Spandau Ballet / This Is the Love - Single / 2014
This Is the Love
uplifting, slightly wistful, anthemic
A late-period Spandau Ballet single built almost entirely around a declarative hook, tracing a drift from aimlessness into sudden, transformative romantic arrival. It trades the band's earlier new-romantic irony for a more straightforward, arena-pop affirmation of love as rescue.
romantic rescue aimlessness turning to purpose transformation through love urban isolation surrender to feeling
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses a 'you' who arrived unexpectedly and changed his sense of direction; the voice is sincere and retrospective, looking back at a moment of drift before the relationship began.
What happens
The song opens with the narrator lost and scraping by, waiting for something (a train, a change) that never quite comes. A figure appears suddenly, compared to passing weather, and the narrator's static life is reoriented around this arrival. The imagery escalates from confinement (streets, walls) to release (flight, dreams), while the chorus repeats the title as a kind of mantra confirming the realization. The final sections dissolve into a hazier, sensory coda about late-night static and songs in the head, suggesting the feeling has become atmosphere rather than event.
How it's built
Simple verse-chorus pop structure with a short cold-open hook before verse one, a recurring pre-chorus/bridge pairing ('waiting on a train'), and a repeated title-chorus that functions almost as a chant. The song de-escalates formally near the end, looping the 'lights turning blue' passage three times as an outro rather than building to a climax, which flattens the arc into stasis-after-revelation.
Section by section
Cold open/hook
The song begins with the chorus itself, stripped of context, functioning as a thesis statement the verses will later justify.4
Verse one
“stepping out with feet of clay”
The narrator describes himself as flawed and directionless, borrowing a biblical idiom to suggest fragility or a sense of being built on unstable ground before the relationship begins.
Pre-chorus
“you passed like summer rain”
The arrival of the love interest is rendered as a natural, almost accidental event rather than a deliberate meeting, which reinforces the sense that this love interrupted rather than resolved a plan.
Second verse
“you torn the roof right off the line”
The imagery of enclosure giving way to flight marks the song's emotional turn, converting confinement metaphors into a sudden liberation.
Bridge/coda
The song shifts from narrative to atmosphere, lingering on a late-night, half-tuned-radio image that suggests the relationship has become a persistent background hum rather than a discrete memory. The repetition in the outro, without further lyrical development, leaves the song ending on mood rather than resolution.
Craft
- simile
- The beloved's arrival is compared to passing rain, framing love as fleeting weather that nonetheless leaves lasting change.
- repetition/anaphora
- The title phrase and the 'waiting on a train' lines recur verbatim, reinforcing the song's incantatory, almost devotional tone.
- extended metaphor
- Walls, streets, and a torn-off roof build a spatial metaphor for emotional confinement giving way to liberation.
- synesthetic imagery
- The closing passages blend visual (blue light), auditory (radio static, songs), and temporal (time running away) sensations to evoke a dissociative, dreamlike state of being in love.
Reading it
The most direct reading treats this as a straightforward love song about being pulled out of stagnation by another person — a generically uplifting pop narrative with little irony. A secondary reading, given the hazy, static-laced ending, is that the 'love' being described may be more about the comfort of a feeling or memory than an actual ongoing relationship — the narrator seems to be replaying or holding onto the moment of transformation rather than describing a present, developing bond.
Context
Released in 2014 as a standalone single, this came well after Spandau Ballet's commercial peak and reunion activity; it reflects a more conventional, radio-friendly pop-rock sound compared to their early 1980s art-pop and blue-eyed soul work. I don't have reliable biographical detail on the writing or recording circumstances of this particular track.
Listen for
- the way the chorus is front-loaded before any verse context is given
- the recurring train/rain imagery marking the moment of change
- the shift from confinement to flight imagery in the second verse
- the looping, static-radio outro that trades narrative progress for mood
- how the repeated title functions almost like a chant or affirmation
About Spandau Ballet
Spandau Ballet were an English pop band formed in Islington, London, in 1979. Inspired by the capital's post-punk underground dance scene, they emerged at the start of the 1980s as The Applause, playing "European dance music" as the house band for the "Blitz Kids" club night.
1979 - 1990 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue