Gay & Lesbian

There’s no getting away from it. Larry Tee has been around the nightlife block more than once. The early 1980s saw him throwing down Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode records to bright-eyed drag queens at his Celebrity Club in Atlanta, and his subsequent roadtrip with RuPaul and Amanda Lapore inspired the film ‘To Wong Foo Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar’.

As New York’s club scene died a monochrome-wearing death when the 1980s gave over to the 1990s, Larry Tee fell in with the supersaturated Club Kids, putting on Love Machine and Disco 2000 parties with the scene’s infamous leader, Michael Alig, who is currently doing time for murder over a long-standing drug debt. Supremely hedonistic times, and Tee burned out the hard way. He resurfaced clean, serene and full of beans at the turn of the decade when a new sound was breaking. Feature continues

‘Out of all of them, I did live for that first wave of electro,’ he says. ‘The proceeding moments were so grim, they’d been cleaned out by the wild abandonment of the drug years. I’d much rather have the creativity and rebellion of electro. We lost a lot of tutors in the AIDS era, there was no one left to teach the kids to reinvent and so you got the drug era as opposed to culture and designers. It was a scary escape from all that, there was no continuation of creative culture.’

Inspired by the likes of Chicks on Speed, Larry Tee released his ‘Electroclash’ compilation in 2001, trademarked the name (‘How cool is it to own a word in the Oxford dictionary?’) and put on a festival that gave stage time to Peaches and Fischerspooner, among others. It took place a month after 9/11 and he lost ‘$80,000, $90,000?’, but found himself propelled into the international spotlight.

Fast forward and skip to London. Last year saw Tee put on the Outsider festival with Queer Nation’s Patrick Lilly, and he’s back this weekend to play the club. While Lilly says that ‘Queer Nation’s spiritual home is New York City,’ the guest DJs tend to reflect a more soulful house sound, such as François K and Lil’ Louie Vega. How will they take to Tee? ‘That’s what I like,’ he laughs. Why would Mr Electro do Queer Nation? ‘It’s the same thing I have in New York. I could keep playing to the converted, literally sticking to the format that everyone expects from me – that Soulwax/2ManyDJs electro rockin’ it all night long – but this is my chance to reach out to people. The big superstars like Erick Morillo and Danny Tenaglia are being paid too much to experiment. I want to shift the way they hear big room dance music. Whether I do it successfully, though, is someone else’s opinion. Anyway, a lot of music out there falls on their side and my side. A record might have a hot black vocal but an updated musical palette that puts it into my game, too.’

Flying in the face of your typical American DJ – all coma-inducing ego and no sense of humour – there’s something about Larry Tee that reaches down the trans-Atlantic phone line and shouts ‘Everything’s just brilliant!’ He’s been there, done that but can’t get enough of ‘new’. He rattles off his fave new minimal records, waxes lyrical about the maximal sound and is looking forward to (finally) putting out his album, which is, to many, way overdue. Tee’s first track was with RuPaul back in 1992, and more recent collaborations have seen him record with Princess Superstar and a seven-year-old girl. ‘To me, it’s just my love of music in general. When I get home, I want to hear some music that will turn me inside out and make me feel like I’ve had a religious experience. I’m always going to be about the next group, nor am I going to be able to stick to one sound forever. How else do I identify that 2009 is a different time than 2002?’

He’s not short of enthusiasm, so what’s with the photo? ‘I really want to be a hipster,’ he admits. ‘But I’m not, so the photo is to give the idea that I’m a bad boy. If you knew me, you would just say “Oh, he’s really sweet, see how cute he is.” My eyes are kinda squinched like I’ve been partying all night. Well, I’m trying my best to look bad. But I tell you, I’ve got more comments on that picture than any other. Some people really liked it. I’m single, can you put that in the article?’

Larry Tee plays Queer Nation this Saturday at Crash.