When the British new wave band Thompson Twins unplugged its synths for the last time in 1997, singer Tom Bailey didn’t look back for nearly three decades. “Someone told me I didn’t play a Thompson Twins song live for 27 years,” Bailey says on a recent call from his London apartment. “Which is kind of a weird thing.
But I mean, it’s just evidence for the fact that I kind of drifted off in other directions and was doing lots of other music. “It was never music that was intended to become a mainstream chart-bound pop music,” he says of the electronica and dub music he released as International Observer. “And I was very happy doing that.
” Bailey says he’d more or less concluded he would never return to the music of Thompson Twins, which had hits with songs such as “In The Name of Love,” “Lies,” “Hold Me Now,” and “Doctor! Doctor!” Bailey says he’d more or less concluded he would never return to the music of the Thompson Twins, which with the classic lineup of Alannah Currie and Joe Leeway, had hits with songs such as “In The Name of Love,” “Lies,” “Hold Me Now,” and “Doctor! Doctor!” “But what happened was someone seduced me into helping them make a pop song and I enjoyed it so much,” Bailey says. “I realized it reminded me of those particular skills that are required for making good pop music that I’d developed and honed a little bit back in the ’80s. “Like, wow, you know? That’s a muscle that I haven’t used.
