Rate Your Music score: 3.55 out of 5!
Where do we start with these guys?
This is the most recent Hot 100 hit by this band from London. The Spandaus always seemed like a fair target for ridicule. They were best known for their big ballad "True." Lead singer Tony Hadley was seen on TV shows wearing a weird suit that looked like it had a giant necklace embedded in it.
They charted in their homeland for decades after their last American chart appearance. Here in the good ol' U.S. and A., people hardly ever talked about Spandau Ballet after 1984. Any mention of them after that had to be a relic.
By the time I was a high school sophomore, it had been years since the Spandaus were the big thing. That was the era of Poison and Bobby McFerrin. So I was surprised to find some Spandau-inspired criminal mischief in my literature textbook. This book included a play that had the memorable line, "Damnable cough!" I don't remember anything else about this script, and I never understood it anyway. But it was accompanied by a memorable photo. It was a black-and-white picture of a man in a suit with his mouth open in frustration.
Somebody had written next to the photo, "Tony Hadley." And let me tell you, he looked just like the Spandau Ballet frontman!
This shows that the book had to have been at least 5 years old. This was fine, as long as the information in it was still relevant - and if the school didn't blame me for the condition it was in. It had to have gone through at least 5 cycles of rough treatment. And it showed. The school kept making me pay for books damaged by others - and then not replacing them. That way, the school could use the book again the next year and make the next student pay for it too. You had to have been there. My school did shit like that.
The Tony Hadley comment wasn't the only damage like that in that book. The book also included a short story about an unruly youngster who carried away his dad's electric razor and shaved his own head completely bald. I've now figured out the story was titled "The Beginning Of Grief." The book included a drawing of the boy with a shaven head. Someone had written "chrome dome" right on his noggin!
I don't think it mattered in the end, because after I was forced to pay for this book that others had torn up, I'm pretty sure it became firewood for my Fourth of July bonfire.
In recent years, Tony has emerged as a bit of a right-wing curmudgeon. He has attended the Conservative Party's annual conference and has threatened to run for Parliament as he has spouted a number of reactionary grievances.
This might not be the last entry devoted to Spandau Ballet on this blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment