Republished: 'A Journey To Glory' by Martin Kemp
To continue our celebrations on the release of ‘The Albums 1980-84’ box set, we thought it would be great to revisit Martin’s written piece on ‘Journeys To Glory’ which was originally written for the 30th anniversary of the album last year. Over to you Martin…
Click here to order Spandau Ballet ‘The Albums’ 1980-84 or receive the box set completely FREE when you switch your energy supply with Ecotricty at www.ecotricity.co.uk/spandau.
A Journey to Glory…I was sixteen years old when the journey began, a wild eyed punk who didn’t know how to stay in for a night and relax for fear of missing out on the big one…Quite what the big one was I never found out but I just didn’t want it to happen without me being there!
Never missing a night out to see a band, The Damned at the Kings Head or Secret Affair at the Marquee, I was in love with standing between two huge speakers and having my head blown away by guitar, drums and bass…standing above Angus Young as he did cartwheels on the floor beneath me or Eddie and the Hot Rods do a twenty minute version of Gloria…I loved it all…..In fact it was at a generation X gig at the vortex I first saw Steve Strange posing at the side of the stage in a cool biker jacket and carrying a monumental quiff as Billy Idol curled his lip to Ready Steady Go…..Steve would later be responsible for putting Spandau Ballet on at his club, The Blitz and trying his damndest to lead us astray.
My school exercise books were covered in drawings of the Ramones, The Sex Pistols and the Clash and in the last month at school had even found the bravado to tear the sleeve off my school blazer and put it back on with safety pins…To me it was a fashion statement, a message to everyone that my heart was buried in rock and roll…..to my teacher a clever stop-gap before getting it fixed.
My last year at school was entirely taken over by a daydream….I wanted to be in a band…what band ….whose band, I wasn’t quite sure, but I wanted to be Elvis, Jagger….Jonny Rotton…I just wanted to be up there and experience the thrill of it all…But I didn’t want the band to be just any band, I wanted to be in the biggest band in the world…a band that toured, played to thousands and spent months at a time in a professional recording studio churning out hit after hit.…The price I paid for the constant daydream was coming out of a Grammar school at sixteen with just 2 GCSEs…But the reward turned out to be by far the greater!
The idea of being in a band and being up on stage became an obsession for me. I had started a school band when I was fifteen with a couple of mates, we called ourselves ‘The Defects’ which I think was a good reflection of our talent at the time. The band split after a disastrous gig in the ‘Pinder of Wakefield’ in London’s Kings Cross where the power blew out two songs in and a three song demo sponsored by our parents, but I was determined that wouldn’t be the end of the dream…Every night after I had finished my feeble attempt at what was supposed to be homework, I would close the door to my bedroom and put Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust on my record player and sing as loud as I could to ‘Star’, hoping that the universe would hear me…. With a special plea on the slow poignant ending.
So inviting – so enticing to play the part
I could play the wild mutation
As a rock & roll star
I could do with the money
I’m so wiped out with things as they are
I’d send my photograph to my honey – and I’d c’mon like
A regular superstar
I could fall asleep at night
As a rock & roll star
I could fall in love all right
As a Rock and Roll Star!
And by some miracle…The Universe did!
On the 10th of October 1980, my eighteenth birthday Spandau Ballet signed to Chrysalis Records and the band went straight into Jam recording studios in North London to record ‘Journeys To Glory’…. The first track to be recorded, was ‘To Cut A Long Story Short’ which went on to sell over 450,000 copies in the UK alone and reached a high of number five in the chart…The Universe definitely heard me!
Martin Kemp
March 2011
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