Song Exploder - Thompson Twins - Hold Me Now

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

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.

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 Hirwe. 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 1970, 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 U.S. 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 Bayley, and he told me how he and his bandmates Alana Curry and Joe Leeway made Hold Me Now. Hello, I'm Tom Bailey from the Thompson Twins. Thompson's gone through several histories with different lineups, and by the time we got to writing Hold Me Now,

my co-writers were Alanna, 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 purest 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, 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, 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. Alanna 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 theater was his thing, and he wanted to work on the live show. So we had this weird, almost formal division of labor. 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 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 fun 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. It's in D and then B and 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 and 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. Alanna and myself you know we've 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 this 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. 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 throw away items were perhaps on our menu.

So at that stage, I made a cassette. Alana would go off into a... darkened rub, and think about writing lyrics, and come back and say, how about this and how about that? I have to say, it's an interesting thing that went on with us as a writing duo, Lanner 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 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. I love a picture into my wall.

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 booth? 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, all tattered and torn. 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. 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. She'd 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.

We fuss and fight. 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. I'm both of us searching for some perfect world we 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. 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. 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. Yeah, it's something we discovered. I realized that was happening. We had this lucky arrangement. 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 Kesh Her Way.

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, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wynrope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. 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 Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, 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. listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. How 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, 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 them, but we can certainly get this single anthem. So then we booked RAC 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, he 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. 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. 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-da-da-da. It'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 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 castanette is very kind of signature Alano-Curray percussion.

This 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. And then I specifically got a drummer in just to do the hi-hat, just kind of humanise 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 Holmey

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. We discovered a great bass sound on the Oberheim OBXA, which is the only synthesizer I used, really. And 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 as I'm recording bass he came in and listened to and at the end of the track he said sounds all right to me I think I got the nod of approval

from one of the great bass players So that's Alanna 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. Hold me now.

It's a song where the verse and the chorus used 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. goes into a different key temporarily, you know, which is a relief from this relentless four-cord sequence that's been going on throughout the song. So it shifts the mood quite significantly. And obviously there's all those rising arpeggios. We're going up. That's me playing the Yamaha Grand. And once we'd mic to the piano up, then suddenly I start improvising around the opportunity, because I love playing the piano.

I haven't heard it that way. I haven't heard it that way for 43 years or something. And 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 then this is just one of those gay. that we play.

With everything that we added to it, it 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. 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. It just felt like something we were doing that month.

Yeah, we were lucky. So I can ask a forgiveness, though I don't know just what I'm asking it for. And now, here's Hold Me Now by Thompson Twins in its entirety. Go to songexploader.net to learn more. You'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 assistants 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. 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.com. net slash shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.