Wonderful words by the ever erudite Adam Turner.

Edgeley is a suburb of Stockport, sitting atop a hill and overlooking the River Mersey and the valley that Stockport town centre is built around. Somewhere in Edgeley is a terraced house that contains the home studio of Thought Leadership – a guitarist in the classic Mancunian/ Stopfordian tradition of bedroom virtuosos, summoning ambient/ instrumental beauty from six strings, some FX pedals and an amplifier. Vini Reilly, a resident of West Didsbury only a few miles away, is the most obvious comparison. 

Thought Leadership’s music crosses the borders into Durutti Column territory and takes up residence there, but there’s more here than that. There’s also the influence of Robin Guthrie and Cocteau Twins. There’s John McGeoch too, and shades of Johnny Marr – if he’d been into ambient rather than The Rolling Stones and 60s girl groups. There are echoes of other 80s guitar anti-heroes, echoes of Felt and The Cure – but missing those bands’ frontmen and singers, who only complicate things with words.

Recorded in January 2024 and released digitally and on cassette in May of last year, III Of Pentacles, is now getting a vinyl release care of Be With Records. Some of Manchester’s finest DJs and label owners have already got on board – Jason Boardman, Ruf Dug and J-Walk’s Martin Fisher are all fans, as are Justin Robertson and Heavenly’s Jeff Barrett from further afield. There’s precious little background info to go on and the track titles don’t add much, since they are only a sequence of Roman numerals, I to X. The mystery is very much part of the whole.

I patters into earshot with a primitive drum machine and then the guitar, an echo unit, some chorus and delay. Liquid droplets of sound, finger picking and occasional chords, conjuring the sun breaking through the clouds above Edgeley Park on a Saturday afternoon, and the first promise of spring. II follows, the drum machine just keeping time as the notes and arpeggios cascade, the echo of those 80s indie guitarists fed into now, the notes all brightly coloured shards. III slows things down, the blissed out sound of Vini Reilly and Martin Hannett at Stockport’s Strawberry Studios a short walk and a few decades away, re-animated. There’s some string bending and soloing, the delay giving the impression of several guitarists playing at once. It’s majestic, emotive and dreamy. The sound of days spent doing not very much, of being content to just drift. IV is a tripped out piece, the sound of two guitars playing against / with each other. One in the foreground and the second behind it, combining in glorious, time stretching melancholy. V, VI and VII complete the album’s first side, with more chorus, delay, and more beautifully contemplative playing. The run from I to VII feels like a sequence to be taken as a whole, the individual tracks forming part of something bigger – a sun dappled succession, optimistic but shot through with a sadness, a bit of regret maybe. Chances missed or never taken. Friends we haven’t seen for years. Never mind, turn the record over…

Side 2 has three longer pieces which shift the mood a little. It’s more downbeat and less sunny, like clouds coming in from the Pennines. VIII starts out with a drone as the backdrop, and the guitar line is more sombre, like Vini playing over a beatless version of ACR’s Winter Hill. An 808’s electronic handclap appears intermittently, a hint of percussion in an epic seven minutes of dubbed-out dexterity and hum. IX is even more ambient and weightless, a nine minute slow jam, the space between the notes as much a part of the music as the notes themselves. Time slows down. The second hand on the clock barely moves. The delay bounces around the speakers, synergising with the buzz of the amp. The playing becomes more jagged and distorted but then the storm blows out and the guitar calms, lost in a sea of echo. X takes us home, a six minute abstract ending, the chords and finger picking blurred into each other, the FX pedals at the fore, the guitar sometimes buried behind the blur. Lying on the sofa, staring at the shadows on the ceiling, this finale is the backdrop to a maze of memories, narcotic nostalgia, the soundtrack to being lost in your own world. Then it fades out and the afternoon’s gone.

Vinyl is due in April, care of Be With Records. Digital is out now, via Darkly Inclined Tapes. 

You can find more proper, on point, prose from Adam Turner over at his own brilliant blog, The Bagging Area. Adam is also part of the admin team at the mighty Flightpath Estate.