Mum, dad and the music

Bob Geldof is quoted on the cover of Gary Kemp’s autobiography with untypical succinctness: ‘Great bloke, great band, great book’.

Bob Geldof is quoted on the cover of Gary Kemp’s autobiography with untypical succinct- ness: ‘Great bloke, great band, great book’. And Sir Bob is spot on with his assessment of the memoirs of Gary Kemp, leader of the popular Eighties combo Spandau Ballet, who are threatening to do it all over again, but in a more stately manner, a quarter of a century later. This is a fine, beautifully written book, primarily describing the antics of the New Romantics, the peacock performers and their audiences whose music dominated the youth of the Thatcher years.

The tuneful supremacy of Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Culture Club and the like held sway in the final decade in which singles and chart positions actually mattered. However, I Know This Much is about a great deal more than these ephemeral musical statistics. Highly unusual for a book of this type, there is no discography at the back (although, annoyingly, no index either). Gary Kemp has many other important things in his life to write about, albeit that he eventually returns to the most celebrated factor of his existence, the band whose legacy he cannot escape. Kemp’s story is about his mum and dad.

Through Spandau Ballet he materially changed their lives; through Spandau Ballet he and his brother Martin more than lived up to their parents’ expectations. At the height of Spandau’s success, pop was power, 16 million watching Top of the Pops and ‘your nan knowing what was at number one’. When your nan is gone, when your mum and dad have gone, if you are lucky your work may survive. Gary’s work survives and though Frank and Eileen Kemp are gone, he was doubly lucky in the parents that shaped and inspired him. The strength and working-class traditions of the Kemp family shine through in every chapter from the cheerful simplicity of Gary’s Islington childhood in the Sixties to his parents’ Poole retirement. Their final days are described powerfully and with love.

Not that the Kemp boys were good clean-living lads when at the top of the pops. They dabbled with most of the usual excesses, chemical and fleshy, their healthy survival a worrying argument against moderate behaviour when young. Rivals such as Boy George did not always fare so well. And rivals they were — there may have been a New Romantic movement in teenage culture but within that faction all the participants were desperately watching their backs, as keen to see each other off as they were the punk movement that preceded them. Spandau did pretty well, as Gary recalls, although he is not afraid or ashamed to recount their failures as well as their successes.

The stories of the cock-ups are inevitably the most entertaining; the band’s failure to get into the front line at the Band Aid finale, their high profile march out of a limo into a shoe shop instead of into Air Studios to meet Charles and Di; their flight from Brussels in a chartered plane with a disastrous lack of restroom facilities; ignored by the god Bowie; a daft physical attack on a daft critic; the producer who felt that Tony Hadley was best recorded wrapped in a Turkish carpet. The more serious problems — clashes with their record company when American sales tanked; the love affairs, Gary’s and others’, that unsettled the band’s equilibrium; and the complete and utter falling out between Gary and the three non-Kemps over songwriting royalties which probably had its roots in the brothers putting the band on hold while they pursued acting careers, notably via the lead movie roles as the criminal twins in The Krays.

Gary had been the group’s principal, indeed only, songwriter, and his haunting and/or funky songs kept Spandau Ballet in the charts for ten years. ‘True’, his biggest hit, was a giant of its time and remains a standard today. The contribution of the others was considerable — in particular Sinatra fan Hadley’s strong and expressive voice that few of his contemporaries came near to matching; yet it all finished up in court when the band ended what turned out to be the first phase of their career. As Kemp says, nobody was lying, and nobody won, although legally he and Spandau’s manager, the enterprising Steve Dagger, did, and it led to communication breakdown for 19 years.

But they’re back together now. It was always going to happen — wasn’t it? Gary Kemp refers at one point to the ‘speed of love’ and in this intelligent, colourful memoir we see love moving at many different rates with a blitz of characters ranging from Bishop Trevor Huddleston to Ronnie Kray via the poppermost of the Eighties. In fact Sir Bob got it right with all three compliments.