Leisure Process
Sunday, March 6, 2022
Typically, I would obsess over a duo that made only four singles in 1982/1983 and then disappear into a Discogs listing for hopeless collectors. Leisure Process, in the same league of band names from the late 70s and early 80s such as Public Image Ltd., A Certain Ratio, Magazine, and so forth. It is like every band member had a relationship with the Situationists or, at the end of the previous era, naming your group after a creature from the animal or insect kingdom. I, for sure, discovered Leisure Process in 1982 when they released their excellent single-A Way You’ll Never Be. Since they were from the UK, I wondered how I found them. I must have read either an interview in one of the English music weeklies or coming upon a review of their single. Before YouTube or the Internet, I mainly discovered new music through imported music magazines. If something caught my eye or an interesting quote in the article, I would go and seek out that record. By luck, the Leisure Process caught my attention.
The four A-sides they have released are A Way You’ll Never Be, Love Cascade, Anxiety, and Cashflow. So including those four and the additional five more songs on the b-sides of those recordings. That is Leisure Process’s complete discography. Then they disappeared. Gary Barnacle is a well-known British studio musician who plays saxophone, and the singer and instrumentalist Ross Middleton is a total mystery to me. Middleton was in a post-punk band with his three brothers called Positive Noise. The band split up, and eventually, he found Barnacle and formed Leisure Process or sometimes billed as Leisure Process International, to give it that cold corporate feel. Music-wise, both Positive Noise and Leisure Process sounds more like Howard Devoto’s Magazine than any other electro-pop duos such as Pet Shop Boys or Soft Cell. Roxy Music meets Devoto, but in a slightly lighter vein, that handled romance in that ironic style of ABC.
When I first heard A Way You’ll Never Be, I was hooked on their sound and voice. It had everything I liked at the time, a sense of romantic moodiness with a touch of disappointment in how the world operates. Most of their recordings, except a few of their b-sides, are made by Martin Rushent, who produced Buzzcocks, the solo Pete Shelley recordings, and brought The Human League into a very commercial (but still good) grace of wide acceptance. If one is a fan of such work as Rushent’s remixing of The Human League’s 12” singles, then I think you would find Leisure Process, at the very least, interesting.
And it is the 12” mix that is the suitable format for Leisure Process. The songs’ extra two or three minutes become symphonies of romantic illusions. I’m not sure why they failed. They were signed to Epic Records UK, and they must have had a budget working with Rushent, yet perhaps they didn’t sell records. This is a shame because I sense that they would have made a fantastic album. It may have gotten lost in the Post-Punk surge of new music of those years, but still, they would have contributed something extraordinary to that decade.
Being a fan of Leisure Process is like loving a ghost. There are hardly any physical traces, but you can find their music on YouTube. Over the years, I have found their records online and at various used record stores. Usually not expensive, therefore probably not collectible, unless one loves their music. A one-sided love affair with a band and their recordings is very much the DNA of a lover of music and records.
A Way You’ll Never Be has a strong bass riff joining in with the electronic drum sound, and then comes the voice that is both pissed off and yearning for some relief of the anxiety that is the song. It is not as brilliant as a song by Magazine, but the charm of the music is that it compliments that type of music or stance. The outsider is looking in and not getting anything out of it, except the angst. When the song came out in my twenties, I was nothing but angst in motion.
Love Cascade reminds one of the Human League songs from the classic Dare album. This is mainly due to the Rushent mix/production and his genius to tear into the song like a chemist and put it back together again. Listening to the extended version of songs by Leisure Process and Human League makes me miss the talent of Rushent. At the moment, I think their masterpiece is The Emigré which is on the b-side of the single Cashflow. It’s Morricone meets a b-side of Roxy Music. It’s very Andy Mackay-like and hypnotic. Before entering a crowded room, I thought of The Emigré as my theme.
Leisure Process Discography as well as Links:
Thanks for the review. A couple of years ago I uploaded a video of A Way You'll Never Be to YouTube which combines the best quality video and audio available, which previously were very much on separate uploads (as is often the case - one video of a song often has good sound and poor video, and vice versa). It took about 2 weeks of editing to get it exactly right because of all sorts of irritating problems, like the fact that the audio and video were moving at slightly different speeds. I've also put subtitles in because a lot of people have trouble hearing the lyrics correctly. (I've done the same thing for Love Cascade as well, incidentally). Here's "A Way You'll Never Be": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxITmn3sWpw
This is the link for "Love Cascade": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCxQoJshdNo&t=0s