Fact #141420

INTERVIEW WITH THE THOMPSON TWINS
There are three very distinct personalities with divergent perspectives and specific roles in the Thompson Twins. Somehow, their contributions meld with mellifluent ease. Johnny Black investigates, exposing them one at a time.
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Tom Bailey : Mental Boomerangs

"When we were in Dublin last year, we were approached by an eight-year old kid trying to sell us heroin," says Tom, sipping his ninth cup of strong coffee, in a quiet room under the shadow of Southwark Catherdral in central London.

He's explaining how the Thompson Twins came to write "Don't Mess With Doctor Dream", an anti-heroin song that has become a worldwide hit single.


"People don't realize that Dublin has the same drug-related crime rate as New York City, USA. We were writing songs for the new album, so that seemed a natural subject."
Careful to point out that it was written long before the current anti- heroin campaign started, he adds, "The sad thing is, there was nothing immediate we could do for that kid, or dozens like him."

Accusations that the new Twins have betrayed the socialist leanings of the original group still pursue Tom Bailey, three years after that first outfit broke up. A song like "Doctor Dream", however, suggests there has been no betrayal, merely a change in focus. Where the old group bludgeoned its audience with politics, today's Twins offer something they feel more capable of dealing with.

Bailey blows his nose loudly, laughs and says, "You can read every book written about Marx and Lenin, but if you don't share the washing-up when you get home..."
Another laugh, but the eyes remain serious. "Politics isn't just about changing one government for a very similiar one every five years. It's about what you do and how that affects the people around you."

In a sense, Bailey claims, Live Aid captured the spirit of what he feels the Twins, old and new, have always been about. It was a symbolic musical commune in which "People at roots level found a content through which they could solve a major world problem without the help of any government whatsoever."

Sitting opposite him now, it's impossible not to wonder what changed the 1981 model Bailey - very much the Gilbert O'Sullivan Midnight Runner - into today's sleek silk and satin pop star. I thrust an old picture under his nose.

"Oh God! I remember finding that jacket in a rubbish skip. I had hair in locks but it's under the hat. How did that photo get through the net? I had fantasies then of becoming successful. I was actually a hard worker but fantastically naive."

The photo, he recalls, was taken on the same day the final scene for "An American Werewolf In London" was filmed. Next time you see it, look carefully at the crowd when the werewolf is being killed and see if you can spot the Twins among the extras.

"The change in me," Tom continues, "really came about because I'd written "In The Name Of Love" as a filler for the Set Album. It embarrased most of the group but it became a hit in North America."

A funky, electronic dance number quite unlike most of the band's output, Tom saw the song as the way ahead to a kind of music that could reach more people.

The pursuit of that end split up the old band and gave the world the racially and sexually integrated Twin trio, whose very existence Tom now sees as a political statement.

"It's also an indictment of the state of the world that there's even ANYTHING remarkable about a pop group consisting of a white woman, a black man and a white man."

To promote the new LP, the Twins will start touring in October, and something special is promised.

"There will be an eight-piece band on stage," promises Tom, "only seven of whom will be human, if everything goes according to plan."

The non-human, being built now, is a 5'2" android capable of playing a keyboard. Incidentally, the techno-freaks among you will be delighted to hear that its innards are being constructed in accordance with the Neuman Architecture, not the boring old Harvard Architecture. Or so Tom assures me...

Ironically, despite more than six years as a Thompson Twin, Tom still finds the whole business of playing live a nerve-racking experience. Need- less to say, our Tom has evolved a technique to cope with it.

"I have a mental boomerang."

Oh really? From some performers, this might be hard to accept, but from Bailey - who once saw a vivid blue light streaming out of the eyes of a monk in India - mental boomerangs are child's play.

"When I go out on stage, I throw it around the whole hall and, when it comes back, I have an awareness of the whole audience. See, on stage, music is the last thing on my mind. The music just happens, but I have to work on the performance, the movements, the communication with the crowd. I like to try and play with the crowd, not just the front rows."

Perhaps the strain of all this is what led to his collapse earlier this year?

"No, it's working in the studio that gets to me. I'm a workaholic and when I get going, I forget to do ordinary little things like eating and sleeping. It's no big surprise that I collapse now and again. It's really stupid."

Because of the way work is shared in the Twins, Tom is responsible for the studio, Joe takes care of live work, and Alannah handles percussion, visuals and lyrics. This leads to a curious anomaly. It's quite normal in pop for men to write songs to be sung by women, but the Twins are close to unique in having a man sing lyrics written by a woman.

"We have long discussions of what her songs are about," says Tom. "I've never refused to sing one of her lyrics, but we do have to make amendments sometimes so I can sing them. Sister Of Mercy, for example, was based on a true incident in which a woman was sexually taunted by her husband until she hit him over the head with a bottle, killing him.

"It was written from the woman's point of view, but I could identify with it, because we all drive each other crazy at times. The only people I ever fight with are the ones I love, like Joe and Alannah so...no, I never have trouble singing a woman's words."
He pauses.

"But then you couldn't call Alannah a traditional woman!"

Alannah Currie : Wordy Rappinghood

Mmmm. The average traditional woman probably wouldn't start a pop group. Even if she did, she certainly wouldn't call it The Unfuckables. Alannah did.

I encounter her in a room next to the one where I met Tom. Getting Alannah started is no problem. Words flow copiously, often in verbal shorthand, with a nervous energy born of a genuine dislike of interviews.

"Interviews are like going to a psychiatrist. Except they're free. You just get used to the fact that they'll twist everything you say. Especially the daily papers in Britain, who just want stuff about sex and drugs. I used to make up lies for them, but in the end I realized it was easier to let them make up their own!"

Anyone looking deep into the Thompsons will realize that Currie's contributions are important, but her abrasive personality has dented the egos of several pop scribes, to the extent that they don't care to look further.

"Where I grew up, in New Zealand, it was accpeted that girls would beat up boys and climb trees. I come from pioneer stock, the sort of woman who had to cut the heads off chickens to make the dinner. They dug the garden and chopped up wood. I never heard a woman say 'Oh, I can't do that!' "

Her lack of tact and politeness stems from those same roots. "We say what we mean. We don't hide behind politeness. Politeness is a lie. Caring about people is more important."

The Thompson's participation in Live Aid, she feels, shows the band care about people. Some people, however, didn't care to see her cavorting on stage with Madonna.

"We got a lot of hate mail. They called us hypocrites. We met Madonna through Nile Rodgers who was co-producing our album, and appearing with her was a spontaneous thing because we got along well. I happen to think she's a great - well, not great...a GOOD singer, a very good dancer, and she's turning into a good producer too.

"A lot of what she says is tongue-in-cheek. They ask how she got a record deal so she says 'I slept with the producer' - and they take her seriously. She's a tart with a laugh.
It's more important that we appeared with Madonna at Live Aid. If I saw two women with their arms around each other running across a stage - any two women - it would give me a surge of hooray! That's what the women's movement is about, unifying women of different sorts."

Point taken. So what else is new?

"On the new album, you'll find I'm writing better. I've been reading a lot of Edith Sitwell, a very clever poet, completely under-rated. And I'm using lots of, wotchcallit, assonance in my lyrics - clown, around, down, drown, draped in a silk gown...I use words not just for their sense but for their feeling, so they suck you into the mood of the song."

She's also, she says, delving into the mysteries of shadow words.

"Every word has a shadow, like seashells and tourelles. It rhymes, but both words also involve a spiral. You night think, I'm nuts, but that's how I write."

I can think anything I like - but it's Alannah who was the satisfaction of knowing that there's an American in Ethiopia, teaching English to the children by playing them her lyrics. "The first English words they learn are 'I work on the front line, I learn to survive,' " she grins proudly.

Currie isn't an easy nut to crack. She presents a hard exterior built of 'isms' : feminism, socialism (albeit tempered by the fruits of success), egotism, internationalism, realism. But she's also a dreamer.

"I've been reading about Jacques Cousteau. He's amazing. Virtually invented aqualungs and underwater photography techniques and now he has a project to get the major world powers to spend one per cent of their defence budgets in sending children to their enemy's country.

"American kids would spend time in Russia and vice-versa, So who's going to bomb a country with so many of its own children there?"

Joe Leeway : Worldly wisdom

Exit Alannah, dreaming contentedly. Enter Joe Leeway, cup of tea in hand, looking towards London Bridge, and I notice that, like Alannah, he uses some curious turns of phrase. He describes the Synclavier work on the new album as "not majorly over the top," and peppers the conversation with verbal sound effects.

WOW! WILD! and WOOF! all bubble to the top as he describes the work of Stevie Stevens (Billy Idol's guitarist), who was invited to Paris to "come on over and lay some tracks down" with the Twins.

"We wanted a kind of guitar none of us could play, so we asked Stevie and he really blew it away. WOOF! He's got gizmos and machine gun noises built into his guitar, just press a button and it's like Space Invaders. WOW! he did that stuff and we thought 'WILD!' "

Nile Rodgers' participation in the album similarly fires Joe with enthusiasm. "While Tom was recuperating from his er...um...the record company approached Nile and asked if he'd take over the producer's reins. He's a strange guy, but good/strange. Sleeps about three hours a day. We started working with him in early June."

The Rodgers' technique involves active participation as a musician - catch him on Bowie's "Let's Dance" or the various Madonna hits - so, "Tom used him as a session guitarist some of the time. His stuff is so inoffen- sive, it justs sits there, but if you listen, it's superb."

In the past, the Thompsons have used multi-tracking to achieve choral effects on their songs, but this time Nile organized a 16-piece choir to create what Joe called "a big Maori, South Pacific, Sunday School-type vocal thing" on the title track, "Here's To Future Days".

The result?

"WILD! In the end, we took our vocals off and left the choir, so it was a real human feeling, which was what we wanted in the first place."

Apart from Tom's "er...um..." there were two major interruptions to the recording schedule. On American Independence Day, Nile hired a boat and sailed up the Hudson River at night with the Thompsons and other luminaries.

"It was like "Apocalypse Now". Fireworks going off in the dark, lighting up the New York skyline, boats sounding their hooters, Jimi Hendrix blasting out of the stereo . The one drag was that Mick Jones of Foreigner was miserable that night because they weren't asked to play Live-Aid."

Which brings us to the second interuption. Like the others in the band, Joe voices certain reservations about how the Live Aid money is spent. "Gandhi said 'Catch me a fish and I have food for today. Teach me to fish and I have food for forever.' I just hope Live Aid learns from the bad experiences of other relief agencies and uses the money to build irrigation systems and such."

The planning of the Thompsons' coming tour is largely Joe's domain. For the first time, they will tour the whole of Europe. "We've gone before, but we're not very successful there. We have the odd number one here and there..."

With rehearsals looming, Joe is still busy designing tour stage sets. "I work with a weird eccentric guy called Captain Jonathon Smeeton, who's done stuff for the Stones and Pink Floyd. He loves fireworks."

So it seems. When Smeeton provided a display for a recent Thompsons' party, an hour's worth of explosions happened in 15 minutes. "The next day cows were giving birth to two-headed calves. The milk yield was 75 per cent down...no, he's brilliant!"

I'll take your word for it, Joe. But if he's involved in this tour, I'll take a ticket for the furthest back row.