Acid Klaus interview – “Dance music is fun, but it has this dark side…”

Adrian Flanagan aka Acid Klaus invites you to step on his travelator

“It’s very, very fucking miserable right now,” Adrian Flanagan opines in his distinctive Salford accent while nursing a pint. We’re sat in the beer garden of a pub in Kelham Island, Sheffield, a short stone’s throw from his recording studio. A few days have passed since Liz Truss started her ill-fated, short-lived stint as Prime Minister, and midway through the prescribed period of national mourning announced to mark the death of Queen Elizabeth. We’re meant to be talking about his latest project, a brilliant concept album under the alias Acid Klaus, but the conversation has already wandered off-topic.

“There’s no democracy,” he asserts. “It’s fading out now. We’re becoming a police state. There are venues shutting down, pubs can’t pay their bills and you get arrested for protesting. Nobody can express an opinion, though it’s fine if you’re a nonce and your mum’s paid somebody off with millions of taxpayers’ money.”

Like his late, great friend Richard H Kirk and many others in the DIY-driven Steel City music scene he’s been part of since the mid 1990s, Flanagan is not shy about expressing his opinions. While much of the time he does this with a smile on his face and a glint in his eye, he’s finding it hard to conceal the rage bubbling below the surface.

“People have been laughing at us and have been doing that for ages,” he says of the state of Britain in autumn 2022. “With the Tories, I always find that when they make a mess of things, they put a woman in charge to take the brunt of the public’s anger. They did that with Theresa May and are doing that now putting Truss in charge. She’s a fucking idiot. Put her in charge then old Boris, the clown prince of bumble, will be back, or someone just as heinous.”

Ever since he swapped Salford for Sheffield in the early ‘90s, Flanagan has been one of the Steel City’s more interesting, adventurous and eccentric artists – a musical magpie whose musical output has been marked out by a string of collaborations, oddball bands and conceptual projects that tap into both his punk roots and a deep-held love of his adopted home city’s stoic, quirky and often self-referential musical output.

“It’s a city that makes eccentric pop music in general and that goes right back,” he says before taking another swig of his pint. “Projects like the All Seeing I and I Monster which were in some ways pop but also quite odd, were very inspiring for me when I first came to Sheffield.  The All Seeing I album, Pickled Eggs and Sherbert, was big for me, because it was the same core group of people writing the tunes, but they got different people in to sing and pulled in some unusual collaborators.”

When Flanagan first hit the Steel City, following years spent in bands (including, most bizarrely, a stint playing guitar for the Fall when he was just 15 years old), he bagged himself a job working in some rehearsal rooms near Sheffield United’s Bramall Lane stadium. The All Seeing I, who were preparing for a live tour which included guest spots from collaborators including the Human League’s Phil Oakey and Steel City icon Jarvis Cocker, were frequent visitors.

“They were rehearsing downstairs and I was sat upstairs trying to make a tune, but the buzzer kept going off and I’d have to go down and open the door for Phil Oakey and Jarvis and people like that,” he remembers. “It was doing my head in to be honest. Then Dean Honer from the band came upstairs and spotted that I was working on a tune. He asked me if he could have a listen. After I played it, he said it sounded pretty unusual and cool. He then said, ‘I’m going on holiday for a week – you can use my studio if you like’ and gave me the keys.”

It was the start of the defining musical relationship of Flanagan’s career. On his return from holiday, Honer enjoyed what he heard – including the track ‘Rock and Roll Is Dead’, which he suggested the pair re-make with Oakey on vocals. Released under the Kings Have Long Arms alias, the track brought Flanagan his 15-miniutes of underground fame.

“I fucking hated electroclash, so in interviews I always described our style as ‘northern electro’,” he laughs. “Really, it was an eccentric electro-pop kind of thing. All the people I recruited to be in the band weren’t musicians, they were just the biggest show-offs I could find in local clubs – people who were just happy to dance around in their underpants. I was taking the piss out of what was popular in London, but ended up in I-D, Dazed and Confused and the Face. All of a sudden, I was really trendy and getting asked to do gigs all over Europe. I was really suspicious of it all.”

Just as he’s done on numerous times since, Flanagan changed tack. Alongside Honer – who he describes as his “left arm” – Flanagan formed the Eccocentric Research Council and started making odd, conceptual music out of vintage synths, ancient electronic instruments and (on fantastically titled 2014 set ‘Magpie Billy & The Egg That Yolked (A Study of the Northern Ape in Love)’) the spoken word vocals of actor and fellow socialist Maxine Peake.

Since then, the pair have continued to work together on a variety of bands and projects, including psychedelic and glam-rock inspired band the Moonlandingz (a collaboration with Fat White Family), and their own synth-pop combo International Teachers of Pop. Honer has also lent a hand on Flanagan’s new project, Acid Klaus, which sees the Bard of Brammall Lane (as we should perhaps now call him) give his take on dance music and DJ culture.

While Flanagan is no stranger to dance music – he was an enthusiastic back-street break-dancer as a kid and started attending acid house parties and raves in the late ‘80s – the Acid Klaus project is still a surprise twist in a career that has been marked out by restlessness and musical reinvention.

“It started in lockdown,” he says of the conceptual project. “Like everyone else, I started listening to my old records again. It made me fall in love with music again after a really tough period when my gran died and I struggled with the grieving process. I was listening to my old Street Sounds Electro compilations and that inspired me to start some tunes.”

After completing the first track, he sent it to his friend Maria Uzor of post-punk outfit Sink Ya Teeth. She added lyrics and vocals in her distinctive style. The result was ‘Party Sized Away Day’, a fabulously sleazy, stylish and strutting fusion of body-popping drum machine hits, TB-303 acid lines, MK style organ bass and wayward, post-electroclash sonics. “After that, I could visualize what I wanted to do,” Flanagan explains. “I knew what I wanted the album to be – a story but set to tracks that are almost a history of electronic music. That meant I could direct people in terms of what I wanted them to write about lyrically.”

That story is pleasingly universal, in dance music terms at least: the rise and fall of a superstar DJ, set before, during and after the pandemic, featuring songs that offer a biting commentary on the excesses of nightclubs, superstar DJ culture, and the way fame changes people. A big concept, with an equally large name to go with it – Step On My Travelator: The Imagined Career Trajectory Of Superstar DJ & Dance Pop Producer Melvin Harris

“It starts with ‘Step on my Travelator’, which is about getting on a coach and going to a rave when you’re a kid, not knowing where the fuck you are,” Flanagan enthuses. “The next track, with Maria, is all about being at that rave, then on the next track our lead character is DJing at a free party in Wales and some Welsh lass, played by Cat Rin, gets on stage and sings over his set – but what she’s actually saying is this stuff about the English stealing her country and culture. As the album goes on, the lead character gets a crossover hit, becomes big and goes to Ibiza.”

As you’d expect, it gets darker from there. “Then there’s the bad drugs, bad people thing, where you meet all these dodgy characters,” Flanagan says enthusiastically. “You fall into this nightlife scene where you start to lose your head a bit. Dance music is fun, but it has this dark side.”

That dark side is dealt with brilliantly on the album, with the music becoming more muscular and paranoid – all big-room riffs, booming beats, angular and metallic Steel City electronics and twisted TB-303 acid tweakery. It mellows a bit as the album wears on, tracking the inevitable comedown and fall from fame of its aging lead character, with more traditional-sounding tracks featuring Richard Hawley and Maxine Peak (just two of the numerous guests who appear) offering a bittersweet conclusion.

“The album goes from living the highlife, to destroying your life, to hitting lockdown,” Flanagan confirms. “It thought it was important to reflect that because lockdown destroyed our industry. I found it hilarious to see all these DJs doing streams from their kitchens on Instagram and Mixcloud. I wanted to take the piss out of the people who were doing that and taking themselves too seriously. You know, ‘I used to be a DJ, now I just DJ in my bedroom’. The album ends with the character stepping away from it all because he wants out, which a lot of people do when they’ve made enough money.”

While the story arc works and provides the album with a framework – and opportunities for various singers to make their own contributions to the overall narrative – it’s the authenticity of the music, a kind of heavily stylized, full-throttle blend of jacking house, Chicago acid, dystopian electro-pop, post-punk attitude and bustling NYC electro, that makes it much more than an exercise in cultural commentary. It’s fun, basically, and there are countless cuts on Step On My Travelator that slap hard in the club.

There’s also one other key detail: the name of the ‘character’ at the heart of the journey is Melvin Harris, though Flanagan is keen to point out that the story wasn’t specifically inspired by the adventures of a similarly named EDM superstar. “It’s not a dig at Calvin Harris,” he asserts. “I just thought it would be quite funny to call my character Melvin Harris. I know nothing about Calvin Harris, though some of his pop hits are horrendous. Not my thing, but god bless him.”

Matt Anniss

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