Gary Kemp was just 10 minutes into his first therapy session when he had an emotional breakthrough. Edgy, distracted by the state of the world and increasingly aware of his age, the 65-year-old had come out of the pandemic not feeling himself. “When I speak about this, I feel a bit weak,” he says. “But I’d never felt such a sense of anxiety.” His wife of 22 years, costume designer Lauren Barber, suggested counselling.
Over Facetime, the therapist asked about his family background. “Suddenly, I couldn’t speak – I was completely in a mess.” He realised that he’d never properly grieved his parents, who had both died within four days of each other in January 2009 – the same month Kemp’s son Kit was born, and that he reunited with his band, 80s New Romantic hitmakers Spandau Ballet. It was all too much to process.
“I adore my family,” he says. “But I didn’t have whatever access I needed to let that go. Somehow this stranger outside of my world allowed me to do that.” He realises now that keeping himself busy “was a way of avoiding what I had to go through”.
One of the results of this was Kemp knew he wanted to write a song about his parents. His mother, a school dinner lady, and his father, a print worker, raised Kemp and his brother, Spandau Ballet bassist Martin Kemp, in trying financial circumstances. Their middle-floor home in Islington, north London shared an outside toilet with other family members (aunties, uncles, cousins) who lived on the lower and upper floors, and had no electricity until Kemp was a toddler.
“My parents and their struggle live with me,” Kemp says. “They gave me a work ethic.”
But the song wasn’t coming. That is until, one day, Kemp – sitting in his music room at the Fitzrovia townhouse he shares with his wife and three children (Milo Wolf, 20, Kit, 15, and Rex, 12) – got a phone call. It was the singer-songwriter Richard Hawley.
“I told him I was trying to write a song but not having much luck, and he said, ‘OK, go to your piano. Close your eyes. Put your hands out.’” Kemp, trim and dark-shirted, is acting out the instructions sat in his PR’s office in central London. “And then he says: ‘I’m going now – and you’re gonna write a f***ing brilliant song.’”
Kemp immediately wrote “Work”, the emotional centrepiece of his new anthemic, but reflective, third solo album, This Destination. It is an ode to his parents’ sacrifice. “I always thought my dad was like Superman. I didn’t know he was having a nervous breakdown because he couldn’t put enough food on the table, and that his job was killing him. It makes you think: ‘Do I set a good example for my kids?’” Hawley liked the song but, more importantly, his brother approved. “I sent it to my brother, and he went, ‘Oh my God, mum and dad would love this. This is a real honour for them.’”
With Spandau Ballet, Kemp wrote 23 hit singles (including “True”, “Gold”, and “Through the Barricades”) that propelled the band to 25 million album sales. But, eternal ballad “True” aside, hardly any were about him – he was writing for singer Tony Hadley. “It’s really difficult to be personal writing for someone else and trying to keep a pop band in the charts.”
This Destination couldn’t be more of a contrast. Therapy, pandemic, age – it’s all made Kemp take stock, and look back. This Destination interrogates his life from his lack of control (“Take the Wheel”) to how he “wants to be glass half-full” (“Put Your Head Up”) to the beautiful, string-laden final track “I Know Where I’m Going”, which contemplates mortality through nature.
One song, “Borrowed Town,” was written on the London Underground as he travelled to lunch with the Who’s Pete Townshend (as you can also tell from his entertaining Rockonteurs podcast, Kemp is well-connected to, and well-liked by, rock royalty). Kemp considered how he no longer gets recognised on the tube, but that’s OK; London is ever changing, always in flux.
It led him to another song, “Windswept Street (1978)”, about a time when Kemp was, as he puts it, “king of the street”. It’s a reminiscence about the famous Blitz Club in Covent Garden, the centre of the bold New Romantic movement that moulded Kemp and sparked a pop-culture phenomenon.
It came to define the first half of the 80s: “The Blitz Kids” were a bunch of ambitious, arty, outlandishly stylish and, crucially, working-class eccentrics gorging on culture, fashion and “anything that had the validation of Bowie”. Regulars included organiser and DJ Steve Strange, Culture Club, Bananarama, Sade and Ultravox. “We knew we were the next generation. So we were pretentiously thinking, well, we better get on with it. We’ve got to design the decade.”
It was therefore ironic, particularly given Kemp’s background, that as Spandau Ballet dominated the charts amid genuinely fierce rivalry with peers like Duran Duran – “totally genuine, we felt that being in the charts was like football teams trying to win the league” – they were often dismissed as “Thatcher’s Children”, emblems of the era’s empty artifice and yuppyish excess.
“I absolutely hated that,” he says. “I thought, you really don’t get working-class people, do you? We like to look good. We are aspirational. I think the 80s was a fantasy period. We all wanted to see ourselves on a bigger landscape, something that wasn’t down and dirty.”
Sometimes their big ideas weren’t so clever: at Live Aid, Spandau decided against singing “Gold”, instead subjecting a worldwide audience to unreleased “Virgin”. “Total regret,” Kemp says, smiling at the absurdity. “You must be f**king mad.”
They never quite recovered. By 1989, Spandau, like their peers, had seen the hits dry up amid the acid house revolution. And not for the first – or last – time, the band had fallen out. “I put my guitar in a box for four years.”
Having already starred in 1990 gangster drama The Krays alongside brother Martin, Kemp took to acting, enjoying a stint in Hollywood; he starred in The Bodyguard alongside Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston. He wasn’t thinking about songwriting. “And then my marriage broke down,” he says of his first wife, the actress Sadie Frost. They had one child, Finlay, before Frost left him for 19-year-old Jude Law. “The first thing I did was grab my guitar and wrote [first solo album, 1995’s] Little Bruises. I always go back to my songwriting.”
Spandau’s 2009 reunion – 10 years after Hadley, drummer John Keeble and saxophonist Steve Norman failed in an attempt to sue Kemp over unpaid royalties – looks like their last. In 2017, Hadley said he’d left the band after refusing to take part in a proposed 2015 tour. There’s been no contact since. “Not because I don’t want to talk, but because we just don’t need to talk. Me and Tony were always opposites. We’re workmates, and you don’t love all your workmates,” says Kemp. “But we have a legacy that I’m really proud of. I don’t want to say I’m never going to do that again.”
Hadley has intimated he wasn’t treated well by the Kemps, with a vague statement that theirs was “not the behaviour of friends”. Does he recognise that? “I don’t recognise it,” he says. “I got a bit upset that Tony was trying to paint me and Martin as the bad guys, because we saw it the other way around. In the end, no one really is.”
Attempts to replace Hadley were nothing short of disastrous; a potential tour with Seal fell at the first hurdle when he never showed up to rehearsals. “We got notice from his manager that he hadn’t got on the plane from LA.” They then auditioned a young singer called Ross Davidson, who did five Spandau gigs in 2017. “The minute I got on the road it felt wrong.’” Davidson was subsequently jailed in 2023 for rape and sexual assault. “That’s a massive regret doing that. Only Tony can do it.’
Still, one disappointment gnaws away. “I should have done more music making when I left Spandau.” He says imposter syndrome often got in the way. Now, he can’t help but think: “Isn’t it annoying that life gets short?”
Kemp is trying to have fewer regrets. “I think the older you get, the more you don’t want enemies, right? Christ, even me and my ex-wife made up,” he says smiling.
But at least one thought is keeping him young. Last year, Kemp went for a very rock star dinner with Townshend, Mick Jagger and U2 bassist Adam Clayton. “And I said to Adam Clayton, this is great – while they’re still doing it, we’re still the kids.”
This Destination is out now. Q&A and album playback with Gary and Martin Kemp at Pryzm, Kingston on Friday 4 February banquetrecords.com
