Martin Kemp on fame, family and life after two brain tumours

At 61, actor, presenter and musician Martin Kemp has been in a hit band, starred in movies, reality TV, a top soap and documentaries. But for him, the Eighties remains the highlight decade.

And he’s now far enough removed from New Romantics band Spandau Ballet to feel able to write Ticket To The World: My 80s Story – about how the group came about, the spats, the hits (To Cut A Long Story Short, True, Gold…), the competition and, most of all, the fun of the era.

His brother Gary, singer-songwriter and lead guitarist with Spandau, hasn’t yet read the book, but Kemp chuckles that he can go out and buy one. “He can afford it.”

In Spandau’s heyday, the band would be mobbed by screaming fans wherever they went and pursued by paparazzi.

“We would do the shows, escape out the back of the gig in an ambulance huddled together.

"When you are 18 and 19, with thousands of kids banging on the windows, you are laughing at those moments. It was happening to a bunch of school friends.”

Spandau split in 1990. “The last album was very difficult, the tensions were difficult, we’d been together too long. It was one album too many,” Kemp reflects.

It must seem like an age away from his life now, as we see him josh with his radio presenter son Roman on Celebrity Gogglebox and Martin & Roman’s Weekend Best.

After the band split, he and Gary enjoyed success in the hit movie The Krays in 1990.

But in 1995, he was diagnosed with two brain tumours after discovering a lump on the back of his head, and over the next three years had treatment to remove them.

In 1998, still not totally recovered, he jumped at the chance to play Steve Owen on EastEnders, aware that his prolonged health battle had stopped him from working.

“Looking back, I will always appreciate the gig with EastEnders because it took me out of that part of my life that was all about a brain tumour."