If I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a million times: Nothing breaks up a band faster than money.
That’s especially the case in bands where one person makes a lot more than the others. Inevitably, either jealousy rears its ugly head and the other members get mad about the financial disparity or the person getting the money (almost always the main songwriter) thinks they can do better on their own.
Spandau Ballet was supposed to be the exception to the rule.
Formed in 1979 by school friends Gary Kemp and Steve Norman, the band (supposedly named after the infamous Spandau prison which housed seven major Nazi war criminals convicted at the 1945-46 Nuremberg Trials) soon grew to include classmates Tony Hadley and John Keeble, as well as Gary’s little brother, Martin.
The division of labor in the band was clear from the beginning. Hadley, with his expressive voice, was the frontman. Gary wrote the songs and played lead guitar. Norman was their multi-instrumentalist whose versatility allowed Gary to experiment with his songwriting. Keeble was their steady drummer. And the younger Kemp played bass and served as the band’s style and fashion coordinator (he was also the band’s resident chick magnet).
Inspired by eclectic, image-oriented acts like Roxy Music and London’s underground nightclub scene, Spandau Ballet became the biggest of the so-called New Romantic bands alongside their friendly rivals, Duran Duran.
As Spandau Ballet grew in fame and stature, the friendships within the band remained strong. “People used to comment that it was rare to find a band that was as genuinely close as we were,” Hadley said.
The other members of Spandau Ballet seemed especially unaffected by the fact that Gary Kemp, who wrote almost all of their original songs, made a lot more than they did. Maybe it was because Gary paid 50% of his publishing royalties into the band’s corporate entity. More on that later.
As the band experienced more and more chart success, those royalties only grew. From 1981 to 1987, the band amassed 3 British Phonographic Industry (BPI) certified platinum albums and 2 gold ones, as well as 10 U.K. Top Ten singles. Their 1983 classic, “True,” became an era-defining smash hit that remains one of the most recognizable songs of the decade (and remains their sole Top Ten in the U.S.).
They were big enough that Hadley merited a lead spot on the landmark charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” and Spandau earned a performance slot at Live Aid (that might not seem like a big deal, but George Michael, who appeared on the Band Aid record, didn’t get a slot for himself or Wham!).
Things started to change going into sessions for their sixth studio album, 1989’s Heart Like a Sky. Hadley and the band’s manager, Steve Dagger (another childhood friend), wanted to record the album in Los Angeles, thinking it would be good for the band and also help them break more into the American market. The Kemps, on the other hand, wanted to stay in London since they had been cast in The Krays, a movie about the notorious twin British gangsters that was released in 1990. The Kemps’ foray into movies did not sit well with the other three members of the band, who began wondering whether the brothers were looking for greener pastures.
Turns out, they were. Martin had long wanted to be an actor and was hoping to use The Krays as a springboard for other projects. Gary, meanwhile, admitted in his autobiography that he had been feeling dissatisfied and frustrated within the band for a while and wanted to see what else was out there.
As such, during recording sessions for Heart Like a Sky, Gary did a few things that, in retrospect, made it clear he had mentally checked out. He demanded a separate production credit from the rest of the band — a departure from the norm that caused conflict with the others since it meant he would get higher royalties for each album sold (on top of his usual songwriting royalties). He angered Keeble, his best friend in the band, by deciding to use pre-programmed drum sounds for the album, and pissed off Hadley for wanting to sing co-lead on one of the songs. And, fatefully for the others, he also stopped paying 50% of his songwriting royalties into the band’s general fund, figuring there would soon be no more band for him to support.
“Self-preservation was suddenly everything,” Gary wrote in his 2010 autobiography, I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau. “I knew this would be our final album and I didn’t care what the others thought. I felt as though I’d been taken for granted for far too long and I was angry.”
The other band members didn’t seem to realize what was happening. And when they did, they seemed not to grasp the potential long term significance of Kemp’s actions. “I told Martin I didn’t care. Heart Like a Sky was different to the other albums. He could stick the royalties up his arse. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that Gary was planning to keep all the publishing royalties on every song that we’d ever recorded,” Hadley said in his 2004 autobiography, To Cut A Long Story Short.
When the Kemps returned to the fold after filming The Krays to start the tour for Heart Like a Sky, there was a clear division within the band. “I understood how awful this must have been for the other three, but it still hurt when Martin and I walked back into rehearsals only two days after finishing the movie, and no one expressed any interest in what we’d done over the past eight weeks,” Gary wrote in his autobiography.
After a tense tour which saw the Kemps ride in the front of the bus, the other three stay in the back, and Dagger end up in the hospital because of stress, the band actually went back to work, recording a cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.” That song seemed to represent to the others that the band was still together, and Hadley later said that despite their problems, he certainly did not think Spandau was done.
“Despite the problems during the making of Heart Like a Sky, we were still speaking to each other by the end of the process — just about. We had agreed to disagree, but our relationships weren’t beyond repair,” Hadley reflected in his autobiography. “For years afterwards, there was confusion. Had we split or were we just having time off? … The band didn’t blow apart; it deflated. There was never any real closure.”
But to Gary Kemp, it was his swan song and farewell to the band. He admitted in his autobiography that it had been a cynical cash grab for the band and that the song’s quality, or lack thereof, reflected his and his brethren’s lack of cohesion and commitment. “At the end of the recording, there was no group meeting, no plans, no farewell, just a deceitful see-you-later, as I slipped out of the studio, and out of the band,” he wrote in his autobiography.
In the years following, Martin became a fairly established actor, starring in popular British soap EastEnders, among other projects. He also survived two brain tumors. Gary also dabbled in acting, turning in a memorable performance in the 1992 hit The Bodyguard before returning to music. Hadley tried to go solo, but failed to make much of an impact, while Norman and Keeble worked with other musicians. According to Gary, Norman tried to convince him to do another Spandau record, but he declined. The two then had some heated words and the next time they saw each other was in court in 1999.
Why were they in court? Remember when Gary stopped paying half of his publishing to the band? Hadley, Norman and Keeble sure did, and by 1999, they needed that money. According to Hadley, he had been earning about £120,000 a year off those royalties while he was in the band, and was counting on that money to get him through his post-Spandau days. Without that pension, he found himself in dire straits — as did Keeble and Norman.
After trying to work things out privately, the three felt they were going nowhere and decided to sue Gary, alleging nonpayment of hundreds of thousands in songwriting royalties. What ensued was a bitter court clash that formally broke up the band and caused a once-strong group of friends to be torn asunder.
Hadley, Norman and Keeble claimed that Gary had agreed to a permanent royalty split and, as such, had no right to stop paying half of his publishing into the band’s corporate entity. As such, they argued Gary owed them more than 10 years of back royalties — given their long string of hits in the U.K., as well as P.M. Dawn’s 1991 single, “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” which sampled “True” and went to #1 in the U.S. and #3 in the U.K., they were looking at a considerable amount of money.
“It was a utopian, idyllic situation where you wanted to trust everyone; it was all for one and one for all,” Keeble told The Guardian. “We had an arrangement between ourselves, and we were schoolmates. We weren’t cynical, we just did things on trust.”
Barring that, the other three argued that they deserved a cut of the songwriting royalties because of their own creative contributions to the band’s songs. While they conceded that Gary did write the melodies, lyrics and basic chord structure (which is generally sufficient for claiming writing credit), they felt their additions, whether it was a Steve Norman saxophone solo, a John Keeble drum fill, or an emotive lyric that only Hadley could sing, merited some sort of recognition and payment. “We believed that what had happened was wrong; that we were entitled to receive an income from publishing royalties as we had in the past,” Hadley wrote in his autobiography. “I thought it was a way of acknowledging our contribution to Spandau Ballet songs.”
That much was not true as far as Gary was concerned. He alleged that there was no such deal between him and the others and Dagger backed him up (Martin stayed neutral). The royalty split had been an informal one — simply a means to keep the peace and reinvest in the band. No band, no need for a royalty split.
While Gary conceded that the others did contribute things to his songs — he maintained that they were still his songs. “People made some suggestions for free-form solos, particularly Steve, who was the most instinctive musician among us,” Gary said on the stand, according to Brian Southall’s 2008 book Pop Goes to Court: Rock ‘n’ Pop’s Greatest Court Battles. “The songs, the melody, the lyrics all came from me. I would always come to rehearsal with a song, with a title, with the vast majority of the lyrics finished, if not all of them.”
Both parties agreed that there was no formal, written contract dictating a 50-50 split — and that proved to be the deciding factor. Justice Andrew Park of the British High Court of Justice handed down his decision in April 1999, and it was a complete victory for Gary Kemp. Park held that, while the three did make creative contributions to the songs, it did not rise to the level of a co-credit, let alone a share of royalties. In fact, Park found it “unconscionable” that the three would “lay claim to large sums of money which they knew Mr. Kemp regarded as his.” Barring the absence of a formal agreement, Park ruled that the three’s case “fails in its entirety.”
“Let this be a serious lesson to any up and coming artist or band. No matter how good mates you are or whether you were at school together, get a contract,” Hadley later said.
Gary called the verdict a victory for all songwriters, but even he seemed to understand that his win was a Pyrrhic one. “[It’s] like walking away from a car crash, you’re glad to be alive but mortified and shocked by the wreckage,” Gary Kemp said.
Martin, for his part, added that he knew by watching his best friends fight with his brother that the band was finished. “Would there be a Spandau reunion at some point? Would we ever get back together in the years to come and play a couple of shows or even to make the odd record? After this, the answer is definitely no,” he wrote in his 2001 autobiography.
The other three vowed to appeal, but realized they couldn’t afford the attorneys’ fees. They also had to pay Gary’s attorneys’ fees, which only made things worse between the four. The three had to sell off their shares in the band’s corporate entity to Gary Kemp, and in order to make some money, they decided to go on tour as “Hadley, Norman and Keeble, ex-Spandau Ballet.” That drew another lawsuit — this time from the Kemps and Dagger, who argued they did not have the right to use the name “Spandau Ballet” (even with the “ex-” modifier).
Hadley was furious and seemed like he was done with the Kemps — particularly Gary. “I know you should never say never, and bands in the past have said hell would freeze over before they got back together, but in our case I think hell is frozen and we still wouldn’t do it,” Hadley said in 2007 about a Spandau Ballet reunion.
Ultimately, they did manage to resolve their differences. Shortly after the Kemps’ parents died in 2009, the five of them reconciled and decided to reunite. They embarked on a tour and released a new album (really a re-worked version of their greatest hits along with two new songs — one co-written by Gary Kemp and Norman and one written by Hadley). A couple of additional tours followed, and it looked like they were back for good.
However, it eventually became clear that old wounds had not completely healed. Hadley quit the band, seemingly for good, in 2017, later stating that the reunion had been “bloody difficult.” Hadley added that he and Gary Kemp had never really patched things up, and accused his bandmates of treating him in a manner that was “not the behaviour of friends.”
Spandau soldiered on. After talks with Seal to join as their new frontman fell through, the band hired Hadley-soundalike Ross William Wild. They did one tour, which Gary Kemp later called “a mistake,” before seemingly breaking up for good. (Wild was later convicted of sex assault for offenses dating back to 2013 and is currently serving nine years.) The Kemps then seemingly called time on the band, saying that there was no reason for them to tour with anyone other than Hadley.
Since then, things have only gotten worse between Hadley and the others, particularly the Kemps. Even if that weren’t the case, the three seem to have moved on. Hadley says he’s happy working as a solo artist, Martin has returned to acting and Gary, a massive Pink Floyd fan, has joined Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets as a guitarist and vocalist.
“You could offer me all the tea in China and I wouldn’t get back with them,” Hadley told The Mirror.
Looks like they probably won’t go through the barricades with each other one more time.
