Interview: Filter Sequence

Whilst sitting down with a latte in Movers to interview Steve AKA Filter Sequence, he bumped into several friends and familiar faces before I even had a chance to hit record. A true veteran of many corners of the East Midlands music scene, he is extremely gregarious, funny, and knowledgeable on all kinds of music, this has fed into his own style of house music that pulls from across the spectrum of influences… 

I decide to begin the interview by asking him about the first gig he played at Nottingham Contemporary - and funnily enough, it was for one of the guys he had just spoken to, and partially helmed by somebody working behind the bar at Movers! “So it was at Nottingham Contemporary, and it turned out that a workshop was being hosted about the production software Ableton. At first I was only meant to play for 45 minutes at the end, but I ended up being asked to do another 45 minutes. The beginning was some early Filter Sequence tracks, some of which I still do, and then there was an interval where people spoke about music technology, and then the second half I played some more dubby reggae stuff on an iPad. Then it all went quiet for a few months and then I did a set at The Chameleon when they used to have an open mic night.” 

Open mic nights, it turns out, have more generally been influential to Steve, and comprised many of his first gigs, as he used to perform at them across Nottingham, Derby, and Stoke, with the times he performed in Stoke being amongst the highlights. He states that he “Used to do a lot of open mics, and very much began as part of that scene,” but than it then went quiet for a while. However, it may have come full circle, seeing as he recently played at another open mic set at the wonderful Mist Rolling Inn, remixing the fascinating Nottingham electronic-shoegaze band TR^NKS. He’s also a fan of local post-punk rising legends, Bloodworm, with a remix of their song Cemetery Dancing being the basis for the song I am Not A Goth, and is happy to learn that they’ve been received well on their massive tour with Suede, moving up the ranks towards national notability.

Before I entered interview mode, Steve and I spent some time discussing music more generally: he saw David Byrne the weekend before the interview, and is knowledgeable on a wide variety of music ranging from classic rock, post-punk, goth, hip hop, and of course, electronic dance music. So, what influenced him to choose dance of all these avenues to explore predominantly within his own music? An early memory was of watching Top of the Pops and becoming “transfixed” by a Sparks performance whilst his dad commented on the… interesting connotations of one keyboard-banging brother’s now signature mustache. And along with this, his brother introduced him to Kraftwerk, with songs like The Robots leaving a lasting impression. The true turning point came with Sparks’ synth-heavy No. 1 in Heaven record: “I remember seeing an image on the inner sleeve of the keyboard guy, Ron Mael’s, hands all covered in wires from a Moog modular synth, and I just thought that looked so cool and that I wanted to do that someday. It ended up taking about 30 or 40 years but I did get around to it!” Along with this, Steve is a fan of the likes of Visage, and, of course, of New Order and Blue Monday. I mention to him that many have tried, but never succeeded, in replicating it, and he states that “You could sell a t-shirt with the drum pattern on, marked in dots, and people would know what it was!”

Equally, the breaking down of genre barriers is of massive interest to Steve, and influenced his fascination with dance music: “I’d be in the Leicester Students’ Union and suddenly you had very raw bands like The Fall doing stuff like Hit the North, which had drum machines, along with stuff like Pop Will Eat Itself which fused rock and electronic music quite directly.” This is also part of why he’s not interested in remixing electronic music, and would rather start with something that is “Quite like a band” to turn it into something new. Goth music’s many dimensions are also a fascination of his, being struck by how electronically reliant it has become in comparison to its roots in post-punk, and he thinks that the Sisters of Mercy are “Arguably a house music band”.

Now, speaking of the Sisters of Mercy… Steve is a little different from most of my interview subjects in that we have met once before, at a Talking Heads themed club night in this same building. My defining memory from this evening is that he told me something about having once been told that he was at risk of being sued by a former Sister of Mercy, though I was hard pressed to remember what. When asked about this, the answer was about as hilarious as you’d expect: “The thing about goths, is that you can never admit to being a goth, because then you’ve pigeonholed yourself. So I made these t-shirts which said, ‘I am not a goth’ on them, with the Filter Sequence logo (above), and I culturally appropriated… an iconic goth image, let’s say. I went to the Mist Rolling Inn to see a band called Ghostdance, which featured a guy who got kicked out of the Sisters of Mercy. I’d never seen so many goths in such a tight space. The gig was nice, and then I had people coming up to me saying that it was a nice t-shirt, and then this guy came up to me in a big leather trench coat and asked to take a picture of my t-shirt. I said yeah, and asked if he wanted to buy one, to which he very sharply said no. Then I thought, wait, he’s from Leeds - he probably knows the Sisters of Mercy! And I got really paranoid and took all of my photos down.” 

The song to accompany this phenomenon, I Am Not a Goth, has also gone down a treat, as Steve recently played it in Manchester to great enthusiasm. I ask him about where else he’s done some interesting gigs, and he mentions a place on the way to Wrexham which was “Kind of like a sex museum, complete with like dolls on the ceiling, with rubber masks looking out of the walls and things! But, the lights and sound were fantastic.”

The aforementioned sex museum gig was put on by Steve Hardaker, his partner in the Twisted Onion promotions which birthed his Club Onion night. Along with the music, it’s something he’s taken up fairly recently, building his own line of curated gigs highlighting the best bands from across various lines of music, providing opportunities for both Steve and other artists to develop their sound. The basis for the inspiration was the Mega Dog nights, which were “In the late 80s and early 90s down in London, where you used to get bands like Orbital, Underworld, and Transglobal Underground all sharing a space.” 

The first show was by the caves, at The Whistle and Flute, with a band who then broke up “That night, due to an in-band dispute”. The next Club Onion, however, proved to be less conducive to major disagreements: with the aforementioned TR^NKS then taking The Angel by storm. The wider group of people that the two Steves work with make Club Onion a community: “A guy called Brendan does the lighting, going by the name Metempsychosis Lights. I’ve known him for a while, and he’s brilliant, he’s got all sorts of machines and things.” The third Club Onion headliner was, then, the acclaimed world fusion musician Banco de Gaia, who Steve had been familiar with for a while, which was a near-instant sellout, proving that the eclectic choices of music for the Club Onion nights are continuing to go down a treat, with no genre stone left unturned. Up this month, the Club Onion show for the Essex band Sunscreem on April 11th promises to be a hit, with their brand of 90s techno being revitalised for a new audience and a new era. The Club Onion nights also, crucially, promise a wide range of attendees: “You get everybody! From students to… old people.” It’s all done by Midnight too, “So that everybody can go home and go to bed.” 

The debut Filter Sequence record, Infiltration, is now available to stream, having been released on March 20th. However, Steve is hesitant to label it as officially out due to issues with the vinyl pressing which have pushed physical releases back to May. In terms of what to expect: “It’s an 8-track album, with a lot of the stuff that’s been in my set for the last few years in its official form. I remember, when I got the test pressing through the post, I suddenly believed what people say about music sounding better on vinyl: I’m really happy with it. There’s no sort of theme or concept, it just represents what I’ve been doing for the past six or seven years.”

The album’s lead sing, More Acid, has a very intriguing story behind it: inspired by when, at an Orbital show, Paul Hartnoll declared that there was an issue with the sound system which meant that there would be, to quote, “No more acid.” In Steve’s words, “It was inspired by a massive hardcore Orbital fan - I mean, I’ve seen them about twenty times, these are people who have seen them one hundred and twenty times - this guy called Dave, who wears a red flat cap type thing, a big lad from Scunthorpe - who now just screams MORE ACID at the top of his lungs at every show that he goes to. At any gig, he just shouted it out.” Steve was then able to track down a sample of Hartnoll’s original no more acid sample, and then reached out to Dave, who was also happy to provide “About a minute’s worth of samples of him saying more acid in different ways, which came to form the basis of the track as they were such great samples!” Having passed the audition, Dave intends to join some of the upcoming Filter Sequence shows to perform the samples live. Other samples include film dialogue, and guest vocals from Amanda, of the “Bluesy, Sex Pistols-esque” band Railyard Dogs. 

To end things, Steve clarifies that the next Filter Sequence album is virtually already written, due to the amount of material he has, to the point at which he almost released a double album. He’s been overwhelmed by the positive response to his music so far, initially thinking that people were “Taking the piss” by asking for a signed copy of the vinyl, and later discovering they were deadly serious and really responding to what he’s doing. Ideas may even be floating around for the third record…

Tickets for the next Club Onion are available here, and Infiltration is available to stream via Bandcamp here

Liz Clarke

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Edited by Liz Clarke

Images provided directly courtesy of Filter Sequence