How we made I Think We're Alone Now: Tommy James and Tiffany on their shared hit

Tiffany Darwish, singer, 1987 version

When I was a kid I used to sing everywhere – the bathroom, the grocery store. When some musician friends of my parents had a party, my dad suggested I get up and sing. People went: “Wow. That voice. She sounds like a 30-year-old woman.” Before I knew it, I was singing on bills with people like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis.

When I was 15, someone told a producer, George Tobin, about this “girl with a great voice”. George helped me get a record deal and things started to roll pretty quickly. I Think We’re Alone Now had been a hit for Tommy James and the Shondells in the 60s. I didn’t know the song, and it didn’t sound so modern. When I came back the next day, they’d remade it as a dance track. I didn’t want to record it, but I took the song home and my girlfriends were dancing around the room. My producer said: “Trust me on this.”

I went back to the studio and did the vocals in maybe four takes. I don’t think I realised that the song was about the prohibition of teenage sex, but we got away with it. The lyrics are what teenagers think about: going behind a bush and kissing and whatever. People have since told me: “Oh me and my husband were in the car listening to it and …” And I think: “Way too much information!”

The song took off when I sang it live. Because I was too young for clubs, we did a tour of shopping malls and shot some of it for the video. At first, I could go and have a pizza afterwards, but soon there were so many people that I could barely even get into the mall. Having a No 1 hit at 15 was a wild ride. I met Michael Jackson. Girls copied my earrings and my crimped hair. I still have “Children behave” – the first words of I Think We’re Alone Now – on my T-shirts. I love the song now and never tire of singing it.

Tommy James, singer, 1967 version

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I Think We’re Alone Now was presented to me as a slow ballad by my producers, Richie Cordell and Bo Gentry. I was 19, but I heard the hook and thought it sounded like a hit. We did a quick demo, souping it up and making it much faster. When we played it to Morris Levy, the head of Roulette Records, he loved it, so we went back in the studio to record it properly. I recorded the vocal on Christmas Eve 1966, so we could get the song on the street for the new year.

Morris was right out of the movies. At first we had no idea that his Roulette label was a front for the Genovese crime family. He was a mob associate and these mafia guys would hang around Roulette like it was a social club. We soon learned to tiptoe around and not eavesdrop on too many conversations. But Morris could hear hits and if it hadn’t been for him nobody would have heard much more of Tommy James.

I Think We’re Alone Now was the first of what became known as our bubblegum hits. Richie and Bo would come to me with these really simple, almost nursery rhyme-type songs. I’d say, “I’m not singing that!” and half an hour later I couldn’t get the tune out of my head. I learned how to make records with I Think We’re Alone Now. We did the bass and drums first and then layered the rest – which we’d never done before – and made the choruses quieter so that the verses would explode out of a radio speaker. It became a signature sound for many other records.

Twenty years later, I watched in disbelief as Tiffany’s version of I Think We’re Alone Now and Billy Idol’s version of Mony Mony – another of our songs – flew up the charts together like they were holding hands. Neither of them knew about the other before they were released. Tiffany came up to me at a convention to apologise for covering us. I said: “Are you nuts? I should be thanking you.” She did a great job, and she’s a real sweet girl.