Was the world ever ready for Thomas Leer? Listening back to Thomas’s The Scale Of Ten one can hear all the potential there. It’s this theme of tweaking a recipe. Here it was to make his once abrasive, experimental blue-eyed soul into a chromed-out beast, outfitted in Fairlight CMI clothing, permeating with giant-sized hooks. In 1985, this once industrial and noise darling, commanded the attention of Trevor Horn and tried to make the unlikely leap into Pop stardom. Our fault? Not following him further there.
Scottish-native, Thomas Wishart’s (then Leer’s) career began in the late mid ‘70s, working with musical partner Robert Rental floating around the same experimental UK-based scene that landed them spots touring with iconic bands like Throbbing Gristle and The Normal. Fascinatingly ahead of their time, the duo would combine a simple 4-track tape recorder with a very simple EDP WASP synth and a no-name drum machine to create one of the “industrial” genre’s foundational records: The Bridge. Deriving inspiration not from American punk but from different, experimental sources (krautrock, minimalism, etc.), most thought Thomas would go on further along this path.
1982’s aptly named Contradictions signaled the shift to more overground ideas. Signing a solo contract with the influential, Brit indie label Cherry Red, Thomas shifted his lo-fi techniques to the “Pop” arena. Overflowing with soul, jangle, new wave, and tape hiss, both Contradictions and its accompanying/introductory EP 4 Movements foretold, perhaps, an era of glorious lo-fi pop that came to be much further ahead in time. Entirely self-produced and performed with borrowed equipment, songs like “Tight As A Drum”, “Soul Gipsy” and “All About You”, featured the sophisticated ideas found in other groups of the time like Paul Weller’s Style Council and Orange Juice (albeit blended with the anarchic noise of a group like Fad Gadget).
When Thomas was signed to a major label, Arista, his full ambition was finally laid bare. Now having access to the budget of a bigger distributor the first thing he did was catch up with all the technology he couldn’t afford in his much sparser beginnings. Thomas’s main tool then became the big daddy of ‘80s music technology: Fairlight’s CMI sampler/synth workstation. One of the first standalone production workstations, the Fairlight CMI instrument had barely been introduced to the pop world through the work of The Art Of Noise, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, and Thomas Dolby, all big name acts who had the money to afford such (then) new age technology.
The beauty of The Scale Of Ten is that the title itself laid bare his thinking. Now, with the full arsenal of technology behind him and (better yet) increased fidelity/dynamics, we were able to hear all those instantly appealing ear-worms Thomas had in his back pocket, taken to the hilt, sonically. At the end of the day, at that moment in time, Thomas was at his best as a songwriter. Here, the ego was allowed to roam, creating deeply subversive pop speaking of the darker side of yuppie-fied, got-mine, Conservative-dominated, global culture.
The Scale Of Ten’s closest analogue I can think of is Dolby’s own The Flat Earth which couched globalism and environmental awareness through songs that spoke of one’s intimate connection to the degradation of our ecology. This Thomas took a far away view, almost Hitchcockian, through songs like “Searcher”, “Lust For Loneliness” and the shoulda been hit “International” to put us vividly (lyrically) through the environs many dead-behind-the-eyes automatons shuffled through to get their next buck on the roll. For every fake sampled sax and simulated choir, there is that weird mutated, experimental sonic auteur who didn’t leave entirely everything behind in this new phase and somehow found a way to work it in here (with a bit of headroom to spare).
Trevor Horn, of ZTT, would soon come calling, trying to snatch Thomas away and let his ID run rampant via ACT (a duo with ex-Propaganda member Claudia Brücken), hoping to take subversive Pop act further up the charts (albeit by smoothing out the “weirder” stuff) by delighting openly in the joke. However, in my opinion this is where we get the special cut, something that would get lost in Trevor’s more exacting touch.
On The Scale Of Ten we get the pure, unadulterated stuff: Thomas as torch singer for the hardest, darkest times where a little abrasive roughness around the edges works much better to take the scum off. Don’t you know, not everything is a laughing matter (and no one needs another Heaven 17)…