Thompson Twins - Hold Me Now

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. That album went to number 1 in the UK and went platinum in the US. 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, Alannah Currie and Joe Leeway, made “Hold Me Now.” For more info, visit songexploder.net/thompson-twins. https://songexploder.net/thompson-twins

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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 Rishi Kesh Hirway.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm going to be on tour, playing some shows this fall. I'm going to be in London on Wednesday, November 18th. I'm going to be performing solo at Rough Trade Records on Denmark Street, and I'm going to be in conversation about my music moderated by one of my favorite actors and writers, Matthew Bainton. And a ticket to the show also gets you a copy of my album on vinyl or CD. And in December, I'm going to be on tour supporting S. Carrie. We're going to be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast US. So I hope to see you in one of those places. You can find all the details and get links to tickets at songexploder.net/live. That's songexploder.net/live.

• 0:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This episode is sponsored by Tidal. If you're an artist or if you know somebody making music, you should know about Tidal Upload. It's a way to share and sell music without the usual barriers. You can upload your music directly to Tidal at no cost. You decide how you want to release it. You can share it publicly with Tidal listeners, or you can keep it private until you're ready. Or you can sell your music directly through Tidal Upload. Your music will also be considered by Tidal's editorial team for their playlists. And if your track is selected for their spotlight program, you'll get $1,000 bonus and you'll be on one of their marquee playlists. And now, Tidal has dropped its platform fee to 0%, which means you keep more of your earnings there than on any other platform.

• 1:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Visit tidal.com/songexploder to create an account and start uploading your music for free. That's tidal.com/songexploder for zero platform fees on every sale. Your music, your earnings.

• 1:56Hrishikesh Hirway?

  There's a new podcast called Before the Moment with Nile Rodgers. In every legendary music career, there's a moment right before it all changes. And in every episode of this podcast, Nile Rodgers talks to a legendary musician about the choices, the events, and the relationships that shaped their career before the moment that everything changed for them. Every story is unique and opens a window into the lives of some of the biggest names in music. And Nile is the perfect person to lead these conversations because for over 50 years, he's played guitar with artists like Diana Ross, David Bowie, Madonna, Daft Punk, and Beyoncé. In the first season of the podcast, some of Nile's guests include John Legend, Miguel, and more.

• 2:40Hrishikesh Hirway?

  New episodes are coming out every other Tuesday. Listen to Before the Moment with Nile Rodgers wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

• 3:22Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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, Alannah Curry and Joe Leeway, made "Hold Me Now."

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Hi, hello, I'm Tom Bailey from the Thompson Twins. Thompson 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 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, Alana and myself.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  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 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. I can do it, man. Alana was very much a part of the writing part because she was a lyricist.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  But she then took over the visual image of the band. 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.

• 5:50Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And so going into this fourth album, what was the mindset for the three of you?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  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 realized that to be efficient, we'd say, okay, 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.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  It's in D and then B.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Then C.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  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 and 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.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Alana and myself, you know, we'd been lovers, we'd had a big argument. And then we kind of realized, 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.

• 7:42Hrishikesh Hirway?

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

• 7:48Speaker 01

  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 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?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  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 for me singing it. And I think that's a little bit of a clever trick that we didn't even realise we were using. It made the songs more universal.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  I have a picture pinned to my wall.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  An image of you and of me, and we're laughing with love at it all. 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, press a button and put some coins in, and you get four, like passport photographs, don't you? Yeah. And have a souvenir of, you know, 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

• 9:50Speaker 01

  the lyric on. Look at our life now, all tattered and torn.

• 9:59Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's putting words into my mouth. Yeah.

• 10:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

  She's forcing you into empathy.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  We fuss and we fight and delight in the tears that we cry until dawn.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  You say I'm a dreamer.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  We're two of a kind.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  And both of us searching for some perfect world we know we'll never find.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  It's a little bit combative, isn't it? 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.

• 11:37Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Well, in some ways, I wonder if it's easier to step into that role of 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.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's something we discovered. I realized that was happening. We had this lucky arrangement.

• 12:57Hrishikesh Hirway?

  The story of Hold Me Now continues after this.

• 13:02Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 13:49Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 14:32Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 15:12Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 15:53Hrishikesh Hirway?

  How much time passed between the writing process and you actually going in to record the song?

• 15:59Speaker 01

  We must have made a fairly good demo-sounding version of Hold Me Now because someone played it to a fairly senior member of the Top of the Pops team at the BBC, which is the big-- then was the one TV show you had to get on to have a hit record in the UK.

• 16:20Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  And they freaked out. They said, this is fantastic. That triggered a lot of activity with our management, saying, we've got to finish this before Christmas because we want it to be out there in Christmas week when everyone buys records. We won't get the album ready by then, but we can certainly get this single out there. So then, we booked Rack Studios, where I'd worked before, and our producer, Alex Sadkin, wasn't available. We'd done the previous album with him, and he was the producer who was eventually going to go on and make the rest of the album with us. But as I say, it wasn't available. So, you know, full of hubris, I said, no, I can produce it. And it was my first kind of high-pressure production job.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  I'd always done production with other people. But I guess I had a clear vision of what I wanted to achieve. We used a movement drum computer, which is a very early British drum machine. Didn't stand the test of time for most people. But I got one of those very early and it became my toy. So that's what I used on that record. It would come out of the machine sounding fairly boring and we'd be tweaking this, that and the other. Phil Thornley, the engineer, was very good at that kind of thing. I would very often use something called a noise gate. A noise gate is something that opens and allows a sound through, a signal through, and then closes again.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  And whatever triggers the opening and closing, you can program in a rhythm. So that's a synth chord being just held down and the gate would allow the sound to go through in that rhythm. So we used that as a way of making it sound mechanical, which was a fascinating fashion of the moment. We liked the rigidity of the machine-driven rhythms. And yet, on top of that, to make it sound human and interesting, we would often have very kind of loose percussive ideas, like party-style percussion, you know, people

• 18:34Speaker 01

  banging cowbells and shaking tambourines and stuff, to add the sense that something fun was going on over this industrialized interpretation of rhythm. Who's playing all of this percussion? All of us, mostly Alana. Her use of a big bass drum and the castanet is very, kind of, a signature Alana Curry percussion.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  This is Joe playing the congas.

• 19:08Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Was that an instrument that he'd often play in the band?

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's how he joined the band, in fact. I mean, he worked for us as a roadie, as a stagehand initially. And then, one night, after a show, in fact, he confessed to me that he had fantasies about playing congas as part of the show. So we bought some congas the next day and he joined.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  And then, I specifically got a drummer in just to do the hi-hat.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Just kind of humanise the drum machine. And in this case, it was Boris Brownsby-Williams, who went on to be in The Cure. And after the release of Hold Me Now and that album, we toured the world with him as our drummer as well. So he was kind of effectively in the band at the time.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  We discovered a great bass sound on the Oberheim OBXA, which is the only synthesiser I used, really.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  And I'm using the pitchband all the time to articulate ways in and out of notes. So it sounds like it's a real instrument.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  And interestingly enough, as I'm laying down the bassline and playing back part of it to see if it's okay, the studio control room door opened and in walked a publicist who said she would swing by. And her date for the evening was Bill Wyman, the bassist of The Rolling Stones, as I'm recording bass. He came in, listened to, and at the end of the track, he said, "Sounds all right to me."

• 20:47Speaker 01

  So, I think I got the nod of approval from one of the great bass players.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  So that's Alana playing an orchestral marimba, which was one of her favourite percussion instruments.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Down the line, actually, that became something that, because she loved it so much and we had these marimbas and she liked doing it live as well, marimbas ended up on a lot of our songs.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  But "Hold Me Now", it's a song where the verse and the chorus use the same chord sequence over and over again. The only change from that is in, after the second chorus, there's a kind of middle 8,

• 21:42Speaker 01

  goes into a different key temporarily, you know, which is a relief from this relentless four-chord sequence that's been going on throughout the song. So it shifts the mood quite significantly.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  And obviously, there's all those rising arpeggios. We're going up.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  That's me playing the Yamaha Grand.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  And once we'd miked the piano up, then suddenly I start improvising around the opportunity, because I love playing the piano.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  I haven't heard it that way. I haven't heard it that way for 43 years or something.

• 22:43Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And how does it feel to listen to it now?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  It takes me right back. It's a weird thing. It is like reading a diary, a musical diary, that completely conjures a memory.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  With everything that we added to it, you felt, "Yeah, this is getting better and better and better." And there's an excitement and almost a sense of disbelief that you're creating something.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  I have to admit that although I know that we had great ideas, no idea in that room at that time that 40 years later, it would be our most prominent success.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  It just felt like something we were doing that month. Yeah, we were lucky.

• 24:13Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And now, here's "Hold Me Now" by Thompson Twins in its entirety.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Hold me now.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Hold my heart

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Stay with me Let love instar Let love instar You say I'm a dreamer

• 25:33Speaker 02

  We're two of a kind

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Both of us searching for some perfect world we know we'll never find

• 25:46Speaker 02

  So perhaps I should leave here Yeah, go far away

• 25:55Speaker 02

  But you know that there's nowhere that I'd rather be than with you here today

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Hold me now

• 26:09Speaker 02

  Hold my heart

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Stay with me Let love instar Let love instar Hold me now

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Hold my heart

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Stay with me Let love instar Let love instar

• 26:58Speaker 02

  You ask if I love you

• 27:02Speaker 02

  What can I say?

• 27:06Speaker 02

  You know that I do And that this is just one of those games that we play

• 27:15Speaker 02

  So I sing you a new song

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Please don't cry anymore

• 27:24Speaker 02

  I need an ask of forgiveness Though I don't know just what I'm asking him for

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Hold me now, be in your loving arms Oh, hold my heart My cold and tired heart Stay with me

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Let the wind start, let the wind start Oh, hold me now Be in your loving arms Oh, hold my heart My cold and tired heart Stay with me Let the wind start, let the wind start Oh, hold me now Be in your loving arms Oh, hold my heart My cold and tired heart Stay with me Stay with me Let the wind start, let the wind start Oh, hold me now Be in your loving arms

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Oh, hold my heart My cold and tired heart Stay with me Stay with me Let the wind start, let the wind start Oh, hold me now

• 28:46Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Be in your loving arms

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Oh, hold my heart

• 28:51Hrishikesh Hirway?

  My cold and tired heart

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Stay with me Stay with me Let the wind start, let the wind start

• 29:10Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, Mary Dolan, and Kathleen Smith, with production assistance from Tiger Biscuit. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Special thanks, as always, to my older sister, Priya. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me, subscribe to my newsletter. You can find it on the Song Exploder website. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishi Keshi-Hirway. Thanks for listening.