Tony Hadley will take us to good places at Cork Jazz Festival 

Promising to be the biggest ’80s night in Cork since the 1980s itself, on the Saturday evening of this year’s Jazz Festival, Cork City Hall will be hosting Tony Hadley and his band.

To many music fans, he was one of the defining voices of the 1980s, in particular New Romantic pop music, as the lead singer of Spandau Ballet with hits such as ‘True’, ‘Gold’ and ‘Through The Barricades’. Those songs remain very close to Tony himself.

“My personal relationship with the rest of Spandau Ballet has been very fractious, but those songs are a legacy. That legacy is as much mine as it is theirs… or the people that come and see us. People ask me if I ever get tired of singing the old songs, and the answer is that I never ever get bored because they’re great songs, I love them to bits.

“Every time you perform in front of an audience, you’re getting a different reaction. ‘True’ is the lovey-dovey, ‘do you remember our first kiss?’ love song, a wedding song. ‘Gold’ is more of a kind of party, blokey vibe. And then there is ‘Through The Barricades’, which I think was our best ever song, that’s the one that gets very, very emotional. It’s a brilliant song to sing.

“I’m one of these artists that doesn’t deny my past. I’ve seen too many artists go on stage and say, I’m not gonna do any more hits tonight. I’m just gonna do my new album or obscure songs and people walk out. Songs trigger memories, they take you to good places, and I don’t think you should deny the public the chance to hear them again. And I’m the bloke on the records, I’m the original singer!”

While Tony is adamant that there is no going back to Spandau Ballet again, he doesn’t want to forget them. “I do always thank the Spandau boys on stage because — despite what happened in the end — we had some amazing times, for five guys from Islington, pretty ordinary backgrounds, we did good. We achieved an awful lot, a lot more than a lot of other people.

“I think we always gave a sense of hope to people, when we grew up all you had was an outside toilet, it was pretty basic. Hopefully that’s an inspiration for other people as well. Without the guys and without us being at school together and forming the band when we did, I wouldn’t be talking to you, and I wouldn’t be coming to the Cork Jazz Festival. So there’s always a thank you and acknowledgement to the guys and I think that’s important as well.”

While the band reformed in 2009 and did several world tours and released new material, Tony decided to resign from the band in 2017. “I think by doing that it brought me to the realisation that ‘that’s it, there’s no going back.’ Once I say no, that is no, it has allowed me a greater sense of freedom to think ‘I’m gonna do what I want to do’. I’m singing better than ever, my voice is still there, I’ve not dropped any of the keys and I’m enjoying the new songs as well. It’s a really good feeling, and the new stuff is being touted all over the world, which is fantastic. I love playing music, love writing, being in the studio, and ultimately being on stage. It’s gonna be great fun in The City Hall for us.”

Tony speaks with enthusiasm about the band he has now, not just as musicians but as people, “first and foremost, I’ve got a great band, I call them The Fabulous TH band. We’re all mates, we’ve all got young kids as well, and our kids know each other, so we genuinely have a lot of fun. So I’ve got that as a comfort blanket, it’s just great to be around and they’re fantastic musicians. Maybe I’ve taken too long to get there, but I also just have the confidence to do what I want to do now, I don’t really care what anyone else thinks. I have a new album, which will be out hopefully next year. That’s a contemporary album, I think it sounds fantastic… but of course, I would as it’s our album! I’m in a really comfortable environment where we’re all good mates, and we’re enjoying it. And I think that’s the important element of music. If you’re not enjoying it, trust me, the audience can spot that a mile away.”

The combination of confidence and getting out of his comfort zone is a recurring theme in Tony’s career. “I’ve had chances of being in films and they’ve not come off for one reason or another. I’ve learned that where films are concerned, you can talk about it or have talks about talking about it to the Nth degree, and they come off and they don’t come off over the smallest of details. The first acting role I had was playing Billy Flynn in Chicago in The West End and that was a bit of a challenge! I did it around the time my first Swing Album, ‘Passing Strangers’, was released. I just thought you know, there’s a jazz orchestra there, it’s set in the 1930s, it’s a good combination… but bloody hell, it was hard, really difficult. I think it was the most nervous I’ve ever been, I don’t think I’ve ever been that scared in my life. You know when you’re on stage with your band, it’s loud, it’s brash, you can go where you want with the songs. But performing in a musical like that was really out of my comfort zone, but I ended up getting four and five-star reviews, which is pretty damn good. Also doing an American accent was a challenge but I did it for three and a half months and it was good fun, so that was the first proper acting job I did.”

Tony also reached new audiences with appearances on different reality shows such as ‘Reborn In The USA’ and ‘Celebrity Masterchef’, but his biggest TV appearance in that regard was going into the jungle in 2015 for ‘I’m a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!’.

He explained how it wasn’t as hard as others make it out. “I’d been asked to go on ‘I’m A Celebrity’ five or six times before and I kept saying ‘no, no, no. I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do it.’ But eventually, they asked me at just the right time, I’d been on tour with Spandau Ballet for about a year and a half and my connection there was really, really strong. I had just finished my own solo album and was getting ready to go on tour with my band and stuff. I got the call, and I thought to myself ‘I really do love the jungle’ — I’d actually trekked through the jungle for real before I was ever asked on the show, and that experience is amazing. And I thought to myself, it’s primetime telly, every night of the week. People who know my music would be reminded of me and hopefully, a lot of younger kids might connect with me as well — which they did. I still have people come up to me on the street talking about ‘I’m A Celebrity’. And do you know what I say it was like? Flippin’ good fun! I think you have to go in there with a sense of ‘I’m going to enjoy it’ and they were paying me to enjoy it! For me, the weirdest thing was some of the other people getting upset saying they wanted to go home because they missed my family and I was saying, ‘Mate, it’s only been two weeks, I’m on tour for months on end sometimes! And don’t worry your family, they are sitting in their Versace with a bottle of you know Sauvignon Blanc watching you on TV!’ But I enjoyed it. I loved every minute of it. I thought it was great fun.”

• Tony Hadley and his band, and the Spring Break 80s show will play Cork City Hall on Saturday, October 28. Tickets can be purchased via guinnesscorkjazz.com