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Transcript (edited for ease of reading) 

 

I met Dave Shooter a few years ago through the Lancaster Jazz Festival. He's the Exec Producer of the festival and I'm the photographer. But I was also aware that Dave is involved in the electronic music scene, but the live performance side of things, a side that I know less about.  I'm more involved with club music and club events but this music often has a different feel. You go along and you sit and listen often, and it can be from the more ambient end to a more driving 4 to the floor beat as well, but there's not usually a dance floor, or at the ones in Lancaster at least. It's a different immersive experience, and I know this now because I went along to one of Dave's Hymns for Robots nights at the Golden Lion recently. I absolutely loved it. I am now a fan of electronica and the live performance side of electronic music as well. I was fascinated by the range of interesting and intricate equipment that lies at the front of the room. I would highly recommend going along, and I had this chat with Dave before I went along and wanted to find out more about this scene. It's definitely different and I learnt a lot, and we ended the interview wondering whether there was a crossover between the more traditional club nights and the electronica live performance nights. Who knows?
At the end of this project, I would love to get everybody in a room together to see what unfolds and what collaborations could happen. So thank you so much, Dave, for this interview. I hope you enjoy.

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Welcome Dave.
Thank you for coming to talk about electronic music. I was having a look at your Instagram in preparation, and I found a great phrase. So you'd had an event recently. It said; “we had a very lovely and accidental gathering of some of the awesome promoters who help make life beautiful on the North West DIY underground electronica scene”, so I wanted to ask you first: What is electronica? How would you define it?

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Oh, grief. I suppose what I was referring to is the live electronic music scene, but electronica is a very broad term that encompasses pretty much whatever you want it to

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Great and tell us about your connection with the live electronic music scene. Where did it start and how has it evolved?

 

I've been a musician for many, many years, and my journey into electronic music started relatively recently. It came out of composition. I was using computer tools to compose for a band I was in, and as the band became more ‘modern electronic’ sounding as it had more influences like that coming into its music. It came from me being a slightly over obsessive about a band called Nerve, who are New York based live electronic music trio: drums, bass and keyboards, and I was trying to bring elements of that into my music.

I'd been composing on a score writing programme called Sibelius, and I needed to compose using digital audio workstation (DAWs) to try and get that more electronically sound. I tried a couple out and I landed with one called Ableton and it was love at first sight. I felt a natural affinity to it straight away.

I then composed the band with that and started using that with the band live, so I'll be playing bass and having Ableton running at the same time. It was great fun. When something went wrong, I would become the bass player because that was what I've got decades doing and that's what I'm comfortable with. But then I thought, wouldn't it be really cool if I could get out of jail ‘live in the moment’ with electronics as well on stage, rather than going, “OK, I'll just play bass and pretend there's nothing wrong.” So I decided to make music with just the electronics and ditch the bass, and do a project like that.

I was working with the keyboard player from Kollega (the band I was in). That was Leroy Lupton, from Good Boy Nico, and we had a duo which we called Kollega Electronic. We did a gig at More Music - Ben very kindly let us play based on the fact he knew who we were and it was great fun.
We thought we'd do some more and thought “where do you do live electronic music?” You can't go and play the Stonewell Tap and do two 45 minutes of covers or at the John O’ Gaunt or that sort of thing. It just didn't feel right and it wouldn't work.

So we thought “OK, maybe if we got 2 or 3 acts to play and put a night on, that might be quite interesting”. I was in the Golden Lion chatting to John who runs the pub and I told him I've got this idea for this live electronic music night but it’s not typical pub material. He said “Oh, do you want to do a regular event here?” Boom. We said yes and came up with the name “Hymns for Robots”.

It started in 2018 / 2019. I went from having no idea what was going on locally, to all of a sudden all sorts of people started coming out the woodwork saying they play.

A guy called Mark Burford (our kids who's play football together) got in touch. I knew he did PA hire and all of a sudden I discovered he's a ‘Best in Class’ UK recognised electronic musician, who lives 200 yards round the corner from me! All of a sudden there was a whole scene there.

John wanted us to do a monthly night and that's how it started. All of a sudden, artists from further away started getting in touch and we discover there is a whole UK and Europe-wide scene of  EMOMs which stands for Electronic Music Open Mic nights. They've been going for longer than Hymns for Robots. We tapped into that scene even though we're not strictly an EMOM. They’re often run quite differently. They're more like a genuine open mics where you turn up and get a small slot allocated. You set up and play in that slot and then get off the stage. And I think because we’re both from a band background, we wanted people to come and early to set up and soundcheck, and then the gig starts.

 

Fantastic. And what are you working on currently?

 

Hymns for Robots are still going. We've been through a few iterations, and we went away for a little bit and came back again in January 2024. We did, I think 15 events last year.

As well as our monthly events at The Golden Lion, we do occasional special events. A guy called James Adrian Brown from the band Pulled Apart by Horses had an EP coming out, and he wanted to do a special launch because he's from Ingleton. And we got him Kayla Painter, Field Lines Cartographer (AKA Mark Burford) and myself. And we did an evening in the Kanteena in the small room upstairs.

Then we put a couple of bigger events in the Storey and we did one in November in the Gregson, which was an all-dayer. It started at about 3 or 4pm and went through till 11pm and that was very exciting. That's the first time we'd booked somebody in who was a bigger name than we normally have. Normally everyone who's played has been friends and associates, which has been quite nice to be able to do that and we booked Scanner who we’re massive fans off. It was absolutely brilliant. It had a little more jeopardy in it because the costs went up quite significantly, but it was interesting.

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And you recently worked with Darren Andrews on the Murmuration project?

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Yeah. One of the things I do is run Hymns for Robots and the other is to perform my own thing as Guerrilla Biscuits and I do live electronic music, and I did a fabulous thing with Darren Andrews last year. Darren is an amazing local photographer who, at the beginning of lockdown, got interested in taking pictures of the murmurations of starlings. He did a book of his photographs in 2021 I think, and we did a little launch event at the Priory where I did some live music. That was an interesting departure for me. To fit in with the fact it was all about starlings and because also I felt I was taking a bit of a back seat, I took a big risk and made all the noises from samples of starlings.
Darren then progressed into making videos of Starling. Lancaster Arts had a theme of ‘flight’ in 2024 so when I heard this, I chatted to Jocelyn at Lancaster Arts and said, “Darren's done this amazing video of starlings and I'll I do a live electronic music soundtrack for that using just sounds of starlings. Would you be interested?” And she was, so we performed that in December. It was really pretty cool. It was at the Nuffield theatre which is an amazing space and lovely to play in. It all but sold out.

I was so sorry to miss it. I had flu. I was gutted. But you can get it on Bandcamp can’t you?

Yes you can buy the audio on Bandcamp.

My live performance set has changed quite a lot since then. I started digging into these sounds to make different things.  I spent about four days in August last year just hacking around with the samples I already had, making new synths, new noises and new percussion and things.

Where did the name Guerrilla Biscuits come from?

Guerrilla Biscuits comes from an Australian sort of psychedelic pop band called the Hoodoo Gurus who I was a massive fan of in the 80s, and they’ve got an album of B-sides and rarities called Gorilla Biscuits. I just thought it was a fun name although they spelled it ‘Gorilla’. We used it as a track name in the band I was in and when I was thinking of a name for this project, I just used that.

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How would you describe your sound and how do you make it?

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I basically just use Ableton and a whole bunch of midi controllers. I have toyed with using external synths and do use them at home, but I quite like keeping it ‘in the box’ for live. Although I will start using external gear in future.

You plug the midi controllers into the computer, and you can programme them so they control Ableton. So when I'm playing live, the idea would be never to touch the laptop. I have the laptop open so I can see the screen as a bit of an emotional crutch. It would be really nice just to put the laptop away. I could theoretically do this but if something goes wrong, there's a lot of mending you can do with the laptop in real time.

I've got quite a complex live setup. There's an instrument called a Push, made by Ableton and it's a bespoke instrument for controlling the software, a mixture between a keyboard (it's got lots and pads that you can play keyboard or percussion with) and it's also a clip launcher. When you've made things, you can launch the individual things with it in a different mode. So that's the brain that sits in the middle.

Then to the side I’ve got a Novation Launch Control XL, which I use like a mixing desk. I've about 16 channels on Ableton, but 8 of them are mapped to that, so they've got a volume fader, low pass and high pass filter and two sends for each of the main 8 channels.

On the other side, I've got a MIDI Fire Twister, which is a swanky little box with 16 rotaries on it. I've got that programmed to do a variety of things. The main thing it does is manage all my sends. The send tracks are from old school mixing desks and all digital audio workstations have them. You send audio to them as you put effects on them. But then you can send the tracks back into each other, but you have to be quite careful because you can end up making too much noise.

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The other super cool thing I've got is a Launchpad mini made by Novation which is a budget version of Ableton's Push. It's got 2 pages of user programmable buttons, so it's 128 buttons all programmed to control specific things in Ableton. Weirdly, that's the cheapest bit of equipment I've got, and if anyone comes and talks me afterwards, that's always the one they want to ask about because that’s the one that makes strange things happen. 

The way I set it up is quite generative so when I play live, nothing's pre-made. Some people do it, but it's relatively unusual. I'll start by making some noise and a little thing might appear and then I’ll capture that with one of the loopers. All of a sudden that potentially random string of notes becomes not random, because if you take anything and loop it, then it starts to sound really cool quite quickly. It's a lovely general concept.
I then set up loops and sometimes another loop to go along with that, and then I like play something which will inform what happens next.
I might just mash with the muting effects and try and create a sonic journey. I don't tend to play a tune.

I'll start playing and then I'll stop playing at the end of the set. So if I'm doing a 20-minute set, I'll play for 20 minutes. If I'm doing 40 minutes set I'll play for 40 minutes. I'll try and sculpt a journey through that time. There'll be peaks and troughs, creating one piece of music that hopefully ties itself together and takes people on a little journey, or a big journey.

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And you said you don't pre-make anything but do you pre-plan in any way?

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In my head I've got bunch of ways of starting and I'll just pick one of those. It's probably what I've been messing around with in the soundtrack and I'll just start with that because that the thing that was there.
There's loads and loads of options, and I won't use all the options on the gig, so the gigs hopefully don't sound the same.
A few years ago, I would start with pre-made tunes and loops and which are great, Ableton works very well like that. But I just found it wasn't massively satisfying. I felt too tied to what had been pre-made and like I was trying to recreate something. The worst example was when I had a new EP coming out and I'd spent a long time putting this live set together and organising it so I could recreate the EP live. It was a lot of work, and I played it and it just felt quite stressful. I think I'd done an OK gig, but there was no excitement for me.

I've played a lot of jazz-influenced music. I'm really comfortable with improvising and reacting and the best jazz happens ‘in conversation’ where somebody does something, somebody does something else. That's what I'm trying to do with electronics. I'm using the computer as somebody in the band and the computer is set up in a way that I can control it a little bit. I've given it some parameters that it's going to be in tune, for instance, but then something will happen that I didn't know I was going to be captured. So then I've got to react to that. Then I'll change it. The whole thing becomes hopefully a conversation. It certainly keeps me interested. So hopefully it keeps the listener interested too.

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My next question is about the response from the people of Lancaster. What’s that been like?

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With my promoter head on again, when you do a special event like the murmurations gig at Lancaster Arts, whilst it’s still a lot of effort, you can get people to come. When you do things that are more regular like Hymns for Robots at the Golden Lion, it can be difficult to get people to come out to those. Because it’s a regular event, if you're a bit tired that week or have got an early start the next day, you may think “I can't make this month but I can go next month”.
I’ve done it too. If I know there's a regular night and I've had a bad day at work or I'm just too knackered, I’ve though, “I’ll go next month”.

We've sold some of the big gigs out and then we've struggled sell tickets for others. When we did the first big gig at the Gregson, we had a lot of people coming down from Dumfries area of Scotland and around Glasgow. The guy we put on was from Edinburgh and he was saying “I can't get these guys to come to Edinburgh for a gig, but they'll come down to Lancaster!” We got lots of people from Manchester, the Wirral, South Lancs. We pretty much sold that gig out before we even put poster up locally. Sometimes it feels easier to get people to come from further afield than it is to get people to come from the local area.

What is the picture like nationally for the electronica scene? Have you got a sense of the network or where things are the hotspots of things that happen?

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As I say, there are lots of varieties of the EMOMs, and I’d say we’re at the curated end of that.
We have quite a broad church about who we'll put on but people have to apply to play. Everything's been done in advance, whereas in the electronic music open mic scene you turn up and usually, you’re on. You might have to book your slot though.
But what’s nice is that it's a really connected scene. So the gig we were talking about earlier, one of the guys who was playing runs Bleep in Manchester and he's good mates with the two guys that run Noodlr in Manchester. So they all came up together from Manchester and shared a lift.  One guy who comes regularly, runs the Todmorden EMOM. Also on the bill was a guy called Jez who runs more of a club audio interface, which is Wirral-based sort of thing, that does releases, gigs, zines, and they’ve just started a magazine as well. We’ve had people from the North Wales and Stoke events coming over. We find that the organisers go and play at each others nights which is nice.
It's a really generous scene. One of the things that struck me fairly early on is just how lovely everybody is, absolutely lovely. Everyone's so unbelievably supportive and just chilled. When you’re in a band, you run into grumpy people or people who are a bit difficult to deal with, and literally no one has been difficult to deal with.

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What do you put that down to? Any theories about that?

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I think it's the DIY element of it. One of the great things about electronic music is that you can be really self-sufficient. That's where a lot of the innovation has come from over the years. Some kid making something incredible in his bedroom on a £200 laptop, which just promotes innovation. Everyone's super interested in what everyone else is doing, because everyone likes the music.  It's not two people playing a guitar saying “oh, he's played it like that. You know, that's not quite how you should play that solo” or whatever.
If you put an electronic gig on, invariably everyone's got different gear, and even if people have got the same gear, they'll be using it in different ways. No one's been to lessons to play. People don't go and learn in a typical, formalised way that they will do with other instruments.

 

Where do you draw inspiration from? So I guess a lot of my references so far in these interviews have been the sounds from Chicago and Detroit coming to places like Manchester. You've got bands like New Order, but lots in between. You have artists like Delia Derbyshire, who created a lot of experimental sounds for TV. Yeah. Where do you draw your influences from?

 

Lots of places. People just doing interesting things. Sometimes you get excited by something and you don't necessarily try to copy directly or try to sound like, but you just get inspired by this incredible thing. There's a really wonderful set of electronic Proms from a few years ago. They had Ravi Shankar's daughter Anoushka Shankar, who's a phenomenal sitar player, and she was playing with Gold Panda. They did electronics and sitar for half the gig. Then she played with one of the Big London orchestras, but the first half gig was really stunning. They had Suzanne Ciani, who's a sound artist who plays a synth called a Buchla. I was incredible fortunate to see her live. I couldn't do anything like what she does but she’s just inspirational watching her. She's very improvised, so I lock into that improvised nature of how she puts things together.  
Delia Derbyshire, who you mentioned earlier was from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. One of the preceding artists was a lady called Daphne Oram, who was probably the first wave of Radiophonic Workshop employees. At the proms, they put together one of her pieces that had never been performed before, and it was for a particular orchestra. They created a modern version of that particular London Orchestra they went into Abbey Road Studios to play and record her music onto a series of 12“ vinyls. Then the orchestra played it live with somebody using the recordings and manipulating them using 5 Roland Tape Echo machines. And she conceived this in the 1950s! Things like that are super inspiring. It’s pushing the boundaries and that's what’s brilliant about electronic music, having loads of artists who will talk to each other and share stuff. Everyone's coming up with weird, interesting things and different ideas, and that's always really super interesting. Even if it just kicks your arse and makes you think “they're really innovating. I’d better stop just doing the same thing. How can I change my game up?” That's down to the other artists that you meet along the way.

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And collaborating with people who are in a different disciplines…

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Yeah, that's super exciting. I've got really into taking recordings and generating all the sounds from the recordings. I've also done one with recordings of sailing ships, which I did for a track for a label called Castles in Space. The EP showed stamps from the 70s which we've had ships on them, so I thought “if I'm going to do a track for that, I'll make it all entirely of samples from sailing ships”.
When the Gaia, which is the hanging giant globe that was in the Priory, Mark (Field Lines Cartographer) did a live electronic set for that and all the sounds I made were from samples from space. There’s a British Antarctic research survey and they do lots of space recordings with telescopes, and they're very happy to let you use their recordings.

The next big project for this year is with a textile artist called James Fox. He's also very into activism and he's currently doing a PhD on land and land use. We're working on the project together, which will be some sort of visual and audio immersive thing. I've bought a special new microphone and all the sounds will be made of recordings of soil. A microphone that you can put in the earth and record soil with so I'll be using that to make a lot of sounds. We’ll also go into the Forest of Bowland and make lots of recordings of ambient sounds as well.

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So how important do you think music is in activism and in telling social stories, in understanding ourselves and the world? Is that a big motivation for you?

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Yeah. I’m excited by that and I'm terrified by it, because I want to do it but I'm also strongly aware that I don't know everything. I’ve got lots of strong beliefs and attitudes but I want to refrain from standing up and shouting at people because I don't have the whole story. It needs to be a nuanced conversation with people. I'm more into trying to find a way of encouraging people to go look at something and think about something. That's where I'm at. I'm still trying to figure out how to do that.  It feels like I'm a little bit old to be trying to figure that out, but it's something super interesting. What I've found is dealing with people like James, and other artists as well, is that people from visual art disciplines are way better at talking about their art than musicians. Maybe that's because a lot of musicians haven't been trained in being musicians. Whereas a lot of visual artists have been and can talk very contextually about how their art relates to society, how it fits in, what the messages they're trying to get across.

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But like you say, it sounds like the collaborations you choose and the topics you choose are an opportunity for people to reflect on something and do that for themselves. Or perhaps read more…

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Yeah I'm probably better formed at trying to sign create signposts and help people to think, but I'm not saying I'm good at doing that, by the way. It's on my wish list to get better at doing that.

Sounds like you're doing that definitely through some interesting projects.

Let's hope so.

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We started to talk about the challenges of creating events and a scene in somewhere like Lancaster, with its unique aspects and Morecambe as well, but I know you're more focused on Lancaster. But what are some of the other challenges would you say?

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Yeah. So it's interesting to say Morecambe as well, but I've never really crossed the bridge to Morecambe other than to do gigs at More Music.

The Morecambe scene’s quite different from Lancaster scene. It seems very cover bands based and entertainment based. Whereas the Lancaster music scene has an element of that but there's also seems to be room for arts-based music. Although some of the artists that come up, will deliver some banging tunes that would have a room pumping, a lot of people who come and play will be doing more ambient, more atmospheric and more ‘listening music’ than dancing music. So we do a mix at Hymns for Robots. Some of it’s to listen to, some of it will be stuff to totally zone out to and be transported away to, and some of it will be 4 to the floor. There’s often an element of surprise and excitement at our events. Or fear and dread haha.

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But with the spaces, it's hard because Lancaster is amazing, absolutely amazing for live music pubs. Some friends who moved up here recently, their nearest town was Chichester, and there was only one pub who offered live music. In Lancaster, you lose count of the pubs that do live music. But the electronic thing doesn't fit into that. Finding an appropriate venue is hard.

The Yorkshire House had gone before I did any of this, but that would have been an interesting spot. Although it's obviously a historically a rock and indie venue, the space would have been perfect. A rectangular black box with a built in PA.
That's the biggest challenge; finding spaces and because we need a decent PA. If you put an electronic music event on, you need a decent full range sound. No point not having subs. Or some decent tops. Artists will put a full frequency spectrum together when they playing music. Not all artists, but a lot of artists will make sure there's some proper bottom ends, some tasty mids, and some super sparkly stuff. Therefore, we need a PA system that can recreate that, and have monitors so people can hear what they're doing.
If we do anything bigger, we can do it at somewhere like the Gregson, but then you've got to hire the venue and hire a PA.
When stuff is underground DIY you’re not necessarily going to sell huge amounts of tickets or you need to get the ticket price down, or make it a free event because it's more about people coming together and sharing. That becomes hard to make the economics but work, I suppose. Pablo at Kanteena is super open to it. You can do stuff at the Kanteena. And you can go upstairs there. They have  two spaces. Obviously the big space downstairs is way too big for most things we will put on anything we'd put on to dates, but the little upstairs room is the closest thing we've got to what the Yorkshire House used to be. It's a nice rectangular box with a PA that lives there. It's quick and easy to set up.

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Do you look for the smaller, more intimate spaces, or do you think a big space could work if you had the numbers?

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A big space can work because interestingly, when we came out of lockdown, Kanteena was the 1st place that opened up after the pandemic. It had the outdoor space which helped. Before it was refitted, it was just like a huge warehouse. That worked really nicely because it was the only place to go, so people would just be there. They'd generally put on a couple of things during the day. So we'd come in, around 6pm hanging, and there would be an audience hanging around from the afternoon. Then you'd get other people drifting in because it was the only place to go. The music filled the space but obviously it's a massive space.
The difficulty, I mean rightly, for their business. It's now a venue rather than a pub. But as a result, you don’t get many people popping in for a beer or just going along on the off-chance. Smaller underground events that can be quite hard.

That's the way they need to work. I totally understand why they work like that. So it's not a criticism, it's just the reality.

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And any other challenges?

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One thing that's slightly disappointed me…  I always have this stupid utopian idea that it'd grow into some sort of local collective. Our connection, I'd say is more in the UK sense. People are excited to come and play with people coming up from London to play and down from Edinburgh to play. It feels like there's more national excitement about Hymns for Robots than there is local excitement.

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Partly because of Manchester's history in raves them particularly, but electronic more broadly, is there an importance to being this close to Manchester for you?

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No not really, there's loads of places, like Sheffield. Sheffield’s scene seems massively strong, but quite based in Sheffield. Sheffield has a huge history of lots of different music, but certainly electronic music. There's loads of immensely cool stuff that happens there, and really quite innovative as well. It's great being this close to Manchester 'cause it's a big city and therefore there's more artists to deal with, more venues and spaces…

I lived in London for a bunch of years before we moved to Lancaster and if there’s something cool on, and it’s an hour away, that's fine, it's London, it's an hour away. You'd do it. Whereas in Lancaster, it doesn't feel like that. Because Manchester's an hour away, going to Manchester is like going out of London. But then the downside is obviously the trains are pants, so you have to drive. I've just always drive. But if I didn't have a car, then you're stuck because the last train back's 9:30pm.

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So what are Lancaster’s opportunities?

It's really easy to, I suppose, get anywhere.

I was going to say earlier, you highlighted how you started a scene and you found people that  you didn't know were there before. Is there an appetite for new things here?

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I don't know if this is particularly in Lancaster, but it's really interesting the people who come out of the woodwork. They like this stuff and are super excited about it. We're in the Golden Lion and  we don’t have to get a huge amount of people in there to make it feel like it's been a nice night. And again, interestingly, we’ve had some months where there's been more people who have driven an hour to be there, than there are people that have walked 5 minutes to be there.

So I feel confident that it's a good thing because people are prepared to drive.

I was speaking to somebody in the record shop the other day who came to your last event and he was singing your praises, saying it was great to find something like that in Lancaster.

It's interesting and this is maybe our failure as much as anything... people who came to the last one which was number 44 or 45, were saying “I didn't know this existed.”  It's hard to know what to do. I think this is I think this is difficult thing for promoters in the post - social media age. When Facebook originally happened, it was really good for promoting events and now it's really rubbish. But the problem is everyone just used Facebook to promote events and now we’ve lost all the other channels. I think everyone's a little bit unsure what to do. There's a massive challenge around promoting. But maybe the existence of Forty Five Records is great because all of a sudden there's something there that could be a hub. With a big venue like the Kanteena, it can't be a hub because it's only a venue when it's when it's open. For a hub, you need to have something that’s more present. Martin’s super easy to deal with, and he's super up for ideas and thoughts.

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What advice do you have for someone wanting to explore this music, this scene?

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Come to the events. Anyone will chat to you if you want to chat. If you want to chat gear you will have come to the right place.
If you're unsure about how to use things or want some help then hit people up. They will help absolutely.  There's an amazing knowledge base around. I'm an educator and teach all sorts of music, including electronic music. So you could hit people up for lessons and stuff like that.

There's loads of good content on YouTube.  

One of the things I love about Ableton but also FL studios or some of the other DAWs, is the democratisation. As I said earlier, 15-year-old kids in bedrooms can make nice, incredible music with a cheapish laptop which is brilliant.

It's also worth saying that one of the things we pride ourselves with at Hymns for Robots, is we put on new people, if you’re at that next stage. A lot of people's ever gigs have been at Hymns for Robots. So that's really cool. That's one of the reasons we're there, so we can do that. Because there's three or four artists on at each session, there's a lack of jeopardy. You don't need to be filling the room because you can just come along and give it a go.
One of my favourite one’s is last January... a guy from down the bottom end of Lancashire, who I know from various online communities, came and did a gig for us. I'd badgered him to, and he came and did a gig. He's been making electronic music for 30 years, and it was his first ever gig! I was so pleased.

And from a plugging the night point of view, we did the first ever Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan gig, who’s now a huge, huge underground electronica artist in the UK and beyond. 

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The events always go up on Facebook, and on Insta. Find the Hymns for Robots page on Facebook so you can find out what's going on with us there and on Instagram as well (and Bluesky but there are less people on there). John usually puts a post outside the Golden Lion as well.

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Thank you so much, Dave. That's been really fascinating and an area of electronic music I know less about, so I feel like I know a lot more now and I will definitely be coming to one of the gigs soon.

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One thing we haven't done, which is maybe an opportunity… but we've not really explored that DJ / live electronic crossover. We tend to just do live nights but I don’t know if there could be a crossover of the two types of events. Maybe that's the big opportunity, to explore how we can take these two sides of the of the scene and fuse them to make them both stronger, or just to make a third scene.

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Interesting thought and discussions that may ensue as a result of these interviews.
Thank you so much Dave.

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Thank you very much Ginny. It's been brilliant.