Thomas Leer – THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN

AN IMAGINARY COMPILATION ALBUM : #396 : THOMAS LEER

A guest posting by Khayem (Dubhead Blog)

As Big As Life, As Small As Nothing: A Thomas Leer ICA

It’s 25th February 2023, and JC has posted #344 in the excellent (and still ongoing) Saturday’s Scottish Song series, featuring Thomas Leer.

The post prompted some enthusiastic responses, including one from me:

“I’ve got an ICA nearly finished and ready to send, but I’m now thinking of having a try with Thomas Leer next. I may be some time…!”

I wasn’t kidding! The ‘nearly finished’ ICA (ABC, #338, fact fans) saw the light of day in April 2023. It’s taken considerably longer for Thomas Leer’s turn to come, but here it is at last!

Some of the delay has been due to life stuff, but I also have to attribute much of it to the ‘rabbit hole’ factor that frequently affects the ideas that pop into my head.

When I posted the comment, I had enough material for an ICA, but then I discovered that Thomas had released an album in 2022 and I had to check it out. Thomas Leer’s Future Historic site on Bandcamp then revealed a load of unreleased albums and EPs that had been recorded, and I was literally lost in music. In fact, I was taking so long, that Thomas even recorded and released a brand new song in 2024! How on earth was I going to absorb all this and condense it into an ICA that would do him justice!

Yep, time for those self-imposed rules to help me out.

My first act of sacrilege was to rule out using 1979’s seminal experimental album The Bridge by Thomas and Robert Rental. Given that I had nearly five decades to cover, I didn’t want the ICA too heavily weighted towards his earliest recordings and already had a couple of songs from 1978 that I couldn’t exclude.

I also focused exclusively on songs featuring Thomas’ voice. He’s recorded a ton of instrumental music over the years, but that’s for a different time, a different compilation.

I guess that other connecting thread is that to these ears at least, the ICA collates some of Thomas Leer’s more accessible – I hesitate to say ‘pop’ moments – songs, even if they don’t necessarily confirm to the rigid rules about structure, running time, or being commercially appealing.

In his Saturday’s Scottish Song post in 2023, JC described the featured song (Don’t) as “a bit of a hidden gem” which I think sums up Thomas Leer pretty well.

I hope this ICA serves as a helpful summary and/or introduction and inspires you to dive deeper into his music.

Side One

Private Plane (single, 1978)

Leer’s self-financed debut (just 650 copies) and NME Single of the Week. The ‘DIY @ home’ feel is the real deal, but the Can-inspired motorik bass and plaintive vocals are compelling from start to finish. Like Cabaret Voltaire, if they were fronted by Matt Johnson.

Don’t (4 Movements EP, 1981)

Opener of the 4 Movements EP or, in other words, 4 off-kilter A-sides. I love the dynamics of this song, the stuttering synth bass, the tinkling chords, and repetitive riffs, at odds with and complementing one another simultaneously. The narrative sidesteps a chorus, building instead around the one word title to create structure.

Transition (The Scale Of Ten, 1984)

A more accessible, commercial sound on Leer’s debut album, and on a major label (Arista) too. Still left of centre but sailing close to the kind of music that was enjoying chart success from New Order to China Crisis, even Men Without Hats. This wasn’t a single, yet ticked all the right boxes to have been a contender.

Tonight (A Rose, 2009)

As far as official music releases are concerned, Thomas Leer was dormant throughout the 1990s. Collaborative ventures outside of his partnerships with Robert Rental and Claudia Brücken have also been few and far between. And yet… Unexpectedly, a co-write and a vocal on the penultimate song of Stefano Panunzi’s 2009 album A Rose and it was like Thomas had never been away. One of his most conventional – and beautiful – songs.

Death Of A Dream (single, 2024)

Thomas Leer’s Bandcamp site, Future Historic, has been a repository and treasure trove of recordings, rarities and works in progress never completed, as the name might suggest. Spanning 1979 to the present, including the aforementioned ‘lost’ 1990s, where Leer was in fact far from unproductive. Death Of A Dream is his most recent offering, an 8-minute epic from January 2024. This may be an older, ‘broken’ Thomas Leer, but the fire still burns brightly.

Side Two

Absolutely Immune (single, 1987)

From Death Of A Dream to Rebirth Of The Cool, at least according to ZTT in the late 1980s. Act – Thomas partnered with Claudia Brücken, freshly divorced from Propaganda – should have been huge and weren’t. From a vocal perspective, Act was mainly a showcase for Claudia, but on songs like Absolutely Immune and Snobbery & Decay, it’s clear that Thomas brought a quality beyond his songwriting and musicianship. A personal favourite from this short-lived duo, though I’m still not sure about Thomas singing, “I’m going to spray your empty face with flecks of ecstasy”!

The Devil In Me (Fairlight EP ’83, 2015)

From a 7-track EP of demos recorded during a 7-day Fairlight session in 1983, providing a missing link between Leer’s releases on Cherry Red and Arista and the move to a poppier, more chart-hungry sound. Considering some of the pop pap that was troubling the upper reaches of the UK singles chart at the time, it’s a shame that this song remained incomplete and unreleased for over thirty years.

Looks That Kill (Contradictions, 1982)

…Not that the previous year’s Contradictions EP/mini-album missed its own fair share of pop hooks. An insistent synth guitar strum and bubbling preset percussion underpin a persuasive and occasionally meandering vocal from Leer.

Touch My Screen (From Sci-Fi To Barfly, 2022)

Recorded in 2004, released in 2022, the brilliantly titled album From Sci-Fi To Barfly is self-described as “possibly (Thomas Leer’s) most disparate collection”. Maybe so, though Touch My Screen shows that Thomas’ continual crafting and honing of music at home still produced aurally stimulating and lyrically sharp songs.

Chasing The Dragon (No. 1 B-side, 1985)

Relegated to the B-side of the optimistically titled single No. 1 (it didn’t chart), possibly due to it being Leer’s “drug song”. An obvious (a little too obvious) Oriental music motif aside, Chasing The Dragon is a pretty good song and would undoubtedly have made the cut, if it had been recorded ten years earlier… or later.

WeatherBelle (Radio Cinéola Trilogy: Volume 4: The End Of The Day, 2017)

Thomas Leer’s association with Matt Johnson goes way back. The first time that I saw Leer’s name was in the credits for GIANT, the epic closing song of The The’s album Soul Mining in 1983. Although Thomas has recorded very few cover versions in his career (and mostly as Act, with Claudia Brücken singing), it was perhaps inevitable that he would one day get the nod from Matt.

In 2000, The The released the album NakedSelf, with the idea that the companion EPs would feature covers of The The songs by hand-picked artists. Record label shenanigans meant that this never got past the first single, ShrunkenMan. However, various versions by the likes of Elbow, Ergo Phizmiz and Anna Domino have popped up here and there over the years.

Thomas’ cover of WeatherBelle from NakedSelf appeared on the Radio Cinéola Trilogy box set in 2017 and it’s brilliant. As a listener, you can feel as well as hear Leer’s cracked, aged voice stretching to breaking point, lyrical lines like the proverbial torture rack, yet losing none of the emotional impact of Matt Johnson’s original work. Astonishing.

International (single, 1978)

And the ICA comes full circle, ending where it began with Thomas Leer’s debut double A-side single. Leer obviously had a thing for the title/word, as a completely unrelated song called International appeared on debut album Scale Of Ten in 1984 and was also a (flop) single.

The post-punk, synth pop International from 1978 is the one to go for, though. Again, the appeal is all in the lo-fi, home recording, scuzzy riffs, and surfing vocals. Compare this with 2024’s Death Of A Dream, and you’ll see how far Thomas Leer’s music has travelled, yet how connected the timeline is. Future Historic, indeed.

Khayem

Thomas Leer

SATURDAY’S SCOTTISH SONG : #344: THOMAS LEER

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The one previous post on Thomas Leer dates from June 2010. It also looked at Robert Rental, with the basis being that they were two pioneers of electronica music who just happened to have been raised in the same blue-collar former shipbuilding town of Port Glasgow.

One of Thomas Leer’s earliest singles was included in the Big Gold Dream box set. Here’s the blurb from the booklet:-

“Born in Port Glasgow, Thomas Leer played in short-lived local bands before decamping to London and forming Pressure, then self-releasing his solo single Private Plane. Having hooked up with fellow emigre Robert Rental for The Bridge album, Leer moved to Cherry Red for 4 Movements. Lead track Don’t boasted a mix of electronic drum beats, disco bass and nouveau torch singing which mined the playful fourth world funk of mid-era Can.“

mp3: Thomas Leer – Don’t

4 Movements was released as a 12″ EP in July 1981. Don’t is a bit of a hidden gem…..there’s a touch of Soul Mining-era The The in the music.

JC

Robert Rental, Thomas Leer

TWO BOYS FROM THE PORT

As mentioned a few weeks back, I’m not long finished reading Long Shadows and High Hopes, a highly enjoyable and enlightening biography of Matt Johnson.

The book provided a reminder that The The owe a huge debt to Thomas Leer, a fairly obscure Scottish musician – and by obscure I mean not widely known as he’s had a lengthy music career going all the way back to 1978, albeit there were periods of time when he was inactive.

Thomas Leer was born, as Thomas Wishart, in 1953 in Port Glasgow, a very working-class/blue-collar town some 20 miles west of the actual city. It relied heavily on shipbuilding and manufacturing for its existence, so it was no surprise that from the late 60s onwards, like so many other similar British towns, it went into a sharp decline from which it has never really recovered. It’s a town I’m vaguely familiar with and if Wishart/Leer was displaying any sort of artistic merit, especially in electronic music when it was very much in its infancy, he would have been given a tough time by his peers. It’s a town where conforming with the norm is often a pre-requisite for survival.

By the mid-70s, he had moved to live and work in London, at one point forming a punk band before deciding that electronica was his forte. Buzzcocks may well have shown the way in terms of writing, recording and releasing self-financed singles, but Thomas Leer was probably the first to do it as a solo artist in that his debut was recorded in his bedroom and that every single note and vocal contribution came from him. Nobody else played on the single and nobody had any input to the production and distribution side of things – the only thing he didn’t do was physically press the record.

Matt Johnson has often paid tribute to Thomas Leer, and he does so again in this book, making it clear that the Port Glasgow man was the main influence in him pursuing the sort of music he wanted to make with The The.

I hadn’t realised Johnson’s first job, as a 15-year old having left school with no qualifications, was in the music industry in a recording studio in the Soho district of London, which provided him with access to equipment and technology to pursue his dreams – he had already, as an 11-year old, been part of a band that had performed shows in the London suburb in which he spent his teenage years. The first band, Roadstar, had been guitars, bass and drums but he wanted to do something entirely different and the debut single by Thomas Leer provided something of a template.

mp3 : Thomas Leer – Private Plane
mp3 : Thomas Leer – International

In due course, the pure electronica of The The would be supplemented by some great pop songs and thus bringing Matt Johnson a fair deal of commercial success while his influencers remained resolutely underground. It’s hard to imagine anyone other than John Peel playing either side of that debut.

I mentioned earlier that Thomas Leer would have likely had a hard time growing up in Port Glasgow but quite incredibly, there was someone else of his age and from the town who shared his interests. Robert Donnachie, who would later take the stage name of Robert Rental, moved to London with Leer and in due course, he too would release a self-financed electronica single in 1978:-

mp3 : Robert Rental – Paralysis
mp3 : Robert Rental – A.C.C.

The following year, the two of them hooked up to record an album, The Bridge, which was issued on Industrial Records, the label established and run by Throbbing Gristle (click here for more – it’s an impossible task to try and summarise who and what they were).

Rental died from lung cancer in 2000, but Leer remains active today, having also had a period in the 80s when he was signed to ZTT Records (home of Frankie Goes to Hollywood) as one half of Act, in which the words to his music was sung by Claudia Brücken, formerly of Propaganda. I’ve long aspired to write a piece on Act, there was a draft from around three years ago kicking around somewhere but I suffered from a severe laptop crash a few weeks back and a number of draft efforts have been lost forever. I suppose this song is kind of appropriate:-

mp3 : Act – Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now

I do find it astonishing that Thomas Wishart and Robert Donaldson emerged from a town such as Port Glasgow. They would have had no local points of reference in terms of experimental music as they were growing up and they weren’t immersed in any sort of art school or college scene.

I’ll be honest, and this probably comes through in this piece in that there’s a lot of facts and not much in the way of opinions, but I find what they did in 1978 isn’t terribly accessible or even enjoyable, but there’s no doubt that without them, much of the great music that would emerge in the 80s, including that of The The, just wouldn’t have been possible. It’s amazing, in all walks of life, how often the story of the pioneers is overlooked while those who come along later and make something popular are lauded, feted and commemorated.