GROWING UP ABSURD WITH THE THOMPSON TWINS

GROWING UP ABSURD WITH THE THOMPSON TWINS

FEATURES

by

Sylvie Simmons

Scampering around in the British dancepop maze is a painful business at best. You wind up like the little white lab mouse that keeps bashing its head on the same old wall in search of a breadcrumb that's probably old and stale anyway; or worse yet, clean and white and tasteless, some insubstantial, artificial, scientific Wonderloaf that'll make you wither up and die if you don't throw up first. But what the hell, I've got nothing better to do and CREEM is calling, so scamper I did, up the Hollywood Hills to the Greek Theatre, squeezing through the impenetrable forest of shoulder pads and cap visors and MTVeenies to sit outdoors in smog thicker than Dale Bozzio to watch the Thompson Twins. And to marvel at the splendidness of it all!

And this coming from someone who doesn't own their albums, has never been to a, how you say, dance club in her life, who wouldn't demand her MTV if her soul depended on it, who thought their single was Fleetwood Mac, who likes "interesting hairdos" only if they're on Motley Crue's heads, and who thinks humans under the age of 16, notably overprivileged L.A. humans under the age of 16 who bounce and twitter and, Jesus spare me, scream, should not be allowed out in public after dark. More than just a breadcrumb, the Twins were a bunch of interesting appetizers. Not quite the New Talking Heads that people who say those kinds of dumb things have been calling them—though there's definitely elements of the talented, calculating sort who scavenge whatever they want from funk and new wave and ethnic music and what have you and manage to pull it off nicely as their own— they're a bit too bouncy, a bit too comfortable, a bit too easy-listening for that. Still, there's dollops of exoticism to liven things up—reggae, Indian restaurant background music, snake-charming soundtracks, Arabian street markets, tangos, Chinese-to-go and snippets of Saturday afternoon TV movie stuff; and still they flush most of the British dancepop caca—the self-conscious simperers, the snooty funk thieves, the detached clothes-hangers—right down the toilet.

Thompson Twins are a lot of fun. (If you won't take my word for it, Kelly Johnson, ex-Girlschool and Vicki Blue, ex-Runaways, two women of impeccable taste, were so taken with the TTs they're thinking of ditching heavy metal for synthpop; true!) So it's strange that in an interview they're so serious. They talk of things like "learning the language of mass communication" and "we have different commercial aims now; you have hit records so it works." It wasn't always like this. When Tom Bailey and a couple of absent friends put together the Thompson Twins (named for the detectives in the "Tin Tin" comic strip book) back in '77 in the North of England, it was about as high-tech as an earth shoe. An experimental, political seven-piece group, who did shows for Britain's Anti-Nuclear Movement, they'd put on loose, all-join-in affairs, handing out hubcaps for people to bash along with in the crowd, and inviting people to jump onstage (Thomas Dolby joined in on their debut album). Until they went in to record their second LP. They were one track short, so Bailey went home and bashed out "In The Name Of Love," with help from New Zealander Alannah Currie and South African Joe Leeway. The track, a nifty little slice of commercial synthesized disco, stuck out like a sore thumb, and for a while Bailey considered releasing it under anbther name. Then he thought again, and changed the Thompson Twins instead, disbanding the seven-piece and streamlining both the band—kicking out everyone except Alannah and Joe—and the music. As he said at the time, "We realized on what side our bread was buttered." The dancing didn't stop on their third album—with Grace Jones's producer at the helm—all threeminute dancepop songs, so new-music you could pee—which gave them the American hit "Lies" (they were never as big in Britain as here, except with the latest opus). They toured here, recreating themselves in the process, almost wiping out their own history by playing nothing older than "Lies" in their live sets.

"In many senses it is a different band," says Bailey. "The old seven-piece Thompson Twins was very much an experimental outfit which had no direction. I suppose it had a lot of following in the live arena on a cult level, but it never really tackled the business of putting on a show, which now we see as fundamentally important. People want to come and see something special— after all, times are hard; they're going to shell out the money, they should get more than a half-hearted rendition of the album—and it's important to come out on tour so that people aren't just appreciating you through the media or your records alone." All to do with "communication" he says, "though we haven't really honed in on one formula or anything."

"We don't want to be pegged as just a dance band." -Tom Bailey

True enough. After going from cult band to disco success, they've moved on again to conventional pop band—less stark, angular music, warmer, less cynical songs, harmonies and real live instruments. "I' always liked guitars and piano," swears Tom, classically trained in the latter. "But we wanted to avoid the usual rock 'n' roll cliches. And we didn't want to be pegged as 'just' a dance band."

He talks about "maturity" and "confidence," "more personal" and "more traditional" songs, sentimental stuff like "Hold Me Now" which the old TTs would have written off as trite.

"In general I think there's a move towards that in our writing. I think the reason for that is actually because songwriting is like a skill, it's a craft, and the more experience you have the more confidence you have to tackle the subjects whjch you were scared of before. We all know that to write a love song can be really cliched. So I think our approach to the question of human relationships was really cynical. And we've been a lot more open about it this year."

And as the Twins have opened up, the little girls have come rushing in, screaming like a mass mugging at a Duran Duran concert (could it be coincidence that Alex Sadkin produced both the DD's and the TT's recent albums?), swooning whenever, through the miracles of headset microphones, Tom Bailey raises an arm, and throwing undies on the stage. A far cry from the days when people would throw themselves onstage at their gigs to join in the fun.

"We realize on what side our bread is buttered." —Tom Bailey

"I think actually we have a very broad audience," says Bailey. "I'm sure there were a lot of screamers at the Greek, but maybe you noticed those because they make the most noise." That's exactly what Duran Duran said. "My only criticism of the audience," Bailey goes on, "at the moment, is there aren't as many black people as whites—in the American shows anyway." It didn't help matters that their airplay on black radio ground almost to a halt once they breezed into town. "It's curious, we were very hot on black radio until they saw what we looked like," Bailey laughs. "To be realistic, those barriers really exist, and all you can do is find a way of hopping over them. I don't think something as simple as a pop group can break into that, you know."

"It's not a problem, but it's just really boring," adds Joe Leeway, who's just come in. "I think it's just a question of time though— just keep on doing it, keep coming out with the songs and keep on going, and, I don't know, Michael Jackson may run out of steam!"

Their success in the States "comes as no surprise" to them. "We don't really see ourselves as writing for the people immediately around us in London or anything," says Bailey, rather grandly. "We always orientate ourselves towards the world. And in a sense America's a bit like a scaled-down world, there's so many different cultures and races and ideas here."

"We find ourselves," says Leeway, "when we go in to write, revealing loads of influences that we didn't even know existed. I suppose that comes from traveling around and watching things. So there must be quite a lot of American influences, I don't know. It's planetary influences really. I think we're pretty universal." Yes, it wasn't that long ago that people in the Midwest would move away from them in the street because of their excessively silly haircuts and taste in clothes. "It has changed a great deal," says Bailey, "because we're selling records, and partly through the business of MTV. Nowadays the Midwest is no longer two ears behind New York; it's right there ecause of MTV."

Funnily enough, their stage set looked a hell of a lot like a giant television that only shows MTV, what with the soft, even blacklight, the effects (three monolithic screens for shadow dancing, fog and computerized lights) and the staircase and dias custom-made for cavorting and posing and stomping and genera) video-ish antics.

"Not deliberate," swears Bailey, "but perhaps influenced by that."

"I've always gone for that kind of Cinderella-on-lce-y type colors, and the back lighting is really good for that," Leeway explains. "When we first started off the project two years ago, we wanted to create a cinematic effect. Because of the size of the stages and the proscenium arch, it's difficult to do that at the moment. But when we get into a place where we can build our own stages, then we'll lean even more towards the cinematic feel. I can't reveal anything of that really, but we’ll get a little more—I don’t know, 1 was watching Blade Runner the other day, and I really like the idea of those—I’ve forgotten what they are, they’re not videos—billboards. I think you have a couple of lorries and you pull them or whatever, but they’re not actually videoscreens, they’re sort of like bulbs, so you can have graphics and stuff going on behind you. At the moment, the level we’re at, basically we try and keep things fairly simple. But the longterm thing, I think, is we want to lean towards having it an event—people coming along and just getting involved in what’s going on and they’re up for a few surprises. We just work hard at trying to take people by surprise and keep them guessing and just sort of enveloping everybody. Pink Floyd used to do it in the ’70s, and 1 think that’s the way we’re working towards, going for a more total environment thing.

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“So that when we pull into a town, it’s just like the circuses used to be—not because it’s big but because it’s special.”

(Talking of big tops, I never did get to find out how they get their hair that way. They’re serious about their look, see it in terms of a political statement, and denied rumors that they planned to come out with their own line of fashionwear in the States.)

“It’s very much an aim of ours to provoke the imagination,” says Bailey. “A lot of people have varying versions of what they claim our songs to mean, and I think that’s a very healthy thing. A song like ‘Doctor Doctor’or even a relatively facile one like ‘We Are Detective,’ the meaning of it is not all that clear, and so in some small sense it provokes the employment of the imagination. It’s so easy these days to turn on the TV and turn off your imagination. So the more we leave that gap to be filled, the better.”

The three claim to be fascinated by the States, the size of the place, the vastness of opportunity. In some ways they seem to promote themselves as kid’s adventure book hefoes, boldly stomping through alien territories and coming out smiling at the end.

“I guess we never grew up,” laughs Bailey. “Or maybe we just had such terrible childhoods that this is the first opportunity we had to do it!” There’s no one else like them back home in their families; they’re the only celebs. So is it all they hoped it’d be?

“It’s pretty much as you’d imagine. It’s quite good, 1 don’t complain, but there are certain frustrating aspects. On tour, if you hit a nice town, people say what a nice place, let’s go out and shop or something. I can’t do that in a casual way anymore. Those sorts of things tend to make you isolated, because more often than not it’s too much of a hassle—so you stay in your hotel room while other people go out and have a good time. It’s the same old story, you’ve heard it a thousand times before, that success actually does—if you’re not careful—isolate you from the very people that you’re communicating with.”

And is that something he worries about?

“Not very much. If I want to communicate with people, I’ll find the right language.”