Gary Kemp never really left the stage, he just wandered into a different wing of it. The Spandau Ballet guitarist and songwriter has spent the past few years moonlighting with Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets, playing early Pink Floyd deep cuts to crowds of psychedelia nerds. That gig, he says, is what snapped him out of creative limbo. “It liberated me as a musician,” he told me. “I get to play more guitar, sing lead, and I stopped writing for someone else.”
That sense of liberation runs all through his new solo record In Solo, his first in decades. It’s reflective without self-pity, nostalgic without embalming itself. “This was a guy who’s 60 years of age,” Kemp said, “and he’s not as strong as he used to be. He kind of misses the guy he was—but he’s wondering if people can appreciate who he is now.” The record hums with that tension: vulnerability wrapped in melody, middle-age restlessness masked by studio precision.
“Waiting for the Band,” one of the standouts, could be the soundtrack to every teenager who ever pressed against the barricade in eyeliner and borrowed confidence. “It’s about me as a kid, being a fan,” Kemp said. “Dressing up, going to concerts, being uplifted.” The song swells into something cinematic halfway through, its tension breaking open with choirs and saxophones, as if David Bowie himself were stepping back onto the Hammersmith stage. And in a way, he does. Kemp weaves in snippets of vintage interviews with ecstatic kids outside a 1978 Bowie gig—voices bubbling up “like ghosts,” as he put it.
The musical palette of In Solo is a scrapbook of everything that made him want to do this in the first place: 10cc’s gear-shifting songcraft, Wings’ melodic ambition, the glimmer of glam. “I wanted to walk myself into the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973 and see the band,” he said. “Then they’re blown away like ghosts.” He laughs at the idea that it sounds like a Pink Floyd homage—“because of the talking bits,” he admits—but he doesn’t mind the comparison. “I am a melting pot,” he shrugged. “I can only make music that’s true to me.”
For a record soaked in 70s warmth, it never feels like cosplay. Kemp attributes that to age, not aesthetic. “I’ve had enough experiences in my life, good and bad, that I can incorporate them into my songwriting,” he said. “I try not to make anything up anymore.” Even the songs that sound fictional—like “A Rumour of You,” about an almost-relationship that may or may not exist—spring from real emotions. “I take an idea and push it somewhere,” he said. “Leave the listener wondering, does this guy even know her, or is he obsessed with someone he’s never met?”
There’s something charming about hearing the man who once helped soundtrack the excess of the ’80s now writing about fragility and grace. Kemp is acutely aware of time passing, but he’s not mournful—more like curious about who’s left after the applause fades. “I wanted to make something that sounds like me,” he said, “and maybe sounds like the music that made me who I am.”
He succeeded. In Solo feels like the diary of a man who’s been both idol and fan, ego and ghost—still waiting for the band, but content to realize he’s been onstage all along.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
