Tom from Thompson Twins: ‘Rock star behaviour made no sense’

Hold Me Now by the Thompson Twins is one of those classic ’80s tunes – a standout hit in a decade that contained so many – that is instantly familiar to millions who remember that golden era.

Now, the band’s leader Tom Bailey will be coming to Cambridge to perform Into the Gap, the album on which the song appears, in its entirety.

So big were the Sheffield trio – Bailey, Joe Leeway and Alannah Currie – back in the day that they were joined on stage by Madonna and Nile Rodgers when they performed at the most famous music event of the decade: Live Aid, in 1985.

Along with Hold Me Now, which remains their most enduring hit, further singles Doctor! Doctor! and You Take Me Up also charted very highly and also featured on 1984’s Into the Gap, the band’s fourth studio album. The success of this led to them being asked to appear at Live Aid.

This year marks 40 years since the album’s release and there are plans to put out new, remastered and recompiled versions of it this year.

“We had no idea 40 years ago that we’d be having these kind of conversations about what we were doing!” laughs Tom, speaking via Zoom from Auckland, New Zealand, where he often spends this time of year. “So I guess that’s a good thing…

“I think I took a good 20 of those years off from pop music – I wasn’t involved with it for a long time and I came back to it a while back. So it’s actually rather nice for me to rediscover it, as well as everyone else.”

The sounds of the ’80s can be heard in much of today’s music, why has music from that time remained so popular?

“Well I think it was a bit of a golden age,” replies Tom, 68, “I mean the circumstances were ripe for a golden age to occur, and one of those things was the arrival of the technology – of synthesisers and drum machines, that meant that people with great ideas didn’t have to have a recording studio and a band in order to try things out.

“Some really adventurous and new ways of making music came along, and a lot of those got turned into records that were brilliant. I can think of so many experimentalists who did good pop songs at that time.”

It was also quite a hedonistic time, as has been widely reported over the years, though Tom says he managed to stay on the ‘straight and narrow’.

“I’m afraid I was Mr Straight Man for most of the time; I’d given up all my various activities before joining a band actually,” he reveals, “which is a bit weird – especially when we got to touring America off the back of our success, because the standard behaviour of rock stars didn’t make sense to me.

“And it actually helped me to enjoy it a bit more, I think, as an observer.”

On the subject of Into the Gap, Tom says the band “definitely knew” they had something special. “The thing is we had already recorded the big hit Hold Me Now before we started making the rest of the album,” he recalls.

“And that was actually released and climbing up the charts all around the world when we started work on the rest of the album – so it gave us this intensely kind of high bar to achieve.

“We thought ‘We can’t lower it now’, so we were under pressure – but it was a good sort of pressure to have, and I knew that we had good songs.

“We saw the first one doing well and I knew that Doctor! Doctor! was going to be good. You Take Me Up had a kind of novelty quality to it and Sister of Mercy had that classic songwriting feel about it... so I was very happy to proceed and thought, ‘Yeah, we’re on to something good here, let’s make it brilliant’.”

Tom, who was previously married to former bandmate Alannah Currie, will be performing all of the songs from Into the Gap on his upcoming tour – which comes to Cambridge this month – though not necessarily in the same order as they appear on the record.

“Some people complain about that because they want a kind of re-run of how they remember everything,” he notes, “but in fact in terms of the theatrical dynamics, you want to save some big numbers for the end.

“And usually on albums like that, the hit singles go at the beginning, and you don’t want to blow all that in the first 20 minutes of your show!”

Tom, who will also be playing other songs from the Thompson Twins’ extensive repertoire, says it’s “so unlikely” that past members of the group (a number of musicians participated at one time or another) would ever join him on stage.

“I’ve just been having an email chat with Alannah this evening actually,” he says, “so we’re still in touch, but they don’t want to do it anymore, I think is fairly plain.

“Back in the successful days of the three-piece Thompson Twins, we organised a very strict division of labour. I Iooked after lyrics and she [Alannah] looked after the visual side of the band. Joe looked after the live show direction, and I did the music.

“So in a way it’s no surprise that when we stopped, I carried on with music and they did other things. For me, it’s still important to get out there and play sometimes.”

Tom Bailey will be performing at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on Saturday, 18 May. Tickets, priced £40.50, £30.50 and £102 (VIP), are available from cornex.co.uk. Visit thompsontwinstombailey.co.uk.