Spandau Ballet - To Cut A Long Story Short (12" Mix 1)

Spandau Ballet - To Cut A Long Story Short (Mix 1) / 12 Inch Extended Remix (HQ Audio)

To Cut a Long Story Short was not only Spandau Ballet's debut single, it was also the first single to chart from the scene around London's famous Blitz Club, later to become known as the New Romantic movement.

Not long afterwards, the club's founders, Steve Strange and Rusty Egan, had their own hit, Fade to Grey, as Visage. Duran Duran and Culture Club also emerged from the scene the following year. And even David Bowie visited, casting several "Blitz Kids" in the video for his hit single, Ashes to Ashes.

As scenes go, it was quite a movement - a polar opposite, yet essentially logical reaction to the times.

Late 1970s Britain was in economic turmoil, with high unemployment, power cuts, and strikes. The working class was disillusioned, leading to the emergence of the punk movement and, eventually, the election of Margaret Thatcher.

With protest, desolation, and punk's DIY aesthetic well established by 1979, a space was left for a reactionary movement that represented escapism, excess, glamour, and creativity.

The Blitz Club was the catalyst for it.

The club was based on Great Queen Street in Covent Garden and ran every Tuesday night at a former wine bar. Door policy was key, with Strange regularly turning away those whose outfits weren't extravagant or individual enough for him.

Coupled with Rusty Egan's music policy - heavily inspired by European electronic disco, such as Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk, and Ultravox - the duo created not just a nightclub but an artistic movement.

Spandau Ballet are best known for their polished 1983 mega-hits True and Gold, but those were actually their ninth and tenth Top 40 singles, and were an evolution of the more underground new wave sound heard on their debut.

To Cut A Long Story Short couldn't be any more of a product of the Blitz Club, performed, as it was, at the club's 1979 Christmas party before the band was known at all to the general public.

Less than a year later, they'd secured a record deal and were recording the track properly at The Manor Studio in Oxfordshire with producer Richard James Burgess. Burgess was the first to coin the phrase "New Romantic."

Friend of the band and writer Robert Elms saw the World War II term "Spandau Ballet" on a trip to Berlin and suggested it was a better option than their existing name, The Gentry.

To Cut A Long Story Short was released on 31 October 1980 and, in its first month, sold a quarter of a million copies, taking it to number five by the beginning of December.

The band made their Top of the Pops debut on 13 November 1980, bringing the Blitz Kids into the public eye for the first time - before several of their fellow club-goers would join them some of the decade's biggest pop stars.

Mix 1, featured her, is an extended version of the single. On the flipside is Mix 2, a dub version.

So, a 12-inch single that not only represents the original new wave incarnation of Spandau Ballet at its best, but that is also a document of the first of a succession of New Romantic mega-hits in the early 1980s, emerging from the Blitz Club.

Year: 1980 Label: Chrysalis Cat no: CHS 12 2473