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. Or Wandsworth Ballet. But we didn’t think we’d sell many records. We just wanted to be on Top of the Pops, once.’
Kemp’s formative years may have been spent in hair gel and glitter in Covent Garden, but now he’s a man in his early fifties of more distinguished tastes. He has an acclaimed collection of Victorian antiques, particularly those by E.W. Godwin, a giant house in Bloomsbury, and writes serious articles about David Bowie for the broadsheets.
He greets me at his door in a pair of Shipton & Heanage monogrammed slippers, which cost about £400. What would his younger self have thought of those, I wonder? ‘I think my younger self would be more amazed to know I was doing an interview for The Spectator,’ he says.
We walk past a colossal room — featuring a Steinway grand, a Sam Taylor-Wood photograph taken in the flat he used to own with his first wife (Sadie Frost), and a collection of racing bikes (he competes in the Étape due Tour, an amateur race along a stage of the Tour de France) — and ascend to an upper-floor drawing room elegantly set with Victorian aesthetic furniture, an etching by Augustus John, a Minton teapot and first editions of Aubrey Beardsley’s Golden Book.
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