Gary Kemp on David Bowie, Margaret Thatcher, and joining the establishment

There was a funny gaffe on Radio 4 the other day, when the newsreader announced that Hitler’s favourite architect Albert Speer had been banged up in ‘Spandau Ballet’. Cue a lot of laughter across middle England. Gary Kemp, the founder of Spandau Ballet, the 1980s pop band (not the Berlin prison) was also rather amused, even if he’d heard it before. ‘When we first started,’ he recalls, ‘the inky press thought our name meant we were a new fascist movement in music, which was obviously nonsense.’

The real inspiration behind the Spandau name was David Bowie. ‘We were obsessed with Berlin, which had been validated by Bowie. We all went to the Blitz club and bought synthesisers. Robert Elms turned round and said ‘How about Spandau Ballet?’ — it just sounded mysterious and glamorous. I later discovered Spandau is a really boring suburb of Berlin. Over here, we might have been called Neasden Ballet.