Readers Are Leaders Bookshop

I Know This Much – by Gary Kemp, Spandau Ballet’s prime mover – is simply the freshest, most exciting and best-written memoir to arrive for years.

Gary’s story begins in North London, where the Kemp family rented a home with no bathrooms and chickens in the yard. After a couple of failed attempts to kill his brother Martin, his parents gave him a guitar for Christmas.

From schoolyard battles between the Bowie Boys and the Prog Rockers to Mrs Kemp’s firm insistence on net curtains, from acting for the Children’s Film Foundation to manning a fruit and veg stall on Saturdays, Gary brilliantly evokes an upbringing full of love, creativity and optimism.

As the Thatcher years begin, Gary’s account of the outrageous London club scene centred around the Blitz and Billy’s is just sizzling. Out of this glamorous mayhem of kilt-wearing mascara’d peacocks would emerge Spandau Ballet – the band that would define the era, and hold high the victorious standard of the New Romantics.

Kate Copson, born in 1899, is the oldest patient on Ward 3C, Whetstone General Hospital. With her hundredth birthday approaching at the speed of an express train, Kate is engaged in a race against time with a difference: she wants her life to crash into the buffers before she has to listen to the Queen’s telemessage and a rousing chorus of “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow”, but not before she’s worked out which of her three sons is responsible for the murder of her fourth – or is it fifth? – husband, Graham Eldridge. Confined to bed after suffering a massive stroke, Kate is alert and rational. Although she retains limited power of movement, she feigns paralysis in order that she may, free of distractions, replay the mental video of her life and, she hopes, eliminate two of her sons from suspicion of murder.