Spandau Ballet – True
Spandau Ballet’s most famous song is a love letter to a woman who never returned the feeling — stuffed with coded references to a Nabokov novel she’d given him, so that only she would understand.
You know this much is true: the biggest hit of Spandau Ballet’s career is a song about not being able to say what you feel. True — that silky, saxophone-drenched ballad that turned a group of London New Romantics into international stars — was written by guitarist Gary Kemp as a love song to someone who didn’t love him back. And to reach her, he hid private messages in the lyrics that only she was ever meant to decode.
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The object of the song was Clare Grogan, the lead singer of the Scottish band Altered Images and star of the film Gregory’s Girl. Kemp, then 22 and still living with his parents in Islington, had met her and become quietly infatuated, despite already having a girlfriend; the two carried on a platonic friendship, and he once traveled to Scotland just to have tea with her. Unable to declare himself directly, he poured it into a song. Grogan had given him a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Kemp underlined phrases from it — “pill on my tongue” and “seaside limbs,” which he tweaked to “seaside arms” — and threaded them into the lyric as coded signals she alone would recognize. As he later admitted, True became “a song about trying to write a love song to someone who didn’t know your true thoughts.”
A blue-eyed soul record built on hidden tributes
Kemp wasn’t only hiding messages to Grogan; the whole song was a tribute to the music he was obsessed with. By 1982 he had turned away from Spandau Ballet’s earlier synth-and-dance sound and immersed himself in American soul — Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Smokey Robinson. He set out to write, in his words, a “blue-eyed soul” record. The famous line “listening to Marvin all night long” is a direct salute to Gaye, and Kemp has said name-checking him was a defiant statement aligning the band with London’s soul-boy culture against the rock press that dismissed soul as shallow. The chorus took inspiration from the opening of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” Recorded largely at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, the track was built around Steve Norman’s languid saxophone solo — actually a composite of two takes — that became the song’s signature and helped define the sound of 1980s romance.
Even the song’s most quoted moment has a hidden source. That wordless “huh, huh, huh, hu-uh, huh” hook — the part everyone remembers — came from the Beatles. Kemp had watched the Let It Be documentary on television in 1982, and John Lennon’s “I-hi-hi” phrasing at the start of “Dig a Pony” lodged in his head, resurfacing as those melodic sighs. It’s a fitting touch for a song about the failure of words: its most memorable passage has none. There’s one more quiet surprise in the credits, too — for all that the classic Spandau lineup features Gary’s brother Martin Kemp on bass, Martin didn’t actually play on True. A bass synthesizer was used on the recording instead.
The song that conquered America
Released as a single in April 1983, True went straight to No. 1 on the UK chart and stayed there for four weeks — and it remains, remarkably, the only British No. 1 single Spandau Ballet ever had. But its real significance was across the Atlantic. The song climbed to No. 4 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and topped the Adult Contemporary chart, becoming the band’s American breakthrough and part of the Second British Invasion of the 1980s. It also hit No. 1 in Canada and Ireland. The record was certified Gold in Britain within weeks and eventually Platinum, and by 2011 it had earned a BMI award for more than four million US radio plays — a figure later revised upward past five million.
Its afterlife has been staggering. True has been sampled and interpolated across generations — most famously in PM Dawn’s 1991 hit “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” and later by Nelly and Lloyd, while its piano figure surfaces in the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way.” It has soundtracked films from Sixteen Candles to The Wedding Singer to 50 First Dates, been covered by everyone from Paul Anka to Lazlo Bane, and become a permanent fixture of wedding playlists and slow dances worldwide. Poignantly, Kemp’s tribute to Marvin Gaye was recorded roughly a year before Gaye was shot and killed by his father in April 1984. What began as one shy young man’s coded confession to a woman who didn’t love him back became one of the most enduring love songs of its era — proof that sometimes the truest thing you can say is the thing you can’t quite put into words.
