Spending his formative years on the mean streets of Chester, Thomas’ true musical playgrounds were Manchester and Liverpool. “Chester is a bit like, say, Wollongong,” he explains. “It’s too close to a massive city, or in this case two massive cities [Liverpool and Manchester] which are both absolute hot beds of music. It’s kind of impossible to have a small city maintain a particularly important culture like that when you can just get the train for 20 minutes and go do it in a big city”. But Chester had its moments. “The formative stuff of the UK house scene came out of [Chester] curiously. The super club Cream was started by a couple of Chester lads. Sasha is from just outside the town. There have been various famous and semi-famous people from here, but there’s a gravity towards Manchester and Liverpool – it just sucks in anybody within an hour.”
Including Thomas himself. Moving to Liverpool in the early ‘90s, he soon reaped the benefits of a post-Thatcher England. “In those days, you could be unemployed forever. As long as you did courses and pretended you were applying for colleges, they’d just keep giving you money. To my intense joy they actually funded a recording course in this corner of Liverpool. I went there, learnt the basics and then presented myself at one of the big studios and said, ‘Hello, I just about know my way around the desk and I will work for free. I just want to do session times, learn the business and make tea.’” And it worked. Soon Thomas was working in studios and rubbing shoulders with artists like Echo and the Bunnymen and, incidentally, Matthew Roberts. “This guy who’s doing fairly okay making house music comes in one day and says ‘Yeah I’m doing lots of remixes, you should work on one.’ So we hooked up together and originally the King Unique thing was the two of us. Then he decided to move into visual media stuff, and I am ploughing relentlessly onwards in this quest for never-ending King Uniqueness.”
The transition from two to one was a learning process for Thomas. “Initially I was verykeen to maintain what we had been doing. About two years later I realised that I was working really hard to sail this ship as if there was still two of us there. I’d put my own head to one side and try to pretend and do his bit as he might have done it. I realised it was kind of insane, so I took it off in quite a musically different direction.” When asked if he prefers working alone to working in a partnership, Thomas is diplomatic. “They yield different results, that’s all there is to it. It’s no coincidence that some of the more iconoclastic artists are individuals, and I think that’s because you have to have nobody interrupt you or disturb your insane train of thought to become an Aphex Twin. If somebody else is going ‘You know what we should do? We should stick some strings on there,’ you have to yield to them because you’re in a creative partnership. You can’t just sit there going ‘No, no, no, I’m right, fuck off.’ So you don’t get a purely undiluted result. But I think groups create more accessible music. I think the strength of The Beatles etcetera is the fact that you need to sell this to some other creative people. You’ve got to get it past everybody else’s threshold of ‘Yeah, but is it catchy?’ That’s why bands often create the most colossal, successive, world-changing music, because they’ve already been through a mini-democratic process.”
Playing Darkbeats alongside D-Nox, Luis Junior and Psycatron, Thomas is looking forward to the Melbourne leg of his short tour. “Melbourne always used to confuse me,” he laughs. “Before I first came to Australia, everybody was saying Melbourne’s the cool place and Sydney’s just got the Opera House and wankers; nobody likes Sydney. I went to Sydney first and I really liked it, but I felt this enormous angst because if I liked it clearly I must be a wanker. Then I get to Melbourne and I’m staying in St Kilda which I didn’t realise was just drugs and sex, and I thought…this is interesting. It took two or three trips until somebody took me in to all the alleyways and rooftop bars that I was like, now I get it. I realised Melbourne doesn’t jump out and grab you, it’s all tucked away.”
Then it’s back to Chester to continue to work on restoring an old vicarage Thomas recently purchased, which he’s been doing for the past few months. “This [tour] is actually a little break, going back into music for a fortnight from my otherwise monkish seclusion with me and a hammer and bricks.” Contemplating whether his new-found passion for home renovation means the end of his musical career, Thomas says he’s open to the possibility. “I’m enormously resistant to getting stuck into anything corporate because I find it all a bit repellent, so music’s probably the thing I’m best equipped to carry on doing. I’d like to go into writing, but I’ve lived through one industry burning itself into a small ball with the advent of digital and piracy. I can’t do it twice. It’s just lining yourself up for a really hard life.” He laughs. “How is the writing going, Kate?”
BY KATE McCARTEN
