Ticket to the World by Martin Kemp

Author:Martin Kemp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-10-04T12:39:03+00:00

The Keycard Conundrum

Of all the technological advances rolled out in the 80s, one that didn’t quite work out so well for me was the introduction of mag-stripe hotel keycards.

At the start of 1984, Spandau found themselves in Munich. Following the same formula that proved such a success with the True sessions, we decided we needed to escape the country again. Cast off the commitments of daily life, shut out the hundreds of bands that were popping up in the charts following the New Romantic playbook and hole ourselves away.

Steve Dagger’s plan to have us do that at Compass Point in the Bahamas had been just the tonic we needed to kick us out of the second-album slump. Our new plan to lock ourselves away in a basement in Munich in the dead of winter, where the pavement above us was coated in snow and the last drops of sunlight died in the stairwell – well, it was a gear change.

We’d got the idea from Queen. We’d got to know them a little bit doing promo stuff around and about, and they had been working at this studio for the last few years. They had such an incredible sound at that point, recording songs like ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ and ‘Hammer to Fall’ in this same Munich bunker.

Musicland was the name of the studio. It had been responsible for Donna Summer’s genre-bending electro-disco track ‘I Feel Love’ – the song that put Giorgio Moroder on the map and took synthesisers out of experimental art rock and put them slap bang in the middle of Top 40 radio.

But I cannot, for the life of me, understand how that place provided so much influence for so many artists. Led Zeppelin did Presence there. The Rolling Stones did It’s Only Rock ’n Roll there. Marc Bolan & T. Rex did Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow there. But the place was a fucking bunker. There are submarines crawling the ocean floor that had more character. Even ones that have been sunk.

I had been in basements before. Billy’s had been a hotbed of creativity and inspiration, and it was as dingy as basements get. Musicland, though, I could not cope with.

Adding to the sense of claustrophobia was the fact that the hotel we were staying in, the Arabella, was directly above us. For two months our lives revolved around the staircases of the Arabella Hochhaus. Downstairs to the basement to work; upstairs to our rooms to sleep. So we were keen, whenever we got the chance, to escape the complex completely and get out to a bar or a club.

P1 (‘Pee-Eines’) was the one we could rely on most for a good night. One such night, we rolled back into the Arabella at around 3 a.m., feeling the effects of those big German beers. My hotel keycard in my pocket, I was quite keen for the loo, so as soon as we arrived I headed up to my room to answer nature’s call.

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