Spandau Ballet, Tears for Fears

Review: Sydney's babysitters would have made off like bandits this weekend with two shows by 80s superstars Tears for Fears and Spandau Ballet. The audience had a striking singularity of demographic: folks in their late 30s-onwards reliving the music of their youth. Sadly no-one seemed to feel the need to wear their Blitz Club era tartan to celebrate the return of the Spands, but there were more than a few clatches of giggly women congregating around the bar, gulping down the Entertainment Centre's unspectacular house white and having themselves a wonderful Girls Night Out.

The night began with former Southern Sons frontman Jack Jones – near unrecognisable thanks to some Zappa-style facial hair – strumming his way through a solo acoustic set which finished, predictably, with ‘Heart in Danger'. While he was received with polite enthusiasm, the arrival of Tears for Fears via a weirdly truncated karaoke excerpt of ‘Mad World' sent the paunchy, greying crowd into a frenzy – one which only escalated as the band slipped straight into ‘Everybody Wants To Rule The World'. Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith were looking healthy and energetic and both were in fine voice – particularly Orzabal, whose commanding bellow has lost nothing in the intervening years – and their band of hired guns pulled off all the stop-starts as required, with particular kudos to their backing singer: a chap who impressively pulled off the soul-wail vocals of ‘Woman in Chains' in place of the absent Oleta Adams. While newish song ‘Floating Down the River' wasn't up to the standard of the rest of the set, that was mainly because the rest of the hit-after-hit set was seriously kick-ass: ‘Sowing the Seeds of Love', ‘Pale Shelter', ‘Head over Heels' (which sounded particularly mighty) and the set-closing ‘Shout'. But would it have killed them to do a proper version of ‘Mad World'? No, it would not have.

By the time beers were gotten for Spandau Ballet's set there was a huge screen hung before the stage and before long an artsy introductory film (remember when bands bothered doing that?) announced the imminent arrival of "Tony... John... Martin... Gary... Steve" before the screen dropped and the sharply dressed quintet burst into ‘To Cut A Long Story Short'. And you know what? It sounded awesome: Gary Kemp was pounding out the keyboard riff before swapping to guitar, Martin Kemp was anchoring the song with his bass, John Keeble kept the disco beat up nicely, Steve Norman was on guitar duties and Tony Hadley, frankly, sounded magnificent. Like Orzabal, his voice has only gotten richer while losing none of its power (and, unlike contemporaries Duran Duran at their V Festival set, there wasn't any evidence of real-time autotune tweaking the vocals). In fact, at that moment, you could almost believe that the band had just beamed in from the mid-80s.

And then they turned on the cameras.

Nothing ages more badly than a former heartthrob, and seeing a band as often photographed as the Spands transformed into men of early middle age is a disheartening experience. The receding hairlines and crow's feet of the Kemp brothers look particularly cruel captured on a massive video screen, no matter how much they gave it some duck-faced pouting. Similarly, Keeble's attempt at a spiky haircut and interesting jeans made him look like a recently-divorced uncle getting back into the dating scene, and as for Hadley... well, let's just say that while he's on tour, there's an Italian restaurant in his neighbourhood slowly going broke. Steve Norman, on the other hand, has aged exceptionally well and his energy never flagged as he moved from guitar to sax to percussion for the entire two hours, while the rest of the frontline occasionally seemed to be keeping it up through sheer force of will.

What wasn't a disappointment was the music: Spandau Ballet's 1981-1985 heyday made them a part of the last generation of pop idols who actually played their instruments and the band were impressively tight through their two-hour set, with enough minor mistakes to prove that the sounds weren't just being secretly triggered by their touring keyboardist. Their set spanned their entire career, containing a lot of material from their golden age (‘Communication', ‘Round and Round', ‘Only When You Leave'), some of the spikier early material (‘Instinction' and ‘She Loved Like Diamond' were notable inclusions, while an epic version of ‘Chant Number One' turned up late in the set) and some stuff that no-one in their right mind would have wanted to hear: the new single ‘Once More' would have been the set's nadir were it not for the presence of the gormless political posturing of ‘Through the Barricades' and the would-be rabble-rousing beginning-of-the-end ‘Fight for Ourselves'. But let's face it: there were only really two songs that everyone came to hear, and the band freakin' knew it. Teases that they are, ‘True' finally appeared at the end of the set, and then we had to play the will-they-return-for-the-encore game before they busted out ‘Gold'.

Yes, this was basically a pre-retirement money-grab by a couple of bands who've spent the last couple of decades more interested in suing each other than making music; but it's been a long time since I've seen two bands enjoy playing quite so much. For what simply promised to be a fun, nostalgic night out, Tears for Fears and Spandau Ballet were both a hell of a lot better than they had to be. Andrew P Street