For nearly three decades fans of the Thompson Twins have been waiting for more live performances from one of the most iconic bands of the eighties. Now The Thompson Twins’ Tom Bailey, with a new band, will be touring and performing the Thompson Twins hits.
Following a successful first festival performance in the UK in August 2014 in front of 20,000 people, Tom Bailey went straight into a highly successful 17 date headlining tour of the USA. The US tour included Tom making a special guest appearance on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and playing to a 4000 strong audience at LA’s legendary Greek Theatre.
The Thompson Twins’ Tom Bailey features Tom Bailey on vocals, keyboards, guitar, harmonica and percussion. His all female band feature Charlotte Raven on vocals and keyboards, Amanda Kramer (The Psychedelic Furs/Information Society) on vocals and keyboards and Paulina Szczepaniak on electronic drums.
The Thompson Twins had huge hits on both sides of the Atlantic.
Songs such as ‘Hold Me Now’, ‘Doctor Doctor’, ‘You Take Me Up’ and ‘Love On Your Side’ provided the soundtrack for so many people’s lives worldwide in the mid-eighties. In 1985 The Thompson Twins played ‘Hold Me Now’ at Live Aid in Philadelphia and also performed the Beatles ‘Revolution’ with Madonna on backing vocals and Nile Rodgers on guitar.
Says Tom: "It's so good to reconnect with the audience who loved these songs the first time around, as well as with new fans of the music. That's what gets me on stage every time."
Formed in 1977, the original Thompson Twins trimmed down their line-up in 1982 to a three piece of Bailey, Alannah Currie and Joe Leeway as they adopted a more electronic synthesizer based sonic line-up. Tom Bailey was the singer, multi-instrumentalist, producer and, along with lyricist Alannah Currie, composed and arranged the Thompson Twins music.
The Thompson Twins also enjoyed big success on the US dance chart with ‘Lies”, ‘In the Name of Love’ and ‘Hold Me Now’ all reaching No 1.
In 1988 they had another No 1 dance chart hit in the US with ‘In the Name of Love 88”.
The last Thompson Twins show in the 20th century was in Austin Texas in August 1987 and the band finally broke up in 1993. Since then Bailey has worked in many different areas of music, from the experimental electronic Babble and Kolab to the Indo-fusion of the Holiwater Band, the visual astronomy project BSP and the sound-system dub of International Observer.
Tom Bailey played with Nile Rodgers on Nile’s London Fold Festival on 24th June 2016 before going on to headline Rewind North in Cheshire, after which he co-headlined at the Microsoft Theatre in LA (home of the Grammies) as well as headlining a major festival in Tucson Arizona.
In April 2016 Bailey won the ‘Best Live Show 2015’ award in the UK’s Classic Pop magazine. Up against the likes of Duran Duran, Kylie and Kraftwerk, this confirmed Tom Bailey’s current live shows as amongst the best on the planet.