"True" (Spandau Ballet)

For the longest time, I thought "True" (1983) was a song by Tears for Fears.  You have to admit Spandau Ballet's lead singer, Tony Hadley, can sound an awful lot like Tears for Fears' Roland Orzabal—especially on a car radio with crappy reception, which is how I typically heard new music in the 80s.  I believe radio programmers may have played up the similarities, actually, because I remember "True" being in heavy rotation again in the mid-80s when Songs from the Big Chair was shooting up the charts.  There's even the line in "True," Head over heels when toe to toe, which sounded like a reference to the song "Head Over Heels." In fact, I remember being somewhat disappointed when the song "True" wasn't part of the track listing on Songs from the Big Chair.
But I digress.
"True" was penned by Spandau Ballet's keyboardist/guitarist Gary Kemp as an homage to American soul music and artists like Al Green and Marvin Gaye, who gets name-checked in the song.  As Kemp told Rhino Records in a 2014 interview, the song came about because he was looking to write something that wasn't completely rooted in synth pop, like the band's earlier records.  This quest led him to R&B/soul.
Kemp notes that, at the time in the UK, a white, middle-class Londoner band trying its hand at soul was kind of "subversive."  Coming from an American point of view, it's kind of strange to think of this mellow, blue-eyed soul ballad as "subversive."  Nevertheless, Kemp explains, "(Soul music) was seen as sort of aspirational working-class music and therefore not politically correct, maybe.  But it was the sound of working-class kids in London.  And I wanted to make a record that had something that sat in that world."
Kemp and his bandmates probably never imagined the song would land them on Soul Train, chatting with Don Cornelius.  Or that they would be back touring in 2014, playing "True" for American audiences like it's 1983 all over again.