The Thompson Twins were among the biggest British pop acts of the 1980s, enjoying success in both the UK and the US and appearing at Live Aid in Philadelphia, with Nile Rodgers on guitar and Madonna on backing vocals.<\/p>\n
Recalling the benefit concert in 1985, he said: “We were there making an album in New York with Nile Rodgers, and they said ‘will you do it?’.<\/p>\n
“We didn’t have a band so we grabbed David Letterman’s house band to be our backing band and had a few guest appearances from people like Madonna and Steve Stevens from Billy Idol’s band.<\/p>\n
“It became this very hurriedly put together superstar group and with only one short rehearsal. We just pulled it off.”<\/p>\n
Asked whether Madonna had effectively become the Thompson Twins’ backing singer for the day, Bailey laughed: “Well we sang on her set and she sang on ours, so it was a kind of trade-off.”<\/p>\n
The celebrations afterwards were less rock-and-roll than might have been expected.<\/p>\n
“I think it ended up with a game of Scrabble in a hotel room,” he said. “Otherwise it could have gone belly up.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Thompson Twins were among the biggest British pop acts of the 1980s, enjoying success in both the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":710178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-710177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=710177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/710178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}