Photo by Peter Ashtworth
Last week, Industry & Seduction, the first Thompson Twins compilation worked on by actual members of the band, was released in a 3-CD, 2-LP package. While the expected hits are represented, the real treasure can be found on the second disc filled with early, pre-synth, post-punk material and post-Thompson Twins, electronic-oriented Babble tracks. It’s a comprehensive collection of songs that should please both die-hards and casual fans who only know the band from their ‘80s MTV hits like “Hold Me Now,” “Doctor Doctor,” and “Lay Your Hands.”
For many years, Thompson Twins music lay dormant in a live setting, the members scattered and doing their own thing – in Alannah Currie and Joe Leeway’s case, that meant non-musical interests. Only founding member Tom Bailey stayed active in the music business but his interests shifted away from the synth-pop he was known for as he dove into dub and electronica music. In 2014, for the first time in nearly 30 years, Bailey dusted off the songs of his youth and played Thompson Twins hits live on the festival circuit. Since that time, touring and performing hits from the ‘80s has become an annual thing which Bailey enjoys and has no plans of quitting.
As a card carrying member of the ‘80s Nation, it was a thrill to have a conversation with Bailey, who called from his home in New Zealand, to talk about this new compilation, his earliest musical memories, how technology changed everything, and the role of nostalgia.
Wikipedia shows that there are 15 Thompson Twins compilation albums. Were you involved with any of those?
TOM: No, I don’t think so. I never knew there were 15. When we kind of left the mainstream music business, I noticed then that there were things coming out, and we complained bitterly about the lack of attention to the artwork and all that kind of stuff, but we never really got involved. And it was just a way of the record company, I guess, monetizing the fact that they’d somehow lost us.
Were you a moneymaker for the label when the band was active?
TOM: Yeah, I think so. It’s funny, because in the beginning, I realized that we were actually getting a free ride on the coattails of other people who were doing well. And then suddenly it was us who were paying the bills, and other people were getting a ride into the charts that way. But, you know, that’s how it works, I guess, to an extent. You have to accept it. The weird thing is that I think the guy who was paying our bills in the first couple of albums was Barry Manilow. So, not exactly aesthetically a stablemate, but he was certainly on the same label.
For the new Industry & Seduction compilation, what was your involvement?
TOM: What happened was last year, or maybe it was two years ago now, we re-released Into the Gap, which is our biggest album, because of its 40th anniversary, and I think that went well, so they thought, “Hmm, there’s obviously interest out there. Let’s do a kind of greatest hits.” And at that point, we said, “Hmm, it’s been done before, let’s make it special.” They came up with the idea of, at that stage, a three-CD set, and they said the first one has to be the hits, the last one can be a live album, but the middle one is where we’d like your help going through the archives.
So, basically, it was Alannah and I, by email, looking at lists of songs. I had to fight a little bit for early stuff before she joined, because what we set out to do, I suppose, was show the story of the Twins from beginning to end, at least as the record companies saw it. That actually involved several different labels agreeing to release stuff, which was nice. At least they made friends. Alannah and I, we didn’t really disagree about much. I think there’s a couple of tracks we argued about, but by and large, it was fairly obvious, and she got some votes, and I got some votes, and it just kind of fell together quite easily. Of course, the marketing department thought, “This is great, we can say the band did it.”
I was wondering if you and Alannah were sitting down around a table discussing songs or whether it was all done through email or something like that.
TOM: Through emails, because we, at that stage, were probably in different hemispheres or something. Anyway, that’s life.
Wikipedia also says you didn’t play Thompson Twins songs live for 27 years.
TOM: Yes, I was off the live circuit for 27 years. I was never counting that, but people kept pointing it out to me. When I came back to it, they said, “It’s 27 years since you last played on stage one of these songs,” and so it was quite a big deal. In my mind, it was more, how did I get back into it after all that time? But it was, strangely enough, a very natural thing to get back in.
I didn’t realize you had taken a break from touring. It wasn’t like you were refusing to play the songs, you just weren’t playing live at all.
TOM: Well, I was making music, and I was touring with other music. I’m doing a lot of shows with my dub project, and doing a lot of shows with my Indian music project. But of course, these are such alternative taste, most people would never hear about that. And I certainly didn’t want to push myself as, like, “Pop star plays weird music.”
Picking songs for this compilation, as you were digging through your catalog, were there any songs that you didn’t remember writing or recording?
TOM: There’s an element of that, especially the kind of weird versions, some of the instrumental mixes and things like that. And sometimes the titles we gave things confused. I’d forgotten that we called the B-side of “Love On Your Side” was “Love on Your Back.” You forget those things.
To be honest, what it always makes me think of is when I hear an old recording, especially one I haven’t listened to for a while, it’s kind of like reading an old diary. It takes you back to a time and place. And it’s strange, but I have a very distinct sensation of the people I was hanging out with, the kind of ideas we were discussing, the places we were in, and so on. So, it is a very kind of instant memory trigger.
I cannot tell you how much I love that, because I’ve been asking everyone I’ve interviewed in the last year the same final question, but, since you just said that, I’ll ask you now. Besides one of your songs, what’s a song that brings up specific memories?
TOM: You know, I was trained as a classical nerd, so a lot of my earliest memories of music are great classical and Baroque music. I mean, I have to kind of bore you with that, that’s the honest truth. Those things trigger me like crazy, and they’re still fantastically important in my life. I listen to a lot of Baroque music and North German romantic equivalents of Baroque music. So, it has to be something from Bach, I guess. I have to be honest, those are the things that take me back to my earliest kind of reaching up to the piano keys and trying to play those things. Music for me was never really that much of a passive pleasure. It was something I engaged with, physically as well as mentally. Weird, but true.
Did you have a piano in the house, or did you take lessons somewhere?
TOM: Well, both. My father was a medical doctor, but one of his hobbies was repairing old keyboard instruments. So, the house was full of broken harpsichords being fixed, and certainly pianos and organs and things. And he was also an early hi-fi enthusiast. That really was a benefit for me, being able to hear recordings of music spectacularly reproduced, whereas most people just had little tinny speakers. I had this glorious high-fidelity experience a lot of the time, and that’s got to have some kind of influence, right?
Oh, sure. I mean, my dad was a pilot, and I never flew planes, but in your situation, it makes sense. Your dad didn’t mind you tinkering around with stuff that was laying around the house? Was he teaching you about the instrument and how it was played?
TOM: He was a constant influence in the sense that he took music very seriously. He didn’t teach me very much. He sent me to piano teachers and all the rest of it. And I took lessons in piano and clarinet and guitar. Guitar only a little bit, I was mostly self-taught with guitar. But I was also at a school that took music very seriously, so I was instantly in an orchestra, a choir, a band. There was no messing around. You had to get on with it.
Was seeing the Beatles what made you decide that you wanted to stop playing classical music and play pop music?
TOM: The Beatles were key. I wasn’t a fan of the early Beatles, the kind of love song Beatles. It was when they went psychedelic that suddenly this seemed to me like the most exciting experiment with music. Of course, we know that they were kind of shaking hands with classical arrangements behind the scenes as well, through George Martin. So, I recognized that there was a kind of depth to it, even at 14, 15 years old. But it stood head and shoulders above everything else for me. It also taught me a lesson that I didn’t fully realize until we got into a recording studio, which is that that is a creative place in itself. It’s not just a room where you document the sound of a band playing. It’s a place to be experimented with and fooled around with until you discover something that’s not been done before.
I loved watching the Get Back documentary and seeing how the Beatles were taking unfinished song fragments and putting them together in one song. I’ve never thought about writing songs that way. Is that something that you did?
TOM: Oh, for sure. It’s the cut and paste idea that now we take for granted in other aspects of life. But an idea for a song is very rarely a complete and finished work. It’s a catchy chorus, or a rhythm for a verse, or something like that. I think all good songwriters either have a notebook where they write these things down, or mentally they’re thinking. One of the tests that I think we apply to ourselves is that you remember your ideas, and the ones that are no good kind of fade away. The ones that persist with you are going to persist with other people. I think the harsh environment of testing an idea starts in your own mind.
During the Thompson Twins decade-long run, you seemingly put out a new record just about every year. What drove that timeline? Was it label pressure or were you just writing more songs than you knew what to do with?
TOM: I think for a long time, we couldn’t think of what else to do. We were addicted to doing what we did. It was so much fun, and we went from writing to recording to touring, and then we’d take a week off after a tour and go back into writing again. That’s what created the momentum. It was an addiction and a lack of other things that attracted us. But I think it’s fair to say that that also became a problem down the line. It would have been more healthy to have longer breaks and other things to do.
What I appreciate about this collection is it really does capture your entire career, not just the MTV hits that I was familiar with. You’ve got the early, post-punk stuff all the way through to the post-Thompson Twins stuff you did as Babble.
TOM: I’m so pleased to hear you say that, because that was one of our aims, to broaden people’s understanding a little bit beyond the mega hits that people think, “Oh, they only did three good things.”
It seems like you were a band that embraced technology and started using it pretty early on.
TOM: At the end of the second album, which was still a guitar-based band at that stage, I finally earned enough money to buy myself a synthesizer, which I’d wanted to do since I was 15, immediately, like, that very evening. It changed my whole view of what I should have been doing.
I tell this story about how to make a filler for side two of the album we were working on at the time, I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll just do something with this new toy, this new synth, and a drum machine.” That night, I wrote “In the Name of Love.” Embarrassingly, it became the hit. It was writing on the wall, the end of that lineup of the band. I knew that I wanted to pursue that way. I didn’t realize it at the time, but years later, I decided that what had happened in my mind was I’d stopped being a band and started being a designer of a pop music experience. That meant that when you’re in a band, you’ve got to find a part to play for the drummer, the bassist, the two guitarists, and whatever. Whereas, we suddenly had freedom to get away from all that, and say, “If it was just someone clicking their fingers and a synth line, then that’s where we would start.” It was completely liberating and opened up this field of opportunities that were wild and really impressive to me. I never really stopped from that. That’s how I work to this day, by and large, especially on my own.
So, yeah, technology was the thing. And of course, drum machines, synthesizers… it seemed like an outrageous change in the way that music was being made. A few people jumped on it, and a lot of people said no, that pop music is essentially about guitars and four guys. Without realizing it, we were seen as something different. Even troublemakers. We weren’t following the same pathway culturally. And that allowed us to stand, and, you know, it probably held us back in some way, but it set us apart from the general population of pop groups.
As a kid, and discovering music on my own, I leaned towards hard rock music of the early ‘80s, whether it be Rush or Ozzy or Journey or Foreigner. But, I also received an education by watching MTV and really loved the Thompson Twins hits. Even now, I’ll hear the first few notes of “Hold Me Now” and instantly be transported back to my early teen years and the memories associated with that time in my life.
TOM: It’s interesting, isn’t it? Nostalgia has become a dirty word, but that’s completely wrong. I think there’s a power to nostalgia. In the visual arts world, artists talk about having a retrospective show or something, and it’s all very serious and highly respected. For some reason, in music, nostalgia is a dirty word. I think there’s something fantastic if it reminds us about a good time that perhaps we’ve lost touch with. And certainly, the music business in general has lost touch with itself. It’s gone down a weird pathway of respecting celebrity more than content.
I think it’s important to use nostalgia in a positive and good way. And then, of course, there’s the almost mystical concept of the great nostalgia, of remembering where we’ve come from and what we really are, rather than all this falsehood and artifice that modern life tricks us into believing. I think nostalgia is an interesting thing to play with.
You’ve said it more perfectly than I’ve ever thought of. Modern music does seem to be more about celebrity than content. I’ll often turn on an ‘80s radio station just to remember the carefree days, the days before I had adult things like a job and bills to worry about. There’s something wonderful about that.
TOM: Well, of course, then it’s an association of the music with something that you were doing or going through, rather than the music itself. And every generation has that. I always say, the records you were hearing, maybe even passively, like, in the background, or in a jukebox, or someone else’s sound system, when you were first breaking the rules of childhood – the first kiss, the staying out all night, the taking some substance you shouldn’t have been – those pieces of music stay with you forever, because it’s when you are forging the idea of adulthood, which is essentially rebellious. You’re kind of saying to your parents, “I want a better deal than what you’ve been giving me,” which is a necessary thing to go through. And some of us get it completely wrong, and rebellion itself becomes the kind of raison d’être but that’s just a means to finding yourself, you know? And there is a soundtrack to that moment.
Not only were you experimenting with technology in making music, but the Thompson Twins were also on the earlier side of MTV and making videos before a lot of other bands. What is your view of music technology today? Are you always playing around with whatever is new?
TOM: No. I can’t keep up with it. If I try to keep up with it, it just takes too much of my time, and I stop being a musician and start being a technologist, which is not what I want to do. So, it’s really important for me, and I think for a lot of musicians, to go back to simple, hands-on playing once in a while.
However, there’s something intriguing and magical about the technology that allows you to test out. For example, if I decide that I want to put a trumpet on something, I don’t have to find a local trumpet player, call them up, see if they’re free, bring them around, book a studio. I just dial up trumpet on a keyboard, and I can at least test out the idea that musically that might be something that would work, and then pursue it, maybe later, if I decide it’s worth doing.
Those kind of technologies have changed everything, and the fact that every laptop is now a home studio, if you want it to be. But, of course, that doesn’t mean that just because the making of music has been democratized doesn’t mean that it’s all good. A lot of it is real because it’s untutored, and the fact that musicians had to go through a very, very testing process of learning their skills, and honing them, and practice, practice, practice. If you can just bypass all that, or think you can bypass it by pressing a button, then something will be missing at the end of the process. And of course, AI is the big threat to that subject at the moment. Goodness knows where it’s going. It’s kind of intriguing. But I think, oddly enough, the really devastating fact about AI music that I perceive is that people actually don’t care. They don’t care if it’s been made by a machine.
I get concerned that filmmakers will resort to using AI to make music rather than pay for the rights to a song they might want to use. I know there are songwriters whose income is based on song placement, and this has the potential of ending that.
TOM: My intermediate fear was that when record companies realized they don’t have to sign bands anymore, they’ll just have someone program a band into existence. And then I realized, actually, that record companies should be the ones worrying, because the streaming platforms will do it themselves. The evidence is that the lower reaches of the Spotify pyramid, if you like, is full of tracks that are just AI-generated that no one even listens to, but it dilutes the effect of paying anyone. Because whoever owns those is getting some of the money that would be going to real artists now. I don’t want to get into the heavyweight business projections of all of that, but that’s profoundly depressing. It’s okay for me, because I’ve been doing this for 50 years, and I’ve just brought out a compilation of my life’s work, but if you were a musician starting out, my God, it’s impossible. How do you put food on the table? Never mind getting a gig or getting a TV or an advert or something.
I literally get 40 emails most days from publicists about new singles, new albums, new videos, new tours. As a music consumer, that’s pretty great, there’s so much music. But, as a writer, it dilutes so much. I don’t know where to start when I open my in-box.
TOM: You’re right, it’s overwhelming. And yet, at the same time, this generation has access to the entire recorded history of music. It’s crazy what they can get their hands on, whereas we were very limited to, like, 10 new records a week, if we were lucky. And some of those weren’t distributed well enough, so you’d have to order it in. Things have changed fundamentally.
There’s a good and a bad side to that, of course. A 20-year-old can listen to something that was happening way before they were even born. But by the same token, the prominence of each individual piece is diluted by the massive repertoire that’s facing them. I don’t know what it means anymore. I think that’s part of the problem with rock and roll. It’s just become so vaguely massive.
When I was in college, before the internet, I remember walking home from a bar one night and thinking that it would be an amazing idea if a record store was open 24 hours so that whenever I felt the need to hear a song, I could run to the store and buy it rather than having to wait until the next day. Now, I just pull up a website and click and can hear anything I want whenever and wherever I want.
TOM: I remember having an idea. I had to go into town and leave my parents’ house and go into town to meet friends, but I was listening to an album, and it was halfway through, and I thought, “I wish I could just take this album with me while I was going into town.” And little did I know that everyone now is wearing these things and listening to music while they do whatever.
If we can talk about touring for a minute, I know you’ve been on the road pretty consistently the last few years.
TOM: Yeah. I reconnected with that whole scene. There is a fairly vigorous interest in music from the ’80s again, so we do a lot of big festivals, but also I’m touring as a solo artist, and I really enjoy it. After a long break away from it, and thinking I’d never do it again, it’s wonderful. I have a great band, which helps. They’re amazing musicians, really inspiring. With reference to what we were talking about earlier, most of them weren’t born when the songs I’m asking them to play were written, so, for them, nostalgia isn’t a deal. For them, it’s music is music is music, and they do a good job with the arrangements that I present to them. Whereas someone my age is thinking, “Oh, I remember this one, wasn’t it great?” It’s an inspiration to me to have young musicians. They’re all female as well, which is another thing that’s changed since the ’80s, that there are so many very, very talented female musicians, not just backing vocalists. And I love it. There’s something about connecting with an audience and the nurturing that you get from an audience, I love it.
I was scrolling through your Instagram and looking at the festivals you play, and you’re not playing in front of 25 people, you’re playing in front of 2,500, 5,000 people. The crowds look big.
TOM: Yeah, and sometimes bigger. It’s been a big interest. These things come and go, and it’s partly demographic. The ’80s audience stopped going out, they got married, they raised kids. And now they’re on the other end of that. Their kids have left home, and they’re suddenly thinking, “Let’s go out again.” There was a period when they wanted to go to festivals and see all the ’80s bands, and then I think they’re tired of that. They want to be in a theater where they can sit down and watch something great.
I recently saw Colin Hay of Men at Work so a solo acoustic show at an old theater. There was a woman sitting near me who was telling an usher that she didn’t know who Colin was a few years ago but her friends kept recommending him. When she finally listened, she fell in love with his songs. I’m not even sure that she knew about Men at Work which sort of blows my mind. Here’s this guy that had tremendous success with a band and then a lengthy solo career that has been going on a lot longer than Men at Work lasted. There probably are a lot of people who know him as a solo artist and not as the front man of Men at Work.
TOM: You get that, don’t you? I mean, I remember the joke was always that there was a whole generation of people who thought that Paul McCartney was in Wings. There are some club kids who think Babble is my band and that’s it.
I noticed when you perform you’re listed as “The Thompson Twins’ Tom Bailey”. Is that because you’re the only original member and you don’t want people coming and expecting to see Alannah and Joe?
TOM: No, no, I’m not allowed to use just The Thompson Twins. Alannah doesn’t want to do it anymore, and she’s a half-owner of the name. Some people would say she was being a little bit resistant to me having a good time, but the fact is that the promoters definitely want to make that connection, because it sells more tickets to reference the Thompson Twins. So that’s the compromise I came up with. It’s just a matter of fact that I’m that guy from the Thompson Twins.
When you tour in the U.S., it is mostly summer gigs as part of 80s packages. Do you think something like that will happen next summer?
TOM: I hope so. I’ve got a tour in the UK that’s just gone on sale, and that’s in September. With these things, you have to put something in the calendar first, and then work around it. There’s talk of now going either before that or after that, I don’t know. We’ll see. But I love to tour in America, and I think there’s also a quite big Canadian tour being talked about, so I’m sure something will fall together around that.
*On these ’80s package tours, are you familiar with most of the people you’re playing with? Like, did you cross paths back in the day, or are you meeting some of these people for the first time?
TOM: It varies. Some people I know and have played with so often that we’re brothers and sisters. I’m touring with Blancmange in the UK, and I was a fan of theirs at the time, but never met them. It’s only recently I’ve got to know Neil Arthur, and we get on well. It’s great fun working together, so we’re going to do some more. Those things happen. And of course, not everyone is still doing it; not everyone even survived. So, sometimes people are conspicuous by their absence, I suppose. Generally speaking, at these big festivals, especially when you get a circle of RVs, dressing rooms, we’re kind of happy to bump into each other and catch up and see how each other are doing.
I’ve never seen you perform live and I’m hoping I get the chance to next year. The other band I’ve never seen but would like to is Human League.
TOM: I just did some dates with them earlier this year, in fact. They’re great. They stand apart from a lot of the other ’80s bands, I think, in their kind of vision of what a show should be. It’s very conceptual, very theatrical. I think they were quite a big influence on me, partly because they were one of the other bands using synthesizers and drum machines, but also because they had an unabashed love of pop music. I remember, in the post-punk days, in the new wave days, it was a little bit uncool to be into pop music. And I remember Phil Oakey saying, “Pop music’s great.” I agree with him. There’s so much going for pop music that we can’t afford to be snobbish about it like that. So yeah, hooray for The Human League.
Alright, so last question. If this collection does everything you want it to do, would there be a Volume 2?
TOM: Oh, goodness, I have no idea. This really is driven from the record company side. How would you do Volume 2? Go even deeper into the obscurities? I think we probably mined it deeply enough. And of course, there were things we didn’t include. So I guess Volume 2 could be the refuse, the ones that didn’t make it into the show. That would kind of mop up the people’s complaints. But surely, we can’t put out the hits again and again and again.
Well, you could re-record them. You could do the 2026 version of the songs.
TOM: We could, although I think I’ve got some kind of restriction in my recording contract. They don’t like people doing that, because, of course, you can somehow seize control of the situation again, and people have done that and gotten away with it.
Like Taylor Swift.
TOM: Exactly, yeah. But hey, maybe down the line, a live album or a DVD or something. Maybe that’s what we should be looking at, because that’s what we do. And of course, I’m all the time writing new music. People say, “Are you going to put out a new album?” The thing is, you can’t do that while you’re releasing a three-CD compilation, because the two would be competing with each other.
Outside of your Thompson Twins work, what should people check out?
TOM: My dub project is International Observer, and I’ve made six albums with them, and most people have never heard them, because they’re resolutely underground projects, so they’re not promoting themselves to the mainstream. I also have two albums with my classical Indian band, which is a kind of fusion project, called Holiwater Project.
Thank you for taking the time to chat. I told a friend I was going to be interviewing you as he is an ‘80s music fan and he said, “I just picked up the new album at the record store this weekend.” I thought that was great, that not only was he a fan in the ‘80s but he’s kept up with what you’re doing.
TOM: All right, well, tell your friend he beat me to it, because I actually had to go and buy one yesterday. Because I’m in New Zealand, that one hasn’t arrived yet by mail. And it got embarrassing. People were talking about the artwork and the design, and quoting me from the liner notes and stuff. I had to sneak into town, turn my collar up, buy one of my own records yesterday.
That’s funny. Did they recognize you?
TOM: No, no, luckily. As far as I’m aware. I’m probably on a security camera now.
