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This is a story about one night of dancing in Britain's third largest city. It begins in a train carriage racing through the frosty Saddleworth Moors, on Valentine’s Day 2014. Craig Richards, resident DJ and curator of London nightclub, Fabric, is in Leeds to play a set in the Wire Club, for Butter Side Up, one of the city’s many promoters, and three people – myself and a couple who live in Manchester – sip from bottles of Buckfast and discuss the widely respected Leeds club scene.
I ask what makes Leeds such a great clubbing city.
“Leeds is quality, but I’m not sure why. The promoters bring lots of big DJs over to play. Maybe that has something to do with it,” says Sarah, a fiery clerical assistant from Huddersfield. But her husband, a mild mannered tall man wearing a brown suit and smoking an e-cigarette, replied, with a gentle Yorkshire accent, “No, I don’t think it has too much to do with the famous DJs.”
“Well, Ricardo plays in Leeds a lot, nearly as much as he does in London - and we've been to see all the big names from Detroit in the last couple of years, and Berlin,” Sarah quickly added, tugging at her blue cocktail dress and swigging from her Buckfast bottle.
“No,” he said, again gently, “I’m sure it’s not because of Ricardo.”
If Carl, a born and bred Loiner, was at all irritated by Sarah’s comments, he did not show it, did not embarrass his wife, even if he disagreed with her. But that is not surprising. Carl is a Northerner. And while writers hate clichés (a wonderfully ironic cliché itself), the trouble with trying to engineer a route around saying Northerners are friendly is that they make you say it. They are friendly. Not all of them, of course. Northern towns and cities have a hefty share of feral villains – tied, track suited, and otherwise. And even the nicest of parties can cough up a disco narcissist or two, commonly seen pouting and scowling to the left and the right of the after-party’s alpha-DJ. However, to neglect to mention in a Northern feature article, the general charm in Northern English society, especially in its pubs, clubs and parties, a charm which threads through everyday interactions and remains challenged only by a minority of the eternally difficult, would be tantamount to a betrayal. There are lots of friendly people here, and this is serious stuff: the manner of those you bump into on a night out can make or break your buzz.
As we lumber across the countryside, Carl and Sarah discuss Patrice Scott’s set at last month's Butter Side Up (both agree it was superb, and one of the best they had heard in a long time). The ticket inspector appears to check our tickets, and the conversation breaks off. We arrange to pick it up later in the night, and Carl and Sarah settle back into their seats with a tartan blanket, for a pre-party nap.
Unable to concentrate on anything productive, I stare through the smutty window at canals and rivers that meander about quarries and snake through grafittied viaduct bridges, at the mills, and at the forever infamous, desolate moorland. A land made infamous by the wicked actions of the Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, and made desolate by nature. The cobbled streets of the towns that surround Leeds are lined with dusty antique shops, tearooms, and vegetarian cafes, as well as Lidl and Morrisons. On the city’s periphery, obscene Soviet-like tower blocks jut from the landscape. You might think what I describe sounds grim, but in actual fact the Yorkshire countryside is beautiful, and the city of Leeds has plenty of stunning architecture. There is nothing but tickets for sale on the train, so when we arrive in Leeds I plan to go directly to a suitable watering hole to lay some foundations. But for now, I doze off, too, and later retain just one more memory of the train journey: the winter petrified trees which dot the Yorkshire countryside, and fist in all directions with their contorted, revolutionary arms.
I say goodbye to Sarah and Craig inside the station, and we agree to meet for a drink in the club later in the night. They chirp something about finding some coke and wander into the nearest Wetherspoon, and I walk outside into Leeds city, hungry and thirsty, thinking of acid house and socialist politics.
Responding to a recent invitation to visit Leeds, the eminent South African journalist, Rian Malan, quipped: “Darn. Leeds? Home of the endangered socialist? Won’t I be torn limb from limb for being an unreconstructed Dutch man?” Leeds remains a critical part of liberal political thought in Britain, espousing a point of view that has existed throughout dance music history and culture, an opinion that stretches back over the years and the Atlantic to the sweaty, multi-ethnic, multi-sexual, post-disco dance floors of early Chicago house. In Britain, somewhere between now and Ron Hardy, the people revolted en masse. Their battles were fought on open fields next to the M25, their weapons - generators, 303 lines, and high quality ecstasy, or so the story goes. In 1990, Leeds and Yorkshire were in the thick of it. In Wakefield, eight people were arrested as part of the Tory government’s crackdown on subversives.
The government feared acid house raves might be part of, or could form a mobilised political movement, an inherently immoral one. But they mistook apathy for revolt. People were too engrossed in a culture free from oppression to give a rat’s arse about what was going down in Westminster. Our lot gave the conservatives the willies with barking mad news reports, and soon enough acid house had them as scared as non-missionary sex does and blacks do; scared like the 60s, scared, scared, scared. And their matronly warlock had to counter, for the sake of all that is good and moral, with a stern telling off, which arrived on smoked salmon breath, in 1994, in the shape of The Criminal Justice Act. Had they not wielded their iron arm, and hit us where it matters, in a field, in a good place, a generation might have been a bit more ignorant to their pillaging.
Though the acid house era is seen as part of a resistance to conservative politics (which it of course was too), a few insiders gained a lot out of free markets. After the government swooped in on field raves, the session was pushed indoors, and Tory moralising and entrepreneurship begot super clubs, the predictably defective birth that led to jet set, superstar DJs. Positive developments were born of the irrational crackdown on rave culture, though. Not least of which were regular club nights that were free to build something special with less of a headache on assimilated, supervised ground.
Back 2 Basics, the longest running club night in Europe, started in November 1991 at The Chocolate Factory in Leeds. Dave Beer and tragically late co-founder Alistair Cooke's wonderfully hedonistic bash counts David Bowie, Primal Scream, Howard Marks, and Irvine Welsh as friends, and has been scored at one time or another by legendary DJs like Chez Damier, Laurent Garnier, and Andrew Weatherall (who once lived in a Leeds vicarage). But beyond big DJs and commercial success, Back 2 Basics is spoken of in Leeds with pride and warmth in a way that evokes community and loyalty. People admire permanence over pan flashes.
The northern England of old, the one immortalised in Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, is not entirely missing from view. But today you would be harder pushed to find a chimney sweep or pan of spam stew than a juice bar or a Starbucks – the thick industrial smog of old has gone to China. There is some operational industry, but like everywhere else in the country, the trend is to sand blast old mills, convert them into apartments, and camp a concierge by the main entrance.
Built on the back of the wool, flax and printing industries, Leeds has grown from a diminutive market town into a major urban centre, linking smaller satellite economies in towns like Wakefield and Hebden Bridge to the world’s economy, while boasting the second richest financial district in Britain. Leeds has more than thirty national and international banks, most of which occupy glass buildings towering above the city centre.
At their feet lie numerous swish cocktail bars, the type that appears in any glossy magazine supplementary on a weekly basis. Not that you need any instruction, but wander far and wide from the banks – even if you do like a good cocktail – and the bars will become more like pubs; the cocktails more common, but no less tasty. Strawbs Bar lies on Woodhouse Lane, between Leeds University and Leeds Metropolitan University, and is as D.I.Y as it gets; which I find lends itself more to a warm hug when you are new in town. More so than any stale, angular drinks dispensary with penguin outfits and an overly educated maître d. The bar is up some stairs next to another Leeds pub, The Fenton, and is adorned with giant foam strawberries and lovely Geordie bar staff. “We’re the longest running independent bar in Leeds; open more than thirty years,’’ says Kevin Clarke, the co-owner.
Three million people call the Leeds City Region home. Three universities serve forty five thousand students, and the financial, insurance and service sectors employ more than twenty thousand call-center staff alone. For many of these people, the weekend offers hope, and by the time a week of agitated telephone calls is over, they are ready to burn off a lot of bitten lip. chat to Katie Simpson, an engaging and smartly dressed 22-year-old year old call-center worker from north Leeds, outside a bar and club called Maluku, who tells me, whilst playing with her long black hair,
“My job’s shit and the pay’s no better. Me and my mates go out and get smashed whenever we can, and in Leeds there are lots of wicked bars and clubs to do that in. You should go down to Call Lane for a cocktail.”
An obnoxious female bouncer in a Stasi uniform puts me off going into Moloku for a drink, so I heed Katie’s advice and head for Call Lane where I can conveniently also find the Wire Club.
The Tiki Hideaway is a Hawaiian themed bar above the Call Lane Social, on Call Lane, a street of bars aimed squarely at young professionals; that strange all encompassing term. Awkward couples out for the first time in a year drink 8 pound cocktails mixed in a blender, which rips and roars like a drunken dentist’s drill in his patient’s cheek bone. It is a theme bar, so I take it as it comes, but it bears mentioning they make their staff wear Hawaiian shirts. Illuminated puffer fish dangle from the ceiling, while totem poles and bamboo cover everything, everywhere. A tired Nigerian staff member in a Hawaiian shirt approaches me, carrying a spent Mai Tai, and for a moment I think I am in one of Roger Moore’s Bond films. Omar asks that I do not use his real name, though he does tell me he has lived in Leeds for two years, and that the people are kind and welcoming. The Tiki Hideaway is tacky, but also homey, and the bar staff typically friendly. Though the cocktails look beautifully mixed, I go for an ice-cold bottle of Cusquena at three pounds sixty. “Me and my boyfriend are out for a Valentine’s Day drink,” Mary Doran, a legal secretary from County Tyrone, tells me by the bar. “Usually we come down to the bars on Call Lane because most of our friends drink here before going to a club; and because the drinks selections are better than most of the other bars in Leeds.”
Multi coloured sperm – or if you prefer, teardrop – decorations drip from the ceiling in another Call Lane bar, and tinny house music winces out from an expensive sound system somewhere, so I head over to the Wire Club to hear the warm up set for Craig Richards.
The Wire is a dark and cavernous basement venue with a fitted a Funktion One sound system, trippy minimalist lighting, and a trigger happy finger on the smoke machine. When I walk down the club’s steps, a little after twelve, I find the first wave of eighty or so people has arrived, and the dance floor is lazy and talkative. Warm up sets are too often fluffed by over zealous support acts hoping to inflate their reputation by outdoing the main act. Thankfully, no such problems are present tonight, and Leeds resident Jonny Sleight opens the evening with rich and classy house records, before picking the pace and grit up a notch at just the right time, setting the tone for Richards’ arrival at 1 a.m.
I bump into Carl and Sarah and some of their friends by the bar, which lovingly provides tasty glasses of rum and ginger until the early hours. Carl has ditched his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves, and Sarah has abandoned her heels for something more akin to dance floor footwear. We make for some space by the stairwell next to the DJ booth, and as we arrive, Craig Richards takes over the turntables.
The club is busy – maybe a third shy of the three hundred allowed. There is space to move, yet the atmosphere is vibrant. Richards’ trippy set – a wide reaching selection that spans Detroit techno, proper minimal, house, and disco – clatters off the Wire's walls, but the always crystal clean Funktion One’s allow Mike give me further insight into Leeds.
‘’Last year, we jumped on the train to Leeds for Louche whenever we could. It just wasn’t happening in Manchester, and the lads were putting on serious lineups on a regular basis in Mint.” (Louche recently migrated to London, and The Mint Club is one of the most popular Leeds clubs, adorned with a lighting system much like the Watergate’s in Berlin.)
‘’So the line ups do make a difference?’ I say.
Mike takes a sip of his whiskey and coke before replying: ‘’Yes and no. Like Sarah said, Leeds does put on some big DJs and producers. There aren’t many places where you can hear Ame, Andres and Roman Flugel in the same night – and look at Richards ripping it up now,” he paused, “which is great – but Leeds is more than that. The people here are sound and like a proper party, and some of the residents are as good, often better than many of the famous guests. Check out Bobby O’Donnell later mate.”
I leave Mike by the DJ booth as samples from Prince’s “All The Critic’s Love You In New York” creeps into Craig’s set (Moodymann’s “You Can Dance If You Want To”), and go outside for some air. This is a snapshot of one night in Leeds, but I do not see, thankfully, any sign of the loutish behaviour that plagues many a British Friday night. Outside the club at the end of Call Lane, hundreds of people mill past the impressive one hundred and fifty year old Corn Exchange building, and the mood is relaxed. Spending time here, one feels in a city not unlike London – it has a multifarious population, drive, and ingenuity, as well as a strong sense of self. Loiners themselves come off as people who look after each other, and take no shit in the meantime; and though there is a wonderfully infectious, and cavalier attitude to partying, one gets the impression it is time well earned.
Not long after I go back inside, Bobby O’Donnell, a tall puppyish man with long hair and a stripy sailor top, takes to the decks to play back to back with Craig Richards till close. O’Donnell, a Blackpool native who lives in Leeds, releases impressive tracks on Strobe Wax, Mora Music and Catch Records, spins as a resident for System, another Leeds promoter, and looks unfazed playing deep techno with Richards in the early hours of Saturday morning. By 6 a.m., am the crowd has thinned to just a small gathering of the strong. Some men circle the small crowd like mako sharks around a bleeding carcass, women wearing pensive Bridget Jones stares. Most just dance in the dark and the smoke till the music stops. Later I speak with a polite and dapper Craig Richards, who tells me, “Leeds is probably the best city in the UK outside of London to party in. I always have a great time when I play here; it really has it together.”
Exhausted, Mike and Sarah say goodbye and head for an early train to Manchester, but a chipper, moustachioed Essex man, also called Mike, invites me to an after party. Not given to bad manners, I gladly accept his offer, and must here, thank him and all involved in what turned out to be a lovely time. Like it, or not, in major cities, clubbers expect to be able to see the world’s biggest acts at some time or another. And Leeds serves this demand. But proper parties are built around friends, old and new, community, and great music; things which, I sense, on the train home across the Pennines, Leeds knows wel.