Double Or Nothing? It's The Thompson Twins

Double Or Nothing? It's The Thompson Twins

J. Kordosh

by

Question: “So do you get a thrill out of hearing your records on the radio?”

Answer: “Thrill? We get a check!”

Alannah: “Thomas!”

And so it goes with the Thompson Twins, that “lyrics by Alannah, music by Tom” combo. The “Hold Me Now” hitmakers. The former rainbow people’s trio, now reduced to a loving couple since Joe Leeway, the black guy, split.

They’re really something.

With their latest album, Close To The Bone, the Twins have continued a tradition—Tom Bailey calls it “the Thompson Twins rhythm groove sort of thing,” and who can argue with that?—but they’ve also entered new turf. It is their first album without Joe, but (more importantly) it’s also the follow-up to Here’s To Future Days, which wasn’t a big smash hit or anything. Alannah—she of the hair and the several opinions—explains a bit about that last album:

“It took us seven months, or more, to do. We went over and over and over things, making everything so perfect that it lost its spirit. With the new one, it’s fairly rough: it took us four weeks to record this album. Which meant it was just like energy; we did everything in three takes. So it was either good enough on the third take or it didn’t go on—or it went on with mistakes in it.”

A bold plan, to be sure. In fact, the Twins only recorded 12 tracks for consideration, of which 10 appear on Bone. They’re a mixed bag, from the clicheridden “Still Waters” to the Sting-affected “Long Goodbye”—and whether they’ll change anyone’s opinion about the Thompson Twins is an open question. By and large, it’s still a rhythm groove sort of thing. (And Bailey explains “Still Waters,” when asked if it’s some sort of Four Tops take-off: “No,” he says, “But it has that thing. You see, it’s a reversal of the old pop song cliche, which is ‘I might seem like a real popular guy, but inside I’m really sensitive and hurt.’ This is the other way around: this one’s saying ‘I might seem, really, like an ordinary wimp [laughs], but inside I’m really something pretty special, so watch out.’ ”

And being a pretty ordinary wimp is something Tom Bailey might know about. Not that he is. Far from it, in fact: he’s actually a very clever conversationalist and a man of some wit and insight. It’s just that he looks a pretty ordinary wimp. Plus he’s got this thing going with Alannah, who’s also a very smart person, but a woman of strong convictions. So, on the surface, one might be tempted to brand Tom a wimp and be done with it.

We won’t make that error here.

Observation: “It seems to me that in any relationship—man/woman, boss/employee, me/you—there’s someone on top and there’s someone who isn’t.”

Alannah: “Sure, but it shouldn’t always be the man on the top.”

Tom: “That sounds like a good headline.”

Let there be no doubt that Alannah Currie carries considerable weight in Thompson Twindom. As a lyricist, she says she “really likes the man who writes the stuff for Prefab Sprout”—Paddy McAloon, for the three of you who didn’t know that— but her lyrics have never, to the best of my knowledge, been likened to McAloon’s. There must be reason for that.

Since whatever it is escapes me, I’ll mention that Madame Currie is a determined feminist, much like myself. Although she and Tom are an item and would like to conceive a child, she expresses dismay over the notion of wedlock.

“First of all, I’d hate to be called Mrs. Anything,” she says, displaying a rare knowledge of lousy surnames. “Politically, it’s the old tradition of ownership: the father gives the woman to a man—it implies that women are chattel.”

This is good, conventional wisdom, even when it comes from a woman who says they intend to name their child, if a girl, Cuba Currie-Bailey. But Alannah sees the bigger picture, as one might suspect.

“When I first walked into a record company in England,” says the female human who’d earlier described how her hair once went up in flames while lighting a cigarette, largely because said hair was heavily bleached, “all the women were secretaries. They were running the company, yet they weren’t getting the salaries nor the titles. And slowly it’s changing. Women are now the heads of departments and are calling the sflots—which I think is great. Also, in terms of musicians, rock ’n’ roll was totally a man’s thing. Now there’s a lot of women musicians around who are out there doing it and who are every bit as good and expressive as the men.”

“Name some,” says an interviewer suddenly possessed by Satan.

Long pause.

“OK, you can stop now,” says Satan, via the interviewer.

“Don’t be mean! My brain is not functioning,” says Alannah quite truthfully. About being mean, that is.

“Rock ’n’ roll is about sex,” she continues. “What I dislike is women using passive sexuality: the woman being what the man them wants to be.” It does sound like the worst thing ever when you get right down to it.

“But I very much like women’s sexuality,” she goes on. “Which Madonna does... Grace (Jones) certainly does, and Tina. And it’s quite frightening, I think, to a lot of men, because women’s sexuality is very powerful. It’s not lie down and get laid. I think men find that part of women very frightening.”

“Yeah, if they’re really dumb.”

“What about men who use guitars like guns?” she shoots back. “And use them as aggressive weapons and extensions of their penises?”

“But what if they do it well?”

“I just think that women have a much better overview,” Alannah concludes in a spirit of logic.

“Wait! He’p!” wails Satan.

Observation: “Let’s take your hairdos, for example. Obviously, you both spend some time on your hair, is that fair to say? I mean, more than I spend on mine.”

Tom: “Hey, we live in England. People do that in England.”

Question: “Why?”

In fact, Tom and Alannah live in the damp hills of Ireland, where they fled to escape the distractions of London when they wanted to write songs. Falling in love with the Isle, they bought a string of cottages linked together; it’s there that they watch the two TV channels offered, write songs and don’t use condoms. And it was there, evidently, that they wrote a song that doesn’t appear on Close To The Bone—a song called “Lovefish.”

“This is gonna be a good story,” says Tom Bailey. “But you’d never print it.”

Oh boy.

“Do you know what the worst job in the Western World is?” asks Allanah, supplying a straight line par excellence. “Do you know what a lovefish is?”

J4o.

Bailey picks it up. “The worst job in the Western World, apparently it’s this. Especially with the use of condoms becoming more prevalent because of the AIDS scare—people have a habit, after using them, of tying a knot in them and flushing them down the toilet. They go down the sewage system, floating through the channels—they start to form gases which blow these things up.”

“So there you have these big things which are called lovefish,” Alannah interjects.

Do you know this for a fact?

“We talked to someone who went to do an interview with one of these sewage farms,” says Tom. “He said the biggest problem around here is the lovefish. That’s where we heard the name. Anyway, these things float down and then they get stuck—”

“And you get a build-up of lovefish,” Alannah concludes.

Tom goes on: “The worst job in the world is these guys who go around with sticks with points on the end popping the lovefish.”

So you wrote a song about it?

“Yeah,” says Tom.

Paddy McAloon, huh?

Question: “So are you guys Catholic?”

Alannah: “No, certainly not.”

Queston: “What do you mean, ‘certainly not’?”

Alannah: “Certainly not. I don’t look like a nice Catholic girl.”

Observation: “You could be Catholic and still have real white hair like you.”

Alannah: “Oh, get off of my hair.”

I worry a bit for these Thompson Twins. Less than I do for the Minnesota, more than I do for the Doublemint, maybe about the same as I do for the Cocteau— but I worry nonetheless. Maybe people don’t appreciate their innate zest—a zest that’s made them confirmed vegetarians for well on a decade now; a zest that took them to the Himalayas at Christmas, where they talked to a wise man about nuclear war. The wise man assured them that the soul will not die, and he did so in brilliant and simple words.

I guess what I worry about is that people won’t appreciate that the samplehappy Thompson Twins are really pretty cool. No fakery here, just plenty of giveand-take. Take what you will, take what you want... but give the Thompson Twins some credit. Even if you despise their music—an unlikely propositiongive them the credit for doing their best and saying their best.

And then I wonder why I worry about shit like that. ®