Live Review BY ALEC SMART 28/02/2020
Tony Hadley, ex-lead vocalist with chart-topping band Spandau Ballet, performed a selection of songs from his solo career interspersed with much-loved favourites from his former band at Metro Theatre in Sydney on Fri 28 Feb. He was supported on tour by Australian songstress Chloe Styler.
Chloe Styler is a 23-year-old singer from the Queensland Gold Coast who plays her own country-folk compositions accompanied by acoustic guitar.
After her success as a Top 10 finalist in the Australia-wide 2018 Toyota Star Maker competition, she performed with the other finalists at the Tamworth Country Music Festival, which helped her gain national attention.
Performing five concerts with Tony Hadley as main support on his Australian tour, the young talent has a beautiful singing voice and writes her own material, often based on personal experiences.
Styler draws her influences from Fleetwood Mac and Joni Mitchell, and her releases – a self-titled EP in Jan 2017 and recent singles, When Your Light Burns (Nov 2018) and Sweden (Jan 2020) – reveal her star is definitely in the ascent.
Tony Hadley always comes across as very affable and sincere, and indeed during his stage shows he makes eye contact with people in the crowd, continuously smiling, waving and engaging with the audience. He’s thoroughly enjoying himself and he wants you to enjoy yourself too.
Hadley’s Sydney concert opened with Spandau Ballet’s breakthrough song; their 1980 debut single To Cut a Long Story Short, about a soldier with PTSD reminiscing with regret on how he joined the army so ‘very very young’.
Hadley now performs this as a slower soul number instead of the more up-beat synth-pop of the original. On its release the song welded Spandau Ballet to the emerging ‘New Romantic’ post-punk genre that dominated pop music charts at the end of the 1970s, including the band’s obscure choice of name (derived from graffiti seen on a Berlin wall) typical of those in the media-invented category.
This British-based scene included similar sounding synthesiser-dominated bands, like Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, A Flock of Seagulls, Visage, Classix Nouveau and Japan, plus more guitar-oriented bands like Adam and the Ants and Culture Club.
Despite a shared love of stylish clothes and elegantly coiffed hair, most of them distanced themselves from the genre, with Depeche Mode embracing techno music and Spandau Ballet venturing into funk and soul.
Hadley served two terms with Spandau Ballet.
This included the original 1979 – 1990 chart-topping era, when they coalesced into a stable unit after various stints with different members under the preceding names Roots, The Cut, The Makers, and Gentry (all of which featured the core duo of Tony Hadley on vocals and keyboards, and principle songwriter Gary Kemp on guitar and keyboards).
Between 1990 and Spandau Ballet’s reformation in 2009, Hadley released three studio albums, The State of Play (1992), Tony Hadley – primarily cover songs (1997) and Passing Stranger (2006), plus seven live albums and five compilation albums.
After a 19-year hiatus, during which divisions between estranged band members were widened by the unsuccessful launch of a court case in 1999 by Hadley, saxophonist Steve Norman and drummer John Keeble against the Kemp brothers, Gary and Martin, for a greater share of songwriting royalties, Spandau Ballet reformed in 2009.
Old animosities set aside, they undertook The Reformation Tour, a sell-out world tour that showcased their many successful songs and introduced two new numbers, one of which, Love is All, was written by Hadley.
Fast-forward to 3 July 2017: it appeared those old animosities rose to the fore again when after 8 years of sold-out shows worldwide, including Australia in 2010 and 2015, Hadley announced his departure from the band on his Twitter account.
“Due to circumstances beyond my control, it is with deep regret that I am required to state that I am no longer a member of the band Spandau Ballet and as such I will not be performing with the band in future.”
However, Hadley has been gifted with a fine singing voice spanning a dynamic vocal range that will never find him unemployed. Selling out venues like Sydney’s Metro Theatre as a solo artist confirms that fans will flock to see him whichever band he is fronting, so long as there’s a smattering of Spandau Ballet songs in the set to draw them in.
Despite his estrangement from Spandau Ballet, the Kemp brothers have publicly called for Hadley’s return, which suggests that whatever the causes that prompted this latest break-up, it won’t result in court appearances and years of resentment.
The band continued without him a while after recruiting short-lived singer Ross Wild from June 2018 – March 2019, before going into hibernation.
Whatever his feelings, Hadley is forever anchored to his old band’s songs, all of which were written by precocious talent Gary Kemp, because that is what audiences come to hear, and Sydney is no exception.
Of the 18 numbers he performed at Metro Theatre, 12 of them were Gary Kemp compositions, inspiring a continuous crowd singalong, and five of them appeared on Hadley’s most recent solo album, Talking to the Moon (2018).
During the show Hadley spoke about meeting up for drinks a few nights earlier in Adelaide with Queen drummer Roger Taylor, also touring Australia with his band to raise money for bushfire relief. After revealing that they’d got quite inebriated and swapped old reminiscences, “most of which are unrepeatable here,” he performed Queen’s Somebody To Love as a tribute to late singer Freddie Mercury.
The highlight of the night was undoubtedly when Lily Gonzalez, percussionist with Faithless, Brand New Heavies and Jimmy Somerville among many others, and a successful singer in her own right, joined Hadley on Through The Barricades, for a magical duet.
Other highlights included True, which Hadley joked he was flummoxed as to why it was a popular song at weddings, and the night’s finale, Gold.
The audience consisted of a 65-35 female to male ratio, with a small pool of unaccompanied men at the back. Many of those abandoned men talked continuously, burped, farted and wandered back and forth to the bar while this unfortunate reviewer was hemmed in with them.
It was almost as if they told their partners, “You go up the front and enjoy yourself, I’ll hang out at the back and talk cars and sport and fart with my mates until the show is over.”
Despite this, they all raised their mobile phones to film Hadley’s more popular songs, creating a sea of glowing screens recording shaky, unfocused footage you’ll no doubt avoid on YouTube.
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Tony Hadley set list, Metro Theatre, 28 Feb 2020
To Cut A Long Story Short
Highly Strung
* Killer Blow
Only When You Leave
Round And Round
I’ll Fly For You
* Delirious
Soul Boy
Through The Barricades
+ Tonight Belongs To Us
# Somebody To Love
* Accident Waiting To Happen
Instinction
Chant # 1 (I Don’t Need This Pressure On)
True
* Every Time
Lifeline
Gold
* Hadley compositions
+ Toby Gad & Ray Dalton
# Queen (Freddie Mercury)
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