** Book published: 27 March 2012. Available to pre-order now **

** RRP: £10 **

27 March sees the publication of The Lyrics of Gary Kemp, one of the first in a new series of books from, The Lyric Book Company.

For those of us that remember the ’80’s, Spandau Ballet’s songs and guitarist Gary Kemp’s lyrics, hold a special fondness and this collection entitled The Lyrics of Gary Kemp features all of the works that Gary has published in an illustrious songwriting career that has spanned 4 decades.

All of the lyrics from all of his songs for Spandau Ballet and his solo album Little Bruises make up this anthology of 60 tales of love loss and of course London, including global hits Gold, Through the Barricades, True, Only When You Leave,  I’ll Fly For You, Chant No. 1 to the band’s first hit Cut A Long Story Short.

Lyrics from early ground-breaking dance and funk club-scene in Soho era To Cut A Long Story Short and Chant No. 1, mix with the global smash hit about unrequited love True. This lyrical journey continues with the anthemic rousing modern classic Gold, through the story of lovers battling to keep their relationship alive despite physical borders in Through the Barricades  to the bittersweet An Inexperienced Man.

Gary is widely acknowledged as one of Britain’s finest songwriters, and definitely the lyrical voice of his generation. A beautiful, comprehensive and collectable book for any fan of Gary Kemp or Spandau Ballet.

The concept of The Lyric Book Company is a simple one: a unique book company, specialising solely in producing complete works of the world’s finest songwriters. This is a series of beautifully produced, hardback books that artists and their fans can be proud of. Working closely with the artist, The Lyric Book Company will ensure that each song is correctly presented.

“The design is beautiful, like a modern-day hymn book. Thoughtfully put together, I’m extremely pleased by the way it looks and feels. It’s quite an honour to see all of your own work collected together and presented so beautifully.” Gary Kemp

The Lyrics of Gary Kemp will be available to pre-order online at www.lyricbook.com, from 14 February

for more information on Gary Kemp, please go to www.garykemp.com

Superstar DJ Paul Oakenfold remix of the classic single **

* NEW REMIX TO BE USED IN CADBURY’S CAMPAIGN *

* GOLD TAKES RIGHTFUL PLACE AS THE PEOPLE’S ANTHEM *

Spandau Ballet’s classic 1983 chart hit GOLD has been chosen by Cadbury’s Wispa Gold to be the soundtrack to their latest advertising campaign which aims to support Team GB ahead of 2012’s Olympics. The song has been given the remix treatment by world-renowned legendary producer, DJ and remixer Paul Oakenfold and will be available to buy on Monday 28th November.

Since topping the charts around the globe in 1983, GOLD has become a firm fan favourite and has also been used at major sporting events from baseball to cricket, football to rugby and of course at the Olympic Games.

With 2012 seeing London play host to the XXX Olympic Games, Cadbury’s Wispa Gold launched an online campaign to find Spandau Ballet fans to lend their voices to Oakenfold’s new version of the song.

Paul Oakenfold’s GOLD will feature in the new Cadbury’s Wispa Gold advert from 28th November. The video for this will feature Team GB BMX hopeful and Olympic gold-medal prospect Shanaze Reade.

Despite having mingled in similar circles for decades, Paul Oakenfold’s anthemic GOLD remix is the first time he has ever worked with the band and one that he thinks will be a sure fire club floor-filler.

As Paul himself says: “From one of our best loved all time bands, comes the reworking of their classic hit GOLD. I’ve played this out a few times. Give it a play you won’t be disappointed!”

“Spandau Ballet have had many samples used and remixes done over the years but to have the legendary Oakenfold taking control of the song has given it a real edge. The song will be equally at home in the charts as it will in the clubs” says Spandau Ballet’s Steve Norman.

The track will be available as a download on itunes and go to www.spandauballet.com to give fans a taster. Fans can show their support for Team GB by going to www.keepourteampumped.com/videos/gold

To Cut A Long Story Short

The first time that most Londoners heard the words Spandau Ballet was on the London Weekend Television arts programme Twentieth Century Box, in May 1980. Presented by Danny Baker, Twentieth Century Box was the place you went to for your youth culture fix.

And Baker’s programme was devoted to a new cult, The Cult With No Name, a bunch of soul boys and girls, disaffected art students, hairdressers and apprentice advertising salesman who all wore clothes that referenced architecture rather than pop culture, and who frequented the most elite Soho nightclubs, and who learned the art of reinvention at the knee of David Bowie.

Elegant, well dressed, and rather bizarrely obsessed with cleanliness (the band were quoted on the show saying that they hated most gigs because everyone was so dirty), they were, to put a fine point on it, the In Crowd.
And Spandau Ballet were the In Crowd’s band. Ushering in a new era of visually-dominated pop, their dissatisfaction with their musical peers manifested itself in a mechanical, stylised sound that was born and bred on the dancefloor’s of the West End. They were Bowie Kids, Blitz Kids, white soul boys who had rejected funk and rock while embracing electronica, frilly shirts and tuxedos.

Amateurish? Ridiculous? Their adolescent pretensions represented a sensibility rather than a display of ability. “We’re not just another band,” said the band’s singer Tony Hadley. And they weren’t, not by the longest piece of chalk in town. Although, they were soon to become one of Britain’s biggest bands.

The surface smarts and radio-friendly sheen of Spandau Ballet’s biggest, most pervasive hits are familiar to anyone in possession of a radio or a laptop, anyone who was born in the last 50 years or indeed anyone who regularly goes to the movies or watches television – the group’s songs have been used in the Simpsons, Spin City, Charlie’s Angels, The Wedding Singer and Ugly Betty, as well as in advertisements for Coca Cola, Sony Ericsson, Caixa, Nissan, Nescafe, Pils and dozens more – while the band’s songs have been covered by everyone from the Black Eyed Peas and Nelly to Paul Anka and Lloyd & Lil Wayne.

Not only that, but the earlier, more club-orientated Spandau tracks were some of the most exciting records of the early Eighties – in their time as fresh, as intoxicating and as brash as anything produced by their after-dark contemporaries. When discussing the pantheon of Eighties pop, Spandau have occasionally been ignored, but their early records remain some of the most influential, and some of the most resonant of the period. As anyone who was there can tell you.

At the time of their birth, in 1979, the idea of cool – genuine cool – was often less about the music and more – far more – about being in the right place at the right time. It is impossible to stress too highly how achingly fashionable Spandau Ballet were in the winter of 1979 and the summer of 1980 (“so hip it hurt,” the papers said at the time). On the evening of July 26th 1980 there were few places more fashionable to be than on HMS Belfast, watching Spandau Ballet effortlessly career through their set. But although Spandau were the most fashionable band of their time, it wasn’t all about fashion. The music mattered. A lot. Bravely – well, brave in context – the band decided to launch themselves on audiences who were far more comfortable dancing to records by the likes of Kraftwerk, Bowie, Sparks and Telex, and they successfully played gigs at the Blitz nightclub, at London’s Scala Cinema (at the time the most fashionable venue in town), the Botanical Gardens in Birmingham, the Underground Club in New York, the Papgayo in St Tropez, and of course the infamous Ku Club in Ibiza (a decade before it became the trendy destination du jour). And it worked. Like all decent phenomena, having created a huge buzz on the club scene, the band were involved in a major bidding war, eventually signing to Chrysalis Records and releasing the classic “To Cut a Long Story Short”, produced by Richard James Burgess.

With Spandau, the music was not only timely, it was groundbreaking. Prescient, even. Of the moment. And unnerving to anyone not in the know. “To Cut A Long Story Short” was an era-defining slice of electronic myth-making, and a great dance record to boot (if it hadn’t been, the cognoscenti, those who went to the same clubs as Spandau, would have strangled it at birth – or, more pertinently, refused to dance to it); “Musclebound” was a clever, seductive spin on body politics; and “Chant No.1 (We Don’t Need This Pressure On)” was, in its own way, as important to the summer of 1981 as “Ghost Town” by the Specials – a canny mix of contemporary funk and bottom-heavy agitprop, the perfect encapsulation of the new decade’s obsession with fiddling while Brixton and Toxteth burned. It is one of the most important records of the early Eighties, and this is not an opinion solely justified by hindsight.

Having come fully-formed from the new romantic Billy’s/Blitz club scene, Spandau completely understood the currency of the dancefloor, and one of their innovations was to issue every single in a remixed 12” format, stealing a march on their competitors in the charts, and giving them prime equity in nightclubs from Canvey Island to New Jersey, from Soho to SoHo. And back again.

In this respect Spandau didn’t so much surf the zeitgeist as kick-start the wave. And soon they were spearheading an era of new pop that was destined to traverse the globe. Along with Duran Duran, Sade, Culture Club and Wham!, as well as dozens of other British groups who grew out of the new romantic scene at the end of the Seventies, by the mid Eighties Spandau were global superstars, exponents of a shiny, unapologetic riposte to the post-punk industrialists and the emerging left-of-centre political independents celebrated by the NME (who hated Spandau because they could never get into the nightclubs where they were playing). Spandau became poster boys of designer pop, and their regular appearances in magazines such as i-D, The Face, Blitz and New Sounds New Styles helped turn them into copper-bottomed bold-face names. Then, with worldwide blue-eyed soul hits such as “True”, “Gold”, “Communication” and “Lifeline” the band achieved rather iconic status, and in the space of two years went from playing trendy nightclubs to playing stadia all over the world. The release of their third album True, in 1983, heralded a slicker, more adult contemporary sound, produced by Tony Swain and Steve Jolley, the title track being an homage to, amongst other things, Marvin Gaye (in 1991, P.M. Dawn sampled the song brilliantly in “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss”, which became a huge global hit). Around this time Spandau’s club-centric image changed too, and they swapped their harsh new romantic threads for smart, expensive, tailored pastel suits, exactly at the same time as David Bowie – who, on his Serious Moonlight tour in 1983, could easily have been the sixth member of Spandau. Steered by their manager Steve Dagger (a Peter Grant for the post-punk world)Spandau became one of the most commercially successful bands of the Eighties, and during their career they notched up 23 hit singles and spent a combined total of in excess of 500 weeks in the UK charts, and achieved album sales of over 25 million worldwide. Some of their songs, like “True”, “Gold” and “Through the Barricades” (karaoke favourites all), have become standards, while “True” has now achieved almost four million plays in North America alone. Not only that, but it is impossible to watch a televised sporting event these days without hearing “Gold” on heavy rotation.

The group’s enormous success was rubber-stamped by their appearance on the historic Band Aid record and by their performance at Live Aid at Wembley Stadium in the summer of 1985 – not only the most important concert of the Eighties, not only the biggest gig of all time, but also the consummate socio-political flashpoint: never had global awareness been channelled in such a way.

Since splitting up at the end of the Eighties, after a decade of unparalleled success, the Kemps established themselves as credible actors in The Krays, with Gary going on to star in the Whitney Houston vehicle The Bodyguard, and Martin becoming a household name and Britain’s most popular actor in the BBC’s EastEnders.

Tony Hadley embarked on a successful solo recording career, starred as Billy Flynn in the West End production of Chicago and won ITV’s reality TV show Reborn In The USA.

Steve Norman has stayed true to Spandau’s dance credentials, immersing himself in the house music scene for the last decade. Releasing tunes with his band Cloudfish, he also plays live sax in various super clubs around the world in collaboration with DJs.

And John has never erred from his passion for, in his own words, “hitting things with other things,” for various artists including Tony Hadley.

Spandau Ballet lasted ten years, a career arc that spanned the Eighties in perfect symmetry, from the nightclubs of Soho and Ibiza to Hollywood and the stadiums of Europe and Australia. Along with the other bastions of New Pop, Spandau Ballet defined the decade – proving, perhaps, that eyeliner, tartan capes and the variances of the Linn drum are not necessarily mutually exclusive. They came, they saw, they partied. And then they left, leaving a good-looking legacy.

And now they’re back for one more dance.