“I mean, listen, is this going to sell my album? I don’t know,” Gary Kemp chuckles at one point in our epic, hour-long interview — during which he opens up about his post-pandemic anxiety, a sense of his own mortality, grappling with writer’s block and imposter syndrome, mourning his parents (who died just four days apart), going to therapy, and how writing his confessional third solo album, This Destination, helped him heal. “I hope so, because the album is a positive record. … I’m hoping these things are universal. They’re not just about some old rock star who’s writing songs about his predicament.”

Kemp, now age 65, is the man who penned all of Spandau Ballet’s enduring, iconic ‘80s hits, and his CV also includes touring with Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets (which has introduced him to an entire new audience) and acclaimed acting roles in The Krays and The Bodyguard. But despite all of those achievements, Kemp confesses that he has suffered crises of confidence over the years, including one leading up to and during the making of This Destination.

“Some days you wake up and you just think, ‘What the fuck am I doing? Who the fuck am I? Am I good enough? Am I a good enough musician? Am I a good enough father? Am I good enough husband?’ I think we all have those,” Kemp reveals, admitting that his best work emerges during times of personal upheaval. “We need to have that. We should be asking ourselves those questions. … When I go into my music room to write, you take all of that with you and you’re trying to solve it and find answers through those songs. … And if I can solve that in a neat package, which is three to four minutes long and the lyrics and the music are married together in such a way that it’s unique and it’s fulfilling, I can then walk out of that room empowered. I can walk out of that room with this extra bit of armor, this thing that didn’t exist when I walked in earlier.”

Among Kemp’s other CV highlights is his side gig co-hosting the Rockonteurs podcast with Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets bassist and This Destination collaborator Guy Pratt, so as he joins me from the London home studio where all that podcast magic happens, his gift for gab is of course on full display. In the delightful video interview above and wide-ranging Q&A below, we cover not only the above-mentioned heavy topics, but also his memories of the Blitz Club, Band Aid, Live Aid, and Spandau Ballet’s rivalry with Duran Duran; the possibility of another Spandau reunion; how Seal once almost replaced Tony Hadley in a later-era Spandau lineup; the new wave ingenue who inspired “True”; that time Spandau Ballet performed on Soul Train; working with Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard; the sexism behind why New Romantic bands weren’t taken seriously by stodgy music critics in the ‘80s; and if he’s finally figured out his ultimate destination.

LYNDSANITY: It’s wonderful to chat with you again. Right before I actually started recording, we were getting reacquainted, and we started talking about Duran Duran…

GARY KEMP: Yes, I did an interview this morning about the 40th anniversary of Live Aid, which is coming up, and then I was thinking about the 40th anniversary of Band Aid. The night before Band Aid was when us and Duran first really met [except for one time when Duran Duran were still unsigned]. … I didn’t meet them again at all because we were in so much competition with each other. All the bands that were doing well in the early ‘80s, Culture Club and us and ABC and Human League, we wouldn’t meet because it was like being in a football league. We were all competitors, trying to get to No. 1. And then we met the night before Band Aid was recorded, in Germany — we were both doing a television show called Tommy’s Rock Show or Pop Show or something, and of course we decided then to have a competition for who could drink the most. And we locked ourselves in this hotel suite. I remember talking to Nick Rhodes and he said, “So, it’s a big day tomorrow. Have you got a makeup artist meeting you at the airport?” I said, “No. Why do you think we need a makeup artist?” “Oh, there’s going to be cameras there.” “Oh my God, we better get a makeup artist, and you better get some security at the airport because there’s going to be loads of fans at the airport!” And then the next morning we both got on private planes to fly from Germany back to London. I think even while we were in the air, I remember saying to the pilot, “Where’s the Duran plane? Oh, can you go a little bit faster? We should land before them, really.” There was competition all that time. And now we’re mates.

I have two follow-up questions! The first one is, who won that drinking contest?

Well, OK, so our star player, if we’re going for drink only, would’ve been our drummer, John Keeble. What happened is he just came too soon. He made that run too soon in the game and before even the snacks came out, he’d downed so much, he was being stretched off and the coach was wondering who to put back on. And so, John was gone. He was one of our finest party people. And of course, Nick [Rhodes] and I were probably saw ourselves as being just a little bit above that; we were more interested in the quality of the wine and savoring it. And [Spandau Ballet frontman] Tony [Hadley] and [Duran Duran’s] Simon [Le Bon] were talking about humidifiers, as singers do, keeping their voices good. But they were certainly drinking. I think definitely the last people up, John [Taylor] and Martin [Kemp], were just sort of staring at each other with a security guy behind each one of them. And I think one of the security guys in the end just went, “Come on, fellas, just call it a day.” And they went off to bed. But I know that in the little documentary about  Band Aid that came out just recently, which is amazing if you haven’t seen it, Tony says to Midge Ure at the beginning when he’s going through the lyrics, “I’ve only had two hours sleep.” Well, that is a lie. Tony Hadley had no hours sleep.

And Tony was the first one to sing! He broke the ice and went out there and did it! I’ve just seen that Band Aid documentary, for people who’d had little to no sleep and had been up all night drinking, you all look fine to me. I don’t know if the makeup artist was responsible for that…

But at 23… my brother’s 23, Nick’s 24, I’m 25. I think that’s the thing that I took away from that footage, was this was the naive power of youth and it was working-class kids. There’s no Autotune going on, there’s just pure talent out in front of the mic, all making a massive commitment to try and change something. It was kind of mad and daring, and it worked.

I was also going to ask who actually arrived first to the Band Aid session. With the editing in that documentary, they show Simon Le Bon arriving first, I believe.

You know how to touch a nerve, don’t you? [laughs] I think what happened is there was some confusion at the airport and [Duran Duran] got away faster, which was a bit upsetting.

You just mentioned being working-class. But when I first saw Spandau Ballet in your poet blouses or Antony Price suits, I assumed you were aristocrats! It was all so aspirational.

All those clothes that we wore at the beginning, the same as all the other kids who were wearing them, were either adapted from thrift stores and vintage places and Army and Navy stores where we bought stuff. Or, my mother made me stuff. I would stick pieces of paper together to be about the size of a pair of pants, draw the pants how I wanted them on, and she would get by the material, which she would stitch together. She wasn’t very good at stitching zippers in, though; that was the only problem if I wanted to go to the bathroom! … When it came to do the suits, we had a little bit more money, but that was Chris Sullivan who was a fantastic kind of face around town. He was one of our team and he designed these kind of gambling country & western cowboy suits for us, and we got some cheap tailor in North London to run them up for us. And I don’t know where it is; I don’t where any of my clothes are. There’s going to be a massive exhibition here, which I know is going to travel to the U.S., at the Design Museum [in London] later on this year, and it’s about the Blitz Club, the club that was taken over by Steve Strange and Ross Egan on Tuesday nights. … We became the house band.

Wow! I’m completely fascinated by the Blitz Club. Any memories you want to share about that place?

Well, if you look at my Instagram, I did a little thing post the other week of standing outside that Blitz and spoke about it. I’ve been going around town in Soho — it’s really connected with my new album — going around town, sort of standing outside various destinations because the album’s called This Destination. It seemed to make sense to me, because some of the tracks on the album are about the ghosts that I walk with in London.

Your new solo album has a couple of acoustic Spandau remakes as bonus tracks, which surprised me a bit. You had some Spandau reunions over the years, but I guess the last attempt in 2018/2019, with Ross Wild replacing Tony Hadley, didn’t work out…

Oh no, that didn’t work out. We made a big mistake. It was 2015, we were touring again, and it’d been a nice tour, really successful. We got offered a really big gig, which I can’t say, but it was very, very big and it would’ve been very exciting. Tony couldn’t do it — didn’t want to do it. He wanted to go back to his solo career. And I think there was a great disappointment amongst everybody. We were really feeling the flow and we’d made music and it was good. And so there was some talk about getting someone else in, and someone said, “What about Seal?” And I went and met Seal with my brother and he was up for it. He was up for trying it out. … Anyway, we were all sitting in the rehearsal room waiting for him to arrive, and I got a call saying he didn’t get on the plane. There was a real kind of like, “Oh, wow. So, he doesn’t want to do it now?” He changed his mind at last minute. And that’s fair enough. That’s completely up to him. But we were all left a little bit disappointed, I suppose. And then we really naively and stupidly, out of our own passion to stay together, the four of us, looked for another singer. And we found a guy [Wild] and he could sing great, but I just knew immediately it wasn’t going to work for us. And as soon as we started touring, I said, “I just don’t like this.” And my brother and I just said, “We can’t just do this anymore. This just isn’t right. There’s only one guy to sing these songs, and we just have to wait for him. And if he doesn’t want to do it, he doesn’t want to do it.” And of course, I had other things I was doing. I had the Nick Mason shows coming up. And so, I think I realized early on that that was a mistake.

I was under the impression that there was no chance of another Spandau reunion. Are you saying you are open to it?

I think if Tony wanted to do it, I’d certainly go and have a talk with him, chat with him. Why? Not for financial reasons. It would be because we changed each other’s lives. What we did is so deep. We were the kings of the road for a bit. That’s what every kid wants to be. And we were that in London, and globally to a large extent. We changed other people’s lives with the music, because that’s what happens. And just to stand onstage with those comrades and with an audience that all felt and still feel that that music represents their youth… that’s a pretty cool thing to be able to do before it’s too late.

I’d love to see that happen. I’d assumed that you’d put Spandau to bed for good after the Ross Wild thing, so it’s great to know that the door is at least a little bit open.

I think one of the things that I want to make sure happens in my life is that you don’t want to die with enemies. You don’t want any enemies. The older you get, certainly people get bitter when they’re older, but I just think it’s best not to have any of that left.

So, coming back to This Destination, your press release says this is your most personal album yet. And that’s really saying something, because your previous album, INSOLO, was deeply personal and autobiographical too.

I think all my solo albums have been personal, very personal. I mean, my first one had a lot to do with me and my marriage breaking down in L.A. … I can’t write a first-person song that isn’t about me! … Most of the songs on this record are absolutely me trying to answer questions that are in my head and my heart. Isn’t that what songs should be about?

There’s a lot of nostalgia on this album.

There’s [a track] called “Windswept Street [1978]” and that’s about me in Soho, going to the Blitz, going to those places. … It’s about people my age and around my age and how we are not kings of the street anymore. We have to look for those ghosts, those great feelings of being out there when there’s always someone who’s so enigmatic and charismatic and you really want to be them, or they’re teaching you something or they’re telling you about writers or books. And that person, I can’t see anymore. I don’t know that person. And I have to walk those same streets. And so “Borrowed Town,” “Windswept Street,” these are songs that interconnect. “Borrowed Town” is also about how the city that I live in, London, is constantly in flux. And I think that’s the same for every city.

You’re really only champion of your city for a short period of time. When I grew up and I was a young man, I didn’t know those old guys who were walking next to me who had fought in the war. They didn’t know me. They didn’t know this town was a different place now and they would be moved aside. And I think I feel that more and more as I get older, and it felt like it was worth writing a song about. And I wrote it on a Tube train. I was going for a lunch across London to a place called Richmond, which is about a 45-minute journey on an underground train, to have lunch with Pete Townsend, who’s one of my great heroes. I sort of know him and I hadn’t seen him for a long time. He’d gotten in touch and said, “Let’s meet.” And when I’m sitting on this train, this is one of the great songwriters of all time, so that is inspiring in itself: “What am I doing? I’ve got to write a song!” So, I get out my phone and I write all of these lyrics before I get to have lunch with Pete. And that sits on my phone for two years. This is just around the time of the pandemic. And then I finally write the melody for it.

Didn’t the pandemic affect this album in a lot of ways?

I think I connected it with the pandemic because about two or three years ago, two years ago, I started to feel a great deal of anxiety. And I don’t know whether this had connection with the pandemic and I think the insecurity that every one of us felt at that time — something can happen like this, wow, we’ve never have thought. … I’m doomscrolling all day, every single disaster, the Ukraine, Gaza, L.A. It’s all living in my bedroom room, because I’m looking at it all the time. I’m reaching a certain age. You think more about mortality, about how there’s less time in front of you than behind you. So, I think it started to definitely manifest itself physically. And there was something else: I decided I need to sit and do some therapy.

I mean, listen, is this [interview] going to sell my album? I don’t know. [laughs] I hope so, because the album is a positive record. But I lost my parents 16 years ago, within four days of each other, and two weeks later my son was born and a few months later I’m on tour with Spandau Ballet for the first time in years. And I never fully grieved that. And I think that was also really fundamental. But what I’m about to say is, and why it’s connected to this record, is that when I go into my music room to write, you take all of that with you and you’re trying to solve it and find answers through those songs. There’s a song in the album called “Take the Wheel,” which is kind of set in a film noir setting, and it’s frantic and it feels like it’s the chaos that I was feeling at that time. It is this guy driving in a car and the rain’s on the windscreen and he’s saying, “Won’t somebody take the wheel?” And I am a Humphrey Bogart character, trying to find my nemesis who’s within me. And then all the way through, I think as I wrote this album, I felt more and more better, and I felt like I was curing myself in the writing process. And I think if something’s genuine and true to the artist and the writer, then I think the person who’s listening will not see it as fake news.

When you talk about the anxiety you struggled with, was that a new experience for you, or is that something you’d dealt with before?

I think it was fairly new to me at that level. Yeah, it was. But it drove me to pick up my guitar, to go to my piano. I remember when I first went to L.A. to act and The Krays had come out in England, and then I came over and I did The Bodyguard and Killing Zoe and different things, I was determined that I wasn’t going to go back to music. I was so burnt by music and burnt by the band. I felt that. But when my marriage broke down, the first thing I did was take my guitar out of the box and start writing. So, I think it’s fair to say that when a creative person is at their happiest, they’re not at their most creative.

There is that cliché — like, that Adele and Taylor Swift make their best music when they’re going through a breakup, or that Aerosmith made better records when they were all doing drugs, that sort of thing. Basically, that when an artist is happy and their life is stable, they’re not making as music as great as when they were going through darkness and despair. I don’t know if you actually believe that…

I don’t know about the drink and the drugs; I probably don’t believe that. But I do understand that an artist walks into a room to write a song to answer a question that’s in their head. And if I can solve that in a neat package, which is three to four minutes long and the lyrics and the music are married together in such a way that it’s unique and it’s fulfilling, I can then walk out of that room empowered. I can walk out of that room with this extra bit of armor, this thing that didn’t exist when I walked in earlier. It’s alchemy. And I just think without sounding too pretentious — but that is probably what I always sound like! — I think all writers, when you you’re really happy, you don’t get the urge to write. And that’s why I’m quite cynical about writing groups, when people write together. I just think as soon as you write together, it’s objective. It’s not subjective. It’s conscious. It’s not subconscious. And it’s kind of a process to try and make something just commercial. I don’t know what it is, but it doesn’t feel right to me. Someone else hasn’t got anything to do with the feelings that I’m feeling, therefore, why would I bring them in the room to help me write?

Is it different for you when you write for a band? You wrote all of the songs for Spandau Ballet on your own, but not for you to sing the lyrics. Was that a different process?

Yeah, a completely different process, I think. … But if I look at the successful tunes, they are more autobiographical, or more true — sorry, no pun intended! … A few times when I’ve been really doing it from the heart, I think it’s been the most successful. “True” was absolutely a song about my experience in a platonic relationship that I was having with Claire Grogan, hanging out with Altered images. Clare and I had this kind of frisson that we really liked each other, but nothing was ever going to happen. It just didn’t. It was simply a courtly thing, I think. I didn’t see her that much, but she inspired me at a particular time to write this song. And she knows that; we’ve spoken about that. She gave me the book Lolita at that time, and I took some lines from Lolita — “seaside arms” and “with the thrill of my head at a pill on my tongue,” these were kind of Nabakov-ish lines. And, why do I find it hard to write the next line when I want the truth to be said? Why can’t I just admit it? Why is a writer always covering it up with little cryptic clues? There was an honesty in that song, I think. And also, the Marvin thing — the Altered Images guys were really into playing Marvin Gaye and Al Green. And it made me think, “Oh God, I want to write songs like that.” So, there was a big inspiration for me at that point.

Is it common knowledge that Clare Grogan inspired “True”?

I think recently it’s become more out there. Clare’s been on our podcast, and I think we spoke briefly, rather embarrassingly, about it. It was funny. She came on the screen — we did it on Zoom — and she held up this little keyboard synthesizer, and she said, “Do you remember this?” And I said no. She said, “You bought me this!” And she still has it.

Aw. As I mentioned earlier, you covered “True” and “Through the Barricades” acoustically as This Destination bonus tracks. Tell me more about the latter song.

“Through the Barricades” was obviously a big hit in Europe, and it was a song that was directly connected with my experience of visiting Belfast and seeing a friend’s grave who was shot in the Troubles. I was hugely moved by that and needed to express it somehow. And that was what “Through the Barricades” was about. That isn’t a song where I’m writing the melody first to make a hit for us and for Tony to sing. That’s me writing something that’s very truthful. And so, that’s what I’m saying: I think a song is the most powerful when it really has a truth to it.

You went to therapy around the time you were making this current album. Was that a new experience for you as well? Or had you done therapy as a younger man?

I actually did it in L.A., in the early ‘90s. Of course that’s where!

Seems like an L.A. thing to do!

A good thing. It did help me actually at that time, doing visualization. I thought that was pretty instructive, empowering, and that worked for me. We just did visualization, hypnotherapy, that kind of thing. But talking, that kind of New York-type therapy, I hadn’t done before. … I went online and I saw this woman that I’d never met in my life. She popped up on my screen and she just said, “Why don’t you just talk me through some stuff about yourself, your history, your background, family-wise.” And I think after about 10 minutes or so, I mentioned the fact that my parents both died within four days with each other. And then I couldn’t talk. I just literally couldn’t talk. I was so moved and choked-up by it. And I realized that I’d been bottling this thing up for so long.

There’s one song on this album called “Work,” which is about my parents and about me, and they were hard-working, working-class people. It begins with the sound of a factory. and then it’s about my dad who worked in a factory, my mother who worked with disabled kids. All those details aren’t in the song, but that’s the way it was. And how do I live up to that, when I’m trying to work it out? How do I live up to that? How does any one of us live up to the commitment that our parents gave to put food on our table? So, I’m hoping these things are universal. They’re not just about some old rock star who’s writing songs about his predicament. I hope they’re universal. When I wrote that song, it came from another little bit of inspiration. There’s a brilliant artist here called Richard Hawley. I love his work. Out of the blue, he rang me and I’m sitting in my music room and it wasn’t happening for me. And he said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m trying to write a song, actually, Richard.” He said, “What are you writing on, piano or guitar?” I said piano. He said, “OK, go to your piano. Are you at the piano? Close your eyes. Put your hands out above the keyboard. I’m going to go now, and you’re going to write a fucking great song.” And I wrote “Work,” and I sent it to him. I’m so touched by that, what he did.

Amazing. Since we were talking about the whole working-class thing, I mentioned before that I found Spandau Ballet so aspirational and thought they seemed like glamorous pop royalty. I know a lot of British bands of that era wanted to get out, didn’t want to work in a factory all their lives, didn’t want to do what their parents did. And going into music was one way to escape working-class existence. As a young man, when you were starting the band and then living this glamorous life, did you appreciate your parents and their sacrifices? And did writing “Work” help with that at all?

Yes, I think it did. I think it was a message to them. My dad had a nervous breakdown while he was working because he just couldn’t get the money to feed us. But of course, we had great love. So, this song has a more tender moment where he’s being healed by his wife, and then me later by my wife. I think I like the sort of storytelling element of that. But my dad got up every day to work in this factory. He put a tie on. He was never late. He was punctual. I went to work with him once to watch him as a kid, and he was in this underground factory that was full of noise and big machines rolling and the smell of ink. And he opened his locker and he took out a brown overall, and he put it on, and for me it was like Superman putting on his cape. I was like, “Wow, look at my dad!” And his work commitment is one that has remained with me. I think you get up and you work, and if I’m not working, I’m feeling guilty. And I’m punctual! So, it’s really important. All those things gave me that commitment.

You mentioned playing with Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets. I know that has given you a lot of confidence. And the press release for This Destination says making this new album helped you regain some self-belief. It surprises me that you would ever have a crisis of confidence, though, because you wrote all these massive hits. Your CV speaks for itself.

Well, I think it’s just normal human frailty. As you get older, you see there’s a vulnerability. And as I said earlier, because of our 24/7 news cycle, you’re constantly feeling hugely vulnerable. And I think there is an element of imposter syndrome that everyone feels in the creative world. You’ve got to be really super-brave to not feel that. And yeah, I think Nick has given me confidence. I think working withSaucerful of Secrets and expanding my audience into that Pink Floyd world — guys that maybe weren’t interested in Spandau Ballet are suddenly going, “Wow, I really love what that guy’s doing in the band” and “I didn’t realize he could play guitar like that” and all that stuff. It’s given me confidence because I get to play more guitar and I get to sing, and I think a lot of that inspiration from that Floyd material feeds into what I’m doing in my solo stuff. But I just say, I’m a normal guy, and that’s what happens: Some days you wake up and you just think, “What the fuck am I doing? Who the fuck am I? Am I good enough? Am I a good enough musician? Am I a good enough father? Am I good enough husband?” I think we all have those. We need to have that. We should be asking ourselves those questions.

Yeah, I suppose it would be worse to be walking around being like, “Yeah, I’m the shit, everything I do is great,” with no self-awareness or humility!

Yeah. And also, because people want to talk about your youth all the time, there’s a good and bad in that. I see myself as a young man all the time when I walk onstage. I’m that young guy again, and I am that young person in many ways. He’s still inside me, where my dad never had that. He just could only ever see the guy who looked at him back in the mirror. So, we do have that as musicians.

When you talk about how some people that didn’t take you seriously as a musician before, it frankly pisses me off. I actually think Duran Duran probably got it way worse than Spandau Ballet in terms of being critically dismissed, but it angers me in general when bands of the ‘80s — new wave bands, New Romantic bands, bands that played synthesizers, bands that wore fluffy shirts, whatever — get critically maligned. I’d love to get your take on that.

It’s sexism. Because they have primarily a female audience, and the sort of established male-dominated press and media think that if women mostly like a band, they can’t be any good. I’m absolutely convinced that’s the case. It just so happens that the reason women like a band is, maybe these guys are also good-looking guys, but they play a certain kind of open music. They’re not trying to be macho. I saw The Beatles ‘64 the other week, and what really impressed me was, I suddenly thought, “Oh my God, those guys don’t look at their instruments.” They look at the audience, and that’s why people love them, and that’s why women love them. There was a connection between them and the audience that was really physical, where a band like Pink Floyd, they’re looking at their instruments, they’re looking at their guitars. They’re not trying to perform in that sense. But I just think that some bands get more female audiences and they’re poo-pooed, they’re dismissed. They’re seen as being not skilled enough. But the truth is — ask Duran — we were the ones playing all the instruments on the albums. We were the ones writing the songs. We were the ones helping to design the videos. We were completely in charge. We didn’t have A&R telling us what to do. We created the ‘80s. All of those groups that you’d see on Band Aid and at Live Aid. Young men did that. Young kids, young girls like Sade. It was an amazing time for creative energy amongst the youth.

I’m sorry I keep bringing Duran Duran into this, but they naturally come up given your parallel careers. I remember Duran got a lot of critical hate in America, but did Spandau get it as well? I don’t remember you guys getting it as bad here.

No, but I think we probably got it in the U.K. as well. I think it was partly our fault, because at the beginning we were trying to upset the vanguard of the previous decade. The writers that wrote for the inky press, for the NME, Melody Maker, the serious music papers that we had at the end of the ‘70s going into the early ‘80s, we were trying to upset them. They didn’t want aspirational working-class kids. They wanted their working-class kids to look like they came out of Dickens, George Orwell. So, we weren’t interested in talking to them, really. The Face was our magazine. Smash Hits was our magazine. MTV was our place to live. I grew up buying singles, loving T. Rex and Bowie, and I always wanted to be one of those artists that could go on TV and have a hit single. One of the greatest moments of my entire life was getting on Soul Train in America. What a breakthrough that was!  … I think we were looking for credibility elsewhere, by being a crossover band. The blue-eyed soul thing was obviously what we were doing.

Wow, how did you go over with the audience when you played on Soul Train?

It seemed like it was pretty cool, actually. I mean, they were all dancing. But they have to dance, don’t they? They’re being paid to do that!

What memories do you have of being on Soul Train?

Don Cornelius said, “You guys all brothers?” And I said, “No, but actually me and Martin are.” He says, “Oh, because you all look the same.” It was really funny.

You mentioned doing acting and being in The Bodyguard, and that’s another huge feather in your cap. You’re third-billed in the credits, just two names down from Whitney Houston.

It was cool. And it came about because my wife at the time, Sadie Frost, she got a role in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula playing Lucy. And so, we set up a house in L.A. while she was filming that, and within a few weeks I got an audition for The Bodyguard. I did four auditions. The last one was with Kevin [Costner], and then I got the part. I think I brought that baddie Englishman quality to it. I think I was meant to be the sort of red herring, really, where my Sy Spector character was the guy who was trying to assassinate Whitney’s character. But I absolutely love working with her. She was such a dream. She would hang out with the crew all day. She would go to craft services and pick on the sandwiches with them, and she was very open. She wouldn’t run off to her trailer. She was a beautiful person. And I’d listen to her sing in the makeup trailer in the morning, and that was always so sensational. I remember seeing her again at Mann’s Chinese for the premiere, and Bobby Brown was with her then. And there was a different sense about that relationship. I remember going up to embrace her, and Bobby kind of standing between us. It was sort of weird and it didn’t feel quite right.

You were a seasoned actor by the time you did The Bodyguard. Did you ever have any conversations with Whitney — not necessarily giving her advice, but as a known musician who’d successfully crossed over to acting, and with this being Whitney’s first acting role, maybe you had some helpful insight.

I would never have given her advice. No, no. I think we connected musically, although I was always upset that I didn’t make the soundtrack! Because I remember being in the rehearsal room and Kevin said, “‘True,’ that’s me and my wife’s favorite song.” We never made the soundtrack! But was an amazing experience. Four months you work on what is a proper industry big movie, and it’s like climbing Everest. Actually, someone in the crew was killed on the set during the making of that, and we only got the afternoon off and then we were all back to work the next day. Nothing more was said. It felt like climbing Everest: “Oh, we’ve lost someone, but we’ll carry on. We’ve got to get to the summit.” There were a lot of powerful egos on it, but I think it came out well. It’s a really cool popcorn film.

Is acting something you still do or aspire to do?

Yeah, I still do it, but you won’t see me on TV. I’ve done some more theater in the West End. I really love doing Pinter. I’ve done three Pinter plays. … I really love doing the same thing every day. I think there’s that little bit of an ADHD quality to me that has to have something going on, and so going to the theater and walking to work, that’s my world. That’s what I’m thinking about. Nothing else can get in my way. I’m going to get onstage and try and perfect what I got wrong the night before. I still feel that about playing live. When I get up and play live, we’ll do a two-and-a-half-hour show with Nick and we come off and we only talk about the bits that we got wrong. The audience didn’t even notice. … But yeah, I like doing theater. I prefer it to doing film.

Well, that begs the question about doing writing a musical, or having a jukebox musical of Spandau songs. Is that something you’d be into?

There’s been talk about a Spandau musical over the years, and various people have come to us with books, the idea, the script idea for the musical. It was nice, actually, that there’s a Live Aid musical. … It’s called Just for One Day. There’s some Spandau Ballet music in there. It’s mostly Bob [Geldof] and it’s mostly about some kids now who are in a record store and they’re looking back on that era in the ‘80s, and it flashes backwards and forwards.

I kind of feel that this new album, combined with INSOLO and maybe with the first solo album and some Spandau songs as well, could be a one-man show, a story of VH1 Storytellers thing. That would be a cool theater experience. Is that something you’ve thought about doing, or is that something you have done that I’m unaware of?

Oh, that’s something you just told me! I’ll have to go away and think about it! I think we’re all looking for different ways of presenting ourselves, aren’t we? I don’t know if I’m going to take this album on tour, but I’m really proud of this album. I think it’s some of the best songs I’ve written. “I Know Where I’m Going,” which ends the album, I’m as proud of that as anything I’ve ever written. It sort of came all at once on the piano; I think I wrote the lyrics and the music within half an hour. I don’t really know where it came from; it seems sort of like it came from my subconscious in a metaphorical way. It’s about me looking towards an island across the sea and wanting to go there, knowing that I’m going there and getting there and sort of climbing a lighthouse and sending back signals to the people who knew me and love me. Is it about death, maybe? Is it about spiritual bliss and trying to find that? Yeah, probably. It’s very much a solo, individual song. And I’m not a religious person, but I just felt there was some spirituality in that song that I needed to create for myself. And yeah, that’s where I went with it.

Well, obviously the album is called This Destination. It’s kind of like a woo-woo question, but what is your destination? Where are you going? Have you figured it out? Did making this album help you figure that out? Those are the questions we all grapple with.

I think “This Destination,” which is a very upbeat song and was the last song I actually wrote for the record, is me being very positive, very happy, saying music is my destination. It’s written like a love song, saying no matter what you do, no matter where you go, I’m here. The home is here; come back whenever you need to. That’s me talking to myself, really. It’s about that I feel happiest when I’m making music, whether that’s onstage or whether that’s writing songs. No matter what else I do — all that acting stuff, the podcast stuff, the being-a dad-stuff — it’s all great and it’s what I do, but here it is in my life. [Music has] always been in my life. It’s been in my life since I was 11 years old and my mom and dad bought me a guitar for Christmas. And I wrote a song so I could remind myself about it.

This Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity.