Touring here this summer, the frontmen of Thompson Twins and Orchestra Manoeuvres in the Dark chat about the dayglo good old days.
When the Thompson Twins conquered America in the mid-1980s, they took Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark along for the ride. Thompson Twins frontman Tom Bailey says he remembers pulling on a stage costume every night as the pioneering synthpop support band played Souvenir, the early OMD hit that is still a favourite. “I used to do this kind of wiggle dance putting on these really tight trousers … what a melody. It’s a fantastic piece of work.’’
For his part, OMD singer Andy McCluskey remembers the many permanent Thompson Twins earworms.
“Even now, I can’t stop singing Doctor! Doctor! We spent how many weeks on that tour? You’d go to bed with those tunes in your head, and you’d wake up with them in your head.”
By then, the group centred on the duo of McCluskey and Paul Humphreys were already six albums into a career that stretched back to 1978. But the London-born Thompson Twins – built around the trio of Tom Bailey, Alannah Currie, and Joe Leeway – had the US hits, especially the run of them from the group’s 1984 fourth album Into the Gap.
Both groups were part of a wave of British acts embraced by the MTV era that redefined what pop bands could look or sound like.
Forty years later, and ahead of sharing a stage in New Zealand, Bailey and McCluskey are reunited via Zoom at the suggestion of the Listener. Today, Bailey is in London and about to head to the US for a 30-date run after a 40th anniversary Into the Gap tour of the UK. Speaking from Liverpool, McCluskey has had the northern summer off to recover from a recent knee replacement. It seems his distinctive dancing style, often described as being like a trainee teacher, has done some damage.
“Cortisone became my rock’n’roll drug of choice after rubbing cocaine on the knee didn’t work any more,” he deadpans.
Currie was a child of Auckland’s Mt Roskill but Thompson Twins toured New Zealand only once. They had two outdoor stadium shows in 1986 and OMD turned up for three shows at the end of the same year.
After calling time on the band and marrying in 1991, Bailey and Currie spent much of the 1990s living in New Zealand with their two children, first in Matakana and then in Ponsonby. Bailey’s musical outlets included his own dub-electronica albums as International Observer and playing with the Indo-fusion group the Holiwater Project. His closest thing to pop was his co-production on the 1999 debut hit album by Stellar*.
Currie and Bailey divorced in 2004 and he returned to the UK, where, eventually, he started to embrace his pop past.
As with the Thompson Twins, the end of the 80s proved OMD’s undoing. The band foundered in the early 90s – a decade in which McCluskey became the Svengali-songwriter behind UK girl group Atomic Kitten – before reuniting in 2006.
That period when you toured together in the US was referred to as the second British Invasion. Did it feel like it at the time?
Tom Bailey: No, I think that was American journalese. It was to a certain extent presumptuous, because the first British Invasion was The Beatles and all that … I don’t think we quite measured up to that standard taking over America.
Andy McCluskey: But it’s true that after 1982, there were a lot of British bands who were doing very well in the States, I think because we were making better videos than the American pop groups.
TB: Also, the American sound was still kind of trapped in a rocktastic approach to making music. They hadn’t really clicked that there was a new game in town.
AM: The reason we were so jealous when we supported you in 85-86 was because we got signed to a US label early on who didn’t know what to do with us. And so all the hits we had in Europe were not hits in America. So, we didn’t really start having hits there till 84, and you guys had so many more than us. We were jealous as hell, quite frankly, even though it was a great tour.
TB: If we’d have been in Europe, it would have been the other way around, because we did nothing in Europe at that time. Managers see the way the wind is blowing and they follow the current of activity. So, we got our foot in the door.
Do you think the British music in that period gets enough respect? If you look at, say, the retrospective music mags like Mojo or Uncut, they are a constant recycling of the 60s and 70s or 90s. You seem to have been left out of the mythology.
TB: In certain respects. I noticed that 80s festivals here had to do their own thing because the regular festivals weren’t interested in 80s bands. And so that was a mark that we were a little bit left out of what most people considered to be the story of rock’n’roll. I don’t know quite why – maybe it was the sudden impact of visuals on people’s appreciation. By the same token, I think the 80s was a bit of a golden age of interesting new songwriting and record making.
AM: I think every generation holds to its bosom the music that is the soundtrack of the journey from childhood to adulthood and there’s a lot of people out there who do still cherish their 80s music. As Tom said, yeah, we struggle to get onto other festivals that will have other classic acts that seem to be from the 60s or the 90s. Perhaps we were just before post-modern happened, when everything started eating its own history. So, we were the last standalone decade, and maybe that’s the strange reason it’s backfired on us.
How do you feel about being on the sort of nostalgia part of your career? Were you reluctant to do it at first?
AM: You might get different answers from us. We stopped working as a band, and then we reformed in 2006 and initially we were determined not to do the retro heritage things, but we just kept bumping into people who said, “Why don’t you do Rewind? Why don’t you do Let’s Rock.” They are so much fun. You play to thousands of people. Everybody has a great time, and you make a shitload more money than you do carrying your own production.
We felt we were like a secret band that people had forgotten about, because we weren’t as flamboyant as Spandau [Ballet] and Duran Duran and Culture Club. We wanted to go out there and play our songs to a large festival audience who might go, “Oh, OMD. Shit. I forgot how many hits they had, because they weren’t in my face with dressing-up-box clothes and everything.” So, we started doing those.
We’ve released four albums since we reformed, and the last one, amazingly, got to No 2 [in the UK], and if it wasn’t for Taylor fucking Swift, we would have been No 1.
Both the Thompson Twins and us came from trying to be alternative to Anglo-American rock clichés … and yet we both ended up writing tunes that people can sing along to in their dayglo tutus in the middle of a fricken field in England. But we haven’t forgotten where we came from.
TB: There’s an obvious danger with nostalgia that you just wallow in the “it was great back then, and everything’s shit now”. People try to drag that out of me and I’d rather avoid getting into that discussion. But what I will say is there’s a great nostalgia for a time when music in general carried the burden of a kind of revolutionary approach to life. It was bringing people together to try to make the world a better place. And I think that’s what’s been lost, because now music is about celebrity and streaming numbers. But if we can just touch upon a memory of the fact that once we came together with a kind of ambition to improve the world, then that’s worth hanging on to. It’s worth remembering and worth evoking in a live situation.
Was it weird when you went out by yourself singing Thompson Twins songs, having largely avoided them for many years?
TB: Yeah, it was super weird until I actually stepped onto the stage, and then it suddenly became okay, which is a funny thing. I had a big dose of that coming back after a 27-year break from playing those songs. It was a bit weird. It was more a battle in my mind about whether I should be doing it or not, because more or less, at Alanna’s insistence, we’d kind of buried the Thompson Twins. And I thought, “Okay, not going back there.” I agreed with her, but it was a slightly reluctant point of view. I thought, “Why are we not?” After a while, I was seduced back into pop music after working on everything but pop music – lots of dub and Indian and various film projects. It suggested itself as the thing I should be doing, because it felt good.
Looking back at the decade, was there a peak 80s moment in your careers? Perhaps for Thompson Twins it was when you played Live Aid in Philadelphia, and you had Madonna and Nile Rodgers in the line-up?
TB: Well, everyone wants me to say that and explain how come Madonna ended up singing backing vocals? But the answer to most of these questions is one thing leads to another. There’s no explanation. So, yeah, peak 80s. Certainly Live Aid was a difficult thing to follow in terms of the world audience’s experience of music. They got such a big dose of satisfaction that day that anything else seemed pathetic for a while. The relentless forward movement of popular music culture skidded to a halt that day.
And for OMD, perhaps the peak 80s moment was director John Hughes getting you to write If You Leave for the end of his film Pretty in Pink, which became one of your biggest hits?
AM: Ha, no. I think peak 80s for us was probably after the tour we did with the Thompson Twins, we toured with Depeche Mode on the 101 tour and that culminated in playing the Rose Bowl in Pasadena in front of 70-80,000 people. They also had Wire and Thomas Dolby, so that was the synth Live Aid, right? On that tour with Depeche, it was interesting to see a band who we’d influenced. [Depeche Mode songwriter] Vince Clarke always said when they heard [OMD song] Electricity in a club, they decided to throw away their guitars and do synths. Then we were supporting them because they were huge. Watching that tour was just like, “This is stadium synth.” I would probably say that was peak 80s for me, just watching somebody else smashing it.
Going for solid gold
Hopefully, it will be too warm to break out the fingerless gloves or the legwarmers, but it’s going to be a very 1980s kind of summer, judging by the latest announcements of shows and package tours heading to New Zealand. The Tom Bailey/Thompson Twins and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark tour is part of the Sound Series shows. Those bands are headlining a bill that also features early 80s Kiwi pop pin-up Jon Stevens, veteran Australian singer-guitarist Diesel (Mark Lizotte) and local funk veterans Ardijah playing at a combination of indoor and outdoor shows at Auckland Sounds (February 27), Selwyn Sounds in Christchurch (March 1) and Hutt Sounds in Upper Hutt (March 2).
Earlier is the Timeless Summer with a very Solid Gold Hits Volume 35 grouping of Boy George, who cancelled a reunion tour here with Culture Club in 2016, and nostalgia-circuit regulars The Little River Band, Bonnie Tyler, and Starship featuring Mickey Thomas. It’s the 50th anniversary of The Little River Band, Australia’s greatest contribution to yacht rock, though given the band’s fascinating litigious and trademark history, we are not sure the 2025 LRB line-up shares much DNA with the one that wrote all those harmony-heavy, catamaran-friendly hits. Timeless Summer comes to an outdoor venue near you in Christchurch (January 11), Napier (January 12), New Plymouth (January 16), Mt Maunganui (January 18) and Auckland (January 19).
Another Australian band celebrating a half century – but with most of its original line-up, including Jimmy Barnes up front – is Cold Chisel, which is headlining a three-date summer tour with fellow Oz rock veterans Icehouse and relative spring chickens, Californian pop-punk trio Everclear and the not-as-old-as-Cold Chisel Bic Runga. They will be rattling the glassware at the Gibbston Valley Winery on January 18, before heading to Taupo on January 25 and Whitianga on January 26.
Also beaming in from the 80s on a tour they’ve named “8424″ in reference to their 40th anniversary is English goth-hard-rock outfit The Cult, whose publicity boldly claims they are “one of the most influential bands of all time”. They are bringing their apparently inspiring sound to Christchurch’s Isaac Theatre Royal on November 20 and Takapuna’s Bruce Mason Centre the next night. – Russell Baillie