Spatial Brew

Johnny Marr sat in on a two-week residency on BBC 6 Music recently. I tried to catch all eight (ten?) shows, either at the time or via catch up, as Johnny is, as you know, a genial conversationalist and someone worth listening to. He’s a music enthusiast as much as you or I, infectious, with stories to tell about the records he’s playing and the ability to have you instantly seeking out more about some of the artists he’s chosen.

Thomas Leer was one such artist. I wasn’t familiar with him at all but before the track in question had even played out, I had been on eBay and elsewhere to locate a copy of it.

Thomas Leer – Don’t

Cliché merchants will tell you it’s one of those tracks that could’ve been recorded and released yesterday…or 2001…or 1979…or indeed any time in the past 40-odd years (and the shot of Thomas above might well back up that theory) but come on – it’s so post-punk, so anything goes, so experimentally Sylvian and so early ’80s (1982) it’s absolutely of its time…and brilliantly so.

Repetitive and murky, hypnotic and other-worldly, it has bendy, slinky, Talk Talk-ish bass, weird and wired, tightly-strung electric guitar and a synthetic ambience that might find it sitting comfortably between the quirks and cracks in Talking Heads’ Remain In Light, Can’s Tago Mago and The The’s Soul Mining. Pretty great company, then.

There are no traditional verses and choruses, no whistleable melodies, no obvious hooks…until it dawns on you that the hook is in the arrangement and production; harmonic pings, rudimentary drum machine and huge swathes of reverbed electronics that give it a swampy, wee small hours creeping to the dawn vibe. It’s bedsit Brian Eno, warmly claustrophobic and flotation tank funk, edging up on you tightly wrapped in Leer’s own sinuous and serpentine vocal yet simultaneously widescreen and spatial and vast.

I love the half-sung, half-spoken vocal – Don’t make excuses about where you were last night. Don’t. – and the seedy yet sophisticated, meandering pull of the track. It could play for three hours straight and I doubt I’d notice. It’s not an in your face track, but it’ll certainly find its way into your ears. Its creator would, in a year or two, find a level of success playing in Act with ex-Propaganda vocalist Claudia Brücken, but that solo track above is the absolute equal of anything of his that’s better-known.

I must look into his back catalogue.