JIM TOOMEY “WE WERE TOURISTS”

 

It must have been early 1979 when, during our frequent visits to the UK, my wife and I decided to spend a night at Dingwalls, one of our favourite dives in London. The band that night was a five-piece going by the (silly) name of The Tourists, a band we hadn’t heard of so far. The audience was different from the usual Punk crowds in other venues, more refined and also more stylish. The band played a tight set of powerful Pop tunes, cool enough to incite our interest. I remember that a young woman in the audience had her birthday and that the girl singer announced “a happy birthday to you”. The band was so good, that I could not but follow them for some time. Some months later the band played Cologne’s Basement (almost home turf then), and naturally we were there. The Tourists by then had released at least one 7” - and I was heavily involved in Gorilla Beat magazine, so I naturally ventured to have a chat with Peter “Peet” Coombes, the band’s rhythm guitarist, vocalist and sole songwriter. I didn’t conduct a proper interview, like I would do later on, it was just small talk, and of course I asked him what the band’s next single would be. He answered “He Who Laughs Last Laughs Longest”. I made a mental note of it and in the next issue of Gorilla Beat one could read that the forthcoming single by The Tourists would be “He Who Loves Last Loves Longest”. A blooper par excellence. Now Jim Toomey, The Tourists’ drummer, has written up the band’s history in a book that doesn’t take longer than a few hours to read: “We Were Tourists” (113 pages, Austin Macauley Publishers, London 2018, ISBN 978-178693-553-3 [hardback]). It is a far cry from the band biographies you usually get, no interviews, no research, just plain memories (obviously a bit blurred by the various intoxicants that were around the band – even Dave Stewart, the band’s lead guitarist, remarks that in the foreword). Jim Toomey is not a man of letters, thus his book reads like an essay of a highschool student. He touches a few points in The Tourists’ career, but the book doesn’t really rock. He has a few anecdotes to tell, but they are rather shallow. The Tourists had a hit single and their 2^nd album sold extremely well, thus money came rolling in, but their management convinced them to park the revenues in the hands of some lawyers on Jersey, where it – naturally - disappeared without trace. When the band split up, their management asked for a settlement of a £ 34.000 debt. Music business is crooky business, we learn again. The Tourists were Peet Coombes’ band. He wrote all their material, some of it wonderful, some of it enigmatic. Their first two albums were excellent and a household hit here, then they switched to RCA to score even bigger and failed. With Dave Stewart, lead guitar, and Annie Lennox, vocals and keyboards, the band had an outstanding couple on board, and naturally everybody from outside wonders, why they hadn’t been allowed more creative input, after all the duo became The Eurythmics and first-class songwriters (as well as performers).

You can order the book from https://www.austinmacauley.com/book/we-were-tourists