Paint Me Down
1981 single by Spandau Ballet
"Paint Me Down" is a song by the English new wave band Spandau Ballet, released on 2 November 1981 as the second single from what would be their second album, Diamond. Their guitarist/songwriter Gary Kemp copied some of the elements of their previous hit, "Chant No. 1 (I Don't Need This Pressure On)", and the conflict between producer Richard James Burgess and lead singer Tony Hadley that began with that song continued as they recorded the vocals for "Paint Me Down". A controversial music video for the song was rejected by the British music chart television programme Top of the Pops, and its number 30 peak position on the UK Singles Chart was not enough to justify airing the studio performance they had filmed for the show either.
Background
As Spandau Ballet's first album, Journeys to Glory, was being completed, the band's guitarist/songwriter Gary Kemp noticed a resurgence of funk in the clubs around Soho that he wanted to emulate in his own songwriting, and an encounter with the British jazz-funk group Beggar and Co led to their collaboration on one of his first attempts to do so, "Chant No. 1 (I Don't Need This Pressure On)". When that song became a number 3 hit in the UK it also put pressure on him to write more hits for their second album. In his autobiography I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau, he explained how the songs for their debut came much more easily, having been written, re-written and then tested in front of club audiences for months before they were signed to a record label. But as "Chant No. 1" climbed the charts, he suffered from writer's block and decided to copy its use of the Beggar & Co.
The public source identifies “Paint Me Down” as 1981 single by Spandau Ballet. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Paint, Down and single.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q110129139. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “Paint Me Down” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.