Their performances at the Blitz and other exclusive venues attracted the attention of record labels eager to sign them, and one of the songs they had been performing, To Cut a Long Story Short", gained popularity through a recording session made at BBC Radio 1.
The high demand for their music instigated the commencement of recording the album and the release of "To Cut a Long Story Short" as their first single. The song reached number 5 on the UK Singles Chart, and two subsequent hits, "The Freeze" and "Muscle Bound", peaked at 17 and 10, respectively.
The influence of David Bowie on Journeys to Glory has been discussed by Kemp as well as critics of the album, who gave it mixed reviews upon its release and years later. After their composer attempted to shift to a more American style of funk with songs like "Glow" and the first single for their next album, "Chant No. 1 (I Don't Need This Pressure On)", he remembered that the songs from Journeys to Glory had been rehearsed at concerts before they were signed to a label and had received the approval of their original fanbase. When some of the new songs for the second album did not chart as well, the band recovered by remixing a fourth single as a more pop-flavoured tune and lost the interest of the hipsters that Spandau Ballet had initially courted with the songs that were recorded for their debut. Kemp then felt freed from trying to please that crowd and began writing mainstream pop songs that were the band's biggest hits.
While still performing as the Gentry, Spandau Ballet recognized that a new London club scene was taking root at a weekly Tuesday night gathering called the Blitz and decided to focus on playing what they had become used to hearing there, what their guitarist/songwriter Gary Kemp called "white European disco music". He was committed to their new genre: "All fancy rock patterns had to go …, we'd discussed it at the club: these new songs would be to a disco beat; there would be a [discarding] of all the old power pop stuff; our future sound had to be like the one we heard every Tuesday night. If we were to attempt to be the band that represented this new cult, then we had to be absolutely ready."
Before the Gentry members began attending the Blitz in February 1979, their hangout was a similar Soho club called Billy's that they first went to in the autumn of 1978. According to Spandau Ballet's guitarist/saxophonist, Steve Norman, "The oldest song on the album, 'Confused', is the only song to survive from the period before we first went to Billy's." He described how it created a meaningful point of entry for them into the club scene: "It's the song that, when we first got to Billy's, would make you think we belonged there." Their guitarist, Martin Kemp, admitted that "Confused" was the track from the album that meant the most to him because it dates back to the period when the band was still called the Makers and he was just a roadie for them. During a two-week stint in the summer of 1980 at a club in Saint-Tropez, the band performed "Confused" along with "Age of Blows", an instrumental that Norman felt was one of the weaker cuts on the album and theorizes. "To Cut a Long Story Short" the singer begins providing details regarding certain undesirable circumstances but concludes with, "To cut a long story short, I lost my mind". On BBC Radio 4's Mastertapes series in 2013, Kemp said, "The lyrics to those kind of songs, I mean, I suppose they owed something to Bowie's famous cut-ups, you know, slightly esoteric, this grand landscape that we're all living on. That was the kind of lyric, very early '80s lyric about a kind of heroic place that we all wanted to put ourselves."
Puzzled by the opening line of "The Freeze", "Blue sing la lune, sing lagoon", former Evening Standard and music magazine journalist David Johnson did not see the song as an obvious choice for a single but pointed out that it "was not chosen for singability but for its New Romantic clubbing credibility. In 1981 the pathfinding band were consolidating the new approach they had styled—White European Dance Music—led on 'The Freeze' by Gary Kemp's two-fingered synth arpeggios, plus enough percussive kick-drum snaps underpinned with bassline rhythms to fill dancefloors. "Muscle Bound" According to Kemp he was asked about working with Graham Smith on the cover art for Journeys to Glory and commented, "We enjoy playing with imagery, but at that time everyone was taking us far too seriously." To give an example of a lighter moment from the album, he said, "'Muscle Bound' was quite tongue-in-cheek," and explained, "I've always liked folk music since I was really young, and 'Muscle Bound' was like a folk song with quite a funny lyric."
The recordings began in September 1980 Spandau Ballet began recording Journeys to Glory at The Manor in the village of Shipton-on-Cherwell, Oxfordshire. Because "To Cut a Long Story Short" was so well received at BBC Radio 1, the record labels competing for the band agreed that they could start recording it as a single in addition to the rest of their first album and that the label they signed with would pay for the studio time. Some of the sessions were also done at Trident Studios. Norman said, "The sound of all the legends must have been in all the walls," and described the effect of those particular surroundings: “The place had such an energy to it; it makes you raise your game." Its location in Soho also made a difference in that their friends from the Blitz could hang out and provide support.
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