True is the third studio album by the English new wave band Spandau Ballet, released on 4 March 1983 by Chrysalis Records. The band's songwriter/guitarist Gary Kemp realised after the release of their second album that the nightclub audience they initially wanted to attract had lost interest in them in part because of the band's transition from dance music to pop. He no longer felt obligated to keep writing music for them and shifted his focus to soul and R&B influences such as Marvin Gaye and Al Green for this album. Kemp thought that bandmate Steve Norman's newfound interest in the saxophone would be well-suited to the sound he was going for, as would the decision to record most of the album at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas.
After an unsuccessful attempt to begin work on the album with producer Trevor Horn, the band tested out their working relationship with Tony Swain and Steve Jolley while recording its first single, "Lifeline", and chose to produce the album alongside them. "Lifeline" was a top ten hit on the UK Singles Chart, and its follow-up, "Communication", also did well. The album became available as the second single climbed the charts, and the overwhelming response to the title track dictated its release as the third single from the album, leading it to four weeks as the most popular song in the UK. It also became their first song to appear on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US, where it peaked at number four. A fourth single, "Gold", reached number two in the UK but only got as high as 29 in the US, which Kemp attributed to internal conflicts at their record label that took time away from promoting the band.
On the album charts, True reached number one in the UK and number 19 in the US while also having success in numerous other countries. It achieved platinum certification for sales of 300,000 units in the UK less than three months after its release. Most critics thought the album was enjoyable, but there were those who found something or much to dislike. The choice of suits for the album photos and "True" music video was thought to have misled US audiences by presenting them as too clean cut to have much else to offer other than soul ballads like the title song.
Background, development and recording
When Spandau Ballet first formed, their guitarist/songwriter Gary Kemp had been aware of how previous generations of Britain's youth culture had bands representing them, such as the Mods having the Who and the Small Faces. He wanted people to associate Spandau with the fashion-wise clientele of a popular Tuesday night London gathering called the Blitz, and had written songs that sounded like what was played there, what he described as "white European dance music".
Their first album, Journeys to Glory, was a successful culmination of this style of material that Kemp had written at his own pace and that had been tested in front of the Blitz crowd over an extended period of time, but coming up with songs for their second effort, Diamond, was more challenging. Although following a renewed interest in funk gave them a number 3 UK hit with its first single, "Chant No. 1 (I Don't Need This Pressure On)", the writer's block Kemp suffered as it climbed the UK Singles Chart resulted in his mimicking its use of horns and group vocals for the next single, "Paint Me Down", which had a number 30 showing in the UK, the lowest peak position there of any of their singles to date. An experiment with the eastern European sound from American film scores for the third single, "She Loved Like Diamond", fared even worse just as Diamond was about to be released; that inspired the idea to take another song from the album, "Instinction", and hire a new producer to remix it in the hope that it would perform better. Kemp described that track as being the closest thing to a pop song that Spandau Ballet had yet recorded. The band hired Buggles founder Trevor Horn to do the new arrangement of the song, which reached number ten in the UK and made Kemp realise that the clubgoers they had initially catered to were no longer interested in their music. He was now able to write songs without concern for their danceability or adherence to current tastes. In his autobiography I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau, he explained, "The freedom of not having to write just for Soho meant I could dive into that great big reservoir of pop, deep with melody and soul, and hopefully surface with the pearls I wanted."
Because of the rebound the band experienced with Horn's reworking of "Instinction", the plan was to have him produce the next album. He was especially impressed with one of Kemp's recent compositions, "Pleasure", and wanted to start working with the band on it immediately. The rehearsal went well, and they began recording it at AIR Studios with the mindset that it would be the first single from the new album, which was initially called The Pleasure Project. On the first day of recording, however, Horn had drummer John Keeble redo the track repeatedly over the course of the ten-hour day to try to get it perfect and called Kemp that evening to offer to programme the drums and suggest that they get a new drummer. Kemp was stunned by the suggestion: "I heard myself saying that programming the drums would not just be psychologically wrong for our team spirit, but it would also undermine John as a player." He refused Horn, who decided not to continue working with them. Later in 1982 Kemp told Smash Hits magazine, "We couldn't have worked with Trevor because he was too overpowering, too dogmatic."
The band's manager, Steve Dagger, suggested producers Tony Swain and Steve Jolley, who recently had success with Bananarama, and Kemp performed some of the songs he had just written for the duo with the plan of having them produce the first single from the new album to see if they had a good working relationship with the band. While Swain was leaning toward "Communication" as the best choice for their next hit song, Jolley insisted that they work on the "up-tempo, more obvious pop sing-along" "Lifeline". The band was credited alongside Jolley and Swain as producers of "Lifeline" and would be on the album as well.
"Lifeline" was recorded at Red Bus Studios in Paddington as Spandau Ballet got a feel for their new producers, but they worked on the rest of the album at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas because of the soul music that had been recorded there and because Kemp felt that the tropical surroundings would help give the music the feeling he was trying to achieve. The band rehearsed before they travelled there, and lead singer Tony Hadley recorded his vocals at Red Bus upon their return.
Songs
In a Mastertapes interview with John Wilson in 2013, Kemp contrasted the anti-establishment, anticommercial stance of the punk scene with the plan that Spandau Ballet initially had of having similar attitudes in their dress and style of music but selling enough records to make the pop charts at the same time. He felt that their appearances on the British music chart television programme Top of the Pops contributed to their assimilation into a more mainstream sound and explained that, because of his realisation that their music no longer interested the nightclub crowd after the release of "Instinction", "There was a sense of, 'We have to move on from here.'" He told Wilson how their desire to expand to a broader audience inspired the "True" lyric "I bought a ticket to the world". In 2012 he told The Guardian, "We were leaving the London club scene and starting to sell records around the world, so the next album really needed to be pop."
In 1981 the band recorded "Chant No. 1" with the British jazz-funk group Beggar and Co acting as their horn section, and Steve Norman, who had been the band's guitarist and percussionist on its first two albums, subsequently felt inspired to take up the saxophone. Kemp recalled he and Norman enjoying hearing the instrument as teenagers on songs by Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder as well as the hit "Shame" by Evelyn "Champagne" King. Kemp decided that their foray into pop on the new album would use the saxophone in the same vein as the soul music they enjoyed growing up. Once he found this new direction for their music, he suddenly had the urge to write several songs. In an early 1983 interview with Record Mirror magazine, he confessed feeling that the songs for this album were the best that he had ever written and explained that he went back to writing what sounded good with just an acoustic guitar. He discussed the difficulty of trying to focus on more personal subjects without sounding derivative and how he had overcome his fear of being honest in his music. He said, "I honestly wanted to make an album that would cross all ages and become timeless. I said to Tony Swain, 'I like Daryl Hall and John Oates, and I want the album to sound as smooth as that but with a British edge to it.' I think it's got that."
"True" In 1981, Kemp met Altered Images lead singer Clare Grogan and, despite already having a girlfriend, found himself infatuated with her because of their common interests. By the time he started writing songs for the album, he was primarily listening to music by Marvin Gaye and Al Green and wanted to write a blue-eyed soul version of their style of music that was based on his own experience. Grogan had given him a copy of the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov as a gift, so he incorporated a couple of phrases he had underlined while reading it into the lyrics – "pill on my tongue" and "seaside limbs", which became "seaside arms" – in order to convey his feelings in a way that she would recognise. He told Wilson he was still getting questioned about the meaning of "seaside arms" or criticised for his paraphrasing of the expression.
"Gold" Once Kemp decided to start writing pop songs, the first idea he chose to explore was paying homage to film scores as he had attempted on "She Loved Like Diamond", only this time focusing specifically on John Barry and his work on the James Bond series. The title of the song, "Gold", was inspired by Shirley Bassey's 1964 hit Bond theme "Goldfinger". Because he and his brother, Martin, who was the bassist for the band, were still living with their parents as he began writing songs for the album, it was convenient to have his brother listen to what he had just written and play it with him on his bass to see if it sounded like what he intended, and this song was one Martin loved.
Cover art Kemp was competing for Grogan's attention with Altered Images cover artist David Band and asked him to work with Spandau Ballet on the design for the new album. Because they were both seeing their careers take off during their attempts to court Grogan, they went camping together a few times in the English Lake District as a way of escaping their success. Kemp recalled, "We first started to devise a cover together for the True album when we were up in the mountains, in one of the pubs one evening. He was drawing in his sketchbook and a dove appeared, this little dove." Band later added alongside it the outline of a man's head with a brimmed hat, which the band loved; a variation was used for the sleeve of the "True" single. His work was described as "a marker for the look of the time, a jazz-influenced style that could also be seen in an exaggerated fashion in the New Romantic look." Kemp credits him with having "the skill of coming up with simple, figurative graphics that would set a visual tone for the decade." In 2012 he told The Herald:
Release and commercial performance