Top 55 Martin Kemp Quotes

When you’re acting, playing the bad guy, you get a chance to open up this box inside and look at all the bad things that you’ve got in there.

I think love gets better the older you get.

Every TV show you want to do, they want to look in your house. It’s God’s honest truth, they want to send a TV crew round to your house!

Bowie’s my hero.

Live Aid’s one of my favourite memories of all-time.

If you walk through life and you relate to everybody who looks at you, it would send you mad. So you close those people off, and you end up in a very small, tight bubble.

When I lack confidence now, I channel a bit of Steve Owen and that transforms me.

Spandau wasn’t just about the music; it was about the fashion that went with it too. We were part of the New Romantic movement that happened around the Blitz nightclub in London, and we thought the best way to sell the band to America was to take the whole package to New York.

My wife Shirlie was in Wham! when we met, so we were moving in the same circles.

If you do something you love doing, it keeps you young and it keeps you healthy. That for me is what success is.

In 1995, I discovered I had two brain tumours. The process of having them removed went on for about three years. It was a long and drawn-out time, wondering whether or not I was going to die.

Given how shy I was as a kid, the young me would be astonished to discover that I’ve made a career out of acting.

I think we all subconsciously take inspiration from TV.

I remember watching Cilla Black with my mum and dad – I must have been about six years old – and getting off the chair, going over to the TV screen and kissing her. I was sitting with Cilla once and I told her that and she laughed.

My parents taught us respect for other people, and for other people’s things.

When I was young, I first went into the theatre which opened up across from my house. My mum and dad put me in there, not to become an actor or anything but to get rid of my shyness, which was so bad, to the point it was painful. My time there was all about encouragement and improvisation.

There’s not many jobs where you go home and are still smiling.

As a child I was painfully embarrassed by everything, always blushing and unable to make eye contact.

My mum Eileen, a former machinist, made some of my costumes for ‘Top Of The Pops.’

I was a shy kid so my parents sent me to Anna Scher’s theatre school. That’s how I got my first proper role aged ten in the BBC show ‘The Glittering Prizes.’

I remember playing six nights at Wembley in the 80s. I partied for three of those straight, with our friends Duran Duran. Back then, the fun was about the after-show – who was coming to the party and whether they had a guest list pass.

I went to a party in Ibiza in 1984 in this house built into the side of a cliff with glass walls. It was the most dramatic thing I’d ever seen. There was a fountain that ran through the house and off the edge of the cliff. If you’ve ever seen the Peter Sellers film ‘The Party,’ it was the spitting image of that.

I think one of the blessings of being involved in music is that you end up liking a bit of everything.

It’s quite hard sometimes coming into a show where everybody’s quite cliquey, where everybody’s been set for a number of years and you’re the guest star. It’s quite difficult, it’s nervewracking in a way.

I’m a working-class guy.

I’m not a big fan of Russian airlines where you can tell the plane is about 50 years old.

If you’ve seen ‘Hustle’ before, ‘Hustle’ is kind of like one degree over reality. It’s always heightened, which makes it fun to watch in the way that they play it, in the way that stories are, even the way that it’s shot – the camerawork is heightened and it’s meant to do that.

I think it was my mum and dad who taught me how to love and how to think a relationship works, and I think it was by watching them.

I can’t dance. There’s some things I have to admit I can’t do, and dancing is one of them.

I had 10 wonderful years in Spandau Ballet. It was an incredible way to grow up, to hang out with your best mates, discovering the world, discovering who you are.

Father’s Day used to be the only day you’d say I love you to your dad.

Whether it was ‘The Krays’ or ‘EastEnders’ or the songs in Spandau Ballet, if you do a good job or make something that people enjoy, that’s not something you want to move away from. I was never in a rush to get away from what people enjoyed.

I find the older I get – carrying this thing called fame – the more I close myself off. That’s what you do.

I was 18 when I signed my first record contract and in those days fame was a lot of fun.

We all go through moments of depression. It’s part of being a human. Sometimes it’s not circumstantial, what makes you feel that way, it’s a chemical thing. You can get some help.

I’ve never felt comfortable in the spotlight. I never felt pretty enough or wanted people to look at me.

When I grew up in television you couldn’t go on a game show without being suited and booted.

I do believe there’s a bit of bad in everyone.

Having brain tumours made me appreciate my family more. It made me appreciate everything more.

It’s fun being on a film set full stop.

Music was far more tribal in the Eighties; you were into one band and that was it.

When I was younger I really challenged the boundaries of fashion, I guess I always have.

To be amongst people that know their lines and you’re the only person that doesn’t is just bizarre.

Success for me has been turning a hobby into a job and when my kids left school, I did the same for them.

I love greengrocers. When I walk in I always look at their pyramids of fruit to see if they have done it properly because I thought I was an expert pyramid builder.

I was brought up in a council flat in Islington with only an outside lavatory. And there were plenty of kids I knew who later ended up in prison.

I was always proud of the fact that Spandau and Duran Duran were like Oasis and Blur or the Beatles and The Rolling Stones – where you pick two bands of a generation and you’re either on one side or the other.

I used to struggle a lot with the depiction of violence in ‘EastEnders.’ I had more meetings with producers about that than anything else. Because it’s kind of cartoon violence, and I worry when my little boy watches it.

I like Virgin Atlantic and always feel at home on British Airways.

There’s nothing worse than swollen feet after a long flight so I always wear comfortable shoes, usually trainers.

A lot of things in life only become historic in retrospect, but we knew that Live Aid was a historic day while it was happening. Two billion people around the world were watching it on television at the same time. It was a massive moment.

Fame is great when everything in your life is going well. But when it goes wrong, when you’re having to jump on a bus, because you can’t afford to pay for a taxi, and you catch people looking at you. It might sound strange, but you feel ashamed. And that’s hard to deal with.

The violence in ‘EastEnders’ is a lot more dangerous than the violence in ‘Family.’ It becomes dangerous when it is softened, like in ‘The A-Team.’

I wanted to play for Arsenal.

Everything in life prepares you to do something else, no matter what you do.