Strange, when you consider that he was once one-fifth of one of the most influential bands of the 1980s, that Gary Kemp isn’t particularly recognisable. Perhaps that’s because, emerging from the rehearsal rooms of the Hampstead Theatre in London, ordering a mineral water and grinning with boyish wonder at his current good fortune, there’s not a hint of the sulky pop star anywhere about him.
“It’s great, isn’t it,” he says, indicating the futuristic metallic hull of the curved auditorium, “and inside there, that’s where all the magic happens.”
The magic he is here to create is the premiere of The Rubenstein Kiss, written and directed by the award- winning newcomer James Phillips, and based on the real-life trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed in the United States for espionage in 1951. Beautifully structured, the play cleverly interweaves the betrayal and arrest of the Rubensteins at the height of the Cold War with the story of two young New Yorkers in 1975, who meet beneath the unforgettable image of the incarcerated Rubensteins kissing in their handcuffs and fall messily in love.
Kemp plays Paul Cranmer, the FBI agent investigating the Rubensteins, and explains with infectious enthusiasm: “James takes these grand political ideas and sets them around a fictional dinner table — that’s really the skill of the play. My character’s not the stereotypical FBI man that you think he might be and I like him because he’s a bit of an outsider.”
Acting alongside such theatrical veterans as Samantha Bond, Kemp admits that his casting is “a bit of a risk”, though he is quick to point out his credentials: there was a stint in Yasmina Reza’s Art in the West End, and a part last year in Pignight with Snoo Wilson and Paul Freeman at the Menier. He has also written two musicals: Bedbugs with Wilson, which opened at the Connections festival last year and another — as yet unper formed — with the guitarist Guy Pratt, about W. B. Yeats and Maud Gonne. “And I’ve spent most of my life in front of an audience,” he reminds me.
In fact, it was as an actor that Kemp had his first taste of performance, at the Anna Scher Theatre School in his native Islington, North London. “It was an after-school club. We never did scripts, it was improvisation about things we knew. Anna managed to get these working-class kids to play. Her method was praise. No matter how crap you were she would find some wonder in you.”
But if acting came first, music has always been a part of Kemp’s life. With the money he made from bit parts in TV and film, he bought an electric guitar, learnt three chords, and started writing songs. By the age of 14 he was playing in bands all over London.
At 18, he started his own — The Makers, with Tony Hadley on vocals, John Keeble and Steve Norman on drums and guitar, and his brother Martin on bass. They played Kemp’s songs on the club scene with a modicum of success, until the broadcaster Robert Elms, then a poet and peddler of the band’s promotional bumf, spotted the name Spandau Ballet on the wall of a toilet in Berlin and filched it. The rest is big-haired, shiny-suited, fey pop history.
In the ten years they were together, Ballet racked up 20 chart hits, here and in the States. Their biggest hits, Gold and True, both released in 1983, are still earning Kemp cash from radio playlists.
That they aren’t earning the other band members a penny was the cause of a failed six-figure law suit brought against Kemp by Hadley, Keeble and Norman in 1999, but although they still aren’t on speaking terms, Kemp harbours them no ill will. “My thesis is to try to make your enemies your friends. Move on.”
Despite the sad ending to their success story, he has no regrets: “We made a mark on the history of pop culture that we’ve proved with time. I’m proud of that. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But I think you have to prove yourself a little bit more in the acting world.”
After the band’s break-up, the Kemps set out to do just that, starring together in the British gangster flick The Krays in 1990. Martin went on to land his role as Steve in EastEnders, and Gary moved to LA where he made a handful of films, including The Bodyguard, with Whitney Houston, and more maverick projects such as Killing Zoe, with Quentin Tarentino. But when talking about this period, Kemp’s bumptious cheer sags slightly and, for the first time, his quick-fire speech slows down. His nine-year marriage to Sadie Frost, with whom he has a 15-year-old son, Finlay, was straining under the separation, “I just had to come home. Also, I wanted to do more music and I came back to England to make a solo album.”
The cathartically entitled Little Bruises was released in 1995, and re-released this year, while his marriage to Frost finally ended in 1997.
“But really,” he insists, “two incredible things have happened to me — I have remarried (to Lauren Barber, the fashion stylist) and I have a 15-month-old baby boy. Finlay is my only real link to the past.”
Presumably, it’s a pretty pressing link, however. Particularly when the relationship tangle involving Sadie, her ex-husband Jude Law, Sienna Miller, Daniel Craig and Craig’s ex-girlfriend Kate Moss is grabbing more than its fair share of tabloid headlines. Kemp won’t be drawn into the fray and only comments that “a lot of drama” has been made about Moss’s drug-taking habits, which is “wrong”, and that the key to navigating his famously extended family is “a lack of acrimony and sensible communication between the kids and the adults around them. It’s a shame that my old mate Tony Hadley still feels rather acrimonious because it’d be nice to have a beer and talk about it all.”
You get the impression that Kemp has drawn a line under much of his past. He claims to listen to Radio 4 rather than pop music these days. “When you’re in a band you’re building your legacy as you go along. In the theatre it always feels like new. This is where I am right now. I’m not looking back. I’m not nostalgic for the ‘good old days’. These are the good old days,” he says, grinning broadly again, “I’m living them.”
The Rubenstein Kiss, The Hampstead Theatre, London NW9 (www.hampsteadtheatre.com 020-7722 9301), from Nov 17
