Thursday, August 18, 2016

Thompson Twins - Here's To Future Days - 1985

My favorite, and probably the best of the Thompson Twins albums, Here's To Future Days came out in 1985.  This was the last of the great New Romantic albums.  As we shifted into the late 80s, the sound began to change as we saw Rap, Hair Metal, Synth-Pop/Rock, Post Punk and proto-House began to dominate the music scene.  The Twins reached the peak of their popularity with this album, and then it was a slow slide downhill after.

I think my favorite video from this album was the Revolution video.  From what I can remember, it was a pseudo-live performance, and was shot from the floor up.  They were bouncing all over the stage windmilling their guitars and screaming out the song and they were bigger than life.  Yeah, it was a good video.  Trying to find any of the official videos from this album is near impossible.  I haven't seen the Revolution video for 25 or 30 years.  It would be great to see it again.

As with Into the Gap and Out of the Gap, This album had a ton of mixes.  Again, more than I could count.  I know I didn't get all of them, as there were some that seemed redundant and I didn't have enough to fill an entire additional disc.  As it is, there are two solid discs of great mixes and versions.  They also had a bunch of good single sleeves, as well.  I was lucky to find such a great scan of a magazine article that had the trio and logo in front of a yellow screen.  It's a perfect cover.

Now, I liked Close To the Bone, but that album signaled their inevitable slide into obscurity.  So sad.  By the time Big Trash and Queer came out, they were irrelevant and had to re-invent themselves into Babble.  When I hear the name Thompson Twins, though, this is the album that instantly comes to mind.

Enjoy the mixes.


12 comments:

  1. was my first love as a teen.i also loved side kicks and into gap as much.i was obsessed .....up until the sadness came in around close to bone era.but i loved queer and babble still miss them! thank you for this

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  2. https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Without-News-Version/dp/B00KA4J9I0

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    1. OH GOODNESS.... There it is! ..... I can't believe my eyes! THANK YOU!!!!!!!!

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  3. https://d3aou1nks1vv6g.cloudfront.net/VEVOA/B00KA4J9I0/V22/a394ff8f22734c68af1ec736ec4e9711/ShortForm-Generic-480p-16-9-1409173089793-rpcbe5.mp4?Expires=1472273503&Signature=Xiw9UlcjeNE5EWg0mAQTeHWRhrzrrSAL9HC~spDOrbxmltswlDWMfZjbFKDu3jLkXZ4ORmPM0cC-tAdl6jd2fvHjL6mraZqCFsR7ryG2zZY7O3t1JiONhN0oHqE0fWBMqoLLRtbE5TCraJALOx8X9NWQaEi3RCUNrwNnzmFtGuU_&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJ62XWKZ35EOVO4XA

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  4. https://itunes.apple.com/ca/music-video/revolution-without-news-version/id708399974#

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  5. I've forwarded your pages to some other Thompson Twins fans. They say your download contains a virus. So you may want to check it out and repost.

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  6. Thanks very much for this! :D
    When HTFD came out, the T.Twins were my life, and had been since SIDE KICKS had come out and ruled my world in 1983. Of course, it's release followed a long period of silence from the T.Twins camp, following Bailey's recoup for exhaustion. So to say I was champing at the bit for this album is a *serious* understatement.
    I was blown-away by the original Alex S mix of LAY YOUR HANDS ON ME, and was prepared for a new lush exotic sound on HTFD, but of course as we all know the reins were then put into the hands of Nile Rogers, who (post LET'S DANCE) was commercially a right move, but it really made the album more aggressively M.O.R. (well, a funk-tinged M.O.R.) in my opinion, and to this day I honestly wonder what HTFD might have sounded like if another producer would have had an opportunity to craft the album in a more artistic/lush manner.
    I still love it (really, everything they did up-to-and-including this album is gold for me; it ends thereafter), and slavishly collected every single 12-inch and 7-inch release I could ... and the posters... and the calendars... and the pins.... etc etc etc.
    Their Toronto stop for this tour included a New Year's Eve show with OMD as opening act - it was amazing, needless to say!

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    1. Impressive! So, does this compilation meet up to your expectations? Hope so...

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  7. oh there's so much I love about this album, but it does have its faults. Nile's version of LYHOM took a long while to grow on me after the sublime original & there's a couple of album tracks which smack of laziness, (re-using the same trumpet riff on 2 consecutive singles, lifting part of Kamikaze for Emperors Clothes) on the whole though, I think Nile did make the album better (compared to the original Roll Over, Fools/KFAD & the snippet of the original Future Days thats online), I daresay Doctor Dream wouldn't be half as good without his input (though even then the lyrics sounded preachy & cheesy).

    It's still a belter of an album & far more interesting than much of the pop of the time, sadly where next...pushed into making a rock n roll album by the record company that they clearly didn't want to record (nursery rhyme lyrics..ugh!), no wonder Close To The Bone scraped in at no 90 in the UK. Previous posters wonder what HTFD would have sounded like with another producer, but Bone is the one that really, really needed one.

    Thanks for posting - i already have everything here, but it's a great compilation, few folk probably know David Morales was working for the Twins back then..wondered what happened to him...?

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    1. "A belter of an album"
      What an excellent way of describing it. Sorry I didn't have anything new for you, though.

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