Journeys to Glory is the debut studio album by the English synth-pop band Spandau Ballet, released on 6 March 1981 by Chrysalis Records. All of the songs on the album were produced by Richard James Burgess and written by band guitarist Gary Kemp to appeal to the patrons of a weekly Tuesday night club the band started attending called the Blitz, where they were accustomed to hearing "white European dance music". Their performances at the Blitz and other exclusive venues attracted the attention of record labels eager to sign them, and one of the songs they had been performing, "To Cut a Long Story Short", gained popularity through a recording session made at BBC Radio 1.
The high demand for their music instigated the commencement of recording the album and the release of "To Cut a Long Story Short" as their first single. The song reached number 5 on the UK Singles Chart, and two subsequent hits, "The Freeze" and "Muscle Bound", peaked at 17 and 10, respectively. A music video was made to promote each of the three songs, whose success warranted appearances on the British music chart television programme Top of the Pops. The album got as high as number 5 on the UK album chart and received Gold certification from the British Phonographic Industry for shipment of 100,000 units.
The influence of David Bowie on Journeys to Glory has been discussed by Kemp as well as critics of the album, who gave it mixed reviews upon its release and years later. After their composer attempted to shift to a more American style of funk with songs like "Glow" and the first single for their next album, "Chant No. 1 (I Don't Need This Pressure On)", he remembered that the songs from Journeys to Glory had been rehearsed at concerts before they were signed to a label and had received the approval of their original fanbase. When some of the new songs for the second album did not chart as well, the band recovered by remixing a fourth single as a more pop-flavoured tune and lost the interest of the hipsters that Spandau Ballet had initially courted with the songs that were recorded for their debut. Kemp then felt freed from trying to please that crowd and began writing mainstream pop songs that were the band's biggest hits.
Background and development While still performing as the Gentry, Spandau Ballet recognized that a new London club scene was taking root at a weekly Tuesday night gathering called the Blitz and decided to focus on playing what they had become used to hearing there,: Every seminal moment in British youth culture had had a band or artist that represented it: skiffle – Lonnie Donegan… punk – the Sex Pistols. We knew, even then, that Blitz and all it entailed and encouraged was going to be an important chapter in the story of London youth and their street-found fashions; and so, in a basement studio on Islington's Holloway Road, the Angel boys were busily trying to create a band who'd embody this latest twist in the tale. what their guitarist/songwriter Gary Kemp called "white European disco music". He was committed to their new genre: "All fancy rock patterns had to go…, we'd discussed it at the club: these new songs would be to a disco beat; there would be a [discarding] of all the old power pop stuff; our future sound had to be like the one we heard every Tuesday night. If we were to attempt to be the band that represented this new cult, then we had to be absolutely ready." The band bought Kemp a Yamaha CS10 synthesiser, and he came up with what would eventually be their first hit, "To Cut a Long Story Short", which assured them that they were ready to debut with their new sound. After a preview at a rehearsal studio in November 1979 where the Gentry were renamed Spandau Ballet, the band was invited to perform at the Blitz Christmas party, but their manager Steve Dagger realized after a second Blitz show in January 1980 that they needed to play a variety of venues to generate more interest.
Steve Woolley was a friend of Dagger's who managed the Scala Cinema in Fitzrovia and was eager to be of service to this "new movement", so the band performed there on 3 March 1980. Dagger then arranged for a couple of write-ups in London newspapers and a review in the New Musical Express and soon thereafter received a phone call from London Weekend Television asking to do a documentary about the band that would include filming them in concert. Dagger decided that the band would return to the Scala for another concert that they could film, and several record companies were interested in signing Spandau Ballet after it aired but wanted a better sense of their music through either demos or rehearsals or a live performance before they would be willing to meet the band's long list of demands.
Dagger arranged a concert on HMS Belfast on 26 July that gave the labels another opportunity to see Spandau Ballet perform live, but the A&R executive for Arista Records could not attend and offered to pay for the recording of a demo of some of their songs. The band accepted his offer and recorded "To Cut a Long Story Short", "The Freeze", "Confused" and "Reformation" on 31 August. BBC Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell was interested in having recordings to play on his show after having seen them in concert, so the band recorded a studio session of four songs for him. The version of "To Cut a Long Story Short" from that set was put on the playlist for the station, and the listening audience was interested in buying it. Kemp admitted that "the song started to appear as though it were a single before we even had a record label."
On the 40th anniversary of the release of "To Cut a Long Story Short", Spandau Ballet producer Richard James Burgess recalled, "Labels were at a fever pitch trying to sign the group." Burgess, co-founding member of Landscape, had been impressed when he saw Spandau Ballet perform at the Blitz. Kemp showed interest in Landscape's current album that he mentioned he was working on and took advantage of the opportunity to listen to some rough recordings from the project. Burgess received a call from Dagger a couple of days later asking if he wanted to be their producer. He was "ecstatic" that the band chose him, but because he had little production experience, he thought the label they would be signing with would want a big-name producer instead. Years later, appreciating that he was kept on, he said, "I was over the moon because it was obviously a great opportunity for me."
Songs Before the Gentry members began attending the Blitz in February 1979, their hangout was a similar Soho club called Billy's that they first went to in the autumn of 1978. According to Spandau Ballet's guitarist/saxophonist, Steve Norman, "The oldest song on the album, 'Confused', is the only song to survive from the period before we first went to Billy's." He described how it created a meaningful point of entry for them into the club scene: "It's the song that, when we first got to Billy's, would make you think we belonged there." Their guitarist, Martin Kemp, admitted that "Confused" was the track from the album that meant the most to him because it dates back to the period when the band was still called the Makers and he was just a roadie for them. During a two-week stint in the summer of 1980 at a club in Saint-Tropez, the band performed "Confused" along with "Age of Blows", an instrumental that Norman felt was one of the weaker cuts on the album and theorizes "was written as an excuse to test out the Yamaha CS10 and see what it could do." Norman was certain that Kemp was influenced by Bowie's "Warszawa" in writing "Age of Blows" and also hears some Bowie in "Mandolin", which he thinks is the song from the album that has aged the most. He also felt "Toys" needed to be the last song on the album since it is the only one that remotely resembles a ballad and explained, "We were never a band to front-load our albums and say, 'All the singles have to be at the start.' It's the same with our concerts not starting with the biggest hits. The shows – and our albums, right from the start – are about energy; having peaks and troughs."
To Cut a Long Story Short In "To Cut a Long Story Short" the singer begins providing details regarding certain undesirable circumstances but concludes with, "To cut a long story short, I lost my mind". On BBC Radio 4's Mastertapes series in 2013, Kemp said, "The lyrics to those kind of songs, I mean, I suppose they owed something to Bowie's famous cut-ups, you know, slightly esoteric, this grand landscape that we're all living on. That was the kind of lyric, very early '80s lyric about a kind of heroic place that we all wanted to put ourselves." In his autobiography I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau, he described the song as "garage-band stuff – short, to the point, and very English. With its portentous refrain of 'We are beautiful and clean and so very, very young', it seemed the perfect manifesto – or at least lyrical sound-bite – for the Blitz generation." Hadley recognized "To Cut a Long Story Short" as one of his favourite Spandau songs, and Norman told Classic Pop magazine, "If I had to pick two Spandau songs as my absolute favourites, it'd be 'Story' and 'Chant No. 1'. They're just undeniable, unstoppable." He said that "Story" reflected "our certainty about ourselves at that time" and explained that the success they had with it "wasn't just about the song or even us as a band. It was about that whole [Blitz Kids] movement…. There's something about the arrogance of youth in 'Story': you can hear that our attitude is 'We're here now, and if you don't like it, get out of the way'".
The Freeze Puzzled by the opening line of "The Freeze", "Blue sing la lune, sing lagoon", former Evening Standard and music magazine journalist David Johnson did not see the song as an obvious choice for a single but pointed out that it "was not chosen for singability but for its New Romantic clubbing credibility. In 1981 the pathfinding band were consolidating the new approach they had styled—White European Dance Music—led on 'The Freeze' by Gary Kemp's two-fingered synth arpeggios, plus enough percussive kick-drum snaps underpinned with bassline rhythms to fill dancefloors." In the July 2021 issue of Classic Pop magazine, Norman pointed out that his guitar work on the song filled in where there were no lyrics for the chorus and said, "'The Freeze' is such an arrogant song that it didn't really need a chorus, and I like that about it. It's from the same camp as 'To Cut a Long Story Short', of our certainty about ourselves at that time. It's another of those songs you can only write when you've suddenly found a tribe of like-minded, disillusioned teenagers."
Muscle Bound In a May 1982 interview with New Sounds New Styles magazine, Kemp was asked about working with Graham Smith on the cover art for Journeys to Glory and commented, "We enjoy playing with imagery, but at that time everyone was taking us far too seriously." To give an example of a lighter moment from the album, he said, "'Muscle Bound' was quite tongue-in-cheek," and explained, "I've always liked folk music since I was really young, and 'Muscle Bound' was like a folk song with quite a funny lyric." He "didn't think that a folk song of that kind" had ever reached the pop charts in the UK and described it as "an experiment". In his autobiography he called it "a unique blend of constructivist propaganda, Russian folk music and slow-jive disco (pompous was fashionable then), all inspired by a typically Blitz-dreamt European nostalgia."
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