Renaissance man | 13 December 2018

The first thing Gary Kemp bought when Spandau Ballet started making money was a chair. He’s very proud of that chair. He talks about his chair in tones midway between one of Monty Python’s four Yorkshiremen and Nicholas Serota. ‘I wasn’t making any money until “True” was successful, in 1983,’ he says. ‘The first thing I really bought was a William Morris chair. What the fuck is a 22-year-old boy living in a council house with his mum and dad doing going out and buying a William Morris chair?’

It was the first chair anyone in the Kemp family had ever owned outright, he says. ‘Everything in our house was on HP, apart from the cat. It’s very different to the old Alan Clark thing. We were handed down no furniture. Once you’d paid off the HP, you’d sell it and get something else on HP. Still have that chair. It represents a kind of hunger for things. I love the Pre-Raphaelite [and the] arts and crafts movements. For me, they were another gang of rude boys taking over the London scene.’

Like the Pre-Raphaelites, Kemp is currently experiencing something of a renaissance. Spandau Ballet have started playing shows again in their ongoing reunion, albeit with a new singer in place of Tony Hadley, who appears to have left in an enormous sulk. Kemp is onstage over Christmas and the New Year — and not in panto. He’s in Party Time and Celebration at the Harold Pinter Theatre, alongside John Simm and Celia Imrie, in the Pinter at the Pinter season. Oddest of all, he’s spent a chunk of this year playing guitar and singing with Nick Mason of Pink Floyd, in the band Saucerful of Secrets, performing the music Pink Floyd recorded between 1967 and 1972. I can’t vouch for the Pinter, but both the new-look Spandau Ballet and the journey back to the hippie heyday are tremendous fun.

You don’t need to be much of an amateur psychologist to work out that Kemp is fairly obsessed with class.