Tom Bailey talks albums. Tony Bacon Here's him out. Andrew Catlin sees him go.

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that choosing Nile Rodgers to produce your album is not the most original move of the 1980s. Whatever, Tom Bailey used Rodgers as a session guitarist for the first two weeks that the American wunderkind worked on the new Thompson Twins album, "Here's To Future Days".

The record has taken a long time to finish. Primary sessions began in Paris in late 1984, with Tom producing, but ceased when production, writing, playing and promoting got too much for Tom, who collapsed thanks to "complete exhaustion". Tapes were rolling again in June this year in New York, with Rodgers on-board as guitarist and co-producer.

"It was very difficult for him to make any real impression," says Tom of Rodgers, "because most of it was already done. I think that, quite rightly, he was looking for ways of adding to what we'd already got there, rather than giving direction."

And getting the great Chic six-string at work in those first two weeks, had a double advantage. "It meant that he could get to know the songs, and also it meant that I could get some great guitar playing on the record," laughs Tom.

But what of all the pre-New York work that went on, given that Tom describes Rodgers' entry into the proceedings as "pretty much near the end of the project"?

It was the first album that the Twins have recorded digitally, but more significantly from a compositional point of view it was the first time that Bailey had worked out all the pre-arrangements on his Fairlight's Page R facility.

This makes it easy to try out alternative parts and the order of song elements — "none of this counting off bars to get the overdub in position," says Tom — and gives an immediacy when you get to the studio as straight away you have a song with some kind of pre-existing shape to work on. It saves grey hairs, says the elaborately coiffed Bailey, and adds to your confidence.

"Some of the eight or sometimes 16 tracks of prepared Fairlight stuff we'd take into the studio would be sequence-type things, some would actually be keyboard parts, some special effects, nearly always some kind of guide bass even if I didn't use it eventually, and also a guide top-line, just so that you could immediately find your way around the song."

The original drum machine used in the Fairlight stages was the group's trusty if heavily modified Movement, although in later sessions some sounds were replaced with SDS7 or Linn voices. "All the Movement's sounds are changed," says Tom, "they're all our own now, some of the resolutions have been changed, it's been MIDI d, and has a sequencer in it too. The Movement company itself is basically all over now — they only made about 60 machines, I think — but we've been working closely with the designer on these modifications."

Locking all the gadgetry together was the SRC machine (SMPTE Reading Clock), which lays SMPTE time code on tape, then reads it back to drive in sync your brace of Fairlights, Movements, and whatever else you have up and running at the time.

Tom's only criticism of the SRC was its lack of fine calibration in its whole-number beats-per-minute settings. "There were occasions when I felt there should have been a middle ground between, say, 120 and 121 beats per minute."

So, having locked themselves in a New York studio for a few months, rolling the Fairlight prepared tracks, and fiddling about with all manner of percussion, voices, synths, guitars (shock), saxophones (horror), and even a makeshift choir over the top, what did they end up with? Via a very dodgy phone line between One Two and the Thompson's hide-out in Ireland, here's Tom to tell you more. Over to you, me old Twin.

DON'T MESS WITH DR DREAM

"People ask me how I made the 'funky gorilla noises' on this, and in fact it's me just making a revolting noise in the back of my throat, very closely miked. And as with quite a few things on the record, we weren't so much sampling things in order to create a track, but if we found there was a good bit on a take we'd fly it around all over the place. So the gorilla thing I would only do once, pick the best one and then zap it into position. I've tended to do that before with tape, but not from a sample.

"I've just discovered Casio synthesisers, and I used a CZ101 for the bass on this. Spurred on by that I got the CZ5000, but only since the album. I'll be using two of those on tour, MIDI'd to the DX7-in-a-rack, the TX7. I'll also have a DX7 with me, two Oberheim OBXa's, and the Fairlight. But I got a really wicked bass sound from the little Casio for this."

LAY YOUR HANDS ON ME

"The version on the single was done in Paris, but we did a new version for the album in New York. On the chorus vocals we added a bunch of people singing, people we know in New York, a sort of ad-hoc group. Not really a choir — it's very trendy to get some church choir or something to sing on your records, so we didn't want that.

"There's also some extra guitar from me and Nile, and I copied the piano part that I'd played on the first version because it was so out of tune in Paris — in New York I used a medium Yamaha grand, which worked out fine. And, of course, there's the remix."

FUTURE DAYS

"The 'pipes' sound at the beginning is sampled from blowing over a Coca-Cola bottle. When you get into the first frenzy of sampling the tendency is to grab any thing in the room that looks like it might make a sound to see if you can play a tune with it.

"When I first learned how to work the Fairlight, we were in a tiny village to the south of Paris, at an old farming cottage. So there were lots of old things like horseshoes, farming equipment, hunting horns, whatever came to hand. We sampled everything — and they're still all on file. Some of them got used.

"There are a lot of vocals on this track, and what we'd do in that situation would be to copy the song to two tracks of another multitrack, and then use the other 22 tracks to load up vocals, make a mix of that, and then fly it back in again. By the time we were doing this in New York we were using a Synclavier to fly vocals around with because sampling the new multitrack to it, its bandwidth is better than the Fairlight."

YOU KILLED THE CLOWN

"Steve Elsin played the saxophone on this. I was looking for an instrument that would act as sort of bookends for this song, at the beginning and the end. I kept moaning and groaning to everyone that we should get a saxophone in there. Eventually I hired a saxophone one day — it was in such bad condition, and I haven't played one for so long, that it just wasn't happening. Out of desperation I said to Nile, 'Get one of your sax guys in.' Steve came in, and it was done in two straight takes — one at the beginning, one at the end! He did the job in about five minutes.

"I think Nile's guitar playing is good on this track: and because the form comes almost directly from Sixties r'n'b it almost demanded to have a guitar in there. It sounds odd to say it but that's not necessarily true in most of our songs, we went for a long time without any guitars at all."

REVOLUTION

"It's me and Steve Stephens, Bily Idol's guitarist, on guitars. We weren't planning to take this seriously. Accidentally, we'd been reading a book about John Lennon which led to various conversations, and while we were doing our pre-production stuff I just sort of wondered what it would be like to take a very technical look, using the Fairlight and everything, at an old rebel-rousing rock tune. We just did it as a joke. We never intended it to be on the album, and used it as light relief. Whenever we got bored or couldn't think what to do next — which wasn't that often, maybe once a week — we'd put the 'Revolution' tape on and work a bit more on that.

"When we came to do Live Aid we thought rather than do one of our songs we'd do something that everybody in the world is going to know. As we'd been working on 'Revolution' we decided to do that, and when it went down so well we actually got a lot of pressure, from record company people, management, saying you've got to put it on the album, it shouldn't be shelved.

"The clattering sounds in the chorus every time you get 'don't you know it's gonna be all right', that's Alannah's pile of junk — she's made a drum kit entirely from sheets of steel. It's really, er, revolutionary, but it's difficult to find a welder who'll make something roadworthy. Things keep dropping to pieces."

KING FOR A DAY

"Yes, the Fame' Bowie quote was intentional! I'd sung the song and then I was going through looking for possible harmonies, high lines, and stuff, and it just happened while the tape was rolling. We all thought it was a bit of a giggle so we left it in."

LOVE IS THE LAW

"This started out as a test. There was what I thought was a problem on the Fairlight, and we spent some time trying to sort it out. It turned out to be one of those silly things where you just haven't plugged in something obvious. But just to test everything was working, I ran Page R and just added things on as the machine was rolling, layering things track by track. That actually gave us the basis for the song.

"The Fairlight brass section at the end is hopelessly out of time if you listen to it carefully, but it just felt right. It comes from a sort of composite brass section sound I've made up, a combination of Fairlight library sounds and a little bit of Oberheim as well, and I'm just playing in octaves."

EMPEROR'S CLOTHES (PART 1)

"It's a dreamy, almost psychedelic type song — my theory is that the weirder it sounds, the better, you know? The song came out of a strange relationship; if you play a C Major chord, and the octave harmonics on a guitar, then you get the strange chord that the song is written around."

TOKYO

"This was the only track we managed to mix in one day: probably because it was the first one we did. I've discovered something: the more you know about making records, the more difficult it becomes. When you're blessed with naivety and ignorance then you just do what you think is right. But when your experience is enlarged, then at any given point in the process there are 50 options to take. Sometimes it's too tempting."

BREAKAWAY

"Yes, the riff from 'Sister Of Mercy'. Let's say it's self-referential. It seemed to me that this song was the brother of 'Sister Of Mercy', I guess emotionally. And it occupies a similar position to that track on the album.

"There's a little of Steve Stephens again on this track... he's the only, for want of a better expression, 'heavy' guitarist that I can get on with at all. It seems so rare to find someone who's coming from that hard, heavy, almost metal school of playing and who's in any way sensitive to modern music. Many of them, I think their brain tends to reflect the way they play after a while. Steve's a nice guy: he listens, he sits, he considers, he's very sensitive. Which is what it's about in the end."