Spandau Ballet

London, the eighties are beginning. The future is already in its sights, punk is no longer fashionable, and post-punk is taking on a new guise. The debut album by Spandau Ballet isn't just music but the cradle of hedonism, born amid fashion magazines and delivered into immortality through the pursuit of the ideal of human beauty. Sons of the working class and the underground scene, five lads from Islington become prophets of reform armed with a £200 synthesizer and a magnificent obsession. Their names are Gary Kemp, Steve Norman, Tony Hadley, Martin Kemp and John Keeble, all former schoolmates who every Tuesday night set the scene alight at Covent Garden, where Steve Strange and Rusty Egan are busy toppling the "no-future" icons to the cry of "new styles/ new shapes/ new modes".

In the nightclubs, David Bowie and Kraftwerk blur together, along with rave culture and ambition, MTV and the gramophone. That sound already existed, but our heroes shuffle the deck and pull out a brand-new futuristic European dance music, one that outlaws anonymity in the name of aerodynamic hairstyles, gaudy jewellery and kitsch footwear, flamboyant clothes and over-the-top make-up, straight and X-gender, vintage and technology — anything goes as long as you enjoy it. Journalist friend Robert Elms suggests the odd name to the group after reading a scrawl on the toilet walls of a Berlin nightclub, and so, after dress rehearsals at the Blitz on 31 October 1980, their debut single "To Cut A Long Story Short" hits the shelves, leaping to number five on the UK charts and serving as a prelude to "Journeys To Glory".

Produced by the mastermind behind Landscape, Richard James Burgess, the album is released on 27 February 1981 and marks the start of a new era, one that dubs itself "new romantic", in homage to the line "some new-romantic looking for the Tv sound" coined, ironically enough, by those very Duran Duran against whom Spandau Ballet would go on to duel for years in a rosé-tinted rivalry with an unexpectedly creative payoff. The discus thrower with an amputated arm depicted on the cover by Graham Smith reflects a clear intent to give the world a marble-solid work, not something fleeting but built to last for eternity, while the Cyrillic lettering superimposed over it hints at the Labour-leaning politics running through the content, much to the dismay of those who, purely because of the band's name, still brand them as Nazi sympathisers. They're good-looking and they know how to work it: annihilating the nihilists, that's the mission statement of an album that stands as a symbol of rebirth for an old Europe already rotting away.

Sitting on a park bench, years away from fighting

to cut a long story short I lost my mind

("To Cut A Long Story Short")

"To Cut A Long Story Short" tells the story of a soldier returning from the trenches, but there's life all around, and Spandau Ballet certainly have no intention of sitting on a bench twiddling their thumbs, especially since within a few months out come "Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret" by Soft Cell, "Rage In Eden" by Ultravox, "In The Garden" by Eurythmics, "Travelogue" by Human League and "Computer World" by Kraftwerk. Guitarist Gary Kemp, who writes all the songs, rises to the challenge by transfiguring the rampant synth-pop craze into a white disco with a romantic, decadent pulse, where the driving groove is no longer glacial and geometric but is instead carried by bass, rhythm guitar and snare drum. This way, the band's image stays faithfully anchored to the unpredictable canons of the "Visa Age", while at the same time the focus shifts to clothing and self-care as an ecstatic celebration of the sensuality of youth. The budget to shoot the video is razor-thin, a mere £5,000, and director Brian Grant wraps filming at the London Dungeon in half a day: glory looms on the horizon, Tony scans it through binoculars while the others play cards wearing Scottish military tartans, which they later also sport on Top Of The Pops, with results impressive enough to make even Depeche Mode's then-keyboardist Vince Clarke take note — he would later candidly admit that he drew on "To Cut A Long Story Short" when writing his enormously famous "Just Can't Get Enough".

But it's the class-conscious anthem "Reformation" that truly serves as the manifesto track of "Journeys To Glory": Hadley is an elegant, refined vocalist with a gospel background, yet at this stage of his career he has dynamite in his vocal cords, and the obsessive cry "shattered glass reflects elation/reformation!/reformation!" comes down like an axe over a martial, marching gait that closely recalls Litfiba's "Yassassin" and "Guerra". The intriguing neo-melodic elegy "Mandolin" alternates sinister arrangements with sumptuous, wing-spreading openings, releasing the built-up tension at just the right moment and guiding the listener through a surreal flashback across time, where Ziggy Stardust and Debbie Harry share the stage with Moroder and Ian Curtis, while the second single "The Freeze" is another dancefloor-filling whirlwind driven by pumping bass and two-finger rhythmic arpeggios. "With the guitar I tried to fill the gaps in the lyrics," Steve Norman would later say of a song that, chart-wise, only reaching number seventeen, marks a small step back from "To Cut A Long Story Short". "It didn't really have a proper chorus, but what I liked most was that, in the end, it didn't even need one. We could count on a solid legion of fans who felt exactly the same way we did, which is why we felt so confident and free to experiment." The single's cover art is again entrusted to Graham Smith, who, at Kemp's specific request, tries to fit every piece of the puzzle to a shared visual thread. This time it's a chariot lifted from Egyptian iconography, while for the other key track, "Musclebound", the inspiration for the artwork comes from John Flaxman's neoclassical busts.

Work till you're musclebound, all night long

Work till you're musclebound, all night long

Work till you're musclebound, all night long!

("Musclebound")

"Musclebound" is a kind of proletarian electro-folk call to arms that anticipates by a couple of years the factory-worker Depeche Mode amid the smokestacks of "Construction Time Again" (it brings "Pipeline" to mind). Its hypnotic, repetitive drive weaves insidious metallic jingles together with Caucasian-tinged sounds, and it's no accident the video was shot in Cumbria, among the peaks of Kirkstone Pass, precisely because the landscape resembled the Russian steppe. The band is captured on film during a gruelling horseback trek repeatedly interrupted by a prolonged snowstorm. When Gary Kemp passed out after being thrown from his thoroughbred, drummer John Keeble refused to carry on and talked the other members into calling it quits too. As a result, director Russell Mulcahy was forced to fork out double the money originally budgeted: from then on, costs would rise sharply, since it's with "Musclebound" that Spandau Ballet seem to kick off a most-expensive-video arms race with rivals Duran Duran (also under Mulcahy's direction, though a year later, for "Hungry Like The Wolf", "Save A Prayer" and "Rio", he would instead opt for the exotic, tropical settings of Sri Lanka).

Stand by the wall, watch as they shoot you down

blood onto stone, thet're still your toys

("Toys")

Swirling and sickly, "Toys" carries the disorienting cadences of Simple Minds's "Empires And Dance" beneath the Berlin Wall ("This Fear Of Gods"), while "Confused", joyful only on the surface, borrows the typically darkwave sound of Sisters Of Mercy or Diaframma's "Elena" before blossoming into synth phrases that are never dark or depressive, but instead speak the sunny language of the less genetically-inclined OMD of "Bunker Soldiers". Finally, there's "Age Of Blows", an instrumental curio haunted by the ghost of David Bowie's "Warszawa" ("Low" dates from 1977), and the drum-pounding, Seventies-B-movie disco-funk of "Glow", a single with a whiff of INXS and Japan about it. "Glow" would be released as a double A-side with "Musclebound", putting the seal on a bold, narcissistic, irreverent debut.

It's probably not the best yardstick for judging the artistic trajectory of a band that would go on to embrace a decidedly different sophisti-sound, and yet it remains an unmissable snapshot of the counterculture of its time. Spandau Ballet aren't overly fond of new wave, but with "Journeys To Glory" they prove they can hold their own in it just fine.

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20/03/2022