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Tue 31 March 2026 8:00, UK
In the beginning, the Thompson Twins were anything but a pop band.
A ragtag group of northern new-wave misfits consisting of Tom Bailey, Pete Dodd, John Roog, and Jon ‘Pod’ Podgorski, they shimmied from Sheffield down to London in 1977 to set up life as squatters in Lillieshall Road, Clapham. When they began piling out of a battered white van and into their chosen squat, directly opposite the one occupied by musician and former journalist Alannah Currie, the state of the place was so bleak that even Currie, no stranger to the realities of squatting, conceded it was in a “really bad” way.
These two sets of music-squatting neighbours eventually came to know each other through the shared proximity of the scene, and Bailey would go on to invite Currie to join the Thompson Twins on stage at the end of a gig, where she reportedly stole the show. Up to that point, Currie had effectively ruled herself out of mainstream radio play by giving her anarchic improv band the most deliberately confrontational name possible: the ‘Unfuckables’. In true punk fashion, they only performed one gig, seemingly more invested in provocation than longevity, as she described the group “wild feminists who’d fill eggs with black paint and throw them at sexist adverts” in an interview with The Guardian earlier this year.
By 1982, Currie had joined the Thompson Twins, whose comparatively palatable name was borrowed from the bumbling detectives Thomson and Thompson in The Adventures of Tintin. While the band’s line-up fluctuated, at one point stretching to seven members, their most recognisable incarnation was the trio of Currie, Bailey, and Joe Leeway. This reduction to a three-piece was a deliberate manifesto, a skinnying down of the guitars in an attempt to shift towards a more synth-driven sound, as Bailey noted in a 1983 interview: “We weren’t going to be a rock ‘n’ roll band… Right now, technology is what’s important, and that’s what our music tries to reflect”.
Seeking to free themselves of UK influence, the trio decamped to the Bahamas to record at Compass Point Studios in Nassau with producer Alex Sadkin, a move that yielded immediate commercial dividends, with the band breaking into the international charts with ‘Lies’ and ‘Love On Your Side’, and yet, their greatest triumph was born from a private domestic fracture. ‘Hold Me Now’ was written after Currie and Bailey, who were secretly in a relationship they were trying to hide from the eyes of the press, had a creative disagreement that spilt over into a trading of personal insults. In the high-octane world of 1980s pop, this was the moment they were supposed to trash a hotel room à la Joe Walsh, or perhaps start a lifelong feud like Nicks and Buckingham.
Instead, they opted for something truly radical, wherein they made up and decided to pen a song to help them process what had happened, which was unheard of. Currie recalled scrawling the lyrics down like a “frenzied” love letter to try and make sense of what she was thinking, before tailoring the words for Bailey to sing: “Hold me now, woah / Warm my heart / Stay with me /Let lovin’ start, let lovin’ start”.
“It felt more mature than the clubby stuff,” Bailey recalled, noting that “it was slower, heartfelt, more emotional, and being about real stuff gave it authenticity”. Sometimes (but not too often) you probably do need to have a bit of a wee fallout with someone you care about to realise that you absolutely love them to bits and don’t know what you’d do without them, and hey, maybe if you’re lucky, you can even get a hit song out of it too.
They released the single in November 1983 to chase a Christmas number-one (more of a cultural phenomenon than it is now), and because they were away recording in the Bahamas with very little contact with the outside world, the scale of their success came as a total shock, as Bailey recalled the discovery when chatting with The Guardian, “We came out of those sessions to find it racing up the charts, then it just became this monster hit”.
The band would go on to perform at Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium for Live Aid in 1985 and collaborate with artists including Nile Rodgers, Madonna, and Grace Jones, while Currie and Bailey stayed together for the entirety of the 1980s before marrying in 1991 and having two children shortly afterwards. As the histories of Fleetwood Mac, The Fugees and Sonic Youth prove, making music with your significant other isn’t always a harmonious venture, and in this regard, Bailey and Currie are a refreshing change of pace. While the relationship did end in 2003, it didn’t descend into acrimony, and all three members of the classic line-up remain close today.
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