This post is also available in: Nederlands (Dutch)
This week I had a chat with British house icon Gez Varley a.k.a. G-Man or 'the significant other' of LFO. About his first gig: "It only lasted thirty minutes."
“The fist gig I ever did, was together with Mark Bell as LFO, in May 1990 at the well-known Leeds Warehouse club in my birth place Leeds In the United Kingdom. We played as a part of Leeds Music Week.”
'Partner in crime'
“We played 100 % live using my 808, 303 and my Kawai K1 keyboard. My ‘partner in crime’ Mark Bell also had his own JX-1000 small keyboard. Aside from this we had a handful of small FX´s, mainly reverbs and delays, and a small Roland Line mixer.”
Four hours too early
“I remember the gig itself very well. For starters, because we turned up about four hours too early for our set. We ended up sitting and waiting outside of the warehouse club in the beautiful sunshine. We were totally nervous!”
Home city
“Anyway, the gig went really well although it only lasted about thirty minutes. We played for a crowd of about one hundred people and – Leeds being our home town – we personally knew half of them. Also, we always used to hang around in the warehouse club ourselves. Our first record, LFO-LFO, was also named after this club: The Leeds Warehouse Mix’.”
The unexpected
“We learned a lot from this gig. Among other things we learned how important it is turn up on time – although as early as we were, was a little over the top, hehe – and to always be prepared for the unexpected.”
“Little did we know that in a few months time we would have a huge global hit record on our hands and that we would be playing all over the world!”
This interview with G-Man (LFO) was originally published on DJMag.nl on November 5th 2015
Who is G-Man (LFO)?
G-Man a.k.a. Gez Varley first came to prominence as one half of the ground breaking electronic group LFO. Their first release LFO “LFO” reached number 10 in the UK charts and went on to sell 150 000 copies worldwide (1990).
G-Man left LFO in 1996 and went on to do G-Man as a solo project over the years. Gez produced some real classics under this new alias G-Man, like the “G-Man Ep” and the track Quo Vadis and he has recorded for labels like Warp, Force-inc, Gigolo, Swim, K7and White Noise to name but a few, and worked with the following producers: Mark Bell , Richie Hawtin, Karl Bartos, Marco Carola and Thomas P Heckmann.
G-Man has also remixed many people over the years including Radio Head, YMO, Art of noise, Afrika Bambaataa (Planet Rock), Laurent Garnier, Soft Ballet, Alan Wilder (Depeche Mode), AUX 88, and many others. G-Man has also played most of the top clubs worldwide, such as Nature One (Germany), Sonar (Barcelona), Berghain (Berlin), The Omen (Frankfurt), The Orbit (Leeds). Liquid Room (Tokyo) and New Music Seminar (New York).
Over a career of almost 30 years G-Man has sold over 500.000 records worldwide, not including remixes and compilations and has had his music used for two computer games and two adverts (VW Golf and the american Hummer).