In 2025 A Love From Outer Space will celebrate 15 years of parties, festivals and events. To commemorate the occasion, Flight Commander Sean Johnston has put together a cracking compilation, preorders for which went up a couple of weeks ago. The album comes with comprehensive sleeve notes, penned by Sean and respected journalist Tim Murray. If you’re quick / lucky these come in the expanded form of a fanzine. In his essay, Tim colourfully covers the history of ALFOS, but here Sean shares a few top tunes from each of the venues that the “gnostic sonic” phenomenon has called home. 

Sean and I also talked a lot about how the ALFOS “aesthetic” evolved, keeps evolving, and that conversation will be posted closer to the compilation’s release date. 

THE DROP (STOKE NEWINGTON)

We were at The Drop for about a year. 2010 to 2011. It just got so out of hand. About 80 people turned up for the first one, but after that it was a roadblock. It was an utter scrummage. The party was really popular, but it was also the only place in Stoke Newington that was open after after midnight. So we’d get this kind of rush at 12:30. This is a funny one. One night this guy turned up and he wasn’t into it at all. He was like, “What the fuck’s this? what you playing at? Can’t you play some proper music?” Andrew looked at him and said, “Look, mate, how much did you pay to get in?” The bloke said a fiver. Andrew put his hand in his pocket, gave him a tenner and told him to fuck off. The bloke just stared at him but then burst out laughing. 

Richard Wahnfried / Time Actor

When Andrew and I started thinking about what ALFOS was going to be, what it was going to be like, at that point in time, there was a fair bit of slow music, but there wasn’t the shitload that there is now. So I’d started digging amongst old stuff that I felt was kind of cosmic and hadn’t been been over played, and I came across Time Actor. It has Arthur Brown, from The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, absolutely out it, doing a 10 min of freestyle about time and relative dimensions in space. It’s fucking bonkers.

The Undisputed Truth / Ball Of Confusion

This was one that got played early on at The Drop. I put the Love & Rockets version on a DJ History mix years ago, but I didn’t know this one existed.  Even Andrew didn’t know it. 

We used it to start one of our Electric Elephant boat parties, and Andrew also played at a Primal Scream gig, when the band started touring again, so it’s very reminiscent of that time.

M / Pop Musik (Todd Terje Mix)

We can’t talk about tunes at The Drop without Todd Terje’s edit of Pop Musik. I remember putting it on, and Andrew just looked at me.. I got this kind of stare / glare with the eyebrow raised, as if to say, “What the fuck are you playing at?” and then the acid bit came in and there wasn’t a single person who wasn’t going nuts. 

Teengirl Fantasy / Cheaters (John Talabot Remix)

This was one that Andrew found, and it became an end-of-the-nighter at The Drop for time immemorial. It’s still one that I can play and people just go absolutely wild.

Hardway Bros / Mania Theme (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

THE GARAGE (ISLINGTON)

The garage was a one-off. It was a Fred Perry-sponsored event, run by our old mate, James Baillie. He’d been hired to a curate a series of these things. The Drop’s capacity had been around 120. The Garage was 1000. We were like,”Hold on. We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

Brioski / Radio Anatomy (Emperor Machine Remix)

This was one of Andrew’s selections. I remember asking him at the time, “What the fuck is this?” and he said, “I don’t really know. It’s an Andy Meecham remix, but it’s by somebody called Brioski.”

So I tracked Brioksi / Claudio down on Facebook and sent him a message, telling him that we’d been playing his record a lot and asking him if he had any more. He said, “Yeah, I’ve got quite a few. I’ll send you some demos.” These included Late Night, which went on to be an absolute fucking out and out ALFOS classic, and Hey, Gringo!

I was signed to Throne Of Blood at the time, and when James Friedman from the label asked me if I’d heard anything good? I said, “Fucking hell have I heard anything?” and put him in touch with Claudio.

CORSICA STUDIOS (ELEPHANT & CASTLE)

We loved that venue, and Adrian Jones, who runs it, is a really really cool guy, really, sweet guy. I like him very much. However the problem with Corsica is that you’ve got one main room which is reasonably sized, and then a back room, which is a bit smaller. About 500 people in total. The issue was that the main room wasn’t quite big enough for the amount of people that wanted to be in the main room. 

The residency was interesting, though, because we could book other people. We had Dan Avery, Mugwump, Ivan, Optimo, D’marc Cantu, Trickski… but running ALFOS as a 2-room operation never really worked. Even though the guests were great. Everybody wanted to be in our room, locked into that journey from start to finish. 

Brioski / Calling 626

There was another track amongst those Brioksi demos called Calling 626, which Andrew played loads, and actually reminds me most of Corsica Studios. I’ve put this on the new comp.

(Previously unreleased, the comp is the only place you can get this – Rob)

Trickski / Pill Collins

BLOC (HACKNEY WICK)

We were here quite a while. Must have been 2015, 2016. It was a big, old warehouse, with shuttered windows that opened up onto the canal.

Spike / Sometimes (Sexican Remix)

Erkin Koray / Cemalim (DJ Steef Edit)

This came on a really nice 3-track E.P. which also featured Pete Herbert’s edit of Pat Metheny’s Are You Going With Me? 

Blancmange / Living On The Ceiling (Pete Herbert Remix)

I’m looking at my Rekordbox. Fucking hell. You would not believe how many records that Pete Herbert’s made that we’ve played.

ELECTRIC ELEPHANT (CROATIA)

We DJed at Electric Elephant a few times. We did one when it was in Petrcane, and then 1 or 2 when it was in Tisno, and then it stopped, and turned into Love International.

Kolsch / Der Alte

Massive piano thing from a boat party. We played it at the end.

Andrew found it. 

LOVE INTERNATIONAL (CROATIA)

The original plan with Love International was that one year we’d do ALFOS and the next Andrew would play solo, so at the moment I do one year on, one year off. I’m there in 2025, but I didn’t do it this year. I did Dekmantel Selectors with Vladimir  (Ivkovic) instead. We did a boat party where me and Vlad played very, very slow stuff, which was fun… and then we did the main stage, where we played absolute out and out bangers, which was also very good fun.

Tom Demac / Serenade

This is one that I found. Someone sent it to me literally the week before, and I thought, “This one’s going to cause absolute devastation”, and lo and behold, it did. My dear friend Arturo Capone got a video of it.. and it’s just really moving.

THE GOLDEN LION (TODMORDEN)

The Golden Lion Pub in Todmorden is an incredibly important community / arts hub. It’s somewhere that Sean once described as “a cross between a school disco and The Wicker Man“, and has paid tribute to as The Summerisle Trio and then The Summerisle Six.

Blondo Connolly / Last Night at Bagno 36

This was from one of the summer solstice parties. I’d had it for a while but hadn’t played it out before, the moment felt right and it took the roof off. Nice Italo mood for a summer’s night!

If I remember correctly that was followed by this…

Anders Ponsaing & Claus Højensgård / The Man With The Red Face

“Don’t fear the cheese”, Andrew once advised… A beautiful Balearic spin on a stone cold classic. Big with the valley people and sun worshipers!

Falk And Klou / UFO (Andi Hanley Rework)

Given Todmorden’s long and illustrious history of alien abduction and UFO sightings, this one always proves popular.

BERKELEY SUITE (GLASGOW)

This is practically a residency. I’ve played the Berkeley Suite probably more than I’ve played anywhere else.

Glass Candy / Warm In The Winter

COVENANZA (CARCASSONNE)

It’s crazy but Covenanza has been going  for 11 years now.

Frankie Goes To Hollywood / Welcome To The Pleasure Dome (Fruitness)

From me. 

Red Axes / Der Sexa

From Andrew. A smashing edit of Shocking Blue’s Love Buzz. 

This caused utter devastation.

PHONOX (BRIXTON)

We throw the parties at Phonox once every couple of months. When we came back after the lockdowns, the venue was in dire financial straits, so they suggested doing some day time parties. These run between 4 and 10PM, allowing them to do another party afterwards, and try to recoup some of their losses. So I kind of split it. Now we do some day parties and some night parties. It works works really well with our crowd.

There’s there’s so much history involved in Phonox. For me the place is now so emotionally charged. They initially invited Andrew to do a kind of month-long residency, where he played every every weekend for a month, inviting various guests. I think he did one with Ewan Pearson, he might have done one with Ivan (Smagghe), but for one of them we did ALFOS. After that Phonox asked us to do ALFOS on a regular basis. To be honest, looking back is hard, but I’ll give you a couple of recent ones. 

Radio Slave / Strobe Queen

Massive massive Phonox record. Matt Edwards sent this to me and Dean, his manager, was there in the night, and he got video of me playing it. The place went off. It just erupted. 

Yame / As I Ran

Another huge Phonox record. I was playing at We Out Here, and Leo Zero came to pick me up in his van from the train station. He said, “You’ve got to hear this. It sounds like a fucking Yello record.”

It’s these Israeli guys. It’s got this mental slowdown in the middle of it – French Kiss style – and then it comes back in, and all hell breaks loose.

Mugwump / Boutade

This is something that we played right at the start, at The Drop, and that I still play today at Phonox.

Released on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, A Love From Outer Space // A Compilation can be ordered directly from Material Music.