Their first album, Bridge Of Spies, went quadruple platinum and spawned a string of worldwide hits including ‘Heart and Soul’, which stayed on the US billboard chart for 6 months, and most notably ‘China In Your Hand’, which occupied the No1 slot in the UK for 5 weeks.

The original T’Pau line up split in1991, but Carol continued to tour and record and has even acted on the West End stage as well as popping up on numerous TV and radio programmes.

GaydarRadio’s Dickie and Dolly caught up with Carol to find out more about T’Pau, juggling her hectic family life with performing, Hit Me Baby One More Time, getting old and touring with other 80s stars.

How did you come up with the name T’Pau?
This is such an old story, even I can hardly remember! I was doing the ironing and watching the telly, and the old Star Trek was on – the one with Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock. One of the characters on the show was Mr. Spock’s grandmother and she was called T’Pau. I quite liked it, but I’ve obviously lived to regret the name because I’ve had to answer that question so many times!

How did you form the band?
I was at art school in Shrewsbury when I was 22 and I really liked singing. I went to a party and there were lots of musos there and archetypes – you know what it’s like at art school – and I got chatting to this guy who had a band and asked if I could audition. It was literally a garage band called The Lasers and we did okay on a local level.

Then I met Ron Rogers who was in another local band called The Cats and we poached him. Ronnie and I started to write for The Lasers, then we left The Lasers and became personally involved for thirteen years.

We invested in a home recording studio with the help of my father and a few quid from MDA Publishing, and we just kept writing. We finally sent the tapes off and they ended up in the hands of the management arm of Harvey Goldsmith, the big promoter. And that was it – we had a manager!

It was still another two years, though, of honing our act and getting some musicians in who we already knew and a couple that we knew from London via our new manager, and by then we finally had a band and started doing showcases. Virgin – or Siren, their little satellite label – signed us in 1986.

’Heart and Soul’ then came about – I understand that the song was featured on the Pepe Jeans advert?
That’s right, yes. Unfortunately it was in the days before you got an enormous fee for that kind of thing; it was just considered to be an honour to benefit from the promotion, so they didn’t give you any money. Of course, that would be completely different now. But yes, ‘Heart and Soul’ got picked up by the Pepe Jeans ad, which saved our ass.

‘Heart and Soul’ had bombed in this country – it had gone in the charts at number 98 and had gone straight out. Then Pepe Jeans put it in their cinema ads and America just fell in love with it.

"I still like the late 80s look of a good leather jacket, some Levis 501s and some cowboy boots...The shoulder pads and the Vivienne Westwood puff ball skirt were huge errors."

What was it like for you when ‘Heart and Soul’ became really big in the US? That must have been phenomenal – did you do a lot of touring over there?
Yes, and we also toured Canada quite a lot. When it went big in North America, it was the biggest dream come true for me. I loved America back then in the eighties; everything great was coming out of America – it was bigger, it was better, it was faster, it was slicker. To have a hit in America meant that you had hits all over the world because everybody looked to America and paid attention.

You also did ‘China in Your Hand’. Did you write that song?
I co-wrote all of the T’Pau hits with Ron Rogers, my then-partner – with whom I’m now writing again after many years.

You’ve had two kids, haven’t you? How old are they?
Scarlet is nine and Dylan is five.

Do you find it hard juggling being a mum and being in the industry?
I find it really difficult to apply myself in the way I used to. Gigs aren’t such a problem – I do an awful lot of eighties multi-bill concerts and they’re great because I can often take the children with me. But in terms of being creative, I personally find it very difficult to schedule in song writing time because my husband works hard, too, and then the kids have to get left with someone. Also, I’m probably just lazy as well!

Do the kids they go to school with know who you are? Do they know you’re Carol Decker?
They do because I had my children late – I was 40 when I had Scarlet and 45 when I had Dylan. Most of the mums with children who are the same age are 30 something, so when I first appeared in the playground when we moved out here to Henley two years ago, their jaws fell because I’d been a poster on their wall.

Anybody under twenty could be excused for not remembering me, but the mums at the school all tell their kids about me and whenever I do a bit of telly they tell each other. They also talk to me about it and I like to talk about it as well; I’m not protective of it, nor do I hope I brag about it. We’ll just chat in the playground about what we’re up to and I’ll just tell them I’m doing Ready, Steady, Cook the following week and that they’d better tune in! Then we all have a good giggle about the TV shows I have to do these days.

Speaking of TV shows – let’s talk about Hit Me Baby One More Time. What was it like to work on? Was everyone really competitive?
There was a mix of people. Shakin’ Stevens is quite a strange fruit, anyway – I’ve known him for a while. Mica Paris took her work very, very seriously because she was really competitive and not very happy when she went out. Nick Heyward and I just sat in my dressing room drinking wine and trying not to giggle at everyone!

How did they approach you for that show?
I work with various agents and they hunt you down. These days, especially with the internet, you can Google anyone and their MySpace or website will come up. I get tracked directly - twelve months later I did Just the Two of Us, the sing-off program. I didn’t particularly enjoy the competitive side of that, but I still enjoyed doing the show because I got to sing duets with Beverly Knight and Natasha Hamilton from Atomic Kitten.

I got a lot out of the show because when you’re visible again, the phone rings again. You have to have a really good reason to say no to these things because something will come out of it, even if the thing that you’re doing is in itself not that highbrow.

I understand that lately you’ve been doing an eighties tour around the United Kingdom?
Yes, I’ve been doing those for six years now and they’re great fun. We use one big fantastic band and then we front people come and go, so everybody does anything from 20 minutes through to maybe 35 to 40 minutes if they’re higher up the bill. They’re such fun for both the artists and the punters because it’s a trip down memory lane and we all think we’re twenty again.

Some people don’t like it; some people think you’re supposed to hang up your spurs when you hit 40. You know how they say that 50 is the new 40 and all that? Well, I believe that. We are the first generation who doesn’t change overnight like Cinderella’s coach into a pumpkin when we hit 35 or something. We still want to go out and have a social life, whereas our parents before us probably would have been quite middle-aged.

"‘Heart and Soul’ had bombed in this country – it had gone in the charts at number 98 and had gone straight out. Then Pepe Jeans put it in their cinema ads and America just fell in love with it."

One of the wonderful things about the 80s – the time and the music – was that it was all about the look. I don’t think any other generation ever had a look like the 80s – the make-up, the hair, the PVC. Do you regret some of the looks that you adopted? Or do you have any favourites?
I have the joy of having those pictures circulating forever! I still like the late 80s look of a good leather jacket, some Levis 501s and some cowboy boots. That’s still quite a classic look – a good pair of faded jeans and cowboy boots. I still sometimes wear that in my downtime. The shoulder pads and the Vivienne Westwood puff ball skirt were huge errors.

Who are you on tour with, then?
I actually don’t always know who’s on the bill. If you chase me down through my MySpace, you’ll see where the venues are and the venues usually have a website which advertises who will be appearing. We have a rolling cast of players and it can be anyone from me, Paul Young, Kim Wilde, Heaven 17, Nick Heyward or China Crisis. It’ll be some combination of all of us on the shows, but I’m never quite sure until I get there who’s agreed to do it. It makes it fun because you don’t know who you’re going to see on the day.

What about making music now? I understand you did an album called Red which was available for download?
Red is ten years old already, but I recently put out a download single called ‘Just Dream’, which is on iTunes. I put it out under Carol Decker - not T’Pau - and it didn’t set the charts on fire, but it’s up there and it’s available for you to buy if anybody is buying anything these days! It’s a great track and it is on the MP3 player on my MySpace page.

Ronnie and I are also writing new songs to put out, but we have no idea what will happen with them. You just have to put them out there and tell the community and the people who are still interested in you that they’re there. Sometimes you wonder what the logic is in it anymore, but if you’re creative and you want to write music, you have to do it, you just have to. So there will be stuff out there floating about.

Find out more and listen to Carol's latest tracks at www.tpau.co.uk and www.myspace.com/tpaucaroldecker.


Want more? Then get Greatest Hits Live and More online and save some money to put towards 80s Heroes, Sex Talk, Red and Bridge of Spies.