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REVIEW: Spandau Ballet, Sheffield Arena
As the house lights go down, five little figures appear from the gloom, backlit, motionless behind a gauze stage-curtain. Magazine cuttings from Spandau Ballet's 1980s heyday flicker across the giant netting.
The gauze drops and the pounding riff of To Cut a Long Story Short launches their first English gig in two decades. The band are huddled closely on stage, with clinical-white, minimalist lighting casting shadows on a black backdrop.
In many ways the audience are looking down a lens at a band 30 years ago, playing new music to New Romantic teenagers, cramped into a dark, sweaty club. The music is no longer new,but the band has never claimed this is anything more than a reunion.
The break from touring has given them an energy tonight and the brothers Kemp give the spotlight to the booming tenor of Tony Hadley, whose massive stature matches the soaring clarity of his voice.
Towards the end the set seems to lack pace – perhaps a song or two too long, but they're here to give people their money's worth and the fans certainly seem to go for it as they launch into a rocked-up Fight For Ourselves.
Spandau Ballet are a band of their time but the songs and energetic performance show why they built up the respect they did.
Tonight, through the magical medium of music, band and audience gaze through a window on a time and a place both long gone and strangely alive.
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Weather for Sheffield
Thursday 24 May 2012
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: 11 C to 24 C
Wind Speed: 10 mph
Wind direction: North east
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 10 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 16 mph
Wind direction: East
