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Leer ache

Thomas Leer — the self-confessed Svengali of adventurous yet substantial technology. With a carefully crafted and illustrious past, spanning the highly acclaimed ’Private Plane’ and ’4 Movements’, Thomas now finds himself at the chrysalis stage of his career. Now with the tantalising single ‘Number One’, and album ‘The Scale Of Ten’, Thomas Leer is ready and waiting…

“The past response has been rubbish. It’s down to the radio play that I wasn’t getting. Plus the all round bad reviews of the last single (‘HeartBeat’). So the press are not entirely 100% supportive of me now. They probably were with ’International’, because that was a ‘worthy’ record with a ‘worthy’ lyric,” he explains in a delicate Scottish lilt.

“I didn’t sign to a major record company without realising that I would have to tone the music down a bit. But I wanted to anyway. I was fed up being a cult. It wasn’t satisfying; especially being the kinda cult I was. I never met anyone who was into what I was doing.”

How are you going to change that?

“Just by being more active, and having more things happening; rather than waiting a year to put out my next record! I want to work on what I call ’pure’ music — not pop songs.”

And who’ll buy it?

“People who like symphony music, I suppose.”

Are there a lot of them then?

“Yeah, there must be. If there aren’t then I’ll have a damn good try at indoctrinating them! I want to be well known. I’m just doing it because I happen to rate commercial music, and I’ve got a record company that want me to be successful, and are pushing me. I’m going to go along with that because I don’t see anything wrong with being successful. If I was left to my own devices I probably wouldn’t be doing this.”

So if it was your choice…

“No, — my own devices.”