(#281: 14 May 1983,
1 week)
Track listing:
Pleasure/Communication/Code Of Love/Gold/Lifeline/Heaven Is A
Secret/Foundation/True
The stories about Spandau Ballet and Trevor Horn vary,
according to who tells them and when they are told. The most common is that,
following The Lexicon Of Love, Horn
had two choices of job; to produce the next Spandau Ballet album (the “safe”
option) or to go around the world, or a bit of it, with Malcolm McLaren and put
together Duck Rock (the “risky”
option). Horn weighed up both options and decided on adventure. The other
story, which I remember reading and hearing more of at the time, is that
Spandau Ballet had begun working on their third album with Horn at the controls
but the two parties didn’t really get on – I remember a comment from Gary Kemp
in Smash Hits complaining about
Horn’s “schoolmasterly” approach – and the group finally opted for the more
approachable south London production team of Tony Swain and Steve Jolley, then
best known for their work with Imagination and Bananarama.
The truth – in connection with an album about truth – is
probably somewhere in between; Horn had returned the faltering Ballet to the
top ten in the spring of 1982 with his magnificent remodelling (remix is too
modest a word in this context) of “Instinction,” a record which helped explain
why some of us at the time did not need Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin when there
was so much glorious new pop demanding our attention. And it is beyond question
that some of the songs on True –
notably “Gold” – do proceed with an eye on Martin’s lexicon, complete with
dramatic piano flourishes and meditational sax solos.
I am not sure that Horn would have smothered these songs
under tons of instruments and effects, and certainly none would have benefited
from that overload. Swain and Jolley had already proved that the secret of
their success as producers was their use of space in music; listen to something
like “In And Out Of Love” or “Shy Boy” and you’ll see how the less-is-more
approach can be made to work with startling results and understand the
importance of not putting too much sound into each mix. But Horn was
tangentially involved with at least some of the album; two of its most striking
songs, “Code Of Love” and “Pleasure,” take their lead from his original
arrangements, and both demonstrate an understanding of spaces and silence which
Horn would continue to use to great effect; it’s not that long a way from the
disturbing synthesiser drone left hanging in the air like a threatening cloud
throughout the long outro of “Code Of Love” to the considered stillness of
“Moments In Love.”
The deployment of huge, field-like spaces and the subtle
deployment of echo in the music both suit the ambience of True, an album made to be listened to on a Walkman on an extremely
hot and sunny day, preferably in the presence of a vast sea (from personal
experience I recommend listening to it on a July midweek afternoon in North
Berwick, across the Fife coast from St Andrews); indeed that is how I listened
to True at the time – on the very
same chromium dioxide cassette that I am using for this piece (and which, I am
pleased to report, still plays perfectly after nearly thirty-one years).
The music on the record reflects this troubled sunny
outlook, too; it was recorded, but not mixed, at Compass Point Studios in
Nassau, and the opulent Lynn Goldsmith band photograph reflects the mood
perfectly – there’s Tony Hadley at far left, happily bouncing around like a
newly-fed leveret, John Keeble standing to attention in his Lonsdale T-shirt,
Steve Norman sitting down and grinning. Meanwhile, Martin Kemp glares warily at
the camera, underneath a hat, at the back of the picture; to the far right, and
with his back turned to the rest of the group completely, is Gary Kemp, in
skipper’s cap, sitting on the edge of the sea wall and solemnly contemplating
the ocean – Bing Crosby starring in Existential
Society.
I am bound to say that I greatly enjoyed True at the time and generally didn’t
mind Spandau Ballet, and am aware that in certain early eighties quarters both
activities bordered on the illegal. Their initial run of singles was never less
than interesting and often considerably more than that (“Chant No 1,”
“Instinction” and its strange B-side “Gently,” the 12-inch of “Glow”) and their
second album, 1982’s Diamond, was
good enough for me to purchase in a multi-12 inch single box set (outrageously
priced at £7.99); I particularly recommend “Coffee Club” as an example of how
the neurosis of “Born Under Punches” could be creatively recast for a noisier
and more optimistic Soho-via-Essex Road club culture.
Many saw True
as a sellout, its inherently aspirational nature (or so it initially appeared)
too close to Thatcherism to call, and viewed Big Tony as an eighties David
Whitfield, bellowing and unsubtle. I’m inclined to be a lot kinder myself;
Hadley was never going to be Al Green or Steve Arrington, but his approach –
belting out alternating with considered sotto
voce – works perfectly well in the environment of the songs which Gary Kemp
wrote for him to sing, and has subsequently revealed a very endearing,
self-deprecating side to himself. He knows that he is seen by some as being a
little absurd, but still tries his best and is happy to sing a song if its
melody attracts him and retains his interest, perhaps irrespective of what the
song might be saying.
That latter aspect is fairly important, since there are two
ways in which True could be viewed.
One is as a crass betrayal of former promises of futurism, a white-flagged
surrender to cabaret. The other, I think more fruitful, option is to regard it
as a rather clever record which isn’t quite what it pretends to be.
It is true (that word again) that, in the early eighties,
Kemp didn’t want to stay a “cult” and wanted his songs to have greater
commercial appeal. But the eight songs collected in these admirably economic
thirty-six-and-a-half minutes do not represent a Bowie-style turnaround. They
show a lot more imagination and creativity than anything on Let’s Dance for a start. Why? Because, I
think, Spandau Ballet were ambitious, but knew their limitations. They don’t
travel beyond their field of smooth jazz-funk (Bobby Caldwell’s “What You Won’t
Do For Love” might be the template for the whole thing) but do continue to
reflect a past of Roxy Music (Steve Norman’s alto is strictly in a late-period
Andy Mackay setting with bits of Grover Washington Jr) and even Mott the Hoople
(Kemp has said that citing Marvin Gaye in “True” was his tip of the hat to
Bowie, via Ian Hunter, citing T Rex in “All The Young Dudes”).
But what are the songs on True about? “Code Of Love” might be the record’s key song, since
all of the lyrics appear to be written in some kind of code, signifying
something else; on one level the songs are about the difficulties that Men and
Women have in communicating with each other (“Communication let me down”
indeed) with these unspecified “he”s and “she”s. On that surface it is a
concept record about a relationship that never goes anywhere, that almost
certainly never actually happens. Everywhere Kemp, via Hadley, is let down one
way or another – “Pleasure” reasserts the charging, funky Spandau to a distressed
vocal which sometimes sounds like Simon Le Bon (the “holding” in the line “Warm
within the hand she’s holding”). “Communication” sets its deliberately ungainly
swing against an organ motif that could have come from Tarkus.
“Code Of Love” has stayed with me, however; its quietly
needling guitar line suggesting Culture Club-style reggae-lite, and yet the
song never truly resolves – it simply, and very slowly, fades into the distance
with Norman’s melancholic sax, Kemp’s Brothers Gibb-ish backing vocal and that
haunting, static synthesiser cloud (Moon
Safari is a mere fifteen years down the highway). Nor is “Gold”
particularly reassuring, driven as it is by two conflicting motors; the urge
for material prosperity and the corresponding traduction of human relations.
Conservative or Labour – which way to go? The song’s essential unrest is
reflected in the ingenious chord modulations heard within its verses, and
Hadley’s “always believing” sounds very far from a man convinced.
But then there is “Lifeline,” a bigger hit than
“Instinction” in the autumn of 1982, and it seems to be about more than just
boy meets and fails to understand girl; “Changing her colours, she’s off to the
shore,” “There’s a power in his voice and it makes her feel so sure,” “A democracy
of sorts that justifies the sun (or justifies The Sun)” – is this about the Falklands war, and are there two
women being sung about on this record, one bearing the name of Thatcher? This
can, of course, only be conjecture; whereas “Heaven Is A Secret” is at root a
very touching song about being “far from her arms tonight,” being at a distance
from the one you love and not knowing whether or how to touch, to make things
known. In contrast the determinedly upbeat “Foundation” could, with some change
of perspective and arrangement, be Weller’s Style Council (“We’ll build a
foun-DA-TION!”). But the writer knows that this can never really be built up.
And so the record ends with the title song, an inevitable
number one probably from the moment it was conceived (and plaudits have to go
to the “sixth member” of Spandau Ballet, Jess Bailey, who provides most of the
keyboard work throughout the album), and a song addressed expressly to the
listener, or possibly even a single, specific listener, all about the difficulties
of writing a song, about the impossibility of saying what you actually want to
say out loud (nowhere on this record do the words “I love you” appear, although
“Live and let live in love” does turn up in “Lifeline”), about listening to
Marvin Gaye all night long, knowing that he was all about rising above his
circumstances, and wondering if you’ll ever have the nerve to do anything like
“I Want You” or “Just To Keep You Satisfied,” wondering why it won’t come,
listening to and taking in “Sexual Healing” and Midnight Love, paraphrasing that book by Nabokov that she sent you
(for “seaside hands” read “seaside arms,” and “With a thrill in my head and a
pill on my tongue” comes from the same source), thinking about Paul bloody
Weller (“I’ve bought a ticket to the world/But now I’ve come back again” echoes
the “I scoured the whole universe/And caught the last train home” of “English
Rose”) and…waiting and wondering, as the song slowly fades into the ether, with
one heartstopping suspension of rhythm in the fadeout, as though breathing had
temporarily ceased, before life starts again.
“Bring me closer!” cried Clare Grogan, the secret
addressee of True, a couple of months
later on a phenomenally good album with the very pertinent title of Bite, while warning: “Something that you
do to me/Fills me with unease.” Heaven is perhaps not so much of a secret now,
since Gary Kemp revealed in The Guardian
last May that he did indeed have a crush on Ms Grogan, to the point of
travelling to Glasgow to have tea with her parents, but that nothing came of it
(the late David Band designed the sleeve for True and its attendant singles, as he had done for the early works
of Altered Images). So the truth which he wanted to be made known was an
unrequited passion, and the knowledge that getting famous, and having them
spell your name correctly in Vladivostok, was not enough in itself, not in the
eighties. And True hit so big, I
suspect, because it bore a near-naked personal nature; the compass then moved
outward, the detail became blurry. But the record worked, and I think still
works, by virtue of its demonstration that even walking in the prosperous early
eighties sunshine with the blue in the air and a Walkman clamped to one’s ears is
only enjoyable when you know that life isn’t just about that. I would give this album the alternative title of Boué.
Next: Caught between Loch Ness and the Sahara.
