Day 16: LFO by LFO

 

Today’s disc is the 12” single LFO by LFO. This is the Leeds band LFO (low-frequency oscillation), not a later US band with the same name (their LFO stood for lyte funky ones apparently). I didn’t think I’d ever heard of the US LFO but then I went and listened to their 1999 hit Summer Girls (so you don’t have to) and it is ever so slightly familiar (and pretty terrible – lyrics include “Chinese food makes me sick”). 

 

Anyway, back to Yorkshire. I’ve picked today’s track as it’s very representative of the Leeds dance music scene/culture that I found when I moved there in September 1989. I was happy to be moving back to the North of England (from the South). I’d been born and grown up in the North and I was ready to return to sensible vowels, better chips and fewer Tories. I’ve written a bit about my move to the city in my previous project in 2021 (31 Postcodes). The first Leeds post is here and you can just click newer post again and again to get all the others. Altogether I lived in ten different addresses in the city.

 

As we know (see Day 12 of this year’s posts), earlier in the year I’d already joined the tribe called house (or rave – I can’t remember exactly when people started calling dancing to this specific kind of music raving, I guess it was gradual – some history of the word here). This meant pretty much the first thing I did once I moved to the city was find the places to go and listen to this music (and most importantly to dance to it – all night long if possible). There were quite a few places to go (and more sprang up all the time) but the one I have the strongest memory of from that early time is the Astoria on Roundhay Road in Harehills. Luckily someone else I knew moved to Leeds at the same time and had the same tastes in music and absolute hedonism so we went out together a lot and I think it was Friday nights we went to the Astoria. I can’t remember if the night had a name (other club/rave nights of the era were Joy, KAOS, Audacity, Dream – you get the idea) but the venue was an old ballroom (now demolished) and around 1989-90 it was amazing. Part of the appeal was that it wasn’t in the town centre so you really only got people who knew what they were coming for (and not just drunks who stumbled in by accident). It was a big dancefloor with a balcony area (I think) and it worked really well for the kind of bare, hypnotic music they played there. Don’t ask me who was DJing – at this point I was still totally oblivious to such things (it was about the music, the dancing, the drugs, not personalities) but I do remember there was a lot of really great music (much of it local) and that a lot of it was on the techno end of the house/rave spectrum (at the time sometimes called bleep house or bleep techno). Here is LFO (and even though it all felt very underground at the time this track was actually in the charts, hitting number 12 in July 1990):

At the time I wasn’t buying records and I know I got all these much later when I was working in the record shop and DJing (see yesterday’s post). I got them for the memories and with the thought that we might play them in pubs and clubs (but we rarely did as these tracks didn’t fit in with the music of the era that followed, roughly 1993-7). In 1989-90 I listened to music via cassettes (in the company car that I drove very badly) or via pirate radio* (more on that in another post). Quite a lot of the local music of this kind and this era was put out by the record label Warp (then very much a Sheffield label, now still going, still influential, but based in London now). Here are some of the other bleepy singles (all of which I loved at the time). 

Of the above Nightmares on Wax (George Evelyn) is still making great music (if of a much more chilled variety). Tricky Disco made me cringe the most listening recently (I don’t think it has aged well) and I can’t tell you much about what happened to Ital Rockers (added later: a North of England vinyl correspondent has told me they are working as the dub sound system Iration Steppas). One of Unique 3 went on to make drum and bass under the name L Double and has the record label Flex. He also used the name Asylum and we did play one of his records under that alias in clubs sometimes – the drum and bass track Da Base II Dark by Asylum (below). 

After this bleeping big start Yorkshire did stay quite influential for techno music. One of the biggest English techno clubs, Orbit, started in the county in 1991 and ran for 12 years (most of its days/nights spent at the After Dark club in Morley, apologies to Morley residents are due no doubt). I did go once (it was very full-on…).

Back tomorrow with something a little more soulful. 

 

 

*There was also the Pete Tong Friday evening radio show on Radio 1 which I especially used to listen to if I was driving down the M1 for London clubbing with friends around that time. In later years (around the mid 1990s) Tong played at a club we worked at in Leeds and we were the warm-up DJs for his guest spot. He didn’t even say hello, which was very disappointing (if not totally surprising, many big name DJs were total arseholes by that point). 

For the first intro post to this series go here.