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The classic
‘artist biog’ traditionally takes a strictly linear path. Year by year, album after album. But that wouldn’t do Tom Bailey justice. Bailey's creative past, present and future
can't be plotted along a straight line.
It's a prism, with dub, pop and world influences at each corner.
The
pop element is his most well-known and came back into play in 2018 with a brand
new album, Science Fiction. It arrived just over 25 years after Play With Me, the last single by the
Thompson Twins, which sat alongside tracks by Bowie, Eno and Moby on the
soundtrack to 1992's Cool World. The previous decade of course, had seen the
Thompson Twins rise from squat-based free-form indie anarchy – with 1981's Set and '82's A Product Of... – to world domination, with a set at Live Aid
backed by Nile Rodgers and Madonna. They had 7 top 40 hits in the US and 10 in
the UK with another 4 top 40 hits in the US Dance Chart including 3 No1’s with
‘Lies’, ‘Hold Me Now’ and ‘In the Name of Love’ with over 10 million album
sales worldwide.
Those
singles tell a unique story: Tom accessing early synths; being so taken aback by
the possibilities they offered; the Twins shifting from band to project as a
result; whereas much creativity – thanks to his two accomplices in the classic
trio line-up, Alannah Currie and Joe Leeway – was poured into design, video and
production as it was into everything else.
It was that ethos that meant no group other than the Thompson Twins
could possibly have released an anti-ballad as captivating as Hold Me Now or an anti-drugs song as danceable
as Don't Mess with Doctor Dream.
“People accuse the Thompson Twins of being
saccharine because we were so poppy,” Tom recalls. “But we headed in that direction consciously
– we turned ourselves into cartoon characters for God's sake! – so it doesn't
get more superficial on the surface. But
we were doing things for real, for sure.
Everything we did, we did because we felt seriously about it.”
It
was on the B-sides of those classic singles that Tom Bailey explored his love
of dub music, although it's a love that stretches back to The Blankets, one of
his earliest groups and Weather Station,
a 1982 film soundtrack and his first solo release. Then came the A Product of…'s
off-shoot, A Dub Product and, when
the Twins' hit the big time, Tom would regularly, surreptitiously slip dub into
the mainstream with tracks like Doctor!
Doctor!'s B-side Nurse Shark and
the flip of Lay Your Hands on Me, The Lewis Carol.
“B-sides were a great opportunity to
experiment. Sometimes, because so little
time was spent on them, they carried a carefree freshness, which is a rare
thing. The remix/version was a big thing
back then, and coming up with a radical, sometimes unrecognisable dub of an
existing track was part of the creative fun.”
Further,
deeper explorations into dub territory have been the main focus of Tom's journey
over the past two decades. As
International Observer, he's released almost ten albums, the core works being
2001's Seen, 2009's Felt, 2014's Touched and the Dungeons of
Dub series. But again, prism-like,
Tom's pop sensibilities are audible even in some of his deepest dub cuts. Like his reimagining of The Animals in House of the Rising Dub, or a fusion of the
mid-70s reggae of Burning Spear (Slavery
Days) with late 70s synthpop of Jean-Michel Jarre for Popcorn Slavery.
With
recent International Observer collaborators including Banco De Gaia and the
Bombay Dub Orchestra, a certain worldbeat feel has filtered into Tom's
work. But this is nothing new. This third corner of his musical prism has
been there since the beginning. The
fourth Thompson Twins single, Oumma
Aularesso was Tom's rearrangement of a traditional chant from Sierra
Leone. Its follow-up, Make Believe (Lama Sabach Tani) threw
tablas into the mix. And as soon as the Thompson
Twins became a three-piece, Tom followed trips to India with a trip to Egypt,
and then worked with Alex Sadkin – following his production of Grace Jones' Nightclubbing – at Island Records'
Compass Point studios in the Bahamas, to forge the sound of the Twins' most
influential albums, 1983's Quick Step and
Side Kick and 1984's Into the Gap.
The
worldbeat element came further to the fore after the Thompson Twins officially
disbanded with the formation of Babble with Alannah Currie, and two albums -
1994's The Stone and 1996's Ether.
Then, in the mid-00s, Tom travelled up the River Ganges writing and
recording – and performing at festivals to thousands at a time - as part of the
ambitious Holiwater project. It spawned
two albums: 2012's Holiwater and
2014's Maya, both of which were
produced by Tom and written in collaboration with Sarod virtuoso Pandit Vikash
Maharaj.
Right
now, the pop edge of the prism is shining brightest, spurred on by Tom’s return
to live work in 2014.
“It’s exciting,” he says, “because
rediscovering the ability to play live and write pop music has been part of a
personal transformation. I started off full of fear and all sorts of ‘oh no I
can't do that, and I can't do that'. But,
little by little, I've rediscovered that it's OK. It’s fun and it's really interesting.”
Playing
the Thompson Twins’ hits live around the world for the past few years has also forced
Tom to reassess the group’s music, which paved the way for 2018’s Science Fiction, his first pop album for
22 years.
“One thing I've discovered – that I
never really consciously understood back in the day – is that, although the
Thompson Twins' songs nearly always have this bright punchy positive chorus,
often evoking love and togetherness, there's actually a dark heart in most of
the verses. There are all sorts of weird
complications and confusions going on.
They're not just boy-meets-girl love songs. I found myself relating very
strongly to that, and what it means about what we all did 30 years ago, and
what's happened to us all ever since then.”
As a result, Tom has hand-crafted 10
songs that are instantly accessible not only to fans of classic Thompson Twins
but also to a new generation who have been alerted to his quintessential sound
and style after hip-hop producer Metro Boomin’ remixed Hold Me Now for GAP’s SZA-starring commercial that debuted at the
2018 Grammies.
Hard to imagine given the illustrious career
covered here but Science Fiction is
Tom’s first-ever solo album. It’s also,
to get the stats down on paper, his first pop album since Babble’s Ether in 1996, and his first solo output
since Industry and Seduction was used
as the finale of Cool World.
“I so much enjoyed playing concerts around
the world over the last couple of years, that I began working behind the scenes
on writing, recording and mixing the songs in this collection. I have
concentrated on other areas of music for the past couple of decades – but I
find it incredibly rewarding to be making pop music again. There’s something so
special about the way this kind of music works and, for me, it’s like finding a
long-lost friend.”
The tracks on Science Fiction spin the musical compass – from Synthpop-meets-soca
on What Kind of World? to the stadium
pop of Bring Back Yesterday to If You Need Someone, a track that’s so
radio-friendly every copy should come with a free pocket transistor.
While the Thompson Twins may have
recorded in some of the world’s most famous recordings studios, from Sarm West
in Notting Hill to Compass Point in the Bahamas, nowadays Tom is free to record
and write wherever and whenever inspiration strikes. “I recorded Science Fiction all over,” he explains,
France, New Zealand, London... These
days, my studio is a laptop and a pair of headphones! I'm a real wanderer. I don't stay in one place for very long.”
“I produced the album myself but worked
with Hal Ritson (whose credits range from the Chemical Brothers to David
Guetta) to produce the vocals. That's
the one thing I can't do myself is be my own vocal producer, because I need to
wear the performer's hat totally, so I get someone else to record my vocals and
try and get the best out of me. But Hal
had an idea to 'Latinize' What Kind of
World? and to get a Cuban backing vocalist in to give it a real Cuban feel.”
Worldly-wise, musically and spiritually,
2018 saw Tom take Science Fiction out
on the road. And with good reason, this
is the man who, after all, won Classic
Pop magazine’s award for Best Live Show in 2015 for revisiting the hits of
the Twins in such a creative, retro-futurist way: highlights ranging from a
wistful reworking of King For a Day
to the steampunk opening of We Are
Detective, adding all their visual trappings (right down the to the techno
tambourine from the front cover of You
Take Me Up) but with a modern twist.
In December 2017 Tom toured Australia
with Culture Club which was followed in 2018 with UK stadium dates with A-Ha
and OMD followed by a massive 60 date tour of USA and Canada with Culture Club
and the B52s playing to between 3000 and 20,000 people each night. 2018 ended
with a tour of the UK and Ireland with Culture Club and Belinda Carlisle.
An immense undertaking, 2018 saw the
most intensive live schedule Tom Bailey had ever taken on, reminiscent of the
headlining stadium whirlwinds of the Thompson Twins’ heyday. Testament indeed to the power of perfect pop
music and an artist who remains on a perpetual (prismatic) artistic journey.
Photo Credit: Rosaline Shahnavaz