"True" is a song by the English new wave band Spandau Ballet, released in April 1983 as the title track and third single from their third studio album. It was written by the band's lead guitarist and principal songwriter Gary Kemp to express his feelings for Altered Images lead singer Clare Grogan. Kemp was influenced musically by Marvin Gaye and Al Green songs he was listening to at the time, and lyrically by Green and the Beatles. "True" reached number one on the UK singles chart in April 1983 and made the top 10 in several other countries, including the US, where it became their first song to reach the Billboard Hot 100.
Kemp wanted to shift the sound of Spandau Ballet into soul and incorporated band member Steve Norman's newfound interest in the saxophone into his writing; the band also updated its look to include wearing suits for the song's music video and tour. "True" was recorded with most of the other tracks from the album at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. The True album was released as its second single, "Communication", was climbing the UK Singles Chart. DJs were so enthusiastic about playing the title song that the band knew it would be their next single.
The song has since become the band's signature hit. It has been covered by Paul Anka in a swing style, and used in films such as Sixteen Candles and 50 First Dates, as well as TV series such as Modern Family. Other artists have sampled it in their own hits, including P.M. Dawn, who went to number one in the US with "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" in 1991.
Background and writing
In 1981, Spandau Ballet guitarist/songwriter Gary Kemp met Altered Images lead singer Clare Grogan and felt an "instant connection" in part due to their conversations about writers. For his birthday that year, she gave him a copy of the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, whom they had discussed. He intended the relationship to be platonic since he already had a girlfriend, but he was also competing for her attention with two other men: actor John Gordon Sinclair, who starred with her in Gregory's Girl, and artist David Band, who had designed cover art for Altered Images; he would later do so for Spandau Ballet with the single "Communication".
Spandau Ballet's first album, Journeys to Glory, was released in 1981. It reflected their desire to represent the clientele of the trendy London nightclub the Blitz: 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. with its focus on what Kemp called "white European disco music". Their second album, Diamond, had a successful stab at funk with its lead single, "Chant No. 1 (I Don't Need This Pressure On)", but otherwise disappointed critics with its more experimental material. The poor chart performance of its next two singles, "Paint Me Down" and "She Loved Like Diamond", resulted in a remix of its more pop-sounding track "Instinction", which became a number 10 hit on the UK Singles Chart in spring 1982. That rebound brought a stark realisation for Kemp: the nightclub crowd Spandau Ballet originally catered to was no longer interested in them.
Kemp told John Wilson in a Mastertapes interview in 2013 that, because they were unable to keep the audience they initially attracted, "[t]here was a sense of, '[w]e have to move on from here,'" a desire to expand to a broader audience. This later inspired the "True" lyric "I bought a ticket to the world". He suddenly felt free to compose pop music without concern for its danceability, which allowed him to focus more on the melody. He told Creem magazine in 1984, "For the first time, I was trying to write songs that were emotional release for me—me just writing about myself and the way I felt."
Kemp was primarily listening to soul artists Marvin Gaye and Al Green as he developed songs for the band's next album. His love of their music factored heavily into writing the title track, even to the point of paying tribute to Gaye on a first-name basis:
Kemp wanted to write a blue-eyed soul version of what Gaye and Green performed, something "with that kind of vulnerability and atmosphere of uncertainty", with music like Green's "Let's Stay Together" and lyrics from his own experience, particularly with regard to his feelings for Grogan. Kemp began the music for what became "True" in mid-1982 after watching the 1970 Beatles documentary Let It Be on television; afterwards the song "Dig a Pony" stuck in his head. In a 2017 interview with The Wall Street Journal, he described how the song opens: "John Lennon sings 'I, hi-hi, hi-hi, I dig a pony.' I loved how he took that one word—'I'—and turned it into a snaking melody." Kemp took to his Eko acoustic guitar that evening wanting to avoid the dance rhythms he was used to writing and instead structured a melody around the word "I" the way Lennon had. He reworked the opening line from Green's hit, "I'm, I'm so in love with you", as "Ah ha-hah hahh-hi / I know this / much is / true-oo."
"'True' is about how difficult it is to be honest when you're trying to write a love song to someone", Kemp later admitted. "Hence: 'Why do I find it hard to write the next line?'" In his 2009 autobiography I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau, he explained that even conveying his feelings in lyrics he "felt inhibited, shy even, so I started to write about that very thing: the fear of revealing oneself, of saying in song what was true." Of the infatuation that he was uncomfortable confessing, he later told The Daily Telegraph, "I didn't want to write it down—because there's nothing more embarrassing."
After reworking Green's opening line, Kemp decided the song would not focus so much upon what he knew was true regarding the subject as it would on the issue of how much of the truth he was going to tell. He wanted to use the song as a way to tell Grogan how he felt by choosing phrases no one else would understand and looked through the copy of Lolita she had given him. He found the underlined phrases "pill on my tongue" and "seaside limbs", the latter of which he modified for the lyric "Take your seaside arms and write the next line / Oh, I want the truth to be known." Parsing the other selection, he thought, "'A pill dissolves, doesn't it? And the pill was trying to dissolve the nerves that I have, because I'm nervous when I'm with you or thinking about you'". He wrote the lyric "With a thrill in my head and a pill on my tongue / Dissolve the nerves that have just begun." After he had finished writing the song, he felt it was more about the process of creating something "with a blue-eyed soul feel" than it was about Grogan.
Spandau Ballet had already released two albums and several singles, but Kemp and his brother, Martin, the band's bassist, were still living with their parents. Once finished with "True", Kemp sang and played it on his guitar for Martin, who liked it and thought it was ready to record. When Gary performed it for the rest of the band, he was accompanied by an old friend from his years at Dame Alice Owen's School, pianist Jess Bailey. Kemp had discovered a Rhodes Chroma keyboard that gave him the sound he wanted, and Bailey adapted Gary's guitar chords so that he could play more than just single notes on the new polyphonic synthesiser.
Kemp wrote in his autobiography that "by far the slickest musician in the band" was Steve Norman, who had played guitar on Journeys to Glory but switched to percussion instruments on Diamond. They enlisted the help of Beggar & Co as the horn section on that album for tracks such as "Chant No. 1", which inspired Norman to take up the saxophone.: the sax, an inspiration from the Beggar & Co. sessions, fell easily into his hands. Kemp called it "another voice within the band" and that he "would purposely write to elevate his saxophone into its own space" by changing keys, "and that just steps it out of the track and puts it somewhere else."
Kemp wrote "True" in the key of G major with a tempo of 98 BPM and a chord progression of G, Em9, CMaj9, Bm7. The song modulates to the key of E♭ major for the sax solo, after which it returns to G Major. Norman told The Guardian in 2012 that his solo combined two takes; at the time the band began working on "True", he had been regularly listening to the Grover Washington Jr.–Bill Withers hit "Just the Two of Us", explaining, "The solo is a reply to that: at the key change things just lift off, giving the song a moment of elation." The interest in the saxophone went beyond "True" for Kemp, who recalled how, as teenagers, he and Norman had appreciated its use on hits by Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder and, specifically, on Evelyn "Champagne" King's "Shame". He thought the instrument epitomized soul music and should be prominently featured on the new album.
Recording The band wanted to record at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas because of the soul music that had been recorded there; Kemp also felt that the tropical surroundings would help give the music the feeling he was trying to achieve. They also decided to get assistance in producing what would be True from Tony Swain and Steve Jolley, who had recently worked with Bananarama and Imagination. The band appreciated the use of the synth-bass on the latter's hit single "Body Talk" so much that they had Swain play the instrument on the recording of "True" instead of having Martin Kemp play electric bass. In describing how the change lent itself to the new sound they were after, Kemp insisted, "Martin didn't mind. We all loved the synth bass's sound. It was of its time and had a disco, funk-soul feel. We were trying to rebrand ourselves in a slightly different direction."
The backing vocals for the song were recorded using a Dolby noise-reduction system, but the band decided not to use the decoder that would remove the hissing from the recording because they liked the sound of the "airy, breathy fizz on top". The result gave Kemp a sense of the success they would be enjoying: "When we listened to the playback in the studio, everyone suddenly started singing along, the road crew and everything. I think we knew then it was a number 1."
Tony Hadley's lead vocal was recorded with Steve Jolley producing at Red Bus Studios in Paddington after returning from Nassau. In his 2004 autobiography To Cut a Long Story Short, Hadley wrote, "It's quite a complicated song to sing in terms of phrasing and timing, and we soldiered on for ages before we felt we'd got it right." When asked in a 2017 Professor of Rock interview about the high note he reaches while singing, "Oh, I want the truth to be said," at the point between the sax solo and the final chorus, he responded, "I don't do that big note at the end now. I just play it down." The plan was to open the song with just a string synthesizer, but Swain was unhappy with how it sounded and came up with the idea of using the chorus for the beginning without the lead.: At the end of mixing "True", Tony Swain felt dissatisfied with its introduction — an instrumental bass-line ramble that meandered up to the first verse. He had the ingenious idea of copying a chorus minus Tony's vocal and pasting that on to the front instead. Kemp attributed the album version's six-and-a-half-minute length to their love for the finished product with the lead vocal finally included.
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