"To Cut a Long Story Short" is the debut single by the English new wave band Spandau Ballet, released on 31 October 1980, and later included on their 1981 debut album Journeys to Glory. The band began recording the song before they were signed to a record label because of the interest they had generated with a debut concert for patrons of the exclusive weekly London nightclub the Blitz as well as a Christmas party at that establishment. After having tried other popular genres, the band had been preparing to make their debut as performers of dance music and wanted the public to associate them with the young crowd who met at the Blitz every Tuesday. They needed their guitarist/songwriter, Gary Kemp, to come up with something that they could feel confident about presenting to the top tier of the club's regulars at their first performance.
By shaping their image around an exclusive club scene, Spandau Ballet piqued the interest of a television documentary filmmaker who then wanted to film the band in concert as part of presenting their story. A popular DJ attended the concert and requested that they record some of the songs for him to play on his show, and "To Cut a Long Story Short" became so popular that other shows on the station aired it as well. Several record labels were in touch with them after the documentary aired in July 1980, but the band had a long list of requirements that had to be met and had difficulty deciding which label would meet all their needs. The song had gained such popularity on that one station that the labels in the running all agreed that the one the band chose to sign with would pay for the session time needed to record it right away and start working on their first album.
The fact that they had little money to spend on the music video for "To Cut a Long Story Short" did not prevent the band from wearing historical military outfits. They kept the same look for their debut on the British music chart television programme Top of the Pops, emphasizing that their image was as much a part of their performance as their music. The single received mixed reviews at the time of its release, but when it got as high as number 5 on the UK Singles Chart, several other UK pop groups that were associated with nightclubs were signed to record labels and began charting in the US as part of the Second British Invasion as well as at home.
The record contract that Spandau Ballet signed with Chrysalis Records stipulated that covering the cost of remixing their songs for dance clubs would be included. The band was inspired by the practice of creating dub mixes and released both the 7- and 12-inch singles with such reinterpretations of the song on the B-side. The contract also gave control over all aspects of how their music was presented, which allowed them to get help from the creative regulars from the Blitz who specialized in such things as graphic design, hair and costumes. The tactics that put Spandau Ballet in the public eye with the song were more about recognizing the cultural shift that these young people represented than they were about just having a hit record.
Background Just as the Sex Pistols epitomized the punk era in British youth culture, the Gentry wanted to be the band to represent the Blitz Kids, the fashionable clientele who gathered every Tuesday for the weekly London nightclub the Blitz.: Every seminal moment in British youth culture had had a band or artist that represented it: skiffle – Lonnie Donegan… punk – the Sex Pistols. We knew, even then, that Blitz and all it entailed and encouraged was going to be an important chapter in the story of London youth and their street-found fashions; and so, in a basement studio on Islington's Holloway Road, the Angel boys were busily trying to create a band who'd embody this latest twist in the tale. The band worked on what their guitarist/songwriter Gary Kemp referred to as "white European disco music" and presented it to their manager, Steve Dagger,: we were there developing a sound for our new identity… We finished playing the four or five songs we had and faced Dagger. who explained that they needed to get ready for their debut quickly because of the growing competition to be the breakout artist amongst their peers.: his words were frantic with concern. "We have to get it out there quickly. This is gonna explode sooner than we think. I met someone the other night that told me he was the Steve Strange of Salisbury! And that fucking Gary Numan song, have you heard it?" "He can't even get into Blitz! Anyway," I said, "that's futurist bollocks, Steve, not what we're doing." "All I'm saying is we need to be ready soon." Band member Steve Norman, who started out as one of their guitarists, recalled, "Once Gary had the riff for 'To Cut a Long Story Short', it felt so right." Kemp concurred that the band was confident that they were ready to make their debut the first time they played the song in which the singer begins providing details regarding certain undesirable circumstances but concludes with, "To cut a long story short, I lost my mind". On BBC Radio 4's Mastertapes series in 2013, Kemp said, "The lyrics to those kind of songs, I mean, I suppose they owed something to Bowie's famous cut-ups, you know, slightly esoteric, this grand landscape that we're all living on. That was the kind of lyric, very early 80s lyric about a kind of heroic place that we all wanted to put ourselves." In his autobiography I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau, he described the song as "garage-band stuff – short, to the point, and very English. With its portentous refrain of 'We are [sic] beautiful and clean and so very, very young', it seemed the perfect manifesto – or at least lyrical sound-bite – for the Blitz generation."
The Gentry's first Blitz-style concert was a private show for a small group of people: If this was to work, then we needed the approval of the cognoscenti, so a private show was how Dagger saw our reveal. We needed to give the elite the privilege of seeing it first; a small crowd but the most important as far as we were concerned, and the direction of their thumbs would determine our future. from the club: We… printed up some passes that we handed out at the club to our chosen few. in November 1979, and that resulted in the selection of the new band name, Spandau Ballet, and an invitation to perform at the Blitz Christmas party: But never knowingly outdone, Steve Strange stood forward. "I'm gonna be doing a Blitz Christmas party in a few weeks. I'd love you to play at it." on 5 December. The media became interested,: Hunted by the media as good copy, we were detested by the left and right alike for elitism which resulted in photographers and film crews gathering outside the club for Blitz night every Tuesday,: By now, packs of photographers and film crews hovered every Tuesday outside our spiritual home of the Blitz but the band saw the music press as ignorant: As far as we were concerned, the music press… was run by embittered, middle-class, white college-rockers who'd hated punk when it first arrived and then bandwagon-jumped a little too late. The only black music that they deigned to patronize was reggae; but soul, the real black music of America, and its cousin of the night, disco, were shunned for being too aspirational and not political enough. and was not interested in speaking to them.: In any case, these writers couldn't dance and would never have understood our groove, so we turned it into a trench and prepared ourselves for an advance…. Instead of begging A&R men and journalists to come down, we did the opposite and were perversely thrilled by them not being allowed in. Kemp described the vibe that was the result of the band's exclusivity: "No demo tapes were sent out, and although our name was spreading quickly around town and beyond, very few people knew what we sounded like. It made them want to hear us even more." Dagger, however, felt they needed more media coverage to keep their momentum going and arranged profiles of the band in two London newspapers and a review of one of their concerts in the New Musical Express. When the producer of a Sex Pistols documentary for television was interested in filming Spandau Ballet in concert for such a programme,: "Janet Street-Porter wants to do a documentary about us…. She produced that Pistols documentary on telly. She's doing a new series called 20th Century Box. I think it's similar, and they wanna do one on us, the whole thing. They wanna film a gig." the band seized the opportunity and performed on 13 May 1980 in front of television cameras and an audience that included journalists and record company executives. The documentary aired on 13 July, and several major labels were in touch within days.
Recordings In addition to meeting with several different labels to begin to negotiate a contract, the band also scheduled a public performance on HMS Belfast on the River Thames. While several labels were represented in the crowd, the A&R executive for Arista Records was unable to attend and offered to pay for the recording of a demo of some of their songs, so on 31 August the band recorded "To Cut a Long Story Short", "The Freeze", "Confused" and "Reformation". "To Cut a Long Story Short" was also one of the four songs recorded at a studio session for BBC Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell to play regularly on his show because he enjoyed attending their documentary concert, and it also happened to be the one he played most often.: He loved what he saw and asked us to do a four-song studio session for him that he could play during his show…. The resulting tracks were highly potent, and the ever-ebullient Peter Powell played them endlessly, although one more than any: "To Cut a Long Story Short". Other Radio 1 shows also aired the session recording of the song, and their listeners were eager to get a copy of it. Kemp admitted that "the song started to appear as though it were a single before we even had a record label."
On the fortieth anniversary of the song's release, Spandau Ballet producer Richard James Burgess recalled, "Labels were at a fever pitch trying to sign the group." Burgess, co-founding member of Landscape, had been impressed when he saw Spandau Ballet perform at the Blitz. Kemp showed interest in Landscape's current album that he mentioned he was working on and took advantage of the opportunity to listen to some rough recordings from the project. Burgess received a call from Dagger a couple of days later asking if he wanted to be their producer. He was "ecstatic" that the band chose him, but because he had little production experience, he thought the label they would be signing with would want a big-name producer instead. Years later, appreciating that he was kept on, he said, "I was over the moon because it was obviously a great opportunity for me."
Since the song seemed destined for success, Dagger and the band chose a release date of 31 October for the single and started to record it as well as their first album, and the labels competing to sign the band all agreed that the chosen one would pay for their studio time. Looking back, Burgess wrote, "I have never seen that happen before or since." The group had recorded some of "To Cut A Long Story Short" by 10 October when they signed with Chrysalis Records, and they skipped celebrating the event afterward and went straight back to the studio to continue their work. The managing director of Chrysalis UK felt the song would be a success based solely on what they had completed that evening when Dagger took him to the studio. Upon revisiting the recordings of the song in 2020, Norman was reminded of the "minor annoyances" left in the recording, "such as the odd volume levels which I felt required tweaking but weren’t done as we ran out of studio time. And my slightly out of tune guitar wouldn’t get past anybody these days, so accustomed are our ears now to pitch correction software."