Pop Song 206 'True' Spandau Ballet 1983

Pop Song 206 'True' Spandau Ballet 1983

"True" is a song by the English new wave band Spandau Ballet. It was released on 15 April 1983 as the third single from their third studio album of the same name. The song was written by band member Gary Kemp.

"True" was composed by group leader Gary Kemp, who wrote the song at his parents' house while living there. It is a six-minute (in its original album version) song that in part pays tribute to the Motown artist Marvin Gaye, who is mentioned in the lyrics, and the sound he helped to establish. According to Kemp, "I think I wanted to write a song that was a bit like a Marvin Gaye, Al Green song, a blue-eyed soul song. It was at a time when it was me concentrating on melody first rather than the sort of riff and the groove." Kemp also said, "'True' became a song about writing a love song. Why 'Why do I find it hard to write the next line? I want the truth to be said?' Because I didn't want to write it down—because there's nothing more embarrassing."

The song was partly about Kemp's platonic relationship with (and unrequited love for) Altered Images singer Clare Grogan. Some phrases in the lyrics (including the much-quoted reference to "seaside arms") were adapted from Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, a copy of which Grogan had given Kemp. The song is written in the key of G major. It has a tempo of 98 BPM and a chord progression of G, Em9, CMaj9, Bm7. The song modulates to the key of E♭ major for the instrumental break, after which it re-modulates the key of G Major for the remainder of the song.

In 2009, Tim Rice wrote in The Spectator that the song was "a giant of its time and remains a standard today". In 2014, Ian Gittins described it in The Guardian as a "juggernaut power ballad". In 2015, Peter Larsen wrote for the Orange County Register that the band's formula of mining "a vein of soulfulness tinged with nostalgia and romance" had "reached perfection" on the track, describing it as "the one Spandau Ballet song everyone knows... It's truly a perfect song, as moving today as ever it was. "It has been characterized as a "karaoke staple". In 2015, the song was voted by the British public as the nation's tenth-favorite 1980s number one in a poll for ITV.

"Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" is a song by American hip-hop group P.M. Dawn, released in August 1991 as the second single from their debut album, Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience (1991). It is built around samples of Spandau Ballet's "True", The Soul Searchers' "Ashley's Roachclip", and the Bob James version of Paul Simon's "Take Me to the Mardi Gras", with the remainder of the song written by P.M. Dawn vocalist Attrell "Prince Be" Cordes; only Prince Be and "True" writer Gary Kemp were credited for writing the tune.

The song was P.M. Dawn's first (and only) number-one hit on the US Billboard Hot 100