A Love From Outer Space, the club night that celebrates music that never goes above 122 BPM set up by the late DJ / producer Andrew Weatherall and his musical friend of over 30 years, Sean Johnston, in 2010 is celebrating a big birthday this year. Nowadays any club making it to just five years of age is something to celebrate, with promoters still struggling due to a potent blend of loss of earnings from Covid-19 and a cost of living crisis that is robbing their punters of going out money. Making it to 15 is a landmark, then, which is why Johnston has created a compilation that skilfully condenses the special slower house, hypnotic disco and spaced-out Krautrock vibes of the ALFOS – as it’s affectionately known by regulars – dancefloor by celebrating past anthems, while hinting at where it’s going in the future too.
Paring down a collection of music that is usually played over six hours to 19 tracks over 75 minutes is no mean feat. But then again Johnston is no mean compiler, or producer under his Hardway Bros alias, or DJ for that matter, either. His music career goes back to 1988 when his first job after moving to London from Yorkshire was as a junior booking agent for the Inspiral Carpets, amongst others. Then, Jeff Barrett of Heavenly Recordings introduced him to Weatherall amid the maelstrom of 90s acid house London and the two connected over shared tastes in the likes of Adrian Sherwood and Factory Records. The decade saw him DJing too, and releasing techno on Weatherall’s Sabres Of Paradise label, eventually accompanying the Sabres band on tour doing their merch after being unceremoniously fired from his agent gig.
The late 90s, meanwhile, saw Johnston moving away from music and placing his energies into mountaineering, a hobby he tells tQ “that has fucked my shoulders comprehensively but which was a huge part of my life for a long time – I liked the challenges, both mental and physical.” No forays into yoga or running – the usual retreats for middle-aged acid housers looking for a cleaner buzz than raving – for him then. The 2000s saw Johnston taking a day job in tech recruitment, a field he still works in during the week. Towards the end of the decade, however, he ended up giving a lift to his old acid house mentor when Weatherall had a gig in Brighton. The CDs he played on the drive, compiled for fun around the slower Daniele Baldelli-inspired cosmic disco sounds he’d recently got into via the DJHistory message board, inspired Weatherall and became the roots of A Love From Outer Space’s low-velocity music policy. They launched at The Drop (now The Waiting Room) a 120 capacity venue in Stoke Newington on 20 Many, 2010. It cost four quid on the door and they weren’t sure that anybody would come. The club caught on, however, with a Croatian festival booking within the first year
Weatherall was, as ever, doing something nobody expected, while Johnston was being dragged back into the music world, Michael Corleone-style. Well, at least on weekends, when the duo toured the club internationally, building an ALFOS community (and Facebook group) that showed that people were hungry for music that wasn’t forever getting faster, no matter what the trends may be on other dancefloors; ‘An oasis of slowness in a world of increasing velocity’ is how the duo first described the club’s vision. This appealed to a crowd that broadly splits into two camps: vintage acid housers who might have been Weatherall fans since the 90s, and the younger contingent who heard the duo at festivals and embraced both the music and the floor’s unfailingly friendly vibes. By the end of the night , they’re united under a carefully curated groove. The party has moved onto bigger venues in London like Elephant & Castle’s Corsica Studios, the Bloc Warehouse in Hackney Wick, regular gigs at Brixton’s Prince Of Wales and over the road to Phonox. A Glasgow residency from early doors has also seen the formation of a staunch Scottish chapter, and regular visits to Leeds and Manchester have kept the North firmly engaged. tQ has regularly met Dublin and Belfast clubbers who can’t get enough of the ALFOS vibe either.
But since 2020 that vibe has been marshalled by Johnston alone. As the world fell apart under the Covid-19 pandemic the ALFOS faithful suffered a shocking loss when Andrew Weatherall died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism at just 56. The news broke on Monday 17 February, and an ALFOS had been scheduled for that Friday night; it ended up being Johnston’s first in sole charge of proceedings. He hadn’t been sure it could go on at all, but was quickly disabused of such a notion by close friends and the ALFOS family at large. Since that night where he played at times through tears, the ever-modest Johnston has steered the ship alone, through gigs worldwide including at the Convenanza Festival in the south of France – which is inspired by Weatherall’s musical repertoire – and his own Emergency Broadcast Service (EBS) online sessions that soundtracked the pandemic for so many and continue occasionally today.
So it’s to Johnston that tQ turns on a cold winter’s day as we sit down for a very special Baker’s Dozen: instead of albums from an artist’s life we have tracks from the lifetime of a club. And because he’s a busy man and time is short, Sean picked them all out on the spot – only hesitating when he couldn’t find them on YouTube – and even emailed the links to us as we spoke. Truly one of clubland’s finest gentlemen.
A Love from Outer Space, a new compilation marking the club night of the same name’s 15th birthday, compiled and mixed by Sean Johnston, will be released on 14 February via Material Music. To begin reading Johnston’s Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Record’ below.
