Hold Me Now

The biggest American hit for The Thompson Twins, "Hold Me Now" was written by band members Tom Bailey and Alannah Currie, with additional contributions from the third member, Joe Leeway (he does the falsetto backing vocals). Bailey and Currie were a couple - they got married in 1991 and had two children together. They wrote the song after a heated argument that they had resolved. "We actually decided, well, this is an interesting emotional subject," Bailey said in a 2014 Songfacts interview. "What it feels like to get back together again after separation and the kind of ideas that come up and the way that emotion and physicality somehow are brought together." The song has such permanence in part because it was triggered by a real relationship. Over the course of its 4:44 running time, the song takes us through Bailey's desperate pleas, as he's not even sure what caused the damage or what to apologize for. He is, however, eager to work through their problems and move on. In the chorus, Bailey asks Currie to hold him, stay with him and love him again.

Thompson Twins had a very modern sound with many of their songs relying on electronic instruments, but this one was more organic than their previous efforts, with a guitar, marimbas and piano out front in the mix. "It's such an emotional song, we wanted to have that warmth you often can't get from synthesizers," Alannah Currie explained. They wrote the song using a drum machine, but played it using real percussion instruments.

Tom Bailey studied classical music, which informed the writing of this track. He told us why the song works so well from a musical perspective: "The bass line and the chord sequence are the same in the verse as they are in the chorus. There's no change. The only change is in the amount of instrumentation that goes on top of that. So you could play the same four chord trick around the verse and the chorus continuously. The only time it diverts from that is in the middle eight immediately after the second chorus. So it's very repetitive. And of course although it's a medium tempo emotional song, because of its repetition and it's groovy-ness, it has one foot in the dance department, as well."