My Summer Reading: Musician Gary Kemp

Next in theartsdesk’s series of recommended summer reads is musician Gary Kemp, guitarist with Spandau Ballet, five working-class boys from north London who emerged from a surfeit of floppy fringes and pantaloons to become one of the most successful pop acts of the swaggering, vainglorious Eighties. Kemp wrote 23 singles for the band including massive hits such as "Gold", "True" and "Only When You Leave", which still crop up repeatedly on TV and film tracks.

However, this was not Kemp’s first foray into the spotlight. Aged 11 he appeared alongside Roy Dotrice in the film Hide and Seek (1971) and when Spandau Ballet split up in 1989, Kemp returned to acting with roles in the The Krays (1990), The Bodyguard (1992) and Killing Zoe (1994). In 2001 he made his West End stage debut in Art by Yasmina Reza and in 2005 he appeared in The Rubenstein Kiss at the Hampstead Theatre. He has also co-written a musical with Snoo Wilson, an adaptation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s The Bedbug, which was seen at the National Theatre as part of the 2004 Shell Connection season.

In 2009, Spandau Ballet reformed and went on its first world tour for 19 years. Kemp, a voracious reader, has also penned his autobiography, I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau.

I'm reading Girl, 20 by Kingsley Amis. Many reasons for picking it up: nostalgically enjoy indulging myself in 1970s London (I love London novels, be it Iris Murdoch or Patrick Hamilton), incredibly funny dialogue and detailed characterisation - and I'd promised myself another Kingsley Amis since reading the sublimely funny Lucky Jim.

[Excerpt from Girl, 20 by Kingsley Amis (Penguin Modern Classics)]

As you know, I had reservations about running a music column in the first place. People don’t go to concerts any more, they buy records. All part of the stay-at-home culture. We deal with them already. And the whole thing goes on here, anyway. Manchester. Birmingham. Once in a blue moon. You’ve heard me say this isn’t a London newspaper, it’s a national newspaper. Is he a Jew?

Harold said all this at this usual regular pace and level pitch, his small hands (joined on to small arms and by way of them to small shoulders) loose and palm upwards on his desk, the weak sunshine gleaming tranquilly on his nearly bald head. His style of discourse, with the mild strain it laid on his hearer’s attention and powers of recall, was as usual too. One item, indeed, had strained my lot to breaking-point. I had not known that he had had reservations about my having become, a few months previously, the paper’s music critic, or rather musical-events reporter. He had told me then that this innovation, dreamed up by him alone as the first blow in a campaign to raise cultural standards in journalism generally, had been fought through by him alone in the teeth of opposition from his proprietor, his features editor and perhaps the liftman. Facing him now in his large, modern, shabby office, I answered his question truthfully.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Do we need to advertise these bastards? What about the do where there was that dust-up, you know, that Bolivian song-and-dance lot last Friday? People read about the hooligans busting in and being arrested and so on, but what about the actual stuff? A bit less esoteric than Telemann and Prokofiev and who’s this other chap?”

“There was Beethoven too. I heard the Bolivians rehearsing, and I didn’t think they really – ”

“A critic ought to go easy with his superlatives.” Harold dropped his lustrous brown eyes to my copy that lay before him, and for a moment I thought he was reading it. “We didn’t put politics into art,” he went on very soon. “They did. You do realise, don’t you, that this chap’s only allowed abroad because he’s a loyal and trusted servant of that bloody awful regime? A walking advertisement for it?”

• Find Girl, 20 on Amazon

Unfortunately, having two young boys means that the idea of a relaxed summer read is far from my reality. Proust will have to wait until they've left home and I'm in one. Kill Your Friends by John Niven – an ex music-biz man – which came out a few years ago, is my aim. It's an insider’s view of the record industry at its nastiest and has come highly recommended. Apparently I may even recognise a few characters in there.

[From Kill Your Friends by John Niven (Vintage)]

Energised by a knuckle of coke as the driver pretends not to notice we pass a bottle of Maker’s Mark back and forth and talk random industry gossip: who’s going to win the Mercury? Beth Orton? The Chemical Brothers? Are Nude going to have it away with Ultrasound? Will Kylie’s new indie stuff work? Are the Prodigy going to sell records in America? Money. Will London have a hit with All Saints, this new girl band they’ve signed? If they do will it clear the pitch for Songbirds? (Unlikely. Remember – there is no bottom to this crap.) It looks like Ray Cooper at Virgin is singing this new band Catch, who are managed by Hall or Nothing. My head starts swimming, that last pill kicking in. “Martin Hall reckons the singer kid, Toby, is a star…” Darren says. “Yeah?” I say. Or maybe I just say, “Yeah.” I don’t know. I feel funny. Leamington craps on, he’s telling some story I already heard the night before, about something that happened at Tracy Bennett’s wedding the other week. (Subtext from Leamington: I went to Bennett’s wedding.) I nod and just stare through my Aviators – we are all wearing sunglasses – at the back of the driver’s head, at his cracked, seamy neck. I need to make some more money. It occurs to me – and the realisation is in no way an epiphany, it just dawns on me in the same way you might idly realise that you really prefer linguine to spaghetti – that, were I forced to choose between Leamington’s life and my own career success, then I would happily watch Leamington die. I am now experiencing auditory hallucinations. I can hear feedback and the beating of helicopter blades. Watch? I would kill him myself. And I quite like Leamington. “They sound like the fucking Police,” Darren says, talking about some band. The Police. Woodham. Fuck. Money. Waters. I think I am going to be sick. A helicopter chops right by my head. I flinch and whisper something.

“What?” Leamington says, turning.

“What?” I reply.

“Did you just say,” he lowers his glasses, “kill them all?”

• Find Kill Your Friends on Amazon

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst - I just have to wait for my wife to finish it. I loved The Line of Beauty. Hollinghurst’s writing is so striking and I often found myself re-reading parts because I was so moved by them. He manages this while still making the story exciting. One of our greatest living writers.

[From The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador)]

She’d been lying in the hammock reading poetry for over an hour. It wasn’t easy: she was thinking all the while about George coming back with Cecil, and she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was in a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face. Now the light was going, and the words began to hide amongst themselves on the page. She wanted to get a look at Cecil, to drink him in for a minute before he saw her, and was introduced, and asked her what she was reading. But he must have missed his train, or at least his connection: she saw him pacing the long platform at Harrow and Wealdstone, and rather regretting he’d come. Five minutes later, as the sunset sky turned pink above the rockery, it began to seem possible that something worse had happened. With sudden grave excitement she pictured the arrival of a telegram, and the news being passed round; imagined weeping pretty wildly; then saw herself describing the occasion to someone, many years later, though still without quite deciding what the news had been.

In the sitting-room the lamps were being lit, and through the open window she could hear her mother talking to Mrs Kalbeck, who had come to tea, and who tended to stay, having no one to get back for. The glow across the path made the garden suddenly lonelier. Daphne slipped out of the hammock, put on her shoes, and forgot about her books. She started towards the house, but something in the time of day held her, with its hint of a mystery she had so far overlooked: it drew her down the lawn, past the rockery, where the pond that reflected the trees in silhouette had grown as deep as the white sky. It was the long still moment when the hedges and borders turned dusty and vague, but anything she looked at closely, a rose, a begonia, a glossy laurel leaf, seemed to give itself back to the day with a secret throb of colour.

She heard a faint familiar sound, the knock of the broken gate against the post at the bottom of the garden; and then an unfamiliar voice, with an edge to it, and then George’s laugh. He must have brought Cecil the other way, through the Priory and the woods. Daphne ran up the narrow half-hidden steps in the rockery and from the top she could just make them out in the spinney below. She couldn’t really hear what they were saying, but she was disconcerted by Cecil’s voice; it seemed so quickly and decisively to take control of their garden and their house and the whole of the coming weekend. It was an excitable voice that seemed to say it didn’t care who heard it, but in its tone there was also something mocking and superior. She looked back at the house, the dark mass of the roof and the chimney-stacks against the sky, the lamp-lit windows under low eaves, and thought about Monday, and the life they would pick up again very readily after Cecil had gone.

• Find The Stranger’s Child on Amazon
• Find This Much I Know by Gary Kemp on Amazon