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| Spandau Ballet in rehearsal last month. From left: Martin Kemp, Tony Hadley, Steve Norman and Gary Kemp |
There was a time when a million teenage girls would have pleaded to swap places with me. I am sitting in a rehearsal studio in west London facing Spandau Ballet as they perform a lively version of “Chant No 1”, one of their earliest hits. The 1980s pop stars, who once gazed boyishly from posters on countless bedroom walls, are a few feet away, close enough to throw a pair of knickers at.
“Chant” was originally a top five hit in 1981, in the same week that Prince Charles married Lady Diana. Soon after, the teen magazine Smash Hits brought breathless news of the Spandau boys “looking lovelier than Lady Di as they modelled their latest style, all dangly watch chains, light and baggy suits, hunky flashes of hairy chest.”
It is not a comparison that springs to mind as I watch them almost three decades later. The studio, unglamorously located on an industrial estate, is hot and dark. A pony-tailed roadie, who once worked for Led Zeppelin’s axe hero Jimmy Page, tunes guitars. Now in their late-forties, the former leaders of the flamboyant New Romantic scene are blokeishly dressed in jeans and T-shirts. I overhear singer Tony Hadley offering an old lag’s advice to the young female backing singer: “Squeeze the top of your legs and you’ll hit the high notes.” Other members of the group are quietly disagreeing about how to begin a song. At the back of the stage, the drummer John Keeble, clocking the presence of a journalist, shouts a sarcastic commentary: “It was mayhem, they were at each other’s throats!”
This month Spandau Ballet play their first concerts since splitting up in 1989. The five childhood friends from north London, who sold more than 25m albums together, suffered a bitter falling-out over money. In 1999, Keeble, Hadley and saxophonist Steve Norman unsuccessfully sued principal songwriter Gary Kemp over unpaid royalties. “Gary and I used to room together”, says Keeble, “but we haven’t really seen each other for 15 years, other than in court under oath.” Yet now they are back in action, preparing to play the old hits for nostalgic fans. There is even a new single and album, recorded after a three-week retreat. “If you’d said to us six months before, ‘You’re going to stay in a house together,’ we would have laughed,” says Martin Kemp, bassist and younger brother of Gary.
The rapprochement was led by Keeble, the band’s conciliator. “Gary and I did quite a lot of negotiating, shall we say,” he reveals. Last December, the five sat around a table for the first time since the break-up; two months later they were in a rehearsal space together. “I didn’t want another 19 years of silence,” says Gary Kemp. “I just wanted to talk with everybody again because we had the greatest experiences ever. It began to feel like I’d imagined it.”
Spandau Ballet’s resurrection is dramatic, but not unusual. The reunion tour has become one of pop’s biggest draws. Each week brings news of some act springing, or creaking, back to life, from big names such as the Bee Gees to cult acts such as alt-rockers Pavement, both of whom are due to return next year.
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| Robert Plant performs with Led Zeppelin at the one-off memorial concert honouring Ahmet Ertegun in 2007 |
The trend is not confined to classic rock. After flopping in their respective solo careers, the Spice Girls were back doing the “zig-a-zig-ah” in 2007, while Take That – the Spandau Ballet of the 1990s – returned in 2005 after a nine-year break. The boy-band-turned-man-band were without Robbie Williams, the only member of the original line-up to flourish outside the group. Two new albums later, they are once again at the pinnacle of British pop. Williams, whose star has waned, is rumoured to be keen on rejoining them.
In the past few months I have seen the revivals of such diverse acts as Britpop leaders Blur, ska band the Specials, post-punks Magazine and 1950s rock’n’roll relics Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Even veteran rock parodists Spinal Tap have got in on the act. “We’re back from the grave, it’s life that we crave,” they chanted at their “one night only world tour” at Wembley Arena in London in July.
Watching these shows has been a mixed experience. When Led Zeppelin played their one-off concert, their first since a brief appearance at Live Aid in 1985, the sense of history was extraordinary. From the moment they opened with “Good Times Bad Times”, it was clear that the sexagenarian hard-rockers still had the old magic. On the train afterwards, fans compared the distances they had travelled to be there: one had flown in from New Zealand.
Other reunions have left a nagging sense of dissatisfaction. Encountering the Pixies in 2004, an elementally noisy and hugely influential US alternative rock band I loved as a teenager in the late-1980s, was particularly dispiriting. They performed immaculately – time had evidently improved their musicianship – but without any spark.
For reformed bands, chemistry is, perhaps, the hardest thing to find again. Often they broke up following some catastrophic breakdown in personal relations: the Pixies’ front man Black Francis informed band-mates of his decision to scuttle the group by fax in 1993. To reunite, therefore, requires former colleagues who may have once detested each other to swallow their differences. “If I ever reform the Police, I should be certified insane,” Sting once remarked. At the press conference announcing the trio’s reunion tour in 2007, he joked about owning a white coat.
It is best to brazen out such inconsistencies. “When hell freezes over,” was Don Henley’s stock response to questions about the Eagles reforming after their bitter split in 1980. In 1994, they reunited: the tour was called Hell Freezes Over.
Why do they do it? For the money, say the cynics. As album sales slip, concerts have become an increasingly important source of music industry revenue. The sums generated by reunion tours can be huge. The Police’s comeback was the highest grossing tour in 2007, generating almost $360m at the box office. Last year, Abba’s Benny Andersson confirmed they had been offered $1bn to reform, a total that would have dwarfed the most lucrative tour ever, the $558m-earning Bigger Bang tour by the Rolling Stones. A full Led Zeppelin tour would also have done stratospheric business: more than 25m people registered for tickets to their 20,000-capacity O2 Arena show.
But money is not the only motive. Rock stars tend to be wealthy; they also get bored. Gary Kemp, who turns 50 this month, insists money is not Spandau Ballet’s main reason for reuniting. He is candid about peaking in his twenties. “I had the privilege to make this amazing band and legacy and just to never do that again ... ” His voice trails away incredulously. “I could start another band. But it wouldn’t be Spandau Ballet, would it? No one would be interested.”
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| Spandau Ballet in their 1980s heyday |
Martin Kemp is looking forward to his children seeing the band they have heard so much about. “You can show them who they are,” he says. “All their life they’ve just heard about it, but you can show them the kind of people they are, why they live in the house like they do, and it’s down to what we did when we were kids.”
Yet in seeking to relive past glories, bands can betray their legacy. When a reunion fails to spark, it is like seeing a group become its own tribute act, ploughing through their back catalogue in an undignified imitation of their old selves. “There’s nothing worse than 49-year-old guys trying to look 25, that’s really embarrassing,” says Hadley, who warns fans not to expect the return of Spandau Ballet’s New Romantic wardrobe. “No kilts, no frilly bloody shirts, nothing like that.”
Questions of authenticity are multiplied when individuals in the original line-up are unavailable. Earlier this year, the Specials were welcomed back warmly for a reunion tour, yet the gloss was taken off by the absence of Jerry Dammers, who wrote some of their best-loved hits. Unresolved grievances led to his exclusion, causing him to denounce his former band-mates as a “flawed nostalgia act”.
Some members are more expendable than others. When Led Zeppelin reformed two years ago, their drummer John Bonham, whose early death caused the band to split in 1980, was represented by his son Jason. Purists insisted that the band at the O2 Arena was not the real thing but, for most people, the spirit of the original Zeppelin lived on in Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones.
However, opinion swung sharply when a subsequent tour without Plant was mooted. The singer, a successful solo performer, was reluctant to resuscitate the gods of rock for more than a one-off show. “The whole idea of being on a cavalcade of merciless repetition is not what it’s all about,” he said .
Ultimately, it is hard for any band to envisage reuniting without their original singer. There are occasions when a band manages to surmount the loss of its frontman – Pink Floyd and Genesis had their greatest commercial hits with new vocalists – but generally it results in a collapse, like a medieval country thrown into chaos by the sudden death of its monarch.
Still, some have tried, as when the Doors, whose frontman Jim Morrison died in 1971, toured in 2002 with Ian Astbury, lead singer of the Cult and a card-carrying, leather-trouser-wearing Morrison-worshipper, as stand-in. “As travesties go, it could have been worse,” The New York Times’s reviewer acidly noted.
In 2004, the rock giants Queen took the decision to reform, more than a decade after the death of charismatic lead singer Freddie Mercury in 1991. The band had never officially split up, and Brian May and Roger Taylor were keen to resume their partnership so they asked Paul Rodgers, formerly of 1970s blues-rockers Free and Bad Company, to step into Mercury’s flamboyant shoes. Rodgers, 59, remembers his reaction. “It took me back a bit because it was kind of huge. I had to think about it for a second, ‘Can I take this on?’” he says.
Rodgers studied the way the band performed their old hits. “You can’t take too many liberties with the original melody. People want to hear, ‘I Want to Break Free’”, he says, singing the famous refrain, “but you can just change it slightly.”
He carefully describes himself as “joining forces” with Queen: “Roger, Brian and I have an equal partnership. That’s why we call it Queen + Paul Rodgers.”
As Rodgers points out, the life of a band unfolds at several different levels: social, commercial, artistic. “You start off as a bunch of friends, you call the band something and off you go and start making records and all of a sudden it becomes a corporate identity and it falls under legal jurisdiction.” Working out when a band ceases to exist can be as complicated as trying to bring it back to life.
This is something the members of Spandau Ballet are well-acquainted with. Following their unsuccessful wrangle over songwriting royalties, three of the band returned to court in 2002 to fight for the right to use the band name as a touring outfit. They lost and had to tour under the less than catchy name “Hadley, Keeble and Norman, ex-Spandau Ballet”.
With these events behind them, and rehearsals well advanced, Spandau’s reunion is, like others before them, a final chapter in shared histories that often stretch back decades, for both musicians and fans. The followers who once had Spandau Ballet posters on their bedroom walls want, according to the band’s saxophonist Steve Norman, “to be there and shut their eyes and remember when they were innocent, before they got jobs and all that”. Pop music is a powerful tool for retracing steps and triggering memories. It allows us to glimpse ourselves at earlier stages in life.
As for the band themselves, Keeble says: “There are three things that break bands up: money, women and drugs.” In Spandau Ballet’s case, he is “happy it was money. It’s a renewable resource.”
With that he returns to the stage with his reconciled band to play their new single. “Rise up together,” its lyrics go. “Never say never.”
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney is the FT’s pop critic. Spandau Ballet’s tour begins on October 13 in Dublin
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The band as brand: Paul Morley on the Sugababes
Those fans and critics who maintained a lingering belief in the pristine musical integrity of the successful all-girl pop trio Sugababes reacted with yelps of pain last month to the news that the group’s last original member, Keisha Buchanan, had left. It is not clear whether she was pushed or jumped but for those who trusted that the group controlled their own destiny it seemed the end of an era.
Part of the group since they formed as precocious 14-year-old schoolgirls in 1998, Keisha was the last remaining link to the cherished idea of the Sugababes as something unmanufactured and uncynical. Much more than their consistently expert studio-tuned electronic dance music, the key element in the refreshing, glamorously gauche Sugababes formula was the fusing of unusual-looking girls with a definite sulky edge and fluid cultural backgrounds. Keisha’s Jamaican mixed with Siobhan Donaghy’s Irish and Mutya Buena’s particularly complicated Filipino/ Spanish/Chinese/Irish.
Irish Siobhan was replaced in 2001 by bonny Liverpudlian Heidi Range, leaving the spiky Mutya/Keisha core intact. Even when the fiery Mutya was replaced in 2005 by the softer Amelle Berrabah (Turkish/Moroccan with a Middle Eastern hint), the important, diverse mix was roughly maintained.
Keisha gracefully accepted the role as the group’s soul and protector and, as long as she remained, all seemed well. Her unceremonious exit makes explicit that the group is a craftily organised industry product after all.
For Keisha has been replaced by the blander, younger, more obedient-seeming Jade Ewen, who represented the UK in this year’s Eurovision song contest with a most un-Sugababes-like Andrew Lloyd Webber song. Though her selection maintains the integral multiracial balance – she’s Jamaican/Sicilian – but the one-time street-smart Sugababes model has now been replaced by the type of blatantly artificially constructed pop group they once opposed. It’s another Sugababes altogether, and the original three members are now free to reform, in opposition to a glossy shell of a group using their name whose main attraction is that it echoes the initial self-confident idiosyncrasy.
If this new lite Sugababes succeeds, the marketers will have pulled off quite a trick – proving that a pop group can exist as an enduring brand regardless of who is in the group.
A group called the Sugababes could theoretically last for decades. Sugababes can come and go but the Sugababes can last for ever.
