Re/Act: RECLAIM

Part One: Rattails and Whitewalls

“He wants the Queen to be dead!”

- my mother, on Morrissey, 1986.

I didn’t really have a coming out. My mother confronted me, and I didn’t lie. Big mistake. My phone was taken away and I was not allowed to close my bedroom door. I was forbidden to eat dinner with the family for fear I’d give my sisters AIDS (not that I was sexually active with anyone, and certainly not my sisters), then just as quickly ordered to do so because, truthfully, that was a much worse punishment. I was told my hair looked “faggy” and pulled out of drama class to attend therapy, the clear intent of which was to convince me that being gay was simply not something I could be. It was during one of these sessions that my mother said the above, referring to The Smiths’ album The Queen Is Dead.

As gay role models go, the famously sad and celibate Steven Morrissey would seem a pretty good option for the eldest son of conservative Texans. He was always, at the very least, a royalist, if not a right-wing xenophobe. I understood the title of The Smiths’ 1986 album as a lamentation for the glory and romance of a fallen aristocracy, not a call for beheading. Why my mother’s sudden concern for Elizabeth II? No idea. But this was around the time she confiscated all the records, posters, concert tees, and Star Hits issues that were making me gay. In doing so, she robbed me of a sense of recognition I found in that art and music, and really nowhere else. To this day, I cannot listen to The Smiths.

But this is not about Morrissey.

…

What brings you joy? It’s a question I hear a lot in arts, activist, and sobriety spaces. Lately, in my life at least, the stakes seem very high, and my mood pretty low, so I’ve been asking myself how, aside from substance use, did younger me manage (or escape) trauma and disappointment? How did I deal with shit at eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty-seven..? Art, of course. Books. Muppets. (Check out The Muppets and the Poetry Of Everyone by my friend Alicia Stoller.) But more than anything else, music.

One of my tween-era favorites was a seven-piece multi-culti band whose sound combined jangly guitars, Sierra Leonean chants, and an array of percussion instruments including found objects like hubcaps and trash bins. Beginning in 1977 and emerging from a South London squat, the group took its name from a Belgian comic strip. Over a span of sixteen years, as members came and went, the band would venture into club music, synth pop, rock, and electronica, releasing eight studio albums and thirty-five singles, including ten top 40 hits in the UK and US. I think it fair to say that no other pop act in history did more for, or with, the xylophone.

I’m speaking, of course, of Thompson Twins.

If you have a casual appreciation of 1980’s pop culture, three things likely come to mind when you think of Thompson Twins: “Hold Me Now,” the end of Sixteen Candles, and hair. You’re not wrong. During their years as a trio, Tom Bailey, Alannah Currie, and Joe Leeway branded themselves with a logo that featured their hairstyles - rattail, whitewalls, and dreadlocks, respectively. And forty-three years after its release, “Hold Me Now” continues to be overplayed in supermarkets and on oldies stations.

But their earlier stuff! That percussive, can-do, punk squat energy! For a gay kid in suburban Texas suffering anxiety and depression, the colorful high-concept avant-garde music and videos of new wave bands like Thompson Twins was oxygen! I wanted to run away with them and dance around in fingerless gloves and weird hats! From 7th to 12th grades I went to five different schools. I tried fitting in, I tried standing out, it never mattered, I still felt weird everywhere I went. For the most part I brought my friends with me, on vinyl, and then cassette. But I can’t hear songs from Set or A Product Of Participation without thinking of my friend Anna, driving - in her car? mine? where were we even going? - and singing along. Freedom. Belonging. Joy.

Don’t take that, take this!

With Quick Step and Sidekick (simply Sidekicks in the U.S.) the Twins became a trio. With fewer members and more synths, their worldbeat sound palette devolves a bit into the Orientalism typical of a time when everyone was “Turning Japanese” in “Hong Kong Gardens.” Parts of their smash hit Into The Gap feel a little cringey now, but there are guiltier pleasures than culturally appropriative pop songs. To be fair, Tom Bailey is a serious devotee of Indian classical music and a champion of Indo-fusion artists, and it was likely the exoticism of the era that got me interested in, and ultimately respectful of, other cultures.

Besides, what did I survive 1985 for, if not to find meaning and engagement in genre-blending transnational artmaking? It was that year, at the height of their fame, that Nile Rogers (over)produced Thompson Twins’ Here’s To Future Days featuring a full gospel choir and searing electric guitar solos by Steve Stevens. It was all a bit hat-on-a-hat, and I’m not talking about Alannah Currie’s oversized haberdashery. The album’s opener “Don’t Mess With Doctor Dream” is a rather overwrought uptempo warning against using narcotics. The accompanying video includes some mixed and simplistic messaging typical of the late Just-Say-No era, and a dramatic climax employing a long POV shot from high above a cemetery that ends with the viewer looking up from a grave at the bereaved trio, clad in black (but fabulously coiffed). It’s enough to make you laugh and indeed I recall reading an article - I don’t know where, and believe me I’ve searched - describing a guy in early recovery doing just that…and then three minutes and forty-eight seconds later finding himself deeply moved and totally jonesing. I get it.

…because despite the Twins’ dire warning, I ended up on smack myself. As a teenager, I couldn’t imagine that happening. I really wasn’t a bad kid, I just had a weird haircut. Aside from skipping class to smoke Lucky Strikes outside the Circle K, I didn’t get up to much. Yeah there were drugs - one school I attended set a national record for teen overdoses (and suicides) - but I never imagined I’d make it a habit. Surely the cliched lyrics of this otherwise banging song weren’t for me. Years later, in the throws of withdrawal, it provided me with a sort of mantra for staying stopped: Don’t mess with Dr. Dream / He’s not one for sympathy / Don’t mess with Dr. Dream /He will bring you to your knees.

You take affirmation where you can.

I’ll be always falling, only to rise and fall again.

Mazzy Star is another one I can’t listen to. So is Jesus & Mary Chain, and Sade’s Love Deluxe. I associate them all with getting high - the comfort and warmth (and sleep!) it brought me, and the inevitable loss of those things as well. These old records don’t just conjure memories, they cause me actual pain. I suppose it could prove useful. I generally roll my eyes at actors who use music to “get into character” but I also recognize there is science behind sense memory.

What kind of music gets your juices flowing? Is it what you’d expect it to be? I’m currently in rehearsals for a gay period piece that takes place in the early Nineties, just when I was getting in real trouble. I’ve noticed that in remembering that era, I’m not thinking much about the bands I was listening to at the time, which were mostly rock groups making what came to be known as “grunge” (shudder). I’m focused more on clubby stuff like Madonna’s Erotica and her The Girlie Show tour. For a lot of gay men, that era of her work was all about reclaiming our bodies, and our freedom, from a plague.

Like Madge, Thompson Twins were always reinventing themselves. After Future Days, Joe Leeway stepped away, leaving Bailey and Currie to continue as a duo both in music and in life. (Superfan that I was, I didn’t know until recently they’d married and have two children together.) Their next two albums sound like artists eager to eschew the pop sound that made them famous, and indeed their best work during this era was “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” on 1990’s AIDS charity compilation of Cole Porter classics, Red Hot + Blue.

Then comes 1991’s Queer, which turns out to be something of a return to form as well as, in my opinion, a triumphant finale. It’s first single, “Come Inside,” was slipped to London deejays under the moniker ‘Feedback Max.’ In New York, record sleeves featured a question mark in place of the artists name. The song and it’s follow-up “The Saint” were international club hits, but as official Thompson Twins releases they were commercially ignored. I think Queer has some of the best mid-tempo dance tracks of the early Nineties. “Come Inside” sounds rather like Madonna’s “Erotica” actually, but predates it by years. Summarily dismissed as a mere pop act, Bailey and Currie say fuck it, move to rural New Zealand and, rechristened as Babble, delve fully into trance and electronica.

I was so surprised to find that after all it doesn’t hurt to be alone.

I saw Thompson Twins live at Six Flags Over Texas, of all places. I remember being giddy the whole day leading up to it, and blasting Close To The Bone over my walkman as I mowed the lawn. We lived in a very new subdivision, with yet-to-be broken land across the street, and in my hurry to get ready for the concert - which was probably eight hours away but there was hair to be done, okay? - I opted to dump the lawn clippings there. My mother was furious. I remember her pointing her painted nails at me and saying I “better pick up and properly bag every swinging blade of that grass or there will be no Thompson Twins.” You bet I did.

The show was general admission. I got right up front. At one point I swear Tom Bailey looked right at me and, without even thinking about it, I blurted out “Take me away with you!” Anywhere, I guess. Away from being bullied in gym class. Away from the tremendous pressure of “living up to my potential.” Away from the fear of my mother’s disapproval. I am still to this day trying to escape these very things.

Year later, after I’d moved to NYC, my mother and sister put together a mix tape for me of music they assumed I’d enjoyed when I was younger. It was accompanied by a handwritten note waxing nostalgic for the days when I was “just a teenager in love with music.” That seemed pretty rich coming from a mother who once clawed my face to bleeding for my having deigned to utter the words “Did you see Sade on the cover of The Face?” The tape consisted pretty much of lead singles from whatever albums hadn’t been taken from me years before. So “Hold Me Now” was on there. “Hand In Glove” was not.

It’s a labour of love so please don’t ask me why.

It wasn’t long after my quasi-coming out that my taste in music turned darker, harder, cooler. As did Anna’s, I remember. Punk and goth - though we didn’t call it that back then - and “alternative” rock. These days I listen to everything, but I probably went twenty years without putting on a Thompson Twins song.

In that time, Alannah Currie and Tom Bailey divorced. She’s primarily a visual artist now. Joe Leeway moved to Los Angeles and became a hypnotherapist. Bailey is the only one still in music, composing, producing, and currently on tour. His show ends with a “Hold Me Now” singalong. It’s a great song, simple and solid. Yeah, it’s no “Go Your Own Way” maybe, but it was born of a real-life conflict between two artists in love, and I find that meaningful.

Speaking of breakups, I don’t imagine Morrissey and I will ever get back together. Despite the sense of relief and recognition I once found in his and The Smiths’ work, his voice just brings up too much of the worst time in my young life when so much was taken from me. And I’ve tried. Even replaced my gatefold vinyl edition of Hatful Of Hollow but I can’t listen to it. Clearly the confiscation of my collection did not prevent my being queer, or vegetarian. It only made me profoundly resentful.

But I can, and will, reclaim for myself the entire Thompson Twins oeuvre as a source of joy and solace - the songs and vids, the xylophone, the hair. Hell, I might even grow myself a rattail. If belting out “Doctor! Doctor!” at the top of my middle-aged lungs on the way to rehearsal in my Prius is juvenile, fine. A lot of us “gifted and talented” types, especially the queer ones, who got up early for practice or stayed after for rehearsal and worried all the time about being bullied or outed…we didn’t get to have proper childhoods. Hence, Disneygays. Maybe I should have called this one Reparenting.

…

Bailey, Currie, and Leeway recently came together to curate a definitive compilation called Industry And Seduction: A Thompson Twins Collection. There’s also the sprawling Box, comprised of the first five albums in their entirety plus a whopping seventy-one bonus tracks. This is all surely too much for any but the most ardent Twins fan to consume but don’t worry, I got you. Here’s my personal top twenty, available on Apple Music:

1. When I See You

2. Make Believe (Let’s Pretend)

3. Oumma Aularesso

4. Good Gosh

5. In The Name Of Love

6. Love On Your Side

7. If You Were Here

8. Watching

9. You Take Me Up

10. Sister Of Mercy

11. Lay Your Hands On Me (7” Version)

12. King For A Day

13. Shoot Out (Don’t Mess With Doctor Dream)

14. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire

15. Bombers In The Sky

16. Get That Love

17. Come Inside

18. Queer

19. The Saint

20. Take Me Away (as Babble)

21. Bonus: Judy Do (Live at the Del Mar Race Track)

So what are you reclaiming? What once fueled your creativity, strengthened your sobriety, gave you hope, or fired your imagination that you want to bring back into your life today? I’m finding that in order to look forward to anything these days, I have to look back on hard times and ask myself how I got through them. I’m so thankful for music and the musicians who make it. I really don’t know how I’d do without it.

-Slim

ps. No I did not make the deadline to which I committed in Recommit. Things have been hard.

pps. Yes there will be a Reclaim Part 2, eventually, in which I assert my gottdamm birthright, country music.