CREEM SHOWCASE

CREEM SHOWCASE

by Dan Hedges

�Success is a dirty word in England,� says Alannah Currie of the Thompson Twins. �If you even innocently mention to someone that you want to have hit records, your name is immediately trash. But that was one of our intentions. We wanted hits. We were sick to death of struggling, of living on 25 pounds a week and getting our instruments out of the rubbish bin. We needed the cash, and there�s only one way in this business that you can get it: you�ve got to make hit records. Deliberately.�

Obviously, the creators of �Hold Me Now,� �Doctor Doctor,� and �Lay Your Hands On Me� have the whole deal down, chiseled in formica. No pretensions to Great Art here. No burning desire to be the hub of anyone�s cultural universe. No thanks. With their most recent album, Here�s To Future Days, the Thompson Twins have continued their quest for airplay nirvana. Their creed? Keep it short. Keep it tuneful. And never, ever let �em see you in the same clothes twice.

Granted, the thorn in the side of some otherwise ecstatic critics has long been Currie and dreadlocked Twin Joe Leeway�s candid admissions that, of the three, Tom Bailey is the only musician in the trio who�s worth writing home about. It�s Bailey who�s proficient on both keyboards and guitar. It�s Bailey who serves as master-of-ceremonies in their marathon songwriting and recording sessions. It�s Bailey who, if called upon, can generally figure out which plug goes where and why nothing�s coming out of the synth even though the little red light is on. As certain dour souls have suggested, Currie (a former music journalist) and Leeway (an ex-actor and roadie) often seem in the musical sense to be purely window decoration.

�We might not have been playing very long, no,� admits Currie, who only took up percussion a few years ago. �But we�ve certainly been listening to music for a long time. We know what makes a good song. We can come up with something like �Love Is The Law� and sing it to each other in the studio, and it�ll sound great. I don�t think we hold Tom back. You could ask Joe and I the same question, �Do you think Tom oppresses us? Has he stunted our growth?� But he�s so good on keyboards that there�s no point in us going for that. It would be a competition thing, and that�s not what we do!�

THE THOMPSON TWINS: INSTRUMENTALLY SPEAKING

It�s no secret that the band got into hot water during the making of their latest album. Bailey keeled over from exhaustion in a Paris studio, and after long weeks of indecision (and much gnashing of teeth on the part of Arista Records), it was finally decided to wheel in ace producer Nile Rodgers, just to see if head or tail could be made of the tracks already laid down.

��Nile was a great help when it came to us sorting our ideas out,� Tom Bailey explains. ��I remember that we had a song where the chorus just wasn�t happening. Couldn�t get it together. But Nile being there, along with the fact that we had a chance to start afresh on some of the songs, meant �OK, let�s really attack this problem of the chorus again.� In some cases, we completely rewrote things and made them really different. On a couple of songs, there was a very systematic replacement of parts—things we�d never really worked that hard on originally. It was like, OK, let�s get the bass happening a little more. Nile helped us bring that out.�

The Twins� heavy reliance on synths and pre-recorded backing tapes was evident from the time of their earliest Stateside gigs. Sacrilege? Keep your shirt on. But it�s something that many American fans, long accustomed to the blitzkrieg guitar solos that typify other bands, still find visually and sonically disconcerting. Possibly as a means of remedying this, the Twins have been strapping on guitars far more often as of late (Steve Stevens of Billy Idol�s band even joined them in the studio last time around), even if the three straight-facedly maintain that it�s not a consciously commercial move.

�If a song�s a really great song and it�s happening, it�ll happen whether you�ve got guitars on it or not,� Alannah Currie says. �Most people don�t know what a synthesizer is anyway. They might hear a sound on one of our records, and like it, but they won�t necessarily know that a synthersizer is making it.�

True. And as Tom Bailey points out, �Commercially, we�ve made records with no guitar anywhere on them, and yet people have come up to us and said, �Wow!

Great guitar!� It doesn�t matter what you use. It�s a question of how you articulate on your tools to make a desired effect.�

Currie agrees, pointing out that someone even as strongly identified with the guitar as Nile Rodgers �uses an incredible amount of synthesizer on his records.�

When it comes to his own gear, Tom Bailey�s choice in keyboards is pretty much state-of-the-art, and includes the Fairlight CMI, an Oberheim OBX-a synth, and a Yamaha CP-70 electric piano. Expensive stuff, he admits. Gear that few scuffling garage bands could probably afford. On the other hand, his current preference in guitars is economical: two relatively cheap ESP Telecaster-style instruments and an ESP Strat-style guitar (made of jasper wood, fitted with two single-coil pickups, one humbucker, and a Kahler tremolo), pumped through a Roland JC-120 amp.

In holding down the percussion end, Alannah Currie has amassed a veritable drum store�s worth of gear over the past few years. The centerpiece for the Here�s To Future Days tour has been her Midi marimba, linked to a custom soundchest

(a programmable Midi drum computer equipped with a whole battery of sampled sounds). Augmenting that are her Tito Puente timbales, Gretsch concert toms, Paiste percussion frame, Rhythm Tech tambourines, cowbells, assorted bits and bobs, and the ever-present castanets.

Joe Leeway�s gear is comparatively spare, though still state-of-the-art: a Sequential Circuits Prophet T8 synthesizer, an E-mu Emulator II sampling synth, the Van Zalinge Z bass he plays in the video for �Lay Your Hands On Me,� and several ESP Mirage guitars. In the touring department, the Twins collectively agree that there has to be something more to a show than simply getting up and cranking out your greatest hits. �The main thing is to generate an excitement,� Joe Leeway says. �A buzz. When I go to a live show, I want to be stunned and amazed. I get lots of excitement from TV, so when it comes to a live gig, there has to be something more. I don�t think a lot of people who come to our concerts are too fazed about whether it sounds the same as the record because there are loads of other dynamics working in a live situation. I know that when I go to see a group and they end up sounding just like their record, I�m sometimes left with a sense of...well...I might as well have stayed home and listened to the album. You expect something more.�

The current two man/one woman lineup (with extra musicians hired for gigging) is a relatively new development. The original pre-hit Thompson Twins—a seven-piece aggregation that first attracted notice on the British club circuit— was by most accounts a band with one foot grounded in chaos. The songs were chaotic. The arrangements were chaotic. And their audiences gleefully lapped it all up.

Currie admits that the original cast-ofthousands band might have been out slogging around the British beer circuit to this day if it hadn�t been for the fact that she, Bailey, and Leeway woke up and recognized that there was ��no longer any danger in it. The same people turned up whenever we played, time and time again. It reached a peak and then it just sat there. We weren�t really playing to new people, and that�s why we wanted to get out of that in the end. It wasn�t satisfying anymore. We wanted to see if we could make records that could turn on five-year-olds and fifty-year-olds and all the ones in between.�

Up to that point in time, she recalls, ��we were very London-oriented. When we had our first hit in the States, it was like, �America? Where�s that?� We were really narrow-minded. Still, it was all right for a start. It was a good learning ground, and we really got ourselves together as a live band during those two years.�

In the long run, none regret the decision to pare the original band down to a trio. ��There are only three of us, so we can�t do everything on stage, which is why we hire extra musicians,� Bailey explains. ��But at the same time, it�s not seven people in the studio and seven people running the band with equal ideas and equal input. It�s the three of us working by ourselves in the studio, and then saying to the four other people we work with on stage, �Here�s the music. We�ll play this part and you play that. Make it your own, but this is how you do it.��

Playing live as much as possible early on, he reckons, is the most crucial thing to any band just starting out—if only to

be better prepared when the proverbial Big Break finally comes. As he says, �By the time we had a hit, we were well and truly broken in. We knew what the worst audiences were all about. We�d tried everything, good and bad. We�d figured out what turns on an audience and what doesn�t.�

When the Thompson Twins finally got down to business, however, Bailey admits that many of their old-line fans �saw this as being false somehow. But I got a perverse pleasure out of all that. I knew

we were being totally realistic in not dreaming stupid, romantic notions of �Hey man, all it takes is for someone to hear our music and we�ll be famous.��

These days, nobody with their sights set on making their mark can afford to sit idly by and hope someone turns up on the doorstep, waving a two-album contract and a blank check. �You�ve got to work for it,� Tom Bailey says. �You�ve got to have a very clear picture of exactly what it is that you want. If nothing else, the Thompson Twins did.� ®