A UK tour, a new album, commitments abroad and now a new beer. Spandau Ballet's frontman Tony Hadley certainly knows how to keep himself busy.

Sitting at a corner table at The New Inn Cropton sipping half a pint of ale, it would be quite easy to miss the Gold hit-maker. But once he starts talking about one of his passions, beer, it would be hard to miss just how animated he becomes.

"It's great to be excited about something again. I love pubs and I love real ales and drinking beer," the singer tells me excitedly as we chat about his latest venture, Hadley Blonde.

Brewed for the first time last week the "brilliant summer ale" should be on sale later this year in time for Tony's UK festival performances across the country.

Having dabbled in brewing before - he co-owned a brewery in Suffolk six years ago before it was forced to close -Tony thinks that this time along with the help of Joanne Taylor at The Great Yorkshire Brewing Company, they've got it right.

He said: "Every now and again people are going to want something different so we are trying to give everyone a little bit more flavour.

"When you make a beer you want it to be the best tasting beer you can imagine. I think it is going to be fantastic."

Originally from Islington, the 53-year-old said his first brewing experience started out as "a complete and utter joke" with a friend when they went on to create the Red Rat Craft Brewery in Suffolk.

"It started off in a shed, then we moved to another shed and then to a bigger shed before we started in a warehouse. But we should've stuck to the shed," he tells me laughing.

"It was like a group of lads who form a band and then think they're the new Led Zeppelin and we had a long way to go before we could brew properly."

Leaving the scientific part to the four brewing experts at the brewery, Tony has fully immersed himself in to the making of the rest of the product and knows exactly what he wants to get out of this beer.

"I love it when you're sat outside of the pub on a summers evening and you've got a beautiful golden ale that just goes down so easily.

“That's the kind of drink we want to make, a brilliant, brilliant summer ale."

With the rise in popularity of real ales and local breweries the singer said that with the help of the staff at The Great Yorkshire Brewery he is confident that it can be a success and even has ambitions to sell bottles of Hadley Blonde abroad.

"I have just come back from five weeks in Italy," Tony tells me.

"Spandau did very well over there and so Have I so I think in the future we would look at exporting there."

Alongside the launch of Tony's new beer the brewery itself is expanding, with a new warehouse set to be completed by September later this year.

Director Joanne Taylor told me: "It's going to be really green. We're going to have a biomass boiler for example and it's generally going to be much better for the environment."

Hadley Blonde will hopefully be sold at Tony's various UK festival performances including the Dare 2b Yorkshire Festival of Cycling at Harewood House in July.