Spandau Ballet’s Martin Kemp On The Band’s Early Years Celebrated On New Box Set

Members of Spandau Ballet from left: Tony Hadley, Steve Norman, Martin Kemp, John Keeble and Gary Kemp. (Photo by Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Martin Kemp, the former Spandau Ballet bassist, recently had a trip down memory lane when he attended the premiere of London’s Design Museum exhibit “Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s,” which spotlighted the famous venue that was the epicenter of the New Romantic scene during the late 1970s and early 1980s—an era that he personally lived through.

“It’s an amazing thing because to think back when we were kids — I was only 17 at the time,” he says. “And that small club [in London’s Covent Garden district] we went to held probably 150 people every Tuesday night, made such an impression that it would get its own design exhibit 40 years later, it’s just incredible. But it comes as no surprise in a way because it did make such a big dent on fashion and the way people thought for the rest of the ’80s, that it kind of set the pace for the rest of the ’80s. So I think celebrating something like that is really important.”

Spandau Ballet – which consisted of Martin Kemp, guitarist/songwriter Gary Kemp (Martin’s brother), singer Tony Hadley, saxophonist/percussionist Steve Norman and drummer John Keeble — emerged during the New Romantic period as the house band for the club’s regulars known as the Blitz Kids. They later graduated to becoming one of the hugely popular U.K. bands of the 1980s with such big hits as “True,” “Gold,” “Only When You Leave” and “Through the Barricades.”

The early period of the band’s history from 1978 to 1982 is now celebrated in a new nine-disc boxed set, Everything Is Now – Vol. 1, which contains the band’s first two albums, Journeys to Glory (1981) and Diamond (1982); a collection of 7″ and 12″ singles and remixes; BBC session and concert recordings; and previously unreleased demos going back to when Spandau were first known as Gentry. The set captures an ambitious band on the rise during and following the Blitz scene.

“It is post-punk,” Kemp says about their sound at the time. “It is a mixture of power pop that came after punk. And it’s a mixture of that and a little bit of what was to come. I think what you get in that box set is the real cult version of Spandal Ballet. It’s lovely to be able to have all these bits of footage and the book and old demo tapes that we’ve got in there as well, and to package the whole thing up in one complete box set, so we never have to do it again. (laughs) But it’s really lovely to be able to put it out there and say, ‘This is who we were, and this is who we started out as.’”

Most American music fans’ introduction to Spandau Ballet was the sublime soul pop of 1983’s “True,” which became the band’s first U.S. hit. Before that commercial breakthrough, however, the group’s sound was a mix of post-punk, New Wave, electropop and funk, as documented on the Everything Is Now box, and their look and attire projected both futurism and style.

“Spandau was [previously] called Gentry, and we were almost like a power-pop band,” Kemp remembers. “Gary and I went to a club called Billy’s, which was the forerunner to the Blitz. All of a sudden, we were listening to something really different. It was all that German electronic pop that was around at that time. We knew we had to move our band on. So we bought one of the very first monophonic keyboards. And all of the guitar riffs that we had in this power pop band — we spent time either writing new songs or replacing those riffs on the synth, to bring it all up to date.

“When we started going to the Blitz nightclub,” he continues, “we didn’t even tell anybody we had a band for about six months because we knew that what we had wasn’t right for the band. It wasn’t us manufacturing a sound to represent the Blitz. It was because our tastes changed along with everybody else’s. And so we spent time changing that before we even announced to anyone in the Blitz that we had a band.”

By playing select word-of-mouth gigs and generating press attention under the guidance of their manager, Steve Dagger, Spandau Ballet developed a cult-like reputation that attracted a following and major interest from record labels, culminating in the band signing wth Chrysalis Records. The band’s 1981 debut album, Journeys to Glory, produced by Richard James Burgess, went Top Ten on the British album chart. Says Kemp: “Those early memories for me of the first couple of years — when the band was making records like “To Cut Long Story Short,” “The Freeze” and “Musclebound” — they are my favorite memories of all in the band, no matter how big the band got in the end to playing arenas and football stadiums.”

In comparison, making the second album, 1982’s Diamond, was a bit trickier for Spandau Ballet. The first side of the vinyl album consisted of electro-funk tracks like “Paint Me Down,” “She Loved Like Diamond” and the popular “Chant No. 1 (I Don’t Need This Pressure On).” However, the music on the record’s second side — “Pharaoh,” “Innocence and Science” and “Missionary” — was art-y and experimental, akin to the music on David Bowie’s Low and “Heroes” albums from the late 1970s. That didn’t sit well with the band’s label execs.

“Saying it’s experimental is very kind,” Kemp reflects now. “It was completely out there. I think what happened was Gary, who was writing the songs, grew up loving Pink Floyd. On that second album, that’s what we’re starting to hear. All bands will tell you that the first album is the easiest album you’re ever going to make because you have tested those songs. You’ve roadtested them. You’ve seen what people like and what they don’t like. And then you go and record it.”

“I think we were searching for ourselves,” he later adds. “I think that’s what that second side shows. When we played it on a playback at the record company, they were into the first side. When we played the second side, their faces dropped like a brick. You cannot release those records as singles. And that’s what the early ’80s were about. They were about singles.”

Fortunately, producer Trevor Horn came in to not only save the album’s commercial viability by remixing the track “Instinction” as the next single, but he also rescued the band. “He broke the song apart,” Kemp recalls. “He made an absolute wonderful job of remixing “Instinction.” And he pulled it up to date. I don’t have to tell you the impact that Trevor’s production had on the ’80s. I always look at the ’80s as kind of pre- and post-Live Aid. If you look at it pre-Live Aid, it belongs to Trevor Horn. Post- is probably Stock Aitken Waterman. But pre- is definitely Trevor, and I definitely think he saved the band.”

One of the highlights from the new set is footage from a show at New York City’s Underground Club in 1981, when Spandau Ballet made their first visit to the U.S. along with other members of the Blitz Scene. “When we went there as young Blitz kids, what we were doing was almost as if we were missionaries on a mission to convert people into being Blitz kids,” Kemp recalls about that visit. “It was almost as if we were a bunch of aliens that had landed from Mars, the way people looked at us, because we were.”

“I was walking around in something that looked very similar to a dress,” he adds. “Tony [Hadley] looked like he was in a Robin Hood movie. We were wearing these Blitz Kids clothes that we thought were cool and that fitted in absolutely perfectly in the Blitz. But when you walked through the streets of Manhattan in 1980, you were strange. It was as if we were a bunch of missionaries out on a mission to convert people into Blitz Kids.”

After their first two albums, Spandau Ballet proceeded to scale the heights of fame and fortune, beginning with 1983’s True record. But for Kemp, it’s the memories of when the band were starting in the Blitz scene that stay with him. “We belonged to a certain look,” he says. “And in the same way that the Mods had the Who, Spandau Ballet represented that New Romantic/Blitz Kids crowd, which didn’t last that long. Probably in the same way that punk lasted for a year. Pop cultures that had come before were only short-lived. But the impression that they give is that they lasted much longer. So they are by far my favorite memories, those early years.”