Dishonesty and Lies: Lies

Thompson Twins: Lies

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The Thompson Twins song Lies takes off from the worst lie you can tell a person, if it is a lie: “I love you”. The song says the rest.

I caught up with the Thompson Twins in the summer of 1983. They were playing at my local new wave/ punk dive, City Gardens in Trenton, NJ. I had never heard of them, but I had seen enough good shows at City Gardens to take the chance. The band took the stage, and I almost left. At this point, the Thompson Twins were a trio, with Tom Bailey, Joe Leeway, and Alannah Currie and her amazing hair. There they were, with no instruments except synthesizers of various sorts. Now, I didn’t like the synth-pop bands as a rule, and I still don’t. Their music sounded emotionally chilly, and their sound was robotic. But, as I soon found out, this was not the case with the Thompson Twins. I still don’t know how they did it, but the gave one of the most amazingly energetic shows I have ever seen. Sadly, by the next year, things changed. The band’s lineup was the same, but now they were making bland pop songs like Doctor, Doctor. But that amazing energy was glorious while it lasted. They were able to capture it on record, and it still sounds as good to me now as it did then.

And I am happy to say that there never was either a threat to Stonehenge or a British version of the Mouseketeers that I know of. This was a reference to our Mouseketeers theme that appeared on April Fools Day in 2009. Incidentally, in the late 70’s, the Walt Disney Company had the idea to buy Stonehenge and build a British Disneyland around it. They wanted to prepare the country for Disneyfication, so they created a British version of The Mickey Mouse Club for the BBC. It didn’t take, so Stonehenge was saved. But I mention it because Alannah Currie was an original British Mouseketeer.