Thompson Twins - Hold Me Now

0:00Joe Leeway:You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. Song Exploder is sponsored by Intuit TurboTax. I don't know if you have this feeling, but I constantly find myself daydreaming about finding an expert who can solve a very specific problem in my life. And one specific problem that comes up every year is filing taxes. But luckily, finding someone who can solve that problem is easy with TurboTax. They have dedicated tax experts who are there to help you every step of the way. With TurboTax Expert Full Service, you can match with an expert who will handle your taxes from start to finish, no matter how complex.

0:42Joe Leeway:You can even hand off all your tax stuff within the TurboTax app. And then you can see updates on your expert's progress while you go about your day. You can check exactly where your tax return stands right there on your phone. And then if someone ever says to you, man, I wish there were an expert who could do my taxes for me, you can say, oh, I know someone. Visit TurboTax.com to match with your expert today. It's only available with TurboTax full service experts. The real-time updates are only in the iOS mobile app. This episode of Song Exploder is brought to you by Booking.com. And I'm gonna go on there right now because I've got a bunch of tour dates coming up between April and June.

1:21Joe Leeway:So I'm putting in the dates for the first city on my tour, Austin, Texas, and there are over 300 options. There's a huge variety from hotels to vacation rentals. I'm going to narrow it down to hotels and filter the results based on my budget and my tastes. And okay, there we go. There are still over 20 options for me to choose from. I'm going to look at the ones that are closest to the venue where I'm playing. And then I'm going to check out all the reviews and pick the one that feels most like me. Besides being close to the venue, I also want to be within walking distance of great food, preferably a great dessert.

1:58Joe Leeway:And if I can find my perfect stay on booking.com, then anyone can. Find exactly what you're booking for at booking.com, booking.ya. Book today on the site or in the app. Any song from the 1980s that you hear on Song Exploder was most likely one that I first heard through my sister Priya. She is the older sibling, and her favorite songs from her childhood were the soundtrack to my earliest memories. That's definitely the case with Hold Me Now by Thompson Twins. Thompson Twins originally formed in 1977 in Sheffield in the UK. Hold Me Now, their iconic hit, came out as a single in November 1983, and eventually on their 1984 album Into the Gap.

2:44Joe Leeway:That album went to number one in the UK and went platinum in the US. And the song spent 21 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. So for this episode, I talked to the founding member of Thompson Twins, Tom Bailey, and he told me how he and his bandmates Alana Curry and Joe Leeway made Hold Me Now.

3:14with me Let love it start

3:19Alannah Currie:Let love it start Hi, hello.

3:24Tom Bailey:I'm Tom Bailey from the Thompson Twins. Thompson Twins has gone through several histories with different lineups. And by the time we got to writing Hold Me Now, my co-writers were Alana Curry and Joe Leeway. This was our fourth album we're talking about. And on the previous one, on the third album, which was very kind of purist synthesizer and drum machine based, we had dropped from a seven piece, a rather shambolic experimental seven piece band down to three writer producers. It had become the pattern that after rehearsals with the seven piece band, everyone would go home apart from Joe, Elana and myself.

4:07Tom Bailey:We'd stay, brew coffee and talk till four in the morning. But what I really enjoyed was the debate, the bouncing of ideas between the three of us. So we kind of decided to make a stylistic shift as kind of designer producers rather than a band. And we did this weird thing of saying it's not just about music anymore. It's about image and video and stage performance and blah, blah, blah. So each of us divided those jobs between us. and I took responsibility for music because I'm a multi-instrumentalist. Hubris plays a part here. You think, I can do it, man. Alana was very much a part of the writing part because she was a lyricist, but she then took over the visual image of the band.

4:55Tom Bailey:And Joe, I met him at college when he was a drama student, so theatre was his thing, and he wanted to work on the live show. So we had this weird, almost formal division of labour. And it made it actually very efficient and kind of weirdly interesting to have departments.

5:13Joe Leeway:And so going into this fourth album, what was the mindset for the three of you?

5:18Tom Bailey:Well, I think we realized that we'd had significant success with the third record, and it suddenly took us around the world. So we took it really seriously. We used to do this thing where we left town. If we stayed in London, there were just too many phone calls, too many parties, too many clubs to go to, so nothing got done. So we realised that to be efficient, we'd say, OK, next month we're going to go away for three weeks. We're just going to work hard and write a lot of songs. And it worked for us. So we decamped to a room in this house somewhere. And I'd written some music, some chord sequence, just fooling around on a piano, I seem to remember, yeah.

6:01Tom Bailey:It's in D. And then B.

6:08Tom Bailey:then C, and then A minor, which is the basis of the whole song musically. And, you know, the right chord sequence drags you right into the internal kind of emotional basis of a piece of music. And it becomes an addictive place to visit. You sleep on it in the morning, you wake up, and it's the first thing you think of. We've got to go back to that chord sequence.

6:41Tom Bailey:Alana and myself, you know, we'd been lovers, we'd had a big argument. And then we kind of realised, hey, we don't want to give up on either our relationship or this good thing going with the twins, you know. So we just said, let's make up, let's kiss and make up. And that's the basis, that's the core of the song in a sense, realizing that that's a better thing to do.

7:04Joe Leeway:How did you go from having that argument to then saying, hey, this might be good material for a song?

7:11Tom Bailey:I suspect that that wasn't a conscious decision. It's just that that was the atmosphere of the moment. When we happened to be on a writing schedule, we were locked in a room together. We'd had this argument we'd made up. And so that was the feeling that we brought into the room. and I think we'd reached the point where we had some emotional maturity to be explored as well. And so love songs that weren't just throwaway items were perhaps on our menu. So at that stage, I made a cassette. Alana would go off into a darkened room and think about writing lyrics and come back and say, how about this and how about that?

7:55Tom Bailey:I have to say there's an interesting thing that went on with us as a writing duo, Alana and I, because she would write lyrics that I would have to sing. So although she could be very personal in her viewpoint, it had to be universal to make sense of me singing it. And I think that's a little bit of a clever trick that we didn't even realize we were using. It made the songs more universal.

8:20Alannah Currie:I have a picture Pen to my wall An image of you and of me And we're laughing with love at it all

8:37Tom Bailey:Alana recently reminded me that, in fact, there was never a picture on the wall, but what there was was a picture that the two of us had taken in a photo booth. You remember photo booths? You get in this little thing, pull the curtain, and press a button and put some coins in. And you get four passport photographs, don't you? Yeah. And have a souvenir of a day out. She had one of these pictures of the two of us taken in a photo booth that she cut out and stuck in the book that she wrote lyrics in. So that was the picture on the wall on the opposite page to the very page she was writing the lyric on.

9:15Tom Bailey:Look at our life now.

9:21Joe Leeway:One of the things that was so fascinating to me about this song is that I'm looking at the lyrics from her point of view, but you're singing the lyrics. You're singing lyrics essentially about yourself. Yeah, she's putting words into my mouth. Yeah. She's forcing you into empathy.

9:41Tom Bailey:That's right. How about that for therapy? Well, I did have some input into the lyrics, I'm sure, because that would be our normal practice. You come with ideas and you say, what do you think about this? And I would say, yeah, but what if we say this on the third line? And have you got a fourth line yet? No, well, how about that? So we would contribute freely to each other's ideas.

10:02Alannah Currie:We fuss and we fight and delight in the tears that we cry until dawn.

10:10Tom Bailey:We fuss and fight, but we delight in those tears. Sometimes we look for trouble in relationships and we create trouble in relationships in order to find out maybe if the relationship will endure and get through these problems. So for me, it has a lot of strong meaning.

10:30Alannah Currie:You say I'm a dreamer We're two of a kind I'm both of us searching for some perfect world We know we'll never find

10:47Tom Bailey:It's a little bit combative, isn't it? It's saying you're accusing me of being a dreamer, but actually we're both that way. It's kind of sending the criticism back. So at this point, we're still arguing.

10:59Joe Leeway:Listening to your vocals on this song makes me think about the extent to which a singer has to also be a sort of an actor, really embodying the emotions of the words that you're singing.

11:12Tom Bailey:Yeah, it's part of the job. I'm singing to a microphone and essentially singing to myself, but I know that what it's really aiming at is a lot of people on the other side of this process. Therefore, I do have to inhabit the spirit of the song, the character of the singer and what have you. So I inhabit a different set of kind of psychic clothes.

11:38Joe Leeway:Well, in some ways, I wonder if it's easier to step into that role of like inhabiting the words because of the fact that you had that songwriting collaboration with Alana, where a lot of these words were things that she had written for you to sing.

11:54Tom Bailey:Yeah. It's something we discovered. I realized that was happening, we had this lucky arrangement.

12:00Alannah Currie:Oh, hold me now Oh, warm my heart

12:10Tom Bailey:Stay with me

12:13Alannah Currie:Let love in start Let love in start

12:19Joe Leeway:The story of Hold Me Now continues after this. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length. And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Keisha Herway. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. and this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabond, Fen Lily, and the producer Phil Winerope.

13:06Joe Leeway:I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nosrat, Jason Manzoukas, Josh Molina, Min Jin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Kleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikesh.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live.

13:48Joe Leeway:That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks.

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