SPANDAU BALLET – "True"

I suppose this above all others is the track that epitomises that first half of the 90s for me. Mid you, I didn’t notice it getting to the top: I missed something in the previous entry: on 9 June, just before this hit the top (or while it was hitting it, the Tories under Maggie Thatcher won the general election by a landslide that saw the Labour Party at the nadir of its fortunes. Why do I get a sense of déja vû about this right now? At the time I was a naive young thing who still believed there was enough discontent in the country for Labour to win comfortably. I was at the count in Hitchin Town Hall, and I still remember who cheered when rumours of Tony Benn’s defeat in Bristol East came through. I’ve got your number, comrade!

That election, though dispiriting, didn’t do me any harm as it happened. I worked my legs off when nobody else’s heart was in it. I got spat on in Royston market and when Michael Foot came to visit somebody handed me a megaphone and I stood on a bench and ranted until one of Michael’s minders snatched it off me. I was outside any factions and well-in with the full-time agent and well placed to make a mark.

So, the beginning of my rehabilitation begins with this song. That said, it’s immensely likeable, but like the decade it represents it has no soul; it sounds like something put together by committee to press the maximum number of buttons. But I do like that voice – it doesn’t quite make me shiver but it does feel nice and warm inside. Seven is about right.

When I was a kid, my understanding of this song was based around a misinterpretation of the line “a pill on my tongue” – I read the lyric as a suicide note, a final testament: “I want the truth to be known.” The melancholic tug of the melody, the slipping-through-my-hands imagery… it was all of a piece. The note would go unfinished, like so many suicide notes – he was leaving the next line to someone else, because he wouldn’t be around to write it himself.

It all made perfect sense at the time, to my sixteen-year old self; but then, you find death imagery everywhere, at that age. But even though, as a rule, Adult Me *likes* songs about songwriting and the clever pastiche-y bits they engender, in a way I still prefer my earlier, mistaken reading.

True is irrevocably tied to this period for me – being an ‘our tune’ of myself & my first love. 1983 witnessed the highs and the lows of our relationship and by the end of the year it was all done and dusted. It’s difficult under the circumstances to disassociate the song from this scenario but I can appreciate it for what it is. Blue-eyed soul from white boys who patently don’t seem to have one. It’s as fake as hell and Spandau seemed keener than their peers to disappear into MOR balladry (although I have a sneekin regard for ‘Gold’ and ‘Only When You Leave’) forsaking the dodgy kilts and electro funk of the earlier hits. As Tom rightly points out PM Dawn took the best bit and improved the song some years later.

Not that I was listening much to UK radio at the time, but if I had been, “True” at number one would have soundtracked the single greatest month of my life. May 1983 was my last month in Vannes.

I saw the month in with the biggest hangover of my life, after three of the language-assistant community in the town had a joint 21st birthday bash and drank way too much. Three days later we had the triumph of the Lycée’s troupe theatrale, our production of Zadig at the Palais des Arts. I got a big round of applause for my portrayal of the King of Babylon, then after the interval shaved off the beard I’d been cultivating for a year to take the bow clean-shaven, to the delight of my pupils. For the rest of the month classes were a total breeze as I’d never been so popular in my life.

And at weekends, like a cricket team at the end of a one-day match I was hitting out all over the place. The first weekend saw a trip to La Rochelle and the Atlantic coast; the second, visiting another assistant in Brest and spending my 21st birthday touring the north-west coast (and hearing how Manchester City got relegated!); the third, a trip to Cherbourg, Bayeux and Caen in order to get better reception to listen to the Cup Final (with crew members from the Rosslare-Cherbourg ferry buying me drinks in return for listening to my radio); and the fourth, visits to the area’s prehistoric monuments (Carnac the Breton answer to Stonehenge).

What with all that going on, I was only just about following the UK chart. And as for “True”, well, it’s patchy. I do like the verse about Marvin, written from a soulboy’s perspective, but the rest of the lyric is drivel, and when one of your main hooks is about struggling to write the next line, you really are struggling. (Natasha Bedingfield irritated me for the same reason, but at least there was some wit to her song.) And in our language the truth is “told”, not “said”, Gary! Unlike Tom, though, I always found Tony Hadley’s vocals a strength, giving something that set Spandau apart from other bands of the time. Of their two big hits of the year I much preferred “Gold” – stylish, dramatic, a James Bond theme manqué, and most of all – coherent. Spandau’s early material was exciting, funky, versatile: with this they headed off down the road which had me before long dubbing them “Blandau Ballet”.

Rosie # 1 – It’s astonishing to consider that Michael Foot is still with us, bearing in mind the main criticism of him more than a quarter of a century ago was that he was on his last legs! Say what you like about him but he’s always been a far more honest and dignified broker than the likes of Mandleson and the equally vile Balls.

Erithian # 7 – Ah, City getting relegated by Luton in the last seconds and one David “Night Cruiser” Pleat doing a Bob Stokeo in celebration! How times change. City now the world’s richest club, whilst The Hatters will be visiting Eastbourne Borough next season.

Spandau Ballet? Er…no.

I wrote on my blog a while ago that this was the quintessential 80s Disco-Pub slowie. The minute I hear those opening clipped guitar notes I’m taken back to a place where the atmosphere is thick with Paco Rabanne, Silk Cuts, lager and hormones – and I’m usually standing at the bar on my own while people are coupling up and hitting the dancefloor all around me. So in a lot of ways it’s the sound of sadness and frustration to me but I still think it’s gorgeous, even though I can understand while a lot of people would loathe it.

Do people just stick the ‘aspirational’ label on Spandau because they were from Essex which conjures up images of the brash Thatcherite wide boys of that era? I understand the connection but, just thinking out loud here, did Scritti Politti get lumbered with that for their sleek dance music too? Or was Green too middle class and “intellectual” to be categorized like that? It bothers me a little that when working class boys start sounding a bit classy, like, everyone starts calling them Tories.

<tanya>how hard was it to write “when I want the truth to be said” do you think?</tanya>

I don’t think I ever noticed the words to this before I listened to it closely for Popular. Which, once again, serves to point out that I like this for an overall impression, a pattern of sounds if you will, rather than for any profundity in the lyric. I don’t expect profound poetry in pop.

A couple of years hence, after my retirement from Popular, I’ll be working in the City in an environment that might surprise those who weren’t there and read the City as a signifier of everything that was bad and tacky about the eighties. Sure, the power suits and padded shoulders were everywhere, and all that’s been found rotten in today’s City was there in an embrionic state. Mr Cameron sr was funding his son’s expensive education with generous bonuses; if you had the odd few million to spare my employers would let you have an account with their discreet subsidiary in Curzon Street where clever young men and women sought to protect your assets against falls in the market; and armies of young turks who found it more exciting that working on a production line at Dagenham flooded in every day (so many, I had not thought Maggie had undone so many). But it was still a small-c conservative City establishment in charge; one that disliked Maggie the grocer’s daughter, champion of the small businessman. And who’s most telling insult was “comes into Liverpool Street”.

Mind you, it’s a bit unfair to blame Essex for every ill – after all, did not Alison Moyet come from Basildon?

Can somebody please delete the double post?

I knew Kemp was a Labour supporter which is why I thought it a little unfair that the “aspirational” tag gets applied to them – and in a snootily insulting way too, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to better yourself (or have I just lived in America for too long?)

I remember an article in The Face by Robert Elms called “All You’ve Got To Do Is Win” which attempted to cover the history of modern soul boys and their aspirational lifestyle, starting with Bowie’s wedge haircut on the cover of Young Americans.

Essex can be forgiven anything in my book after being the epicentre of the soul/jazz-funk scene a few years later it was the dominant force with hardcore and gave us Rave as we know it…
Having said that Spandau Ballet were from Islington.

That’s really interesting about Gary Kemp and the Bournemouth weekenders I’d heard rumours that Spandau Ballet used to go down and that theys been part of the scene before their New Romantic days but had never actually seen anything in print.

The Bournemouth weekenders lasted up till the start of the Acid House scene at the Bournemouth in Spring 1988 there were a crowd dressed in bandanas, longer hair and brightly coloured clothes (we were still all in baggy jeans and flat tops)who I now know were a lot of the punters from Shoom (I dont think Spectrum had started by this stage or hadnt taken off and I know Clink Street or The Trip hadnt)as Danny Rampling (who’d done the Special Branch up till Shoom) , Nicky Holloway (who was doing the Milk Bar, Doo at the Zoo etc), Paul Oakenfold, Johnny Walker (doing the East Arms back then) etc were all part of the Bournemouth soul weekender crowd.

Spandau may have been from Islington but their, um, soul lived in Essex. Same with Wham! – also from Norf London as I recall but both seemed to epitomize the Loadsamoney, XR3i-driving ‘Essex Man’

I used to go to The Milk Bar, great place, though Acid House ruined the London club scene for me. I was big into Rare Groove and Acid Jazz which just got killed off and replaced with 10-minute tracks with no tune you had to be on drugs to enjoy – and there were all these bloody kids in the clubs too, not drinking and waving their hands in the air.

It has never occurred to me (until now) that this was intended to be a “soul” song.

And on Lee’s point about the Spandau Ballet/Wham! thing how could I miss out the group who probably up to the point they ctossed over to the pop Top 10 drew literally about 99% of their fans from the working class Essex/Home Counties/outer London crowd – Level 42 (even though they themselves didn’t even come from the South East (Level 42 coming from the Isle of Wight).
Their omnipresence among this crowd before they crossed over was such that on pretty much “aspirational geezers in the building or car mechanics” support alone they were already scraping Top 40 hits. Second Image were another similar band who everyone seemed to play on their car stereos back then (as Lee says Xr3i’s but a lot would have still been Cortina Mark II’s preferably 2000Es or Capris with optional “If It Moves Funk It” sunstrips, or “Robbie Spreading Funk Over London Town” car stickers),but unfortunately unlike Level 42 and that band’s eventual commerciality they never crossed over.

Wham! and Level 42 never had their New Wave moment, did they? For me, Let’s Dance & True mark the point where New Wave has really died. Even in Duran’s Something I Should Know you can feel the New Wave roots, but with True we’re onto something completely different that would dominate the British sound for the next few years. Even the Keith Haring-ish sleeve is a definitive move away from the New Wave aesthetic, as typified by the album cover of SB’s Reformation.

Re: “pill on my tongue” as a reference to Ecstasy – I don’t think E. was around as early as 1983, it came in a couple of years later.

Oh yeah, I thought it was Hank Marvin.

The intro is a sweetie, but so much sweeter with PM Dawn’s additional harmonies and melody. True doesn’t ring True; I think its central problem is that it has no style, much as it wants to evoke the spirit of “Marvin”. The lyric is empty and risible (“See how hard I work for you? For my art? Can you almost hear the beads of sweat?” Err, no), and they could write some glorious gibberish so I’m not damning all of Spandau’s repertoire. “The art is pretending it’s art” from The Freeze, f’rinstance, is a very good line; “This is the sound of my soul” makes me feel all phlegmy.

With apologies to Lee and Andy, I never understood the 80s Soul Boy thing, mainly because the music seemed almost devoid of Soul* to me (like Wildheartedoutsider, around the time of True I was catching up on relatively recent but more intense late 60s-to-mid 70s stuff on Charly re-issues, things like George Perkins’ Crying In The Streets). Farahs, maroon v-necks, and waffle cardigans I did like, tho.

I’m only the 9th person to mention this, but I was dj’ing a few years back and this smoothie came over and asked “Got any Marvin?” For once I didn’t have a Shadows record in my box and I’ve kicked myself for the missed opportunity ever since.

*I’d like to be proved wrong.

Re: 31 – I’m not sure that’s true. Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing must have been out or close to being out at this point and was fairly celebratory about MDMA. I get the feeling it was still quite niche though.

Steve at 36: At the average suburban soulboy club in 1983 you’d have a lot of what (post 80s) became known as 80s Groove ie Maze, Change, SOS Band, Grover Washington, (80s) Roy Ayers, Al Jarreau, Donald Byrd, some modern soul, the classier end of disco/mainstream funk (Sharon Redd, Evelyn King (for the “ladies”)) interspersed with a lot of more obscure jazz-funk (both 70s and 80s)plus a bit of real jazz and with the occasional soul/funk oldie from possibly as early as the early 70s thrown in too*.
From about mid-1983 the slightly more progressive djs might have also started adding a bit of early hiphop (Jazzy Dee etc) and less full on electro ie the Shannon and D-Train (who in the latter’s case had been played since the 1981 import/release of ‘Youre The One For Me’)that Lee mentioned.

* the oldies played would be similar to the kind of “tackle” (to use an 80s soulboy expression) that 3 or 4 years later when the West End clubbin trendies got hold of if became known as Rare Groove but were then just the occasional oldies that were expected to be dropped as the set progressed.

H at 29: I don’t think anyone in the UK in the 80s had used the term New Wave seriously since about 1978/79 and I should imagine Duran, Spandau or any synth poppers would have recoiled in disbelief if you’d have called them New Wave.It conjured up images of conventional pop/rock bands with skinny ties,slightly shorter hair than pre-punk rockers and who werent quite brave enough to go all the way and be properly punk. And by the end of the 70s was pretty redundant in the UK except when it was used in a pisstaking way when describing certain American Noo Wave bands.
I’ve noticed to my horror however that probably because of the American domination of the net and the obvious fact that in America they did talk about New Wave post-1970s that it seems to be used to describe acts who were never in a million years called New Wave at the time. Actually I feel quite ill just typing the words New Wave in connection with the New Romantic idols of the earlier part of my teens!Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran were coming from a David Bowie, Roxy Music, Marc Bolan, Kraftwerk and Brass Construction maybe even Frank Sinatra direction New Wave was coming from a very boring place where loads of Radio One djs hung out and talked about Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe and maybe even the Boomtown Rats!

Re: #39 Well, up until “Chant No.1” (which was quite surprising at the time – a funk record! With rapping!) – and even including that if you think it sounds a little like A Certain Ratio/Talking Heads – they were, to use another American label – “alternative” at least.

Lord at 40: among us younger types the Streetsounds compilations were pretty essential at about this time probably peaking in quality and ubiquitousness with (I think) Volume 4 (bang in the middle of 1983!) which was remarkably free of filler and on the case and everyone seemed to have. But I knows there were a few of the more “purist” element who tended to congregate in the jazz rooms at weekenders who would have looked down upon them though. They were often the same people who would frown on electro and later house which made it even more nonsensical when the Boys Own trendy crowd who had moaned at these types for their refusal to get into house were by 1989 trying to dictate what kind of house it was “all right to listen to” (mostly deep house etc) and slagging off a large part of the then acid party-goers including inventing the term “Acid Teds” a catch all insult for them.

And the Streetsounds electro compilations were pretty unsurpassable when they started (first one about Aug/Sept 1983 I think) but also spelled the beginning of the end for the whole Streetsounds concept because from that moment they started leaving the electro tracks of the main compilations (I remember Newcleus was on Number 5 for instance, COD on No 4 just before the electro ones started).

Lee at 41: I know what you mean but in my memory the term New Wave if it was used at all by the early 80s had connotations (in the UK at least) far removed from New Romantics/Synth or New Pop.
“Alternative” could obviously cover all kinds of things and surely the less mainstream side of things in the UK was already more likely to be called post-punk if it was called anything at all.

What seems to be a common thread linking many of the post-punk/new wave/new romantic acts was a sense of ‘anything but rock’.
Punk had been portrayed as a kind of end for the rock ‘project’ and so acts had turned to soul/dance/jazz/electro styles as more fruitful and/or credible models.

I find myself blinking in disbelief at musical styles and acts that have been rehabilitated as credible in subsequent years when at one stage they were portrayed as dead and buried. Metal has returned as has folk-rock – but I couldn’t credit seeing a Jon Anderson solo track being given consideration in this months Invisible Jukebox in The Wire.

I just remembered that the producers on this were Steve Jolley and Tony Swain who also did Imagination’s records, so Spandau were going right to the source of what was “hot” in Brit Soul at the time.

Andy + H – yes, on my American side of the ocean, this would definitely be considered New Wave, as would the Durans. this was a major source of confusion for me while growing up, reading all the British mags and wondering what this New Romantic, New Pop, Post-Punk etc was all about. We called it New Wave exclusively, admittedly a wide classification which started with power pop (costello, the knack) in the late ’70s and continued right through the dawn of the MTV era. i think we were still using that term maybe all the way up to A-Ha. As a matter of fact, I recall my sister buying an MTV compilation in the late ’90s called “MTV New Wave: 1983” or something similar. SB was featured, as well as “Our House”, “Mexican Radio”, “Too Shy”….all New Wave to us yanks. These terms were so taken for granted by British readers that it never was explained in NME and MM where the classifications came from. It was only with Reynolds’ post-punk book a few years ago that I understood completely.