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.

“If you have a dog, I must have a dog, If you have a rifle, I must have a rifle. If you have a club, I must have a club. This is equality.

If I take the wages of everyone here, individually it means nothing, but collectively all of the earning power or wages that you earned in one week would make me wealthy. And if I could collect it for a year, I’d be rich beyond dreams. Now, when you see this, and then you stop and consider the wages that were kept back from millions of black people, not for one year but for 310 years, you’ll see how his country got so rich so fast. And all that slave labor that was amassed in unpaid wages, is due to someone today, And you’re not giving us anything when we say that it’s time to collect.”

• Malcolm X