“True” by Spandau Ballet

"True" is the moment Spandau Ballet steered their new wave toward soul and put on sharp suits to match. The title track of their third album, from 1983, came out of Gary Kemp's pen as a confession of how he felt about Altered Images singer Clare Grogan, and you can hear whose records he'd been spinning: Marvin Gaye and Al Green, all velvet and ache.

Kemp left room for Steve Norman's new fascination with the saxophone, and the band cut it at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. DJs fell for it before it was even a single, and it went all the way to number one in the UK and gave the band their first Billboard Hot 100 hit in the US. It became their signature song, drifted through Sixteen Candles and 50 First Dates, and P.M. Dawn sampled it for their own US chart-topper, "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss", in 1991.

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