up there called the Rum Runner and that everyone was doing a similar thing to us. So about a hundred of our lot all went up there, and it was like the Wild West: the two sides slowly approaching each other. I remember someone asking our manager if they could support us that night and, of course, he answered, “No one supports us. We’re the only band onstage.” Then, after the gig, we went back to the [Rum Runner owners] Berrow brothers’ flat in Birmingham, and I was sitting on the floor, and we were all drinking, and I realized that some of these guys in the flat were in the band that had wanted to support us. I distinctly remember this blond boy I was talking to saying to me, “We’ve got this band—it’s called Duran Duran.” And we soon found out about them.

  “We arrived and we thought, This is our time. This is our generation. We have a responsibility.”

  The electronic thing became popular very quickly, and we sidestepped it into doing a brazenly funky song called “Chant No. 1.” I don’t know why that worked. You just get things right sometimes. It was a song about Soho, a film noir of the Soho streets filled with drug-induced paranoia. It was sort of achingly, archly hip, and you can’t sustain that. That’s why we jumped ship. We could have been like Depeche Mode and just played the same music for 35 years and had great success with it, but we were bored. We wanted to move on.

  For me, the only way to go after t
hat was to write damn good songs, songs that would last forever. I’d been listening to a lot of Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Daryl Hall and John Oates. Steve Norman, who at that point was really Spandau’s second guitarist as well as the percussionist, had picked up the saxophone and utterly fell in love with it. I found myself writing songs that weren’t just for Tony but also for Steve’s sax. Spandau has two things that make us sound like no other band: Tony’s unique and powerful voice and Steve Norman’s amazing saxophone that we always like to include. It’s the sound of our soul, if you like.

  “True” was about the fourth or fifth song I wrote for that album. Originally, Trevor Horn was going to produce, but I don’t think he ever really got the idea of recording a band that was very into controlling their own sonic destiny, so we mutually dropped each other, and we found [Tony] Swain and [Steve] Jolley. They were white guys who were doing black music with a band called Imagination, and I loved the sound they were making. We thought we should get away from London, because we needed to find a sound for the album that wasn’t reliant on Soho. We went to Compass Point in Nassau. Robert Palmer had recorded there, so had Bryan Ferry. Talking Heads were there when we were there.

  Nobody thought “True” was going to be the single. Musically, it was me trying to write an Al Green song. What made the difference was the backing vocals. I went and started tracking up the backing vocals, and they became the unique selling point of that record. I put on this Motown-influenced guitar, we laid down the keyboard, and the drums were all done, and then we made this strange decision not to include my brother, Martin, on the song. We wanted a bass synth because we really loved the bass synth on the Imagination records. Martin stepped aside and let Tony Swain play it. If he had known it was going to be one of our biggest songs ever, he might have argued the point.

  You never know what’s going to make a record work, but there was something about the aural quality of that song that suggested it was just going to be important. But we still didn’t think it was a single—it was a six-and-a-half-minute track. It was going to be the last song on the album. Can you imagine that now, sticking one of your best tracks last? No one would do that. In those days, though, you approached an album as an actual piece of work, and where you placed your tracks was all about how people heard the piece as a whole. Movies have denouements, plays have denouements, and albums had denouements too. Nowadays they just peter out.

  MIXTAPE: 5 More Blue-Eyed British-Soul Songs 1. “Careless Whisper,” Wham! featuring George Michael 2. “Digging Your Scene,” The Blow Monkeys 3. “Bad Day,” Carmel 4. “Closest Thing to Heaven,” Kane Gang 5. “Oh Patti (Don’t Feel Sorry for Loverboy),” Scritti Politti

  At the time, I was having a very unrequited romance with [Altered Images singer] Clare Grogan. It was unrequited on both ends. It was courtly—I think that’s the expression I can correctly use—but it was romantic. She gave me a Nabokov book, Lolita, and that sort of represented her. I took two lyrics that I based on lines in Lolita. One was “seaside arms,” which was an expression that Humbert Humbert used about Lolita. I thought that was rather beautiful, and I was ridiculed for that for years. “What’s that line about? It’s stupid!” Well, go and argue with Nabokov. And the other one was “With a thrill in my head and a pill on my tongue,” which I kind of paraphrased.

  “We were getting back reports from America that it was getting played on black radio. They had no idea we were a white band.”

  “True” became a song about writing a love song. Why “Why do I find it hard to write the next line? I want the truth to be said”? Because I didn’t want to write it down—because there’s nothing more embarrassing. That’s partly what the song is about. But it’s hard to be truthful in a song. As a songwriter, you’re not writing love letters all the time; you’re using real life to help you fantasize about a greater, more powerful life. What you really love more than anything else are the songs you’re writing.

  Eventually “True” made number one in the U.K.—in those days no records went straight in at number one—and we were getting back reports from America that it was getting played on black radio. They had no idea we were a white band. The proudest legacy of that song for me is that it turned on black kids, and there are so many black artists—Nelly, R. Kelly, will.i.am, Lloyd, P.M. Dawn—who dug it and made it part of their aural landscape.

  “Gold” was a little bit of a hit in America, but we had issues with our record company there. They weren’t very powerful, and they made a lot of mistakes. I remember meeting John Taylor when Duran had their reunion in the early 2000s. I went along to the gig, and immediately afterwards, he said, “You guys had Europe, we had America.” Which is kind of how it was. It’s rather ridiculous that these two fey groups that sized each other up in the car park of the Botanical Gardens in Birmingham should then decide that one had one continent and one had the other, but musically that’s what happened.

  I’m not bothered by the fact that Spandau’s American career didn’t last as long as it did in the rest of the world, because what we ended up with was a song that has completely altered the American landscape of music. I’d rather have one of those than a much longer career that left less of a song legacy behind. That’s really where my heart is, with my songs. They’re my children.

  TONY HADLEY: The name Spandau Ballet was chosen out of naïveté. Robert Elms had been to Berlin for the weekend, and he was having a leak in the bathroom in some grotty club, when there, graffitied on the toilet wall where he was standing, was “Spandau Ballet.” Spandau is an area of Berlin—a region, like Brooklyn. He came back and said, “I think I’ve got the name for the band.” We went, “Spand–what?” “Spandau” is not a word that trips off the tongue. He said, “It’s great: It’s got some sort of German vibe to it; it’s ballet—it’s about dance. It’s creative.” We were looking for a name that was going to really stick in people’s minds. And Berlin was a very cool city. Everything was very angular, very stark. There was East Berlin and West Berlin—it was like the forces of good and evil pitted against each other.

  By that time we’d all convinced ourselves it was brilliant. And it was brilliant, until we hit a bit of a roadblock in America. There’s a massive Jewish community there, and certain people started to say that we were an anti-Semitic band. People have told me over the years that there is sort of a Nazi reference, which was nonsense from our point of view. But I could understand people who were a bit more knowledgeable than a bunch of 19-, 20-year-old kids going, “Hey, man, that’s got an implication.”

  No one in America had had the prior history of Spandau Ballet. They just thought we were a nice bunch of guys who sang this really lovely ballad. They didn’t realize that there had been previous albums—True was our third album. Although, I don’t think “True” or even the album is totally representative of the group. We were much tougher live than we were on record.

  If we’d been signed today, we probably would have been dropped on the second album and never have gotten to True, but in those days record companies kept the faith. So we were allowed to make the True album, which obviously was a much more commercial-sounding album. That song and album took us from a cult band to an international success. It was number one in 21 countries around the world. All of a sudden we were traveling in a private jet and going, “Wow, this is amazing!”

  I don’t think “True” is Spandau’s best song—for me, “Through the Barricades” is. But “True” had some connection, and I don’t really know why. It’s not a specific lyric, is it? “Head over heels when toe to toe”—sometimes you’d be like, “Right, Gary, what’s this about, mate?” Is it “I’m head over heels in love?” “Am I in bed because our feet are touching and …?” I don’t know. But then, I suppose, we grew up on David Bowie and Roxy Music. “Virginia Plain”—what’s that about? Half of the Bowie songs, I couldn’t tell you what they’re about. With “True,” you have to create the imagery for yourself.

  THAT WAS THEN

  BUT THIS
IS NOW

  Gary Kemp left Spandau Ballet in 1990 to pursue acting and a solo career. He and Martin starred as the notorious gangster twins in The Krays before the latter joined EastEnders as one of the soap’s most popular villains. In 1999, Hadley, Norman, and drummer John Keeble failed in their attempt to sue Kemp, the group’s sole credited songwriter, for unpaid royalties. After a decade of sullen silences and hurt feelings, all five embarked on a 2009 reunion tour. However, the curtain has since fallen on the Ballet yet again, with the singer returning to the Tony Hadley Band—featuring Keeble on drums—and his duties as a part owner of Red Rat Brewery.

  KEMP: As the decade wound down, there was a sudden interest in club culture, which was sort of inspired by us. Back in 1980, we used to say we wouldn’t tour, we’d only release white labels, and DJs could play our records, and anyone dancing to them were the stars. In the end, that monster we’d built came back to destroy us all. The second summer of love and the rise of the DJ at the end of the eighties was really the death knell for the bands. Remaining at the top of the tree was going to be difficult. Even bands like U2 took a bit of time to regain their speed.

  I had an opportunity with my brother to go into acting. I got bored with working with the band. I was frustrated at being the only songwriter. Ten years later, we ended up in a big court case punch-up. I’d had a child, my marriage [to actress Sadie Frost] was breaking up, and I was in the middle of a solo album. [Hadley, Keeble, and Norman] realized that the publishing makes lots of money, and the songwriter makes more money than the performers, and there’s a bitterness that comes from that. We ended up in a dispute, and it took a judge to sort it out. Once that happened, there was going to be at least 10 years before we could face each other again.