THE THOMPSON TWINS AT THE SEASHORE

THE THOMPSON TWINS AT THE SEASHORE

John Mendelssohn

by

No other band in the British syncopop sweepstakes boasts greater bounce to the ounce. Indeed, to get some idea of what the Thompson Twins are like on stage in their best moments, picture three over-inflated basketballs newly dropped from the penthouses of adjoining skyscrapers.

Considering that there are three of them, and that they’re multi-racial (English, Irish/Nigerian, and New Zealish), theirs is clearly one of the great, great group names.

And their hair is surely the most hideous in the history of Western popular music. Tom Bailey’s is flame orange on top and black on the sides and in back, where it’s gathered into a nearly waist-length ponytail. Joe Leeway’s is that of someone who sleeps in downtown doorways and urinates on his own shoes. And Alannah Currie appears to have done hers by leaning forward into the kitchen sink and switching on the garbage disposal.

You can hardly help but like them.

An old fellow from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such recently chatted with two of the Twins on a soundstage in Hollywood, California. There he learned that the soft-spoken Bailey put the original version of the group together in his native Yorkshire after discovering that he greatly preferred writing and performing music to teaching it. “The reason I hated teaching,” he recalls, “was that the kids simply didn’t want to be there. So the feeling I always had was of forcing people to do something that they didn’t want to.”

From the very beginning, Bailey’s music was very different in at least one big way from that of other technology-intrigued groups from England’s grim industrial hinterlands—it wasn’t depressing. “I may not be the most lively, sparkling sort of person,” Bailey notes, not inaccurately, “but I still get depressed only about once every two years.”

On relocating in London at the dawn of the present decade, Bailey and the four Yorkshiremen who’d accompanied him soon added Currie and Leeway to their ranks, solely on the basis of the enthusiasm

they displayed for the music at hand. “At that point,” Bailey reveals, “enthusiasm was all they really had to offer—they were both nowhere in terms of musical ability.

“In a way, though, I saw that as essential because I’m so involved in music, and have been ever since I was forced into it as a little kid. I could understand being called a muso—a musician who’s got good chops but can’t necessarily tell a hit—because I do tend to be very technical. On the other hand, Joe, who’d never really played anything until I forced him to, has a great sense of what’s pop. And Alannah, who certainly wasn’t up to much musically when she started, turned out to have a great interest in and ability with words.”

Having said all this, Bailey next confirms what those hipsters who were shaking their groove thangs to “In The Name Of Love” as long ago as 1981 know already—that “we got our foot in the door by doing something a little different in dance music, which had got a bad name since Saturday Night Fever. It had become so formulized, with everyone doing the same sort of babylet’s-get-down-and-groove sort of thing.

“That seems to me to be the biggest problem with pop music in America, people stick

with the same thing until they’ve wrung every last drop of blood out of it. It took someone British to come up with an eccentric new twist.”

We were actually quite a big group on black radio until we came over here and they got a look at us. —Tom Bailey

Popping into the dressing room in which Bailey and the old fellow from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such are sequestered, the mascara-less Ms. Currie chimes in, “Whenever anybody in America does something, it’s got to be A Concept. Nothing can be just a manque. (The word manque Bailey relates a little too eagerly, derives “from a disease that cats get that makes their eyes all sort of sticky.”)

“It’s a bit,” notes Alannah, exuding pride in her mastery of the local patois, “like the Californian ‘grody’. ” To the max?

It transpires that Ms. Currie’s had a bee in her bonnet since she told the old fellow from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such that the delightfully peculiar hats she wears on stage had been inspired by Grace Jones. “You said,” she reminds the old fellow from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such, “’Grace Jones, the black disco singer?’ Why must you Americans categorize everything that way?”

“What,” the old fellow from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such wonders, “would you have said? ‘Grace Jones, the white folk singer’?”

“Hmm,” muses Ms. Currie, not altogether tickled with the course the conversation has taken. “Well, I know I wouldn’t have said, ‘Grace Jones, the black disco singer.’ I think I might have said...‘Grace Jones, the absolutely stunning, amazing art object Grace Jones.’ ”

“Some people,” says Bailey, retreating to

matters of more nearly universal fascination, “find the fact that we don’t use guitars very suspicious. We’re the first band to come over from England without them without making that the major point of discussion. Instead, we do other things that divert the dialogue. For instance, our stage show is very much a theatrical or experimental presentation.”

The reason the Twins scuttled the more traditional instrumental line-up of their first album in favor of the all-synthesizer and drum computer format they employ on the more recent Side Kicks, Bailey tells us, is that “Technology not only seemed to be be The Thing That Was Happening in Music— but The Thing That Would Be Happening in Music in 10 years’ time. So it just seemed the most appropriate thing to do.”

He acknowledges that a genuinely fab song would be no less fab for having been stripped of its high tech trappings, but notes, “If you went as a down or Richard III to a party that you were told would be fancy dress, it wouldn’t really matter fuck all in the end. But those who did come in fancy dress might enjoy themselves more. It’s just a matter of creating a context, and I don’t think the context of rock ’n’ roll guitar is applicable to this new generation. It’s just been done too many times before—sometimes brilliantly, but just too many times.”

The old fellow from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such calls Bailey’s attention to a local critic’s haying poo-poo’d the Twins as just another of a growing glut of synthesizer-brandishing dance bands who are distinguishable from one another solely on the basis of which bizarre colors they’ve seen fit to dye their tresses. Not delighted, he observes, “Yeah, and I know white people who say all niggers look the same. It’s the same sort of ignorance, isn’t it?”

The Twins’ decision to embrace technology to the extent that they did was part of a whole manifesto they drew up last spring when they expelled the four musi-

cians who’d belonged to the band to that point and became the nominal (two synthesists, former Rumour bassist Andrew Bodnar, and a live, non-computerized drummer help out on stage) threesome they are today. “Basically,” Bailey reveals, “we just decided to stop being a sort of arts council grant project whose bills were paid by a record company rather than a proper arts council. Commercial success was pur primary goal, followed closely; by transcultural success. We wanted more than to be big just in the U.K. We wanted to make a statement that was universal.

What inspired such lofty aspirations was that “we were actually quite a big group on black radio until we came over here and they got a look at us. Our first record actually broke on black radio.”

Banished from the black airwaves or not, they still have reason to believe that they’re reaching more than white kids with strange hair. “There’s a sort of Chicano music paper here in L.A. called Low Rider,” Bailey notes. “Aside from being slightly obsessed with those cars with big tires that bounce up and down, it’s basically about culture for Spanish-speaking people in L.A. To me, the fact that we’re number one in their dance chart this week is as satisfying as having the number two LP in the U.K,, because it means that we’ve actually broken through r a cultural barrier. ”

Aside from smashing commercial and cultural barriers, Bailey confides, “My only other ambition in life is to be a wildlife photographer. Aside from the odd cockroach in the hotel, animals aren’t easy to get close to, so I’ve been practicing on people. I’ve become fascinated by how weird even seemingly ordinary people are.”

Seeminly ordinary people, the old fellow from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such learns, don’t exactly view Bailey as unworthy of comment. “Some people in this country,” he sighs, “seem to see my hair as a sign of aggression. Because we travel by bus, we occasionally find ourselves in truck stops in isolated areas late at night. That’s where you really face the prejudice head on. Cowboys come up to you apd demand, ‘Hey, boy, did y’all pay someone to make you look like a goddamn Rooster?’ I guess they find if offensive to their sense of what’s normal and good. I’ve been threatened, but I haven’t been in any fights. In that sense I seem to lead a charmed life. Please don’t print that, because someone will probably waijt to prove me wrong.

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“Because we’re beginning to be seen as a household name now rather than a weird cult underground thing, we’re seeing a lot of perfectly ordinary-looking people in our audiences this tour. The last one was like preaching to the converted, in the sense that the audiences were mostly fanatics who were already into the sort of thing that we do.”

Perfectly ordinary though many of their new fans might look, they seem to exhibit

an extraordinary proclivity for hurling things at their fave raves. “Someone threw a bra af me at Magic Mountain,” Alannah reveals with a mixture of befuddlemerit and pride. “There we were, doing our sort of cinematic opening number, when all of a sudden this bra comes sailing through the air and lands on my mike stand. I had the hardest time trying not to burst out laughing!”

A couple of evenings before that, the Twins had taken the stage only to discover their audience enthralled by a fan with an enormous ball of string. “What the guy was doing with this string at that moment in time was as important as any of the preparations that we’d spent so much cash and time on,” Bailey sighs. “You put all this work into your show and then somebody makes it completely their own with a ball of bloody string!”

No one said it’d be easy, Tom, boy.^p1