At the start of the decade, the Thompson Twins were a seven-strong band of Dickensian scruffs whose heavily percussive shows inevitably ended with drunken British students invading the stage and pounding trashcan lids and empty soup cans not quite in time with the beat. And then suddenly they weren't a seven-piece, and they weren't scruffy. The Thompson Twins evolved quickly and skillfully into a Benetton advert made flesh, an unthreatening three-piece hit machine with big hats and even bigger hair. The Twins' output also evolved: Where once they were rhythm-driven, their greatest hits emphasized their melodic strengths. No one heard "Hold Me Now" and started banging on a trashcan lid.
JB: The Thompson Twins were my hate-watch—my Newsroom. Even in that age of artifice, I found them suspect. I didn't buy their skin-shedding. To me they would always be one of these bands that wasn't good enough to be Pigbag. I found Tom Bailey's voice devoid of emotion. Their image turned my stomach. The hair made me heave. And as for those songs … I still remember every note, every intro, every chorus. I will say this for the Thompson Twins: Their best songs were built to last. Even though I professed to hate them, I still had a tiny place in my tiny heart for "Hold Me Now" that pleaded for the chance to be understood, forgiven, and loved.
LM: One of the most romantic moments in cinematic history has to be when Samantha Baker thanks Jake Ryan for getting her undies back. "Make a wish," he says, the titular sixteen candles ablaze on a birthday cake between them. "It already came true," she answers. Kiss. Have to admit, though, I wouldn't love that scene half as much if the Thompson Twins' "If You Were Here" weren't playing in the background. That Tom Bailey knows romance—and he knows women too. That's what I always think when I hear "Hold Me Now." I miss the Thompson Twins. They are one of the few bands in this book who've truly disappeared—no reunion tours or acoustic reimaginings of their greatest hits for them. For that reason, we forget how massive they were. But whenever I hear one of their big, perfectly produced smashes, I'm transported back to a time when they were kings for a day, presiding over a sold-out Madison Square Garden like the Black Eyed Peas of the eighties.
TOM BAILEY: Although we could be accused of being somewhat formulaic, we were trying to express ourselves—in a cartoonish way, maybe, but in a real way. In those days, there was a rule of thumb that to give an album a fair crack at achieving maximum sales you needed four hit singles. You would write songs until you were pretty sure you had four or five that fit the bill, then you could maybe stretch out with some of the other material, make it longer or slower-paced or more experimental. It was a formula in the sense that the industry presented a gateway filter to you: Your songs had to be radio-friendly, they had to be a certain length, they didn't have to have long intros, you had to go out on a chorus—all those standard song-writing things that are nothing more than conventions but you have to learn about them in order to seriously have a go at it.
You know you're writing [songs about] the same subject that's been written about a thousand times before. It's how you stop it from becoming clichéd and try to retain some kind of credibility for the cultural demands of the moment. "Hold Me Now" came partly from a real situation. Alannah [Currie] and I at this time were lovers. We'd gone somewhere to do some writing, and after an argument, we kissed and made up, and that song came out of it. No one sets out to say, "What would we do if we'd fallen out? How would we write a song about making up again?" But it actually happens, so you just latch on to that moment. It's a precious thing that you can write about quite easily, and it's something people want to hear about, even though it is a little sentimental. It's a part of human nature.
There were difficulties being part of a couple and being in the band, and you manage those. But there are also great advantages. Your business doesn't take you away from your home when you're both in it together. We thrived on that for a long, long time. We always had separate hotel rooms, which is something we started doing because we didn't want people to assume we were a couple and we wanted to keep that side of our lives private. So we pretended that we were separate, but then we found that it was a great way of not burning out on each other. So we were together when we were together, but we also built in this time apart. It led to a rather strange way of conducting our relationship. Even subsequently, when we bought a house, we had separate bedrooms because that's the way our relationship had developed. It was quite odd looking back, but it seemed to be very healthy for us at the time.
The band started in Sheffield [in 1977]—it was three school friends: myself and a couple of friends [Pete Dodd and John Podgorski]—then we decided to move to London and try to make it. I'd gotten in touch with an old friend and told him I was moving, and he said, "Well, I'm squatting, and there's a place around the corner." I squatted in South London for years and years. I had … it wasn't exactly the dole but supplementary benefit, which was 16 pounds a week plus 4 for paying my housing co-op fees. I had to be really careful about whether I bought a packet of cigarettes or a bag of chips, and I'd jump over the barriers of the Tube. It was slightly embarrassing because I never quite got round to leaving the squat until our third album.
When you listen to those earliest recordings, you can hear we were a guitar, bass, and drums outfit, and the songs we were keen on were very much in that punk or post-punk vein. I remember being a big fan of Wreckless Eric, that chugging guitar and relentless spewing of lyrics. I became interested in what was known as world music and, in particular, Indian and African music that had something going for it in terms of everyone getting involved. There was an underground enthusiasm about our first album [1981's A Product of … (Participation)], which I like, but it sounds small and a little bit fragile compared with how the band sounded onstage, which was raucous and noisy. It got to the stage where we were making instruments out of tin cans, and there were so many lying around that other people joined in. We encouraged that, but it's a funny thing to be famous for. In fact, it became destructive in the sense that people would show up just to jump on stage. When we became the stripped-down version, the three of us [the recognizable lineup of Bailey, Currie, and Joe Leeway] decided we couldn't do that anymore. It was dangerous.
"We wrote almost a manifesto and said, 'Instead of hoping or pretending to be pop stars, we're actually going to be pop stars. We're going to treat it as a serious job.'"
We were coming to the end of our second album [Set, 1982] with Steve Lillywhite. That felt like a big moment for us, with the big-name producer and working in an expensive studio, and it happened so quickly that we hadn't had enough material. I had finally earmarked enough money to buy a synthesizer and a little drum machine. I wrote "In the Name of Love"—every single part including the percussion—lying on my bed with the synthesizer on the mattress next to me. It was the writing on the wall for that version of the band. Instead of seven people writing it, only one person had written it and it was very much the fruit of technology. They all got to play a little bit on it, but they were basically playing the things I told them to play.
I got a phone call: ["In the Name of Love" is] number one in the Billboard dance chart." I said, "What does that mean?" My interpretation was kind of naive and British, which was that it was like the dance chart in the back of Smash Hits. But people said it was a really massive thing. The searchlight of interest had wandered around various departments of music, and suddenly every-one was very interested in knowing what was going on in nightclubs.
We toured that album in Europe and the U.K. quite successfully in terms of getting bigger audiences, but I don't think the band really knew what to do next. By that stage, Joe, Alannah, and myself were living in squats on the same street. When everyone else went home, the three of us would carry on scheming and coming up with ideas. We had become a central core of activity. The original band ground to a halt, and it left the three of us to pick up the new direction. The new version had a very strange division of labor: I did all the music, Joe designed the live show, and Alannah wrote lyrics, but her main job was looking after the visual side: videos, photographs, that kind of stuff.
I remember someone in the Human League saying they woke up one day and it was okay to be a pop musician. "Pop" had been a dirty word for so long during the punk era, then someone said, "It's okay, you can have intentions to be popular. You can make music that's not for enthusiasts only." We decided that we must have a solid idea. We wrote almost a manifesto and said, "Instead of hoping or pretending to be pop stars, we're actually going to be pop stars. We're going to treat it as a serious job. If we haven't had a major hit in the next 12 months and been on Top of the Pops, then we've failed in our intentions and can go back to being experimental musicians." It seemed like an interesting thing to do—not because we were hell-bent on being famous, but it seemed like the serious way of approaching that task. It was the template for everything we subsequently did over the next three albums.
In terms of MTV, "Lies" was the first hit. I think MTV were just looking for something wacky and British, and they picked half a dozen things and put them into rotation. "Lies" failed in the U.K., but "Love on Your Side" became a bona fide Top of the Pops hit, and one of the promotions guys said something like, "Enjoy the next couple of weeks because it only ever happens once"—that kind of giddy ride to the upper atmosphere. At the time, I had no idea what he was talking about; for me, it was just more of the same. But in retrospect, it's something you never really recover from—suddenly aspects of normal life are taken away from you.
MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs by Three-Piece Groups 1. "Smalltown Boy," Bronski Beat 2. "Tunnel of Love," Fun Boy Three 3. "Robert De Niro's Waiting," Bananarama 4. "Life in a Northern Town," The Dream Academy 5. "Sonic Boom Boy," Westworld
For me, the era that I look on fondly as a golden age of synth pop started with the Human League and ended with Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Something happened there with the celebrity hype machine. It had become so powerful and so effective and so silly. I remember Frankie Goes to Hollywood releasing a different mix of their record every week, and it was just to keep their chart position. I thought, Wow, has it really come to this? Also at that time, videos had become the most effective way of selling music, and I realized I spent more time and more money on videos than I did on music. I didn't want to do that anymore. I spent half my time hanging around video and photographic studios spending a fortune on looking good.
That was around the time of Live Aid. I was in New York recording [1985's Here's to Future Days] with Nile Rodgers, and we took a break from the session to drive to Philadelphia to do Live Aid, which is how come the band we played with was members of Chic, Madonna, and Steve Stevens from Billy Idol's band—all people who were hanging around Nile's empire, which was very exciting. I thought that was an amazing event but also completely overblown, and I didn't feel that we had a successful performance. I met Joan Baez, who had been a massive influence on me as a kid, so that was my biggest thrill of the night. Nile was under strict orders not to go drinking after the gig, because that had been a problem. Can you believe we went back to the hotel after the show and played Scrabble? We didn't even stay for the rest of the night. Maybe our enthusiasm for the big time was waning.[1]
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
Following the departure of Joe Leeway in 1986, Tom Bailey and Alannah Currie (who married in 1999) carried on as a duo. In 1993, they changed their name to Babble, releasing two albums. Bailey—now divorced from Currie—continues to arrange and record music under the name International Observer. Currie upholsters furniture using the carcasses of animals who died naturally or were run over by unobservant drivers. Leeway works in hypnotherapy.
BAILEY: I've no particular interest in being the Thompson Twins again. People are calling me all the time and trying to get me to do it and arguing about the benefits—how much I'd enjoy it and what a thrill it would be and how the fans are dying to see me—and I just don't get it. I have to find some personal trick, some strategy for enjoying it. Otherwise I'd just feel, Why am I here? Why am I doing this? It has the risk of being embarrassing for me.
Essentially, what it comes down to is money and to see if bands re-form after they've split up under acrimonious circumstances, whether there might be a strange, experimental thrill to see whether it can be put back together again. But when someone like, say, Culture Club, re-forms to go on tour, it's because they actually want to do it. I do quite a lot of work with Indian musicians, and one day I said to an agent, "I've got this great idea. I'll go back and perform Thompson Twins songs but, get this, we're going to be sitting cross-legged, and I'll have a sitar and a tabla playing with me, and it'll be fantastic." The agent said, "No, you won't." He said those things are about people who want to relive the past, not to be challenged with some new creative endeavor.
I don't see much of Joe because he's in California. Alannah, I see from time to time, partly because we have a couple of kids together, so we have an interest in looking after them. But we once said, "Should we do it?" And within 10 minutes we were arguing about which songs we should do and what we should be wearing, and I thought, Oh my God, it's too much stress. But when Alannah's out of money, she'll be on the phone wanting to do it.
Notes
[1] NILE RODGERS: Tom Bailey was right. You could watch history change in front of your face from the post-punk, club-kids, gothy thing to more glam, like Madonna. Everybody talks about the Queen–David Bowie performance in the U.K., but I was at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, and there was nothing more rousing than when Madonna said, "I ain't taking off shit today." The set was almost irrelevant. I'm sitting here with the biggest record of my career [Like a Virgin], a 20-million seller, and this woman walks on stage and delivers that line, and you could see that the crowd was loving this new type of vulnerable, highly sexual thing. It was no longer about being dark and mysterious; it was about being upfront and open and "Fuck you!" Madonna was bringing in more of the R&B dance groove that has really never left our spirits, but in America we didn't want to admit it because of the whole "Disco Sucks" thing. The eighties music is still rooted in groove R&B music, and that stuff had never gone away. When you think about records like "Relax" or ABC's "The Look of Love," you can see these guys are heavily influenced by American R&B.
聚合中文网 阅读好时光 www.juhezwn.com
小提示:漏章、缺章、错字过多试试导航栏右上角的源