You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe.

Any song from the 1980s that you hear on Song Exploder was most likely one that I first heard through my sister Priya.

She is the older sibling and her favorite songs

from her childhood were the soundtrack to my earliest memories. That's definitely the case with

Hold Me Now by Thompson Twins. Thompson Twins originally formed in 1977 in Sheffield in the

UK. Hold Me Now, their iconic hit, came out as a single in November

1983 and eventually on their 1984 album Into the Gap. That album went to number one in the UK

and went platinum in the US. And the song spent 21 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

So for this episode, I talked to the founding member of Thompson Twins, Tom Bailey,

and he told me how he and his bandmates Alana Curry and Joe Leeway made Hold Me Now.

Oh, hold me now.

Oh, my heart.

Stay with me Let love in the storm

Let love in the start

Hi, hello, I'm Tom Bailey from the Thompson Twins

Thompson's.

Thompson's gone through several histories with different lineups.

And by the time we got to writing Hold Me Now, my co-writers were Alanna, Curry and Joe Leeway.

This was our fourth album we're talking about.

And on the previous one, on the third album, which was very kind of purest synthesizer

and drum machine based, we had dropped from a seven piece, a rather shambolic experimental

...