Ever Hear That One About How Spandau Ballet 'Stole' Their Name?

On one of countless Saturdays spent at the British Library, a researcher hit the jackpot. Londoner David Barrat was flicking through old copies of 80s music magazines for interesting bits of information about Spandau Ballet. The 51-year-old ran an unofficial fan site for the new wave band, and wanted something new to share with his potential readers.

“I found a letter in the NME from this guy, Mick Austin, who claimed to have come up with the name Spandau Ballet,” Barrat tells me now. “That was the first I’d ever heard of it. Another Spandau Ballet group?!” Well, basically. That January 1981 letter had been written by an aspiring young musician, saying that Robert Elms – a music journalist who had boasted of devising the name Spandau Ballet – had in fact stolen it from his band and given it to the synth-pop quintet who you’ve actually heard of.

As a Spandau Ballet fan, Barrat was astonished and set about to get to the bottom of the mystery. Soon enough, the initial lead unravelled into a story so big that he was compelled to write and self-publish Spandau Ballet: The New Romantics That Never Were – an entire book about it. After speaking to Barrat, I knew I would need to get hold of Elms, Spandau Ballet’s team and the not famous Spandau Ballet to try and figure out who came up with the name first. That took me down a path of accusations, denials and pleas to kill the story. But what’s in a name anyway – can it be owned? Does it even matter that a second Spandau Ballet became hugely successful while the first didn’t? We’ve got to untangle the details of this weird story first.

An unbroadcast interview from 1984 with guitarists and brothers Gary and Martin Kemp also dropped a few clues. In the interview, when asked how the name came about, Martin mumbles: “I think we stole it from another group,” before then referring back to the traditional story of the name’s origin: that Elms had seen ‘Spandau Ballet’ written on a toilet wall in Berlin, before suggesting that the group – who at the time were called The Gentry – adopt it as their own. “To intellectualise about it, we did like the idea of ballet,” interjects Gary. “We never, we stole the bloody name!” exclaims Martin. “Well, Spandau Ballet we stole…” replies Gary, before tailing off as his brother steps back in: “See he’s trying to make it really clever. We stole the name from another group.”

“I was amazed to see that,” Barrat tells me. “That’s a completely different story to the one that had been traditionally told so I suspected there might be something behind it. My curiosity was sparked so I decided to investigate further.” He trawled through old local newspapers and obscure online forums, looking for mentions of a pre-November 1979 Spandau Ballet, before he saw a guy named Mark Robinson post on a forum asking: “Do you remember our band Spandau Ballet that we did?”

Robinson, the not famous Spandau Ballet guitarist, sent him an old photo of a poster advertising a ‘Spandau Ballet’ gig at Ampthill Youth Club and a picture of said band playing at the Hope & Anchor in London in May 1979. The famous Spandau Ballet started gigging under that name in November 1979. “Facts are facts: we played at the Hope & Anchor before they used the name,” Robinson says to me on the phone. “It was only a small thing supporting the Softies, a UK punk band, but we were practicing heavily and thought we were pretty good.” Not long before, the band say Robinson happened to be reading Spandau: The Secret Diaries by Albert Speers – the Nazi war criminal – while they were brainstorming ideas for a name in his dad’s library.

“Mark kept on coming back to this Spandau thing which I couldn’t comprehend,” says Michael Harvey, the band’s drummer, in one of many interviews from Barrat’s book. “It just seemed so irrelevant and off the wall. Mick pulled a gardening book off the shelf [which led us] to the word ‘ballet’, possibly because some flowers in the book were described as ‘balletic’ [..] and then somebody in the room put the two words together.”

Months later, after a couple of gigs, they found out someone else was using the name. The barman where they worked excitedly congratulated them on being booked to play new romantics hotspot The Blitz, and when they said he was wrong, he showed them in black and white on a gig listing in London’s Evening Standard newspaper. Looking back, they’re fairly certain how Elms found the name.

“I used to emblazon stencil drawings of a ballet dancer with barbed wire around her, with Spandau Ballet written beneath all around London, including in the toilet at The Venue,” says Robinson, from his home in Ampthill, Bedfordshire. “Perhaps that’s where Elms saw it, since it was a very popular place to be at the time. It was just one of those things in life you put to the back of your mind and get on with whatever you’re doing – but it always irritated me. Especially when my wife forced me to go to a Spandau Ballet concert.”

Spandau Ballet’s members soon became some of the icons and pioneers of the New Romantic movement, a flamboyant, glam-rock subculture. First, though, they were called The Gentry. That’s where journalist Robert Elms comes in, when he met the band after a gig in north London in November 1979. “I was the one who gave them the name,” Elms, currently a BBC Radio London broadcaster, tells me now. “If it was appropriated, then it was from graffiti that I saw on a wall in Berlin during a drunken night out. All bands had silly names at the time. There was a whole kind of Germanic teutonic disco thing at the time because Bowie had recorded Low there, so during the post-punk period in the late 70s it was the place to be.”

The Chemical Brothers were once the Dust Brothers until an American band put a stop to that. Depending on how old you are, you may remember boy band Westlife originally went by the name I.O.You before they changed it to Westside. They hadn’t been the first band to land on that name, though, so settled on Westlife. Elsewhere, Santogold had to change her name to Santigold after a filmmaker, Santo Gold, director of the 1985 sci-fi wrestling film Santo Gold’s Blood Circus, began a lawsuit. Why? “She’s not telling you why, that’s how it is,” Santigold said during the saga.

But disputes over a name weren’t so common in 1979, before the emergent music consumer culture reached its apex following the millenium. The postmodern world where bands wrote songs like "Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn’t Get Sued" hadn’t quite taken hold just yet. Nonetheless, there were still similar disputes during that era: Fleetwood Mac’s manager hired some phonies to masquerade as the band and tour in the 70s, forcing the real Mac to take action.

Now, the Musicians’ Union goes to great pains to explain to new bands how they can prevent anyone else from using their band name. You can register as a company, patent or copyright your brand name and buy a trademark at the click of a button. In hindsight, we might view the not famous Spandau Ballet’s actions as incredibly naive, in allowing their masterstroke of a moniker to be lost, but they were amateurs and hadn’t gone to any lengths to protect their name (there was a bit more paperwork involved back then too). They were gobsmacked and, beyond sending letters to music magazines and radio stations, didn’t know what else to do.

But what do Spandau Ballet – who broke up, sued each other for songwriting loyalties, got back together for some lucrative shows before their singer quit – have to say about this? “I can put my hand on my heart and say I’ve never heard of these people before and nor have the band,” their longtime manager Steve Dagger tells me, sounding bewildered. Then why did the Kemp brothers hint at stealing the name from another band in that 1984 interview? “It’s just supposition,” says Dagger. “It was probably because at the time we all speculated that it could be a band in Germany and that’s why it was written there. But I have to say, no one contacted me about it. I have no reason to disbelieve what Robert said at the time.”

You certainly won’t get closure on this from Barrat’s book either. He says he decided not to contact anyone from Spandau Ballet because he wanted to write an independent book about them that asks the questions the group don’t want to answer. “They’ve already written their books, sold their stories and plundered their memories but they’ve been authorised biographies reflecting personal perspectives. No one has ever written an independent book about Spandau Ballet – until now.” It could have been a coincidence, albeit an incredibly extreme one, that two bands, in the same year, in the same city, performed under the same strange German name. Elms could have seen it on a toilet door in London and confused that with graffiti in Berlin. Either way, one trip to the library for one music fan spiralled into an adventure few would have seen coming.

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