Story of the song: True by Spandau Ballet

Gary Kemp had long desired to emulate the Motown greats. Sitting on the bed at his parents’ house in 1982, strumming his guitar, he hit on something that he figured might just fulfil that ambition. “Why do I find it hard to write the next line/ When I want the truth to be said,” he sang, commenting later that “it became a song about trying to write a love song to someone who didn’t know your true thoughts”.

A girl he had pinned his hopes on at the time was resisting his amorous advances – Clare Grogan, Altered Images’ frontwoman. “Clare played me Al Green and Marvin Gaye,” Kemp recalled in his appropriately titled 2009 autobiography, I Know This Much. “The music posted itself through my heart and I knew that I had to reply. But I found it hard – hard to be truthful. So far everything was unspoken.”

“The lyrics were delicately influenced by Nabakov’s Lolita, a book that she’d given me,” said Kemp. “We never realised the full potential of this song until we started to record it. Everybody, including the roadies, sang along to it. It was at that moment that I knew we had something special.”

The final version ran to six minutes and became the band’s signature tune and the title track to their bestselling album. The single release made No 1 in the UK in April 1983 and was their sole Billboard hit, branding Spandau Ballet as one-hit wonders in the United States.