GARY KEMP RECEIVES SPECIAL AWARD FOR 5 MILLION PLAYS OF 'TRUE' ON AMERICAN RADIO

GARY KEMP RECEIVES SPECIAL AWARD FOR 5 MILLION PLAYS OF ‘TRUE’ ON AMERICAN RADIO

Gary Kemp, Spandau Ballet’s songwriter and Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets guitarist and singer yesterday received a special ‘Million Air’ award for 5 Million plays of ‘True’ on American radio.

The BMI yesterday celebrated and paid tribute to the top UK songwriters and composers. As part of this virtual awards ceremony, special Million-Air Awards were presented to recognise iconic songs that have reached a million or more broadcast performances in the USA by UK and European songwriters and publishers.

Receiving the award for five million plays of ‘True’ Spandau Ballet songwriter and Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets singer & guitarist Gary Kemp commented “I wrote True when I was 22 years old, I never thought I would be standing here nearly forty years later. We’re living in a time when we see a billion YouTube views, but nothing is quite like a DJ putting your record on, on a radio”.

Watch Gary’s acceptance speech below:

Spandau Ballet was one of the biggest bands of the eighties. Comprising of Gary Kemp alongside his brother Martin, vocalist Tony Hadley, Steve Norman on the sax and John Keeble on the drums.

The band got it’s name after journalist and DJ Robert Elms, a friend of the band, saw the phrase ‘Spandau Ballet’ scrawled on the wall of a lavatory in a nightclub in Berlin. It was a slang term used in the First World War by Allied war troops, referring to the twitching of corpses when hit by the German Spandau machine gun. Their music is just as eccentric and unique, so the name, though negative, was appropriate in that sense.

Spandau Ballet have enjoyed five top ten studio albums as well as nine tp ten singles including the aforementioned ‘True’ as well as ‘Through the Barricade’ and ‘Gold’.