Electronically Yours | EP54: Tom Bailey

You made a record, correct? That's that. Yeah, well, it was kind of thrust upon me, to be honest. But I was well, being a Sheffield Wednesday fan is something that is thrust upon you by heritage in my case, but I love it anyway. But we are part of the elite crew, you know, there's myself, yourself, and we got to Wembley twice in 1993. And, uh, sorry, '83, '93, '93, yeah. My brain's going. Anyway, I made a record for Wednesday. Yeah, it was '93. And by that time you were in a different part of the world probably, weren't you? Maybe I can't remember the exact days of any of those things, but yeah, exactly. So I thought I'd get that out of the way. So let's talk about... So you grew up in Chesterfield, is that right?

Yeah, yeah, all right, cool. And the psychiatric hospital, yeah, that's Middlewood in Sheffield, which no longer exists as far as I know. But in those days it was one of the last of the great Victorian nut houses that still did a roaring trade, you know. And it was in many ways a great place because you managed to focus all the resources in one place for those needs, but on the other hand, it was kind of forbidding, you know, an enormous campus stretched miles. I think it had the longest corridor of any building in Europe. Middlewood Hospital was a shameful thing for something that was a little bit shameful in those days, you know, that people always went to Middlewood. Obviously times are different now, thank God, but it was quite a forbidding place, I agree.

That's right, yeah. Briefly I taught in a secondary school, Brook School in Richmond, Sheffield. And I enjoyed aspects of that, but essentially I'm not a very good teacher for kind of a lesson they thought didn't really count for much. Yeah, I've recently become involved in teaching an MA course in commercial music production and another one in songwriting. I started off with three hours to fill and I'm going, you know, I don't mind teaching people, but that's an awful long time to engage people's interest, isn't it?

That's true, that's true. I did a little bit of teaching at university here as well, and that was much easier. I mean, sometimes I had to wake people up a little bit, but it was taking the piss out of the teachers at King Edward's. Yeah, there was a lot of that going on. It was like a battle, more than a learning situation.

The piano and clarinet. Clarinet. Have you ever used clarinet in your recordings? Strangely enough, I have. I've used it on other people's recordings, but never on mine. Are you good at it? No, I'm useless, but I can make some pretty aggressive shrieking noises with it.

Now, is that everybody? For a lot of middle-class families that have got kids, it seems like a genuine possibility that you might be able to make a career out of being a musician. Everybody's either a DJ or a musician at some point because they've all got the means of production at home, and their mates are doing it. It's a peer group thing. And my job a lot of the time as a teacher is to kind of attenuate people's expectations and create a sense of realism, because everybody wants to do the same now. You took a risk, you went down to London, you really threw yourself in. They don't take those risks anymore because they can do it at home. I think that's an interesting dynamic now which is changing the kind of music that's being made. What do you think?

Fair enough. And what if you were doing the same thing now, how do you think it would pan out?

But you were saying that your street there and the pop group, mostly based in Bristol, but the elements of the pop group there, and then a few you've never heard of probably. But definitely you're right, there was a sense of something in the air which was more than just isolated cases. It was congealing through society. I think that's happened several times in the history of rock and roll. People in the Beatles era of Liverpool say that it was difficult to find someone who wasn't in a group.

Anyway, I know it's true but sad. So tell me about this stratospheric rise of the Thompson Twins. Do you have any bands before that? Any kind of proto-Thompson Twins manifest?

Yeah, yeah. So '76, that's quite early in the punk journey, isn't it? So I'm interested in when you decided to move in a more electronic hybrid direction.

Yeah, I know what you mean. Your singles somehow at that period summed up the zeitgeist of the pop sensibility of that point for me, more than any other artist. I just think you... very kind of you to say. Now, of all time, I just think it's brilliant. Oh, wow, you're very kind. I think by that stage you can't really divorce the music entirely from the image as well. We had those big hits, and so in some funny way we started to rewrite the possibility of what a pop group should look like. Obviously other people were doing that, and it was a sign of the times, so we just kind of fit in. And if you happen to have some catchy songs at the same time, then... oh no, you're really doing yourself a disservice. You know damn well that those songs are really beautifully constructed. I know when I've written... we did it a few times, not many, but you know when you've written a song that... it's not really something you can say you're proud of. It's more like a smash. Hello? Yes, I think we knew. I absolutely agree with you that when you're on to something, usually anyway, sometimes things sneak up on you as well. And sometimes you think you're on to something but you aren't. But there's a heavyweight sensation when you hit the target, and it's very exciting and a little bit frightening as well, because suddenly the weight of responsibility of getting it right... once you have this amazing idea, you can't blow it.

I think you're right. There are so many different ways to approach that job, and it depends on your personal influences and how you allow them to seep into what you're doing. One of the big influences for me was dub music. But by the same token, we all end up migrating towards that verse, bridge, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, middle eight, verse, bridge, isn't it? It works. So within our cultural references, there are certain classical forms, certain classical architectures that we know work well. I use one of my favorite phrases when I'm teaching: to encourage my students to look at things from the point of view of the meaningful denial of expectation. It's not my phrase, and I can't remember who said it, but I love the idea. You set up an expectation and then you meaningfully deny it.

Well, interestingly, I was interviewing Billy Currie yesterday, and I'd forgotten that he was so much a part of the syrup of a piece of traditional songwriting using that kind of hint of bleakness and modernity. I think that's a beautiful thing. It's a bit like taking traditional architecture and applying more contemporary forms on top of it. Were you involved in that version of 'You've Lost That Loving Feeling'? Yeah, I sang the co-lead. Really? Because that's powerfully bleak, the way you did it. I listened to it again the other day, it's a masterpiece. Oh, thank you. It wasn't meant to be that. Obviously, it was myself and Ian that did the music. I just thought, what do you feel like when something so crucial to your life has left your life? It's an emptiness. So I thought we've got to keep this really sparse and make it feel like some kind of futuristic film soundtrack of being lost. I think we achieved it. We perform it live, and people adore it. It's a very emotionally engaging thing. Have you ever done anything that bleak?

It has, yeah. You remind me of one of the sound systems that influenced me very much in the early days, called The Mighty Observer. I partly take my International Observer name from them. They were almost a kind of boys' club. They had a wall all around the room, and they were all speakers the size of wardrobes. In fact, I think some of them were wardrobes that just had speakers put in, like 20-inch drivers. When you get that kind of surface area, it's a physical sensation. It stops being something you listen to; it's something that engulfs your body. Once you've heard that, you realize there's more to this bass business than you hear in your average pop record. So it has influenced me. I like a good bottom end, and I don't like records that... rituals. One of the things he found out in the caves in Ireland: he measured the resonant frequencies of different shapes and sizes of caves, and they all turned out to be designed to resonate at 111 Hertz. He did some research on students, put them in an MRI scanner, fed them different frequencies, and measured their brain activity. Guess what? 111 Hertz switches off half of your prefrontal cortex and puts you in a trance. Isn't that amazing? That's a specific fact. I've been in New Zealand for a couple of years now because of COVID, but normally I live in France for half the year. Near my house in France, there's a cave where if you walk about half a kilometer into the cave, there are amazing paintings. The place is called Niaux. The first question is, why do you have to walk half a kilometer into a cave? Because it's dark after 10 paces. If you're just looking for dark and quiet, you've got that very quickly. The reason is that they found the place that was acoustically resonant deep in the heart of the cave system. I love this idea because it suggests that the paintings may have been coincidental to the real purpose, which was the sound. There were probably drugs involved as well. Music and drugs came before the visual arts. Oh, absolutely, it's true. That was the conclusion they came to: the shamans of the Neolithic tribes would go into these caves, and at the equinoxes, the angle of the sun would illuminate the runes. They would take some drugs, mushrooms or whatever, interpret the runes, and the sound chanting would enhance the experience. Anyway, let's try... coincidentally, you were doing this art installation stuff as well, weren't you? The Holy Water Project, is that right?

So you're going to be on tour with the Human League, right? That's right, in December, and Altered Images as well. That'll be fun. I'm so much looking forward to it. For me, it's going to be the first time I've had the pleasure of doing these summer shows, so I'm long overdue. It's a bit more difficult for me because I've got to come from the other side of the world to do the show, and it might be very difficult getting back into New Zealand afterwards. But my daughter is expecting a baby just after Christmas in the UK, so that makes me very excited. I think it's only when you get to this age, I mean I'm 65, you're 63? No, no, I'm 66. You're older than me. Okay, okay. When you get to this age, post-60, you understand what it means to be a grandparent or the significance of it. I never really understood it before. That's a big thing. It's enormous. It's one of those things like having kids, where you have the... performing with Madonna at Live Aid. I know we're dodging about the timeline, but I think it's quite interesting. I was working with Nile Rogers on his 'Here We Go Again' album in New York, and he had just done the 'Like a Virgin' album with Madonna, so they were friends. Then the whole Live Aid thing came up, and we realized we didn't want to go back to do Wembley because it would be too disruptive, so we applied for permission to do the American side. There were just the three of us in the studio, so we didn't have our band with us. We thought, let's put a band together from session musicians. I'd worked with Steve Stevens from Billy Idol's band, he joined on guitar, Nile was on guitar of course, and I said, 'Why don't you ask Madonna if she wants to do it?' We did this instant deal where she would sing backing vocals for us if we sang them for her. Oh, wow, that's incredible. I've got to look that up on YouTube. I've never seen that. So I think we're close to... oh yeah, this is a fun fact. I was looking at the numbers for you guys on Spotify, and I realized that Heaven 17 are exactly a third as popular as you.

One of them, I always say 'Rashomon', but that's a bit of a pretentious answer. I love 'Rashomon', it's brilliant. I'll go with 'A Suitable Boy'. I was entranced for a long time by that. I'm a lover of India, so maybe that's why. The whole Indian story was fantastic. I've never been to India, I really want to go.

I often think back to a moment where I slipped very close to an enormous cliff in India. I could very easily have just gone over the edge, but luckily didn't. Another one was on the Irish coast, the westernmost point of Europe, called Skellig Michael or Little Skellig. It's like a cartoon island in the ocean that goes up like that. It was in the last Star Wars movie where Luke Skywalker as an old guy has to pay penance for his sins on an alien planet, and they used this as the location. It used to be where they sent the monks to do their penance in the Middle Ages. It has 600 steps going up around the outside. I had to come down on my ass on every step, and people were just blithely going up with kids on their backs. I thought, God, one slip and you'd be gone. What's your favorite musical artist or composer?

Well, I work a lot with my wife, who's a visual artist, Lauren Dreyer. So I have to say that I'm very involved in her work. Very politically correct, she's asleep, so she's... for me, there was a group after the Thompson Twins called Babel, and the first Babel album was a psychedelic masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. I've got to listen to that. I've never heard it. That stands out as something immense to feel good about. I know you're vegan, and you eschew drugs and drink. Is that because you were the opposite in your earlier years?

Judging by the fact that I've still got the Jupiter 4, Roland Jupiter 4, and the System 100, and the Korg 700, and all that, but none of the digital implementations of those are anywhere near as good. You just don't get the warmth in the bottom end. So that's it. Thank you so much for giving me time in your evening. It's your evening, that's right. No, it's a great pleasure. I'm so pleased we could do this, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in the UK at some stage, and who knows, maybe in America. Let's have a talk about that. I'll mention it to our management. The protocols will be whether it's all hugs and kisses or whether we'll all be secretly going into our dressing rooms and never crossing the corridors. I don't know. It was really weird when we were doing the Rewind and Let's Rock shows, because everything would look completely normal, same structure, same people, but everybody's got this thousand-yard stare going on because everybody's been through hell. That will melt away, I hope. All right, man, lovely to see you. I'll see you at a show soon. Good luck. Thanks very much. Cheers. Thanks again. Bye-bye.