T’Pau’s Carol Decker endures in the imagination of all self-respecting forty-somethings. Ian Hamilton talks to the iconic lead singer about her new album

TO those of us who were teenagers in the 1980s, Carol Decker – the flame-haired lead-singer with the pop-rock band, T’Pau – seems a distant figure, a character from our younger – perhaps happier – days. So what has she been doing recently?

The contemporary – and still good friend – of other 1980s pop legends like Rick Astley, Nik Heyward and Nick Kershaw went back on the road in 2013, playing tried and tested hits such as Heart and Soul, Secret Garden and ‘China in Your Hand, reforming her creative partnership with ex-boyfriend and song-writing soulmate Ron Rogers, to celebrate 25 years since the launch of their first album Bridge of Spies. The experience re-kindled her love of performing – and inspired her to start writing songs again.

Decker begins touring with her latest album, Pleasure and Pain, on January 22 in Camberley, playing Sunderland’s Pullman Hotel on February 12 and Stockton’s Arc on February 13. The album – her first since Red 15 years ago – will first be sold exclusively at the gigs where she will also host a post-show meet and greet.

She describes the gesture as “a present to the devoted. They get their hands on (the album) first. Then I’ll go and get a licensing deal for it and see if I can push it around the world and set it up on iTunes.” Promoting albums and building a young fan-base without the backing of a big record label – and without weekly access to a television audience through the BBC’s now abandoned Top of the Pops – is a real challenge, despite having a PR agent on the pay-roll.

Her 21-date UK tour will include a mix of songs from the new album along with familiar favourites, but she admits that she is most looking forward to trying out her new material.

“I’ve been back in the studio for the first time in 15 years (Red, 1998). But I haven’t had an album out with Ron Rogers, my ex-partner in crime, for 25 years… I’m hoping people will really dig it,” she says, describing her second bite at a song-writing partnership with Rogers as “great and very comfortable”.

Decker is refreshingly honest about what interrupted her song-writing – it was all down to predictable mid-life pressures, something her fans – most of whom have followed her from the 1980s – will be able to relate to. She has two children, Scarlett, 16, and Dylan, who is 12, and her attentions have been firmly focused on them and her husband, Richard Coates, whom she married in 2006.

“I think when you’ve got young kids you tend to be, like ‘heads down’. It’s easy to go out and sing China in Your Hand because they’re all done and dusted, created and made and all I have to do is sing them. When the kids were young that’s all I felt capable of. But then I got creative again, which is great.”

Having had early-career multi-platinum-selling success with Bridge of Spies, then being dropped by her record company and re-launching a new T-Pau line-up in 1997 under her own label, Gnatfish, Decker is one of the survivors of the music industry – but she doesn’t resent how hard she’s had to work for it.

“You can think of it as living in your own shadow – or you can be grateful you ever had a hit record at all in such a dreadful, fickle industry,” she says. “We sold a lot of records and I got through feeling a bit sorry for myself when I just wasn’t that successful anymore – to feeling incredibly grateful that I had any success at all.”

So does she resent the apparently easy success that present-day artists enjoy through shows like X-Factor and Britain's Got Talent?

“It doesn’t bother me,” she says. “However you get your foot through the door – within reason – you’ve got to prove that you’re worth the opportunity. I think a lot of people on X-Factor fade away – some become stars. A lot despise it, but I’m not interested in any of those artists. I find them all bland and manufactured – it’s not particularly creative what they do – but I don’t blame the kids for trying.”

What I’m left with is the impression of an experienced artist, one who’s ridden the “roller coaster” as she calls it and has come out the other side with her spirit and humour left intact.

  • Tickets available from ents24.com/uk/tour-dates/TPau or from Arc, Stockton, tel: 01642-525199 or Sunderland Pullman Hotel, tel: 0191-5292020. Prices around £20