LFO are well and truly back, back back! Following the awesome industrial hip hop of their recent single ‘Tied-Up’ and within spitting distance of the release of their eagerly awaited second album, Paul Benney meets the Leeds lads round at Autechre’s gaff and then heads out to teach them the joys of brandy and coke...

Everyone knows the story of LFO. The one about that record, those sales, an album and then nothing. Well, not much anyway.  Another single, the appropriately titled ‘We Are Back’ eventually followed and last year an awesome collaboration with Richie Hawtin entitled LFO vs Fuse landed in DJs’ and journalists’ hands but was unfortunately never given a proper release. Shame. To be fair there have also been numerous remix projects and collaborations with the likes of Kraftwerk’s Karl Bartos, Art of Noise, Recoil (Alan Wilder from Depeche Mode), Yellow Magic Orchestra, Wire and more recently Laurent Garnier and Björk. Mark’s also been knocking out club-friendly, heads-down techno tackle under the guise of Speedjack and LFO have been playing live in places like Helsinki, New York and Zurich. So, let’s just say they’ve been busier than The Stone Roses but not as prolific as The Fall.

Mark and Gez are Leeds lads originally and both still live there but their record label Warp is based in Sheffield, so I plan to meet them there. They’re doing the photo shoot for the cover at labelmates Autechre’s house – shirts off and kitted out in leather bondage gear to go with their latest single, ‘Tied-Up’. An awesome, industrial, dirty, hip hop-style techno record with grating guitar riffs and seedy vocal samples of some girl who fancies the dominant role in bed. I think. But if the original doesn’t go far enough for you then check out the ‘Cheeky Money Slut Mix’ on the flexi on the cover. Altogether rougher, dirtier, shorter and seedier. 

Autechre’s house is set firmly in Sheffield suburbia and is decorated to match. It’s all 70s wallpaper and shagpile carpets and it’s ace. A playground for Britain’s foremost techno innovators and a handful of chosen friends. The photo shoot’s finished when I get there. Discarded bondage masks on the living-room floor and LFO’s Mark and Gez are tired and slightly embarrassed.

“We’ve been wrestling each other with our shirts off and leather masks on our heads out on the patio all afternoon. What on earth will the neighbours think?” asks Mark half seriously.

Gez borrows a fiver from Chantal, Warp’s new press officer, and we head for the local. Mark gets a round in and is straight on the quiz machine. We lose. Another couple of quid in the machine, another round of beers and still no joy on the general knowledge front. As the beers flow we all get more confident and are constantly diving in with answers that are almost always completely wrong. To be honest we’re all crap and eventually give up dejected and at the same time itching to get back on it. At this point my tape recorder should have been switched on. We chat furiously about everything. Mark and Gez rant on about the joys of Laurel and Hardy, reciting sketches like the double act themselves. Gez definitely the Hardy to Mark’s Laurel. In fact, LFO are big film fans or should I say movie fans. What I mean is that ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ is not mentioned but all the ‘Dirty Harry’ films are. Yeah, LFO are into movies. They also tell me recent tour stories about their drunken exploits in Europe. One involves collapsing on a British Airways flight which the stewardess is convinced is caused by an overdose of crazy rave drugs, but is in fact a combination of drink and superstrong pain-killers, and the other unsurprisingly involves drink, a bike, a river and one very scared techno pioneer. “I could have died,” says Gez.

Unfortunately, I didn’t turn my tape recorder on. Instead, Sean from Autechre, Chantal and a friend of theirs turned up and we got another round in. A few games of pool followed, then another pub at which point I tried to explain to the LFO duo the joys of brandy and coke. The way it initially picks you up rather than knocks you out. Anyway, I convinced them and they started to line them up. A trip to Sheffield’s newest techno club followed where, while Laurent Garnier played ‘Tied-Up’ to 1,500 techno punters, Gez went looking for some crazy rave drugs to fight off the effects of too many lagers. Anyway, the rest you can guess and the next thing I woke up next morning, found Gez with his head in his hands and discovered that Mark had already left for Leeds. A rescheduled interview was required.

The next time I meet Mark and Gez things are very different. I meet them in their home town this time and we head straight for a café to do the dirty deed – the interview. As soon as the tape recorder goes on both start shifting in their seats, their voices lower and furious chat turns into one-word answers. In some ways I have a strange liking for bands that don’t talk a good interview. For example, the Manic Street Preachers are brilliant at interviews but so is their music.  Oasis are always brilliant at interviews and so is their music. And then you get a band like Smash who are brilliant at interviews and their music is shit. One hundred thousand NME readers conned into thinking that Smash are actually interesting, they go and buy the record and realise that they’ve been conned. You know that LFO could never con anyone. They always make music better than they talk it. I like that.

So, have you actually been busy over the last couple of years, or have you just been taking it easy?

Gez: “Well we’ve been doing stuff for the album over the last couple of years. I’ve got a keyboard and sampler at my house to get ideas down and then we meet up at Mark’s studio every couple of weeks for like three or four days.

Mark: “And we’ve learnt miles more about production and recording over the past couple of years. For the first album we didn’t really know much technical stuff but now we know exactly where everything should be in the mix, like what frequency and stuff
like that.”

How did the ideas for ‘Tied Up’ come about?

Mark: “It’s a mixture of all sorts of ideas. It’s done in a sort of hip hop-style, using big loops and the guitar sound is done using a keyboard, distorting it and then pitching it down. It’s how Metallica get that really heavy guitar sound. And because it’s slow it sounds harder than stuff that’s 170bpm – when they’re that fast they lose their hardness.”

So, you don’t hate guitars anymore then? (LFO were NME’s first techno cover stars – both pictured trashing guitars).

Gez: “That was just a joke really. We never really did hate guitars; we just knew it would wind a lot of people up. And everyone did go mental – NME was flooded with letters calling us techno tossers!”

Mark: “I can actually play a guitar a bit. It’s good for thinking up melodies. When you’re playing the keyboard you know more about what you’re doing and you end up coming up with really complicated arrangements which you don’t really need, but because I can’t play guitar very well I end up strumming away and eventually coming up with different tunes.”

But what’s ‘Tied Up’ actually about?

Mark: “It’s about the way other people are tied up in life. It wasn’t supposed to be about the bondage thing. We just did that for a laugh. Other people latched on to the bondage element and we just let them get on with it.”

It’s not your ‘Erotica’ then?

“Heh, heh, heh, heh.”

So, it’s nothing to do with getting your sexual fantasies down on vinyl?

“Heh, heh, heh, heh.”

If Madonna had done it, it would have been a return to form.

“We wanted her for the video.”

Did you ask her?

“Nah, heh, heh, heh.”

So ‘Tied Up’ isn’t even meant to be about shagging. A handful of seedy photo shoots and one violent S&M video later LFO happen to mention that their latest track had no sexual connotations until their record company and titillation-hungry journalists and photographers got hold of it. This is typical LFO. They simply make the music and then sit back giggling while everyone around them frantically searches for hidden meanings, interesting angles and marketing ploys. They must think it’s all hilarious.

LFO can’t really be called an underground techno act anymore. Does it mean anything to you?

Mark: “I don’t know how you can define being underground. It’s just how you think of it. Like if you have a press photograph taken of yourself, does that mean you’re not underground? There’s different degrees of undergroundness. Like the Aphex Twin does lots of press but his music is totally underground, it’s certainly not commercial.”

So, what’s your perception of being underground?

Mark: “It’s just about being able to do what you want to do. Like when we did our first single Warp said we should do a seven-inch edit as well and loads of people said: ‘You can’t do that, you’re selling out.’ But if I was 14 or 15 and I didn’t have much money and I wanted to buy that record I would only be able to afford it if it came out on seven-inch.”

Do you think there’s a lot of snobbery attached to the underground thing?

Mark: “Yeah, definitely. When LFO went into the charts everyone started saying that we’d sold out, but it wasn’t our fault that it sold 130,000 copies. We didn’t make people buy it. People said: ‘I don’t like it anymore, I used to like it before it got in the charts.’ But to me that’s stupid because it’s still the same piece of music.”

You didn’t play live in England for a long time until recently, but you’ve been playing live abroad. Why’s that?

Mark: “Well, you get a free trip out of it that way. And in other countries people have more money and seem to be more into it. In England techno is seen as something that dickheads are into. There’s girls I know that think it’s stupid and they’re more into garage music. Over in Europe everyone’s into it, girls and lads, and they still call them raves.”

Gez: “We’ve played at some really odd ones like Carrots in Space. As soon as you walked in you had to wear a carrot in this massive building with carrots stuck all over the walls. That was in Frankfurt and the next week we played somewhere else in Germany which was run by the same promotions company. They’d fallen out with the Frankfurt people, so they had to call it Bananas in Space and everyone had to wear bananas instead.”

That’s obviously the problem with English techno clubs. There’s not enough obligatory wearing of fruit or veg. If everyone got to wear a banana a lot more people would be into it. It’s as simple as that.

So, have LFO got any gimmicks to spice up their two-geezers-twiddling-knobs live shows?

Mark: “There’s this hypnotist that Rob at Warp knows and we’re thinking of getting him to customise our keyboards so that when certain notes are played everyone will get sent into a trance. We want to get people to the point where they’ll eat whole raw onions and run around clicking like chickens.”

LFO are just about to release their second album. Within the techno world it’s as anxiously awaited as The Stone Roses album was in NME land. The reason being that lots of artists have had a go at making techno albums since LFO put out ‘Frequencies’ but rarely has anyone been so successful.

“Most people don’t put enough thought into doing dance albums they just collect together eight or ten dance tracks and stick them on one piece of vinyl,” explains Mark. “And then other people just use loads of reverb and delay and make an ambient album. It’s okay if you’re vacuuming or washing up but you can’t sit down and listen to it. That’s why people say: ‘Oh, that would be a good for a film soundtrack’, because they’re not strong enough to stand up on their own.”

What can we expect from your album then?

Mark: “Just different feelings and different moods.”

One last question. Being 23-year-old veterans like you are do you ever worry that today’s 18-year-old techno fans won’t be interested in LFO anymore?

Mark: “No. We test all our stuff out on my Mum. If she likes it we put it out. We’re not ageist.”

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