Journeys to Glory by Spandau Ballet

Journeys to Glory, Spandau Ballet's debut, came out on Chrysalis on 6 March 1981, and it's the sound of the Blitz club pressed onto vinyl. Gary Kemp wrote every song with the New Romantic crowd at that Tuesday night haunt in mind, kids who wanted cool European dance music rather than guitar rock, and the band had road-tested the material in front of them before any label came calling. A BBC Radio 1 session of "To Cut a Long Story Short" set off the rush to sign them, and it became their first single.

Richard James Burgess produced, and the record is all stiff-backed synth pulse and funk-flecked bass from Martin Kemp, with Tony Hadley crooning grandly over the top and a Bowie shadow that Gary Kemp himself has owned up to. "The Freeze" and "Muscle Bound" followed it into the UK charts and the album went gold, though critics were split on it then and have stayed split since.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.