What does Spandau Ballet mean?
No matter which way you slice it, punk rock, for lack of a better term, was pop music. By simplifying the music of the day back down to its barest necessities, the Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Jam were creating songs that were fast, edgy and aggressive, yes, but also maddeningly catchy. For more proof of this, look at the music it inspired. Post-punk was a movement that inspired the esoteric likes of The Pop Group and The Fall, sure. However, new wave and new romantic acts like Duran Duran and especially Spandau Ballet are just as much part of the legacy of punk as anyone else.
This becomes especially clear when you look up the meaning behind Spandau Ballet’s name. That way, you’ll discover it would suit a loud and dangerous punk band a lot more than the men who gave us ‘True’. Unlike most siblings who form bands together, the story of Spandau Ballet actually begins with one Kemp brother. Gary formed the first incarnation of the band with his school friend Steve Norman after watching a Sex Pistols gig at the Islington cinema, the Screen On The Green.
After recruiting a bunch of their other friends from school to join them, including John Keeble on drums and Tony Hadley on lead vocals, the band set about playing their first shows. While these shows were little more than school parties with ideas above their station, they also contained one more crucial aspect of the band. Like any good younger sibling, Gary’s kid brother Martin had also been press-ganged into helping, presumably so he could hang out with the cool kids for a change.
At first, Martin was a roadie. As the band started playing actual gigs away from school, the band noticed just how much attention the then-17-year-old Martin was getting from girls in the crowd. The band made the savvy decision to bring him into the band as bass player and played their first gig with him on July 1st, 1978. With the band’s classic lineup all but complete, the only thing left to change was the name because, before the SB, the band had some total BS.
The band were originally named Roots before changing that to The Cut. They were The Makers for a cup of coffee when they thought they were going to be a Small Faces-style power-pop band before settling on Gentry when Martin joined the band. All awful, to be sure, so it’s a good thing the band struck up a friendship with writer Robert Elms, who’d hand them a genuine lifeline in 1979. As the band started to get involved with the early Blitz Kids scene in Soho, the band wanted to rebrand as an electronic band and needed a name to reflect that.
Elms had just returned from a weekend trip to Berlin, where he’d seen the graffiti “Rudolph Hess, all alone, dancing the Spandau Ballet”. Perhaps he didn’t know the full context. Spandau was the borough of Berlin where all their small firearms were constructed, from handguns to light machine guns. In the First World War, the phenomenon of soldiers, bodies freshly wracked by machine gun fire, writhing to their deaths while agonisingly propped up by barbed wire, was given the truly grisly nickname of “the Spandau Ballet”.
The new name was everything they were looking for. Edgy, ear-catching and European. The band adopted the name and first used it when playing at the Blitz’s Christmas party in December 1979. Thus, one of the most lightweight, accessible acts in British pop adopted a name more suited to a hardcore punk band. Funny old world, right?
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