Story of the song: True by Spandau Ballet

From The Independent archive: Robert Webb hears how Gary Kemp’s love letter to a fellow pop star evolved into the band’s signature hit

Gary Kemp (second left) knew the song was special when the roadies started singing along (Alamy)

Gary Kemp had long desired to emulate the Motown greats. Sitting on the bed at his parents’ house in 1982, strumming his guitar, he hit on something that he figured might just fulfil that ambition. “Why do I find it hard to write the next line/ When I want the truth to be said,” he sang, commenting later that “it became a song about trying to write a love song to someone who didn’t know your true thoughts”.

A girl he had pinned his hopes on at the time was resisting his amorous advances – Clare Grogan, Altered Images’ frontwoman. “Clare played me Al Green and Marvin Gaye,” Kemp recalled in his appropriately titled 2009 autobiography, I Know This Much. “The music posted itself through my heart and I knew that I had to reply. But I found it hard – hard to be truthful. So far everything was unspoken.”

“The lyrics were delicately influenced by Nabakov’s Lolita, a book that she’d given me,” said Kemp. “We never realised the full potential of this song until we started to record it. Everybody, including the roadies, sang along to it. It was at that moment that I knew we had something special.”