Rant Of The Day is where I get to mouth off about whatever I feel like for however long I like. Theoretically, I'll update my whinge/opinion piece every weekday; in practice, maybe not so often.

Searching for Tony Hadley

I saw your page and was wondering if you can help me out with Tony Hadley.
Do you know about him? Or can point me toward a Web page that is informative?
Thank you! Michele

I can only guess that Michele read my earlier rant on Spandau Ballet (for whom Hadley was lead singer), inspired by the band filing a lawsuit against chief songwriter Gary Kemp over royalty payments. Quite how it qualifies me as a guru I don't know.

Gusworld, though, can never resist a challenge, especially when it relates to 80s music trivia. Ignoring Hadley's history while with Spandau Ballet (details on how to find that below), my own knowledge of his subsequent career is fairly scarce. When the band scattered in 1991, Hadley signed a contract with EMI. He released three singles in the UK over the next two years, to mild chart reaction. 'Lost In Your Love' reached #42, For Your Blue Eyes Only' hit #67 and 'The Game Of Love' scraped in at #72. That's about all I know, really.

Armed with a search engine, though, the options must be limitless. Except, er, they're not. Here's my more-or-less complete list of Spandau Ballet/Tony Hadley Web resources, and everything I've discovered about his recent career:

• The Spandau Ballet unofficial home page is obviously the correct place to start. Unfortunately for this reader, it's in Italian, and is still in the process of being completed. We can nonethless deduce some things with a little linguistic nous and guesswork. The news page (updated in December) mentions an appearance by Tony Hadley in the role of Jesus in a BBC radio production of the Lloyd-Webber/Rice musical 'Jesus Christ Superstar'. He also apparently did a song, 'Build Me Up', for the soundtrack of a film entitled 'When Saturday Comes'. In the past year, he's toured Europe with Joe Cocker and a symphony orchestra, and appeared with the SAS Band (?) in a series of European concerts dedicated to the 50s, called 'Shugaluga Baby'.
• A good general overview of Spandau's career can be found in the Rough Guides To Rock. On the Hadley front, this informs us that "Hadley signed a solo deal with EMI in 1992, releasing three unsuccessful singles before plans for an album were shelved." (If he'd recorded three singles, he'd probably actually recorded the album; doubtless bootlegs trade hands for a large sum.)
• The Gary Numan news update page includes the following piece of useful trivia: "Both Gary and Tony Hadley released singles in 1995 called "Absolution". And unfortunately, both achieved a similar lack of success with them." Wasn't with EMI; wonder who it was with?
• A gig review for the SAS Band gives some other info. Other band members include Fish (ex-Marillion) and Graham Goldman (ex-Wax, 10CC, The Hollies). No info on what Hadley sang, though.
• Dominators' UK Charts tells us that the 'Build Me Up' single was released on March 11 last year.
• And the UK Chart Entries 1996 Guide tells us that 'Build Me Up' managed to reach the grand position of #89 on March 23.
• Brief info on a German concert featuring Hadley can be found here.
• There's a (really) brief band history at http://www.omnicorp.com/videocd/compilations/tracks/spandau.html. No solo Tony information though.
• Proving that even guesswork has its limits, this site includes some Hadley information in Dutch that I can't make head nor tail of.
• A bitchy but amusing summary of Hadley's solo career (or lack thereof) to date can be found here.
• Spandau also pop up on lots of radio station request lists on the Web, which I'm not going to list here.

Clearly, there's a market gap here for decent information on Spandau and its individual members. Equally clearly, Tony Hadley is spending a lot of time in Europe and releasing a lot of flop singles. As a co-operative type of fellow, it seems to me the best idea would be for a multi-lingual version of the existing unofficial page, with built-in Tony extensions. Someone should volunteer for this task immediately.

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