JOURNEYS TO GLORY

Byline: ANDREW PRESTON

It's your funeral...

Spandau Ballet's Gary Kemp used to imagine ending his days on Everest - now he'll settle for the Lake District

I have always been fascinated by the story of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine and their attempt on Mount Everest in 1924. As they reached striking distance of the summit, the clouds parted and the pair were spotted by their colleagues below. Then the clouds closed around them, and they were never seen again. The thrilling question has always been, 'Did they get to the top or not?' I used to have a fantasy, which was rather morbid, that if ever I was struck down by a fatal illness, I would fly to the Himalayas and follow in their footsteps. I would start walking up Everest and just go as far as I could.

But that was before I had my first son. I think you take a very different attitude towards death when you have children because you feel a sense of responsibility towards them. I now have two boys, Finlay, ten, and Milo, aged two months.

The best place to hold my funeral would be at home. Churches and other religious buildings are often beautiful spaces, and I would visit one to see a stained-glass window by William Morris or Edward Burne-Jones, or an example of Gothic architecture. But I have no time at all for what goes on inside.

I'm a fundamentalist atheist in that sense.

I believe that human beings are here on this evolving planet by extraordinary chance and only for a short time. We have to make the most of it while we are here, and part of making the most of it means adding more life - having children.

My funeral should be a celebration - as long as I've not died too young.

I'd like my wife, Lauren, and children to be there, and hopefully by then my grandchildren. I'd also like my bandmates from Spandau Ballet, including my brother, to be there. They've played such a big part in my life.

I've always been a big sucker for folk music, so I'd invite Irish musician Donal Luny and have Davy Spillane play the pipes. That will pay homage to my Irish ancestry. And I'd like Bill Nighy or Paul McGann to read a poem for me, as they both did at my wedding. I thought they were wonderful. Otherwise, I'd like a few good friends to say some nice words and then to gather round my piano.

After that I want to be buried, because I like the idea of just dissolving back into the earth. The place I would like to be laid to rest is the Lake District. I fell in love with the mountains there when I was a teenager. I was living in a council house in Islington, north London, and was taken to this exotic landscape by my school. Somewhere around Helvellyn would be my favourite spot. When you go there, you can understand how it inspired Wordsworth and Coleridge.

A friend of mine has a canal boat, which he moors in Chelsea, so maybe we could take our time and I could be taken by boat up to the north of England.

Everyone could enjoy the view on the way.

I used to be scared of dying when I was younger, and I was frightened of my parents dying. When I had my first child, I suddenly let go of those feelings, but then had a terrible fear of anything happening to him. I think that fear outweighs worries about your own mortality. Anyway, as my son says: 'Dying will be just like going to sleep.' As an actor, it's always quite thrilling to have a go at dying on screen. I've only done it twice. In the BBC drama Murder in Mind, I ended up freezing to death on a snowy moor, while in Killing Zoe I'm shot to pieces. For this I had loads of pyrotechnics placed under my shirt and I stood there waiting for them to go off. When they did, it was such a shock that I didn't have to do much acting.

I'm only 44, so I'm counting on my real death still being a long way off, and I'll keep busy until then. When I look around at the pop world that I've been a part of, I see this Peter Pan thing going on. Look at David Bowie and Mick Jagger - maybe not Keith Richards so much - it's amazing the way they are still going.

Twenty years ago, a man in his sixties was almost a goner. Nowadays, you can still look good and carry on performing at that age. I think a lot of ageing is in the mind. If you can keep yourself healthy and fit, and watch what you eat, then age is really about how you see yourself. It is also about adapting yourself to a world that is, by and large, run by youthful people.

My only concern is that I won't see all the things I'd like to before I go. I'm worried about dying before I visit America's Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks, the Himalayas, the Hindu Kush, and before I have seen all of Shakespeare's plays or read all of the works of Dickens and Graham Greene.

In a way, that's more terrifying than the idea of dying. It's the middleclass neurosis of having so much still to do and learn in such a short time. I think the pressure is really on to try and do it all before you pass away. 

INTERVIEW BY ANDREW PRESTON