Thompson Twins - Hold Me Now

Introduction

0:00You'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 Hirwe.

0:10I'm going to be on tour for the next few weeks, and all the dates are at songexploder.net slash live. I'm going to be playing songs from my new album, In the Last Hour of Light, with a full band, and I'm going to be talking about the making of my album with a special guest moderator in each city. I get to be the interviewee instead of the interviewer. So I'm going to be joined by Jason Manzoukas, Samin Nosrat, Allison Russell, Joshua Molina, Ken Jennings and John Roderick, Min Jin Lee, and Adam Scott. It's a really personal album, and I hope you can make it out to one of the shows.

0:41You can get tickets and more info at songexploder.net slash live.

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Thompson Twins Introduction

1:34Any 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.

1:53Thompson 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 one in the UK, and went platinum in the US. And the song spent 21 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Song Creation Story

2:15So, 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. Oh, hold me now, oh, hold my heart, stay with me, let lovin' start, let lovin' start. Hi, hello, I'm Tom Bailey from the Thompson Twins.

2:49Tom Smith 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.

3:21It had become the pattern that after rehearsals with the seven-piece band, everyone would go home, apart from Joe, Alana, and myself. We'd stay, brew coffee, and talk till four in the morning, you know. 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,

3:53it'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're thinking, I can do it, man. And 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. 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.

4:25So we had this weird, almost formal division of labour. And it made it actually very efficient and kind of weirdly interesting to have departments. And so going into this fourth album, what was the mindset for the three of you? Well, I think we realised 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,

4:58too 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. It's in D. And then B.

5:30Then C.

5:34And 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.

6:04Alana 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. How did you go from having that argument to then saying, hey, this might be good material for a song? I suspect that that wasn't a conscious decision.

6:36It'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.

7:08Alana would go off into a darkened room and think about writing lyrics and come back and say, how about this and how about that? 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 realise we were using. It made the songs more universal.

7:39Alana 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.

8:10You 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 the lyric on. Look at our life now Tattered and torn

8:43One 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.

9:01She's forcing you into empathy. 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. We fuss and we fight and delight in the tears that we cry until dawn

9:31We 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. You say I'm a dreamer We're two of a kind Both of us searching for some perfect world

10:06We know we'll never find 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. 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. Yeah, it's part of the job.

10:36I'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. Well, in some ways, I wonder if it's easier to step into that role of inhabiting the words

11:07because 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. Yeah. It's something we discovered. I realized that was happening. We had this lucky arrangement. Oh, hold me now Oh, warm my heart Stay with me Let loving start

11:39Let loving start The story of Hold Me Now continues after this.

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11:47Song Exploder is sponsored by the game Mixtape. And to learn more, I talked to one of the creators. My name is Johnny Galvatron. I'm the writer and director of Mixtape. It's about three teenagers on their last day of high school going to their final party together, listening to the greatest mixtape of all time. And where did the idea for this game originally come from? Just wanting to make a game based around That's Good by Devo, which is the greatest song of all time. There's just something alive in that song that speaks to me. And it's very much a game about being a music lover

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13:41Thanks to Function for supporting Song Exploder and my general health. I've been traveling these days a lot for my album release shows and I remember that someone once said to me, part of the job of a touring musician is to make sure that you don't get sick. I do have a tendency to get sick when I travel a lot. And the Function tests that I took revealed that I was deficient in vitamin D and magnesium. So I made changes to my diet and my vitamin intake. Because it's one thing to say, oh, I'm trying to be healthier and another thing to actually have the information

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Recording Process

15:43How much time passed between the writing process and you actually going in to record the song? 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. Yeah. And they freaked out.

16:13They 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.

16:43But as I say, it wasn't available. So, you know, full of hubris, I said, no, I can produce it.

16:52And it was my first kind of high-pressure production job. 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. It 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.

17:20It 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.

17:31I 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. And whatever triggers the opening and closing, you can program in a rhythm. So, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.

17:52That'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.

18:12And 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 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

18:45is very kind of a signature Alana Currie percussion.

18:55This is Joe playing the congas. Was that an instrument that he'd often play in the band? 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.

19:20And then I specifically got a drummer in just to do the hi-hat.

19:27Just kind of humanized the drum machine. And in this case, it was Boris Bransby 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.

19:45We discovered a great bass sound on the Oberheim OBXA, which is the only synthesizer I used, really.

19:54And I'm using the pitch band all the time to articulate ways in and out of notes. So it sounds like it's a real instrument. And interestingly enough, as I'm laying down the bass line 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,

20:26as I'm recording bass. He came in, listened to it, and at the end of the track he said, sounds all right to me.

20:37So I think I got the nod of approval from one of the great bass players.

20:50So that's Alana playing an orchestral marimba, which was one of her favourite percussion instruments. 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. But Hold Me Now is a song where the verse

21:23and 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 eight. It 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.

21:50And obviously there's all those rising arpeggios. We're going up. That's me playing the Yamaha Grand. And once we'd mic'd the piano up, then suddenly I start improvising around the opportunity because I love playing the piano. I haven't heard it that way.

22:29I haven't heard it that way for 43 years or something.

22:33And how does it feel to listen to it now? It takes me right back. It's a weird thing. It is like reading a diary, a musical diary, that completely conjures a memory. You ask if I love you What can I say You know that I do And that this is just one of those games that we play With everything that we added to it,

23:07it 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.

23:17I 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. It just felt like something we were doing that month. Yeah, we were lucky. So I sing you a new song Please don't cry anymore I'll even ask your forgiveness

23:50Though I don't know just what I'm asking it for And now, here's Hold Me Now by Thompson Twins in its entirety. I have a picture

24:28A pen to my wall An image of you and of me And we're laughing with love at it all Look at our life now Look at our life now All tattered and torn We fuss and we fight and delight in the tears And we cry until dawn

24:59Hold me now Hold me now Hold me now Hold me now Hold my heart Stay with me Let loving start Let loving start You say I'm a dreamer We're two of a kind Both of us searching for some perfect world we know we'll never find

25:34So perhaps I should leave here Yeah, go far away But you know that there's nowhere that I'd rather be than with you here today Hold me now Hold me now Hold my heart Hold my heart Stay with me

26:07Let loving start Let loving start Hold me now Hold my heart Stay with me Stay with me Let loving start Let loving start Whoa Whoa Whoa

26:48You ask if I love you What can I say? Well what can I say? You know that I do And that this is just one of those games that we play So I'll sing you a new song Please don't cry anymore I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know

27:18Just what I'm asking for Oh Oh Oh Oh Hold me now Hold me now Oh Hold my heart Hold my cold and tired heart Stay with me Stay with me Let loving start Let loving start Oh Hold me now Hold me if you love me Hold my heart Hold my cold and tired heart

27:48Hold my cold and tired heart Stay with me Let loving start Let loving start Oh Hold me now Hold me if you love me Hold my heart Hold my cold and tired heart Hold my cold and tired heart Stay with me Will you stay with me Let loving start Let loving start Hold me now

28:18Hold me if you love me Hold my cold and tired heart Hold my cold and tired heart Stay with me Let loving start Let loving start Go to songexploder.net to learn more.

28:56You'll find links to buy or stream Hold Me Now. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, Mary Dolan, and Kathleen Smith, with production assistance from Tiger Biscop. 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.

29:27If 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 slash shirt. I'm Rishi Keish Hirwe. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia from PRX.

29:54I want to tell you about another Radiotopia show called Proxy. It's hosted by Yo-Ai Shaw, who you might know from her time hosting Invisibilia from NPR. On Proxy, Yo-Ai tackles your niche emotional conundrums. Maybe you have a question that is impossible to get answers for because no one in your life can relate, or the person you wish you could talk to about it isn't in your life anymore. So Yo-Ai scours the world for the perfect stranger for you to talk to, someone who's been in the same situation or has relevant experience and can hopefully provide the insight that you're

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