Tom Bailey’s stepping back into the 80s

Some ’80s pop stars say they are going to put the past behind them, move on and … yeah, right. We’ll see them next weekend at our friendly neighborhood casino.

But Tom Bailey did it. And how successfully?

When he finally caved and agreed to sing the songs of the Thompson Twins again on the Retro Futura Tour, he had to go out and buy a greatest-hits CD to learn the songs.

“I didn’t have the Thompson Twins CDs,” confesses the voice behind effervescent hits such as “Hold Me Now” and “Doctor! Doctor!” “I have some vinyl lying around but no turntable to play it,” he adds with a laugh.

“I completely lost touch with it. … It had been a long, long time since I had listened to any of that stuff.”

The Thompson Twins were a defining new wave dance-pop act of the ’80s, synonymous with the earliest audience-riveting years of MTV. The trio featuring Bailey, his eventual (and now ex-) wife Alannah Currie and Joe Leeway hit a high-water mark performing alongside Madonna at the Live Aid benefit in 1985.

But the momentum evaporated soon after, as the group morphed through lineup and stylistic changes. After the last album in 1991, Bailey was happy to move on to film scoring, music producing and multimedia work.

“I think I’m a little odd in that respect,” the 60-year-old Bailey says, “to be so completely disconnected from the past. I think it was part of my survival mechanism to deny it, and say ‘I don’t care about this stuff anymore,’ and casually dismiss it.”

“There’ve always been offers (to reunite) and you kind of get used to saying no and also to denying the past,” he adds. But Howard Jones approached him at the right time with the idea to at least sing the hits again, even if he is doing it solo billed without the participation of Currie and Leeway.

Bailey had just written a song “in the style of the Thompson Twins” with Mexican singer Aleks Sintek and ended up singing on the recording. “So without really planning to do it, I crossed this line back into writing and performing pop music.”

The Retro Futura show that stops at Mandalay Bay’s outdoor beach stage on Friday has Bailey and Jones headlining, with shorter sets from Ultravox’s Midge Ure, China Crisis and Katrina Leskanich from Katrina and the Waves.

A week into the tour, Bailey is glad he caved, and “already I’m not looking forward to days off.”

“I used to think, ‘Who on earth would want to do the things they were doing 30 years ago?’ But I think from time to time, it’s certainly worth engaging with it to see where you’ve come from and where you’re going to. And so I’ve embraced it.”

However, he adds “I’m not going to do it forever,” and says an official reunion with Currie and Leeway is out of the question. Still, fans seem happy “taking what they can get from me,” he says with a laugh.

“It’s funny, the Thompson Twins kind of snuck into America via MTV I suppose, with fairly unemotional but fun or twisted dance pieces,” he says. But by its peak, the trio had “very quickly matured, in a way, into a more emotionally heavyweight songwriting team.”

The revival tour follows suit. “We start with the party,” he says, but by the end of the set, he’s seeing “incredible climaxes to the shows. Lots of tears — of happiness hopefully — and just a release at finally having got back to it after all these years.”

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.