And so, Spandau Ballet are back. I’m guessing not many contributors to this site will be celebrating (except me) but then there was never much love lost between the music press and arguably the coolest band of the early Eighties.
Let me explain why.
When I was a rookie music journalist starting out on Sounds in 1980 the bands I wanted to write about seemed to be the ones many of my colleagues despised. They were into Rock. I was into Pop and Fashion.
One of the first major interviews I did for Sounds under my nom de plume Betty Page was with a bunch of young Londoners who had been causing a stir around town in the first year of a new decade, shortly after Margaret Thatcher had seized power.
Spandau Ballet were at the centre of a style-conscious clique known as The Cult With No Name that had grown out of “Bowie” nights at clubs such as Billy’s and the Blitz.
The Cult members were imaginative and talented young people, many of whom made their own clothes or were graphic designers, hairstylists, photographers or entrepreneurs.
If punks wanted to destroy, the Blitz Kids wanted to create, to put some colour into a grey, broken Britain.
I loved their flamboyance – the frocks, the furs, the frills, the flirting and the frisson of unusual sexuality.
The Kids were stars in their own theatre and I wanted a bit part in the production. Unfortunately, however, I wasn’t up for audition – for two good reasons. First, like the members of any close-knit community, they didn’t welcome outsiders.
Second, I wrote for a rock music paper. They hated rock music and all who thrived on it. They wished to spit on its grave. Whatever their personal style, they were united in their love of dance music and the clubs that played it.
Most of them – and particularly the boys in Spandau Ballet – ignored the music papers. They didn’t play “gigs” as such – they held “events”, playing in unusual venues such as the HMS Belfast, a decommissioned warship permanently docked on the Thames, to invited audiences only. They rapidly became the focal point around which the scene revolved. Their fans, most of whom were also friends, were as important as the band and their music.
In their short career, Spandau Ballet had already been the subjects of a television documentary and were about to release their first single on a major record label. They weren’t the least bit interested in being interviewed by the music papers, which they quite rightly associated with unstylish, unkempt rock herberts in flared denim. More shockingly, they didn’t need the press.
However, my editor, the venerable Alan Lewis, was determined to get them into Sounds. I was desperate for my first major assignment as a Staff Writer and he knew that I wasn’t a natural defender of the rock ’n’ roll tradition and might be the secret weapon he needed to penetrate the Cult.
Most dyed-in-the-jeans music hacks hated the idea of being bypassed by a bunch of sharp-suited upstarts, so Spandau had been dismissed by them as elitists, fops, dandies, upper-class twits and even fascists, because of the Nazi connotations of their name. It didn’t help that the Ballet boys deemed fashion to be of equal importance to music. The fact that they were actually working-class Labour supporters from north London didn’t seem to count.
And so it was with a combination of naïve enthusiasm and blind panic that I dialled the number I’d been given for Spandau Ballet’s manager, Steve Dagger. I had no reason to believe he’d even give me the time of day – the last thing he needed was another stitch-up job by an ignorant music hack. But Steve was a smart operator and quickly realised that I was something of a blank canvas upon which he and Gary Kemp, their chief theorist and songwriter, could paint their ideas. But he wasn’t going to give me the interview easily.
I managed to persuade Steve that I had no hidden agenda and that my interest was genuine. He told me I would have to do some research before I met the band. I had to watch the documentary that Janet Street-Porter had made about the band and their fans for the 20th Century Box series.
I dutifully went to Steve’s office to watch the programme, making notes all the way through. I knew he was making me jump through hoops but I had nothing to lose.
I’d done everything the manager had asked me to do, so he grudgingly gave me permission to speak to Gary – as long as he was there too. Steve was the sixth member of the band, the master strategist.
Gary Kemp was an intense, idealistic young man who had carefully considered Spandau Ballet’s image and agenda. As I sat down to interview him, he fished out his well-thumbed copy of George Melly’s book Revolt Into Style and read out a passage about the true meaning of mod being a small group of young working-class boys forming a little mutual admiration society “totally devoted to clothes”.
I carefully copied down the words without quite taking them in. I had to check again – was he telling me that when the band first met in the late Seventies, it was only about dressing up? “Yes, basically it revolved around admiration of clothes,” Steve interjected before Gary could open his mouth, “and featured extreme posing.”
Extreme posing: words to strike fear into the heart of any rock music purist.
Since punk, Steve told me, it had been a case of the most stylish people wanting nothing to do with rock music or the media. “These people wanted to go to soul clubs, to dance, to dress up,” he said. “And on top of that there are sets of innovators who really pushed the fashion thing a bit further, making their own clothes, maybe buying some chain-store stuff, but using it differently. Why the music papers haven’t picked up on it I don’t know.”
Gary did. “The thought of people like us spending money on looking good – they just can’t stand it,” he fumed. “I don’t think they like the idea of fashion as a progressive force. But it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
I wanted to tell him “progressive” was an adjective that only applied to “rock” in my world, but I wasn’t too keen to reinforce the “us” and “them” theme that was emerging as we spoke.
“It’s not your Marquees, not your polytechnic gigs, nothing is created there,” continued Steve, emphasising his point. “It happens in the clubs. Without injections from innovators, rock music becomes very boring.”
I wasn’t able to develop a counter-argument. I’d spent most of my time as a music business rookie complaining about dour student music and looking for something more ambitious and optimistic. And here it was, sitting in front of me.
“The scene attracts people who want to develop, who want to achieve something in any direction, whether it’s for art or money,” said Gary.
“It all started with our first gig,” continued Steve. “We invited about 10 young fashion designers, 10 hairdressers, and a couple of people who run clubs. We thought they’d like us and they did. It’s much easier when you’re surrounded by people like that – not only hairdressers and clothes designers, but also graphic designers, photographers, even people who write for us.”
It was this image of the self-contained creative elite that so horrified the music papers – along with the constant reference to hairdressers, of course.
Steve was very keen for me to understand that Spandau Ballet were not a bunch of art students. Gary and his brother Martin had grown up in Islington with little money but a lot of attitude, mixing with the sort of blokes who’d blow their entire wage packet on a flash pair of trousers or shoes.
“We’re not saying they should wear anything in particular,” interrupted Steve, “because the group changes its clothes from week to week – we’re not advocating uniforms, like the Jam. The whole point is that if you see someone else wearing the same clothes, get rid of them.”
I wasn’t at all convinced that this infinitely changing wardrobe option would be a big vote-winner during the continuing recession, with so many young people unemployed.
“If you haven’t got anything, if you haven’t got a chance, then you should make the most of your appearance,” said Gary. “If that’s all you’ve got, beat everyone at it. Do you dress for functional reasons only? You dress to attract and look good, don’t you? As far as a poseur is concerned, he is his own work of art. The human sculpture.”
Suddenly I felt hyper-conscious of the charity-shop suit I was wearing. Boy George certainly qualified to be installed in a gallery; I did not. I wasn’t expecting to figure on the Cult’s best-dressed list any time soon.
Despite the fact that I felt intimidated by the exclusivity of Gary and Steve’s “dance for perfection”, they were speaking my language. There was a theme here that resonated with what I’d been trying to articulate in print for months – ditch the dull, express yourself, don’t follow the crowd and move with your own feelings. Distinguish yourself from the masses, be an individual. The “colourful little scenes going down in all the big grey places” – that’s what I wanted to be part of.
My hard-earned interview with Steve and Gary appeared on the cover and centrespread of Sounds in September 1980 under the headline “The New Romantics – a manifesto for the Eighties”. A genre was born, although Spandau Ballet were already fighting shy of the label.
The biggest test would be whether the public would take to their music as well as their image. Their first single, To Cut A Long Story Short, was released in November 1980. It was dominated by Tony Hadley’s theatrical vocal and a Teutonic electro-beat that was perfect for the angular dance performed by the poseurs of the time. I loved it and so did the British record-buyer – it spent nine weeks on the chart and went to No 5. I felt I’d made a creditable start on my quest to make a name for myself in rock journalism – by interviewing a band that abhorred rock journalism. How ironic…
This blog is an abridged version of early chapters in the as yet unpublished book Hit Girl: My Bizarre Double Life In The Pop World Of The Eighties, copyright Beverley Glick.
12 Responses to Spandau Ballet return: Betty Page reminisces…
Beverley, I really enjoyed your well written account. But I’m afraid my loathing of Spandau Ballet and everything they stood for was re-ignited by reading the arrogant, insight-free hubris they came out with when you spoke to them.
I hated Spandau Ballet not so much because I disliked their music – though the sight of Tony Hadley clenching his eyes shut with faux white-man soul while strenuously – forcibly – crooning, while draped in his assortment of tablecloths, did make me shudder. No, I hated the crap they came out with. Like many people with chips on their shoulders, they were right about the fact that people found them repugnant and repellant, but wrong about why. It wasn’t seething envy or a wish to suppress these working class boys done good. It was the way they took themselves so immensely seriously. The way they had no humility or modesty about their rather mediocre musical talents and looks. If they’d sounded and looked even a hundredth as wonderful or original or innovative as Bowie, I would have loved them. But they didn’t.
I also felt as if their followers had betrayed the punk cause to a certain extent. Not that I’d ever been a punk – I was 12 in 1976. But my teens had a soundtrack of the most gorgeous, diverse, creative new wave music, from the melodic Aztec Camera and Prefab Sprout through the evolving Clash, the technobeat of the Cabs, the hypnotic operatic swoon of The Associates, the perfect clear-voiced pop of Teardrops, the angsty adrenaline rush of The Buzzcocks, the plaintive pimply pubescence of The Undertones, the harder punkier edge of The Ruts and Stranglers to…to so many other incredible bands.
You’ve got me started now and I’m digressing. I just felt like Spandau and their ilk were reverting back to values that were held pre-punk and new wave – an emphasis on style over substance (and couldn’t Spandau be the perfect analogy for smarmy, posing, rhetoric-spouting, content-free Tony Blair?); an elitism that was based not on intelligence or ability to appreciate good music or literature or art or shared politics, but on the simple desire to blow all your money on slick haircuts and lots of ugly sack-like clothes. Add to that the fact that I hated tribes – even bands of bondage-trousered punks made me feel uneasy and as if I was viewing a herd of sheep, and you may understand a bit of my antipathy.
Don’t get me wrong – I’ve never been someone who’s dismissive of the desire to look good. Looking and feeling attractive and well dressed is, after all, a universal and understandable objective. It was the total lack of individuality of the Blitz kid sheep, their self aggrandizement, their utter obliviousness to any semblance of passion or emotion other than peacock pride and sneering strutting. The audience could be forgiven, most were teenagers looking for a good night out to escape from the monotony of their jobs, but Spandau and their ilk’s milking of this need and using it to promote a culture based on superficialities and no heart or soul was simply repugnant to me. And my view is strengthened by reading their risibly pompous remarks. The fact that they didn’t have gigs but ‘events’ makes me snort into my coffee. And I would disagree with your use of the term ‘the creative elite’: were a bunch of hairdressers in Gothic make up and robes more creative than the amazing bands that sprouted up for years from the less fashion-obsessed sector of new wave? How many really talented artists, musicians, writers and original thinkers would go along with a gaggle of clones, swallowing the diktat of a bunch of posing tossers?
The whole Spandau thing was, for me, the epitome of the emperor’s new clothes.
Funnily enough, many years later I bought a copy of Spandau’s first album and I don’t hate the music – it has a certain nostalgic, blustering, mediocre-voiced, nostril-flared charm. It was the individuals – or non individuals, I should say – that I despised.
Still, very well written piece, Beverley. You’ve perfectly conjured up their smug personas
Very nice piece, so well-reasoned that I really wanted to agree with you.
Indeed, I loved To Cut A Long Story Short. Still do. Great little piece of electro-pop-tinged New Romanticism, i thought.
Like Leyla, though, i quickly came to dislike the attitudes of the people involved in the music, and have always felt that their music went very quickly downhill to the point where songs like True are unbearably cringeworthy, MOR schlock as bad as anything by Barry Manilow.
But then I always have a problem when style takes precedence over content. It seems to me there’s something wrong when music journalists are harping on about the cut of a pair of trousers instead of about the way the music makes them feel.
In fact, i don’t like it when anything sidelines the music because the music is the art, and at its best it transports the listener into emotional states that can otherwise only be achieved through experiencing grief or joy or pain (or whatever emotion is aroused) first hand.
No pair of trousers (or any other nice bit of schmatter) does that for me.
And it’s not just fashion. I don’t like it when social movements co-opt music to such an extent that the music become secondary. A song about the ecology or a song about anti-violence or a gay anthem or a song in favour of some worthy cause is only worth hearing if it’s a good song to start with.
I think there was a point in the seventies when music journalism became a breeding ground for people with socio-political axes of all sorts to grind – and music to them was just a vehicle on which their messages could be carried.
Spandau were one of the bands for whom style and fashion were the most important aspect of what they did, and music was just a way in to a mass market.
I don’t suppose it helped that Tony Hadley sang as I imagined Roger Moore would in the shower, and that’s a thought to send a shiver up the spine of any sensitive soul.
I fully endorse almost everything Leyla says – a woman of great musical taste obviously – and as a working class lad myself, I saw Spandau as arch-conservatives, more like Bryan Ferry than David Bowie, desperate to shrug off their origins and make good by adopting the elitist attitudes of the upper class.
Beverley’s description of Gary Kemp as the band’s “chief theorist” is intriguing: had they sprung up outside London (and had Kemp read Debord and Derrida alongside Melly), they might have fallen under the conceptual spell of Trevor Horn/Paul Morley, and we’d have identified their surface shimmer as an ironic comment on pop and consumerism (cf ABC). But we think of them as twerps in kilts. Then twerps in suits. Then twerps in the High Court. Then desperate twerps on a boat, re-forming for the moolah. Whereas Martin Fry is forever cool.
That said, were a gun placed to my head, I’d have to side with the Spands over the egregious yacht-pacing vileness that Duran Duran turned into (after their quite good first album).
What Leyla said… with bells on.
In a sense, my first hazing as a music critic came from the self-appointed “Dean” himself. Having called into a local NYC college radio show where Christgau was taking questions, the teenage me asked what he thought about this whole New Romantic movement thing.
“It’s not a movement, it’s a fad.” Click
Well…fair play to him, but had I been 10 years older and less startled by the blunt assessment, I might have re-dialed the program and mentioned to him that it was 1980 just then and no one was wearing stacked heels and feather boas a la the Dolls either. True, they may have influenced legions, but their clothing was no less ridiculous and I swear to Todd that the trashy production quality of “Personality Crisis” was no better or more interesting than the airbrushed sound of the Spandau singles. Many clued-in teens had picked up on the buzz surrounding the Blitz kids one night stand in lower Manhattan, and given that many of us were in the rush of the synth-pop revolution, my question was innocent enough. Considering all the bands today (good and band) that can’t seem to not have similar flavors embedded in their music, it was probably not as stupid an inquiry either. I mean, after all, how many groups have carried on the solid B+ traditions of all those BTO records Christgau reviewed in the 70′s?
I’d echo and endorse JoE Silva’s observations in general. Synth-pop/New Romantic was glorious. OMD, Human League, Blancmange, Tears For Fears, Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys … all of them made some terrific pop music (even if Depeche did deny ever having heard Kraftwerk when I first interviewed them).
And, yes, to be seeing the legacy picked up and modernised by The Killers and Panic! At The Disco and many others is a delight.
But to return to the specific topic at hand, Spandau, regrettably, after that first rush of To Cut A Long Story Short, just didn’t hold a candle to the better exponents of the style.
Great piece Beverley. I fully understand why people get so offended by Spandau Ballet, but I found their pre-suit fashion excesses wonderfully odd and colourful alongside the dour uniform of the tribes at most of the gigs I was going to at the time. If it’s ultimately all about the music, those first three singles were fantastic – though I lost interest after that – and the only time I ever saw them live, at the Festival Hall, was a riot. I never had professional dealings with them, but bumped into a few of them occasionally at the Wag club, and they seemed to have none of the elitist pretensions the media so often projected onto them.
I agree with Johnny about the fabulousness of Pet Shop Boys, Dep Mode, OMD and so on. Their synthy pop was gorgeous and always evoked – and still evokes – involuntary bopping round the living room. The finest of these imo – PSB, DM, OMD – never made preposterous claims like the Spandau boys or the similarly egotistical Duran peacocks did. Let’s face it, noone likes a cocky vain twat, and since so many immensely talented and beautiful people in pop have managed to avoid looking as if they’d like to eat themselves, Spandau and Duran’s inflated self regard just switched a lot of people off.
Phil Oakey and the rest of The Human League were obviously also into posing, but the League’s synth pop was so catchy and disposable that I could ignore their egos, and they didn’t seem to
make endless statements suggesting that they had a monopoly on cool as the SpanDurans did.
To echo Tim from above, how much easier it was to feel affection for ABC than the strutting SpanDuraners . Martin Fry, in spite of – or perhaps because of – his ill-fitting gold lame suits, came across as someone who didn’t take himself too seriously. He was like a lost soul who had wandered into a pub in Black (or gold)Tie, and his earnestly beseeching songs about searching unsucessfully for love made him an endearing figure rather than an object of ridicule.
I’ve just realised that I have no memory of having ever at any point read an interview with Spandau Ballet. Maybe this fact and my fond memory of them are not unconnected.
Yes, Leyla, yes and yes again.
Except for your observation that “Let’s face it, no-one likes a cocky vain twat”.
So why does Liam Gallagher have so many disciples?
Maybe what you were trying to say was, “In a perfect world, no-one with anything resembling a smidgeon of good sense, taste, decency and concern for their fellow human beings would like a cocky vain twat, probably.”
Unfortunately, that would exclude a hell of a lot of people.
And, when we’ve finally thrashed this topic to death, can somebody please start another one about why OMD should be elevated to the status of the most god-like synth pop band ever?
Pretentious they may have been, but their words and music will live with me to the grave.
The Tony Hadley – Roger Moore line is great. Thanks for the laugh, Johnny!
Bill, you’re welcome round my place anytime.
I’ve always found that there’s no characteristic more charming in a house guest than a tendency to laugh unprompted at my witty quips.