As Spandau Ballet was working on their 1989 album
Heart Like a Sky, lead guitarist and songwriter
Gary Kemp decided he wanted a production credit on the album that was separate from the rest of the band. In his autobiography
I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau, he wrote, "I knew this would be our final album and I didn't care what the others thought."
Heart Like a Sky and its four singles performed poorly in the UK. The band then recorded a cover of
Simon and Garfunkel's "
The Boxer" in order to receive a payment from their record company, but Kemp described his feelings about the fate of Spandau Ballet after recording the song as "an unspoken acceptance that the band would not be working, at least for the foreseeable future." By the late 2000s, Kemp was wanting to get back together with the disgruntled bandmates and eventually convinced them to do so. The London show sold out in 20 minutes, so a second was added. According to Hadley, the positive response to the tour was so encouraging that they were compelled to work on a new album as soon as possible. They chose to record acoustic versions of their chart hits, which Norman found to be beneficial in that "it kind of eased us into the studio process together. If we'd all gone into the studio and tried to have written songs together, it might have been a bit too much to handle at the time." Kemp described the approach they took: Kemp always had sole credit for the previous material he had written for the band, but he shared the songwriting credit with Norman on the title track. Kemp said, "The new song was a way for us to show that Spandau Ballet are back, not just to play the hits on tour but also to take on our contemporaries in the pop charts!" ==Release and commercial performance==