PREVIOUSLY A CULT PROPOSITION ACROSS THE ALBUMS A PRODUCT OF… AND SET, US HIT IN THE NAME OF LOVE INSPIRED TOM BAILEY TO TRANSFORM THOMPSON TWINS FROM A SEVEN-PIECE CULT COLLECTIVE INTO A STREAMLINED POP TRIO FEATURING ALANNAH CURRIE AND JOE LEEWAY ON 1983 CLASSIC QUICK STEP & SIDE KICK. TOM REFLECTS ON THE PRICE OF HARD WORK AND WHY HE’S EAGER TO MAKE UP FOR LOST TIME ON HIS RETURN TO POP.

JOHN EARLS

How did you come to slim Thompson Twins’ line-up down to a three-piece for Quick Step & Side Kick?

After two albums, I was tired of waiting to see if it might happen for us. I thought: “Why don’t we just make sure it does happen?” Set’s producer, Steve Lillywhite, does a lecture tour about the music business. It’s apparently very good, and Steve says in it that the only single he made with a drum machine was In The Name Of Love. I only wrote that song as filler for Side Two of Set because I didn’t have enough material for the band, and it became a big US hit. It was the signpost record telling me I had to get away from the original band.

I didn’t want to get away from that music or the people in the band, it was just that the way we were doing things wasn’t going to do it for me. In the tour, Steve also says I fired everyone in the band who was a musician and kept the ones who weren’t. It’s a funny line, but in a way it’s true. I didn’t want Thompson Twins to be encumbered by: “I’ve got to find a nice part for the drummer to play.” I went straight for obvious pop, with a drum machine: kick, snare/kick, snare. I wrote music around that.

How hard was it to achieve that new style in reality?

We’d go into a writing session and think: “We need four of these songs to be hits.” We clarified our vision, forcing ourselves to be clearer than was comfortable. We said that, if we didn’t have a Top 10 hit in the next year, we had to dissolve the band. We put that pressure on ourselves to stop the what ifs and maybes in everything we’d done before.