Queer Nation: US House Music for a Discerning London Crowd.
- Martyn Fitzgerald
- Jun 9
- 11 min read
Queer Nation. A one-two punch that set out its stall with no apology. Started in December of 1990 by Patrick Lilley, its offering on a Sunday night of soulful black US house in Covent Garden’s Gardening Club quickly established itself as the place to end the weekend for discerning devotees. Early 90s London offered an increasingly wide range of LGBTQ nights, many of whom like Trade took more of the limelight, but it was this small basement club that bridged the gap between what was being played on predominantly Black US gay dance floors, and their UK counterparts. In an ever-quickening exchange of ideas and trends, British and American cities imported, percolated, and birthed a myriad of new musical and cultural influences. The capital was buzzing, as was New York, with the two cities’ underground scenes symbiotically connected.
“I set foot in New York a very long time ago,” says promoter Patrick Lilley, who had been doing the UK PR for several dance acts, including Ten City and Kym Mazelle. “On my first visit I found my way to the Paradise Garage, and I got to know Mel Cheren, Frankie, and Larry Levan. I remember my last night there in the mid 80s, walking along the pier, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Queer Nation wasn’t about duplicating Paradise Garage, who could? But it was an inspiration for me both personally and professionally.”
Another of his PR clients in London was Camden rock venue Dingwalls. “It was the late 80s and it was my mission to kill rock music and replace it with club nights,” he says. “Gilles Peterson already had a day party there (his Sunday afternoon jazz dance do) and I programmed Kiss FM to take over the Saturday nights. Then the Thursdays I started a party called High on Hope with Frankie Foncett, Norman Jay, and eventually Ricky Morrison DJing.” He credits these DJs with educating him in Salsoul, Garage, and House, and acknowledges it was Norman’s on-point musical programming and his ability to convince the likes of En Vogue and Chaka Khan to perform that helped create something special. “It was small and perfectly formed, a wonderful antidote to the big house clubs of the time.”
Despite these successful club nights, Dingwalls as a venue was struggling. To help boost the club’s finances, he launched a Sunday gay party called Pansy with Daisy Chain promoter Jimmy Trindy. “It was a total flop,” he recalls laughing, “but out of its ashes I got approached by the Gardening Club to do a Sunday.” Having recently returned from San Francisco and learned of a well-known activist group called Queer Nation, he thought it a good name for a club night. He was right.
While thirty years no doubt lends a rose lens to the early years of the club, it feels that there was a serendipity to its evolvement; that the gods were willing the best for this small Sunday gathering of night creatures. This comes across in those I’ve interviewed, for all of whom Queer Nation was an important part of their personal and professional lives. Eyes lit up when remembering it as a formative experience, and the gratitude felt to have been part of it was evident. Luke Howard and Princess Julia were the first residents.
“It was just our mates for the first six weeks but then suddenly we had a queue,” says Howard. “I think a lot of that was due to the music we were playing. At that time there was a move towards harder sounds, you had Trade which had started two months before. I was much more into the soulful, New York sound and I think we were the only gay club playing that.”
Despite its reputation as a house night, Howard says slower club music and some disco would be played, a harbinger of his future at Horse Meat Disco. When it came to house, however, he offers props to his fellow resident. “Julia was so good at getting promos and buying imports. She was obsessed with that music and often had great records no one else had. We were both vinyl junkies. I used to spend all my money at Black Market or Catch a Groove Records.”
If music moves the spirit, his own six week visit to New York in the summer of 1991 proved to be an awakening. “Frankie Knuckles was doing the Sound Factory as Junior wasn’t playing, and there was Shelter with Timmy Regisford. I went to those clubs religiously that summer and it was such an inspiration hearing that music in its home,” says Howard. “It helped me see that the music I loved had a big and important story behind it. To know that those people dancing at the Shelter would have been at the Garage and then hearing Timmy mix disco, I’d never heard it mixed like that before. It’s giving me goosebumps now remembering it.”
Heavily inspired by the Paradise Garage, and with the best sound system in London, Ministry of Sound became a home from home for the biggest names in US house music. “Queer Nation was already on a roll on Sundays, but then the Ministry opened, and we started to get the big American DJs play at Queer Nation,” says Howard. Legendary industry figure Lynn Cosgrove, who was involved with the club at the time, supported Queer Nation by inviting visiting DJs to play unannounced. “That’s how I ended up playing with Frankie Knuckles when I was 21,” says Howard. “We had Louie Vega, Tedd Patterson, Kenny Carpenter became a regular, Francois K, Norman Jay was already playing regularly. These were all mine and Julia’s heroes.” To have these prestigious names playing a small basement gay club with an appreciative, mixed crowd of house lovers, was what made those nights so memorable. As the buzz grew, the tiny stage would come to host PAs from Ultra Naté, Barbara Tucker, Michael Watford, Juliet Roberts, Sharon Redd, Colonel Abrams, Martine Girault, and the fabulously filthy mouthed Candy J, aka Sweet Pussy Pauline.
One memory of another vocalist stands out. “Joi Cardwell, who had a lot of records out back then, came to perform. What we didn’t know because she wasn’t credited was that she was the vocalist on Lil Louis’ Club Lonely, which was a huge Queer Nation anthem. We were expecting her to sing Hot Little Body and some of her tracks that we knew, but she came on and started with, ‘Miss Thing, there is no guest list tonight!’ I cannot tell you the response; everyone went ballistic. She was almost drowned out with everyone cheering and going mad,” Howard says, breaking into a smile. “Obviously there were no mobile phones, so people were totally in the moment. It was really about dancing, music, and celebrating.”
Reflecting on the wider context of being gay back then he says. “When I look back, they were obviously scary times in terms of HIV and AIDS. It was an unconscious thing, in a way we didn’t really talk about it, but there was this urgency to go out and release yourself on the dance floor. That music is gospel influenced and lifts you up. We needed that release from the reality of knowing that people were dying.”
Patrick Lilley recalls first meeting Queer Nation’s other resident, Princess Julia, in 1978, in the Sombrero club in Kensington. “I had mistaken her for someone else and she said to me, ‘Nah, I’m not Claire with the hair, I’m Julia.’ She was phenomenal.” An unmissable and ubiquitous presence on London’s queer scene, by the late 80s she was a resident DJ at Kinky Gerlinky, Michael and Gerlinda Kostiff’s seminal West End night where drag, extravagance, and impeccable music magically fused. She confirms Luke Howard’s claim to her love of wax.
“Oh, we were both vinyl sniffers sniffing it out and adoring the New York house coming out, but also vocal house from the UK and Europe. That was the basic formula for it. We just played the music we loved,” she says. “It wasn’t a planned manoeuvre. It was a subconscious vibe that there was a vacancy in our community for this music to flourish. I think that's why that club night was so important, because a lot of people didn't realise that the house music that had been adopted in the UK by these big clubs was coming from such a queer place. It was only if you’d had the opportunity to go and sample the delights of the club scenes in New York, Detroit, and Chicago that you got a flavour of that.”
For someone with such a long history of living the London nightlife, Queer Nation remains a standout. “It was just so brilliant. It’s hard to describe the atmosphere,” she continues. “There was something very modern about it; it felt truly underground with this fantastic energy. It was such a joy to go there and see everyone. I made lifelong friends both here and from America who had come over and performed or ended up at Queer Nation.”
One person who remembers Princess Julia well is Manchester’s DJ Paulette. “Julia actually taught me to beat match, although I don’t think she remembers,” she says. “Patrick Lilley was good friends with Paul Cons, who promoted Flesh at the Hacienda. He would come up regularly with the Queer Nation family who would all play. I was DJing in the basement called the Pussy Parlour, and I asked her how she mixed. She said to me while clapping to the beat, [Paulette does a very good impression of Julia]: ‘You just count the beats in: one, two…’” A couple of years later in 1994 she moved to London. “I didn’t really know anyone so Queer Nation was my first port of call - and I just LOVED. THAT. CLUB. It was real Black house music, it was the dancing, the energy, and racially it was a mixed crowd which was not that common at venues in Manchester back then where I was playing or going out. Queer Nation felt like finding my own people.”
Producer and DJ Ricky Morrison echoes this. “It was a very special, unique, organic situation,” he says. “I used to go the [Paradise] Garage and musically it had that vibe: different styles but encompassed into one feeling the DJ was expressing. We were all schooled in that: you play music to generate an energy. It was all about programming. We were trying to create an atmosphere and Jeffrey Hinton (regular DJ alongside Luke and Julia) was the master of that. He’d play everything across the board in a unique style.” Morrison says back then some straight people were wary of gay clubs, holding the idea that people would either think that you were gay or you’d be hit on. “Besides not giving a fuck about what people thought, it just wasn’t like that. It was a very relaxed situation. A gathering of like-minded people enjoying amazing music and just getting down.”
DJ Heidi Lawden was heavily involved in the Gardening Club and at the time of Queer Nation co-promoted Moist on Fridays with DJ Harvey and Ophelia on Saturdays. “I was friends with and fans of Luke and Julia, who was a rare example back then of a kick ass female vinyl DJ,” she says. “I met lifelong friends at Queer Nation, as well as a girlfriend. It was an early blueprint of the more inclusive nights we see now in Glitterbox and Horse Meat Disco, a proper melting pot of people.”
A long-time regular at Queer Nation and someone who recently celebrated his 54th birthday at my own club Handsome is Marc Thompson, HIV awareness campaigner and organiser of Black & Gay, Back in the Day. “Many of the clubs back then were still quite racist with door policies that reflected that. As a Black person you often felt unwelcome, or fetishized, sometimes you’d be the only Black person in the club,” he says. “As well as being predominantly white, most were almost exclusively cis male. Queer Nation wasn’t like that. It was genuinely what we would now call inclusive. There were women there, trans people, people who today might identify as non-binary, people of different ethnicities. It was London’s most diverse club. There was no attitude, people were there to dance. There quickly established a family feeling with Colin and Danny on security and Paula [Harrowing] on the door. It was renowned for being open to anybody, and that continued for years.”
The Sunday night grew for several years before developments brought new challenges. Due to the Gardening Club’s licence the party was more akin to a tea dance, starting at 7pm with alcohol not being served after 11pm. However, as more people came those serving hours were stretched to meet demand, so when the venue got raided on a Saturday night the management, fearing repercussions, enforced the legal time limits. For those turning up later and used to getting a drink, it was a can of Coke or water. This coincided with the opening of Mr. C and Layo Paskin’s venue The End in 1995. Just a few minutes’ walk away and with a late-night alcohol licence, the gay weekly Sunday party DTPM moved its residency there, and then numbers at Queer Nation quickly collapsed.
“We limbered on for an awful year with dwindling numbers,” says Lilley. “People were angry because they couldn’t get a drink. We served vodka jellies but that doesn’t quite do the trick.” Nevertheless, like his unsuccessful attempt with Pansy at Dingwalls inadvertently leading to the Gardening Club, a failed Thursday night at Wayne Shires’ Brixton venue Substation South resulted in him being asked to do a monthly Queer Nation on a Saturday when a promoter left. “It immediately took off and we soon went weekly,” he says.
With a 6am licence, the Brixton version kept its musical roots but morphed from tea dance to late-night sweatbox with Jeffrey Hinton playing more regularly alongside the original and new residents Super Don, Paulette, and Francesco Simonelli, who tragically died of AIDS in 1997. American guests like Tedd Patterson, Kerri Chandler, and Kenny Carpenter would continue to keep the house faithful happy, while emerging UK garage spinners Matt Jam Lamont, Ramsey & Fen, and Spoony brought a new flavour.
This second phase of the night ran for several highly successful years until, once again, developments beyond any promoter’s control changed the scene’s landscape. With the emergence of Vauxhall as London’s LGBTQ all-weekend party parlour in the early 2000s, its gravitational pull of multiple all-night venues, a sauna, and the option to pinball from one venue to another proved too much competition. The night moved venue several times before spending its final eight years hosting the house room at Lilley’s Urban World.
“Overall, it ran for 25 years,” says Lilley. “It wasn’t all plain sailing by any stretch of the imagination. You’d have times when Vivienne Westwood and Prince were turning up and it was very, very trendy, and then you’d have periods of being unpopular and not making any money.”
More than 30 years after it opened, Queer Nation leaves a lasting legacy. We end by talking about my own night Handsome, itself an homage to what Queer Nation was and just one of a host of parties who owe a debt to what Patrick and his friends created. “I think Queer Nation was the custodian of that vibe for a very long time, far longer than I expected,” he says. “We weren’t the first multiracial alternative gay night, others had existed prior to us, but we happened to inhabit a time when there was an explosion of the best music in the world and our DJs knew it and had access to it. They also understood the long heritage that came with it and so had much joy to play with.”
Footnote: it’s not lost on me that trying to incorporate a quarter of a century of a club’s existence in an article is an impossible ask. Those I spoke to had so much more to say than what is included here; editing was a brutal task. I’m also aware there are others who should be quoted and acknowledged who are not. Doubtless thousands enjoyed Queer Nation over the years, and each person will have their own memories. My hope is that what is included here gives a flavour of its uniqueness, impact, and its special place in London’s LGBTQ history and the wider (Queer) House Nation.
This article was first published in Faith zine summer 2023. Photos in original article courtesy of Luke Howard.
Comments