In 2010, Sean Johnston and Andrew Weatherall came together to start a night that many of the latter’s acolytes would argue is the equal of anything the much-missed musical renegade achieved elsewhere. A Love From Outer Space continues to be a fitting celebration of Weatherall and Johnston’s vision: a club with joy, magic and love at its core. Ahead of celebrations marking the night’s 15th birthday, Johnston reflects upon his memorable apprenticeship, telling Jim Butler: “Andrew didn’t leave a map, but he did leave a very strong compass bearing for me…”

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Sat in the basement of a closed Social in London’s West End on a sunny September Friday afternoon, Sean Johnston is attempting to explain the enduring popularity of A Love From Outer Space, the post-acid house club night he established with his erstwhile partner, Andrew Weatherall, in 2010. Despite being primarily attended by those closer to receiving their bus pass than being asked for ID at the bar, the always affable Johnston is adamant that the dancers in their forties, fifties, sixties, and even older, are not trying to relive some colourful or hedonistic misspent youth.

“No, it’s not like going to a retro ‘Back To ’89’ night,” he says in-between taking sips of his can of water (“we live in interesting times” he surmises). “I think there’s the music, good times, drugs, community… I think people want to be part of a gang don’t they? It’s like religion. People want to be part of something. There’s worse things, it’s better than going to, oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s not better than going to an IKEA or something on a Saturday afternoon. I don’t know, it’s very life-affirming and people get a lot of joy out of it.”

Anyone that has attended one of ALFOS’ irregular, peripatetic nights will instantly recognise what Johnston is talking about. The joy in the room is palpable; in fact, it’s more than joy. When Weatherall took the title from the A.R. Kane song of the same name, he unsurprisingly chose well, the transcendence that is almost unfailingly achieved is, without being too soppy, akin to love. Initially, this wasn’t something that Johnston recognised; he talks about being too absorbed in the technicalities of mixing “to the point of being almost oblivious to the local environment”. However, in time, this state of mind became familiar.

“I joked to my wife that regardless of where we were physically, mentally ALFOS always felt like the same place,” he explains. “I feel completely immersed in the music, in sync with the crowd. Time seems to warp and mixing feels instinctive. I’m not overthinking the technical details – everything just flows. I can feel the crowd’s energy and respond naturally, making spontaneous transitions that just feel right. There’s a deep sense of connection and I lose all self-consciousness, just being in the moment.” 

It’s quite a feeling, he says, when the lights come on at the end of the night and he’s confronted with a sea of smiling, sweating faces. He’s not looking for justification or even acknowledgement, but regardless, it’s a beautiful sensation.

“Andrew talked about it being a gnostic ritual,” he smiles. “That was maybe part of his, you know… he also said it’s just a fucking disco, but what became apparent was that it was much more than just a fucking disco. As to what it actually is, is open to interpretation, but it certainly means an awful lot to a lot of people. It makes people happy – it makes me happy.”

Although Sean Johnston seems content to have left the cosmic rhetoric to his much-missed friend, he’s happy to concede that music has always been in his blood. In the 70s, his dad was in a band, Rinky Dink & The Crystal Set, whose sole claim to fame, he says, was that they lived in the squat in Beck Road, Hackney, that was later frequented by Chris & Cosey. 

When Johnston was young his dad left the family home in Yorkshire in “fairly ignominious circumstances” and came down south. Subsequently, despite being a massive music fan – he recounts the classic teenage rite of passage listening to John Peel under the covers at night – his mum, quite understandably, tried to dissuade him from a career in music. “If I expressed any interest in playing the piano or playing the guitar her stock response was: ‘No way, you’ll turn out like your father.’ It was forbidden arcane knowledge for me.”

Eventually, the musical pull (“I come from this Northern, alternative, Factory Records, post-punk, Adrian Sherwood, Tackhead background”) proved hard to resist. After time spent at Hull University as its social secretary and his first forays into DJing upstairs at the city’s Welly Club – while Steve ‘Fila Brazillia’ Cobby and Dave ‘Porky’ Brennand played downstairs (fact fans: his first break came via Roland Gift’s sister Ragna who ran the club) – he moved to London in 1988 and got a job as a junior booking agent, where one of his first clients were the Inspiral Carpets. “As a result, I met Noel Gallagher because he was their guitar technician.” 

He also got to know arch enabler Jeff Barrett, who having left Creation had set up his own PR company, Capersville. Johnston was soon a frequent visitor to Capersville’s Farringdon HQ because they did the Inspirals’ press. “Jeff liked me,” he recalls, “because he could see I was a music fanatic. He took me under his wing a bit, introduced me to a few people.”

Indeed, it was Barrett who first formally introduced Johnston and Weatherall. “I was in the office to discuss some Inspirals bullshit and he said he was meeting Andrew Weatherall for lunch; he asked me if I wanted to come. We just hit it off, similar sense of humour, similar taste in music.” 

The pair’s first informal meeting had already happened. Not long after moving down to the capital, Johnston attended a house party in Clapham where Weatherall was DJing. Having been mildly disappointed by what he’d heard in some London clubs like The Wag (“They’d be playing LL Cool J ‘I’m Bad’ and all the old Maceo & The Macks stuff; it didn’t excite me that much”), he was pleased to see Weatherall play the likes of “William Orbit, Adrian Sherwood and Chris & Cosey”.

“All of this stuff that I heard Andrew play at this house party was stuff that I knew – or wanted to know. In my youthful arrogance I thought I was the only one who knew about these records. I thought a lot of London clubs were boring and then Andrew came along and I thought: ‘Hang on a minute, maybe it’s not boring.’”

As the 80s became the 90s, Johnston complemented his booking agent work with more and more DJ slots, “anywhere I could snaffle a gig”. This could be at the Rock Garden in Covent Garden playing music between bands or warming up for Danny Rampling, Darren Emerson and Weatherall. He started to dabble in production with some mates and took a demo tape of his techno productions to Weatherall’s office in Dean Street, “above the strip club”. Weatherall liked what he heard and put out Flash Faction’s ‘Repoman’ on his Sabres Of Paradise label. Johnston was a regular at Sabresonic and their friendship was further cemented when having been “ejected from the booking agency and moved into merchandise” he accompanied Sabres on tour doing their merch.

“It was a fun job,” he laughs. “It was a good job to have peak 90s. We did merch for everybody: Oasis, The Chemical Brothers, Manic Street Preachers, Ocean Colour Scene… Going on tour with Sabres Of Paradise is when we started to become proper mates.”

By the end of the decade, however, Johnston had ceased DJing, stopped the tour merch and had decided he was going to be a mountaineer. 

“I really got into it in an obsessive way,” he recalls. “I started on a climbing wall in Shepherd’s Bush and ended up on the north face of the Alps. It’s like doing drugs, scaring the shit out of yourself. It’s a proper game of edge-playing. The mental aspect was really quite appealing because you could really frighten yourself.”

He remembers one climb in the Chamonix Valley in particular. “It was the only time where I thought any wrong move and I could be dead. I guess it’s like being in a war or something. It’s character building. I don’t know if I could do it now.”

His mountaineering years coincided with moving into a massive flat in Shoreditch by the railway bridge on Kingsland Road. A light industrial unit that had been converted into flats it was, he laughs, party central. “Shoreditch was like living in a mad village,” he remembers. “For a period of three years I don’t think I left the area.” 

One of his flatmates, Lizzie Walker, started stepping out with Weatherall. One day towards the end of the 00s, Weatherall came round “in a flap”. He was meant to be doing a gig in Brighton, but his driver had let him down. Now holding down a steady job in tech recruitment – which he does to this day – Johnston had a company car; he offered to drive. 

By this point, he’d stopped climbing because his “shoulders were fucked” and was hanging out on Bill Brewster’s DJHistory Forum, where he immersed himself in all things Daniele Baldelli and the cosmic sound proffered by the cult Italian DJ. He started making mix CDs for his own amusement. When Weatherall got into the car and asked what they could listen to on the drive down to the coast, all Johnston had were the mix CDs he’d made of this slower cosmic stuff. Weatherall liked what he heard and the seed for what would become A Love From Outer Space was planted. 

When their friend Nathan Gregory Wilkins became the booker at The Drop, a small venue beneath a pub in Stoke Newington, a year or so later and asked him if he wanted to do a night there the idea of a club promising to be an ‘oasis of slowness in a world of increasing velocity’ became a reality.

So it came to pass that on a Thursday night in late-May 2010, ALFOS launched. The intention of never knowingly exceeding 122bpm was laid bare in the choice of the first record played. Richard Wahnfried’s ‘Time Actor’ is a proto-electro 12-minute treatise on time (narrated by Arthur Brown of Crazy World fame) recorded in 1979.

“It’s one of the Krautrock guys (the alter ego of Klaus Schulze of Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel),” says Johnston in his laconic northern twang. “Really slow. Less than 100bpm. It’s fucking bonkers, one of the craziest records you’ll ever hear.”

The first event was well-attended. There were a lot of off-duty DJs and faces there interested – as ever – in what Weatherall was going to do now. “There was a certain amount of curiosity involved,” Johnston explains. “But it struck a chord because it went against the grain. This was the time of minimal; 130-135bpm. We weren’t sure if people would go with it. But they did. It appealed to a lot of older heads and girls because it wasn’t just boys-y techno. The appeal was wide-ranging.”

It wasn’t just the crowd that got off on the music and the vibe emanating from the night, Weatherall did too. Although he never explicitly told Johnston he was bored of playing “boompty boompty” music whilst trekking around Europe’s mega clubs, “I do think he felt as though he had painted himself into a little bit of a corner”.

“When ALFOS came along he said to me: ‘I feel like I did when I was playing at Shoom. I feel like I can play whatever I want and there’s no expectation.’ I think the open-endedness appealed to him.”

Fun was baked into the night from the outset. Johnston openly admits his relationship with Weatherall began – like so many – from the point-of-view as a fanboy, but when asked what he thinks he brought specifically to the night he suggests he helped inject some fun into proceedings.

“I gave him permission to play things that he might not have otherwise,” he notes. “For example, that Todd Terje remix of M’s ‘Pop Muzik’; I played that at The Drop once and the look he gave me, there was an archly-raised eyebrow, but then he saw the scenes of absolute carnage and chaos. He started playing it himself, so I think it gave him permission to take himself a little less seriously than he might have done. We did have a laugh, we really did.”

The weight of that last remark is, unsurprisingly, dripping with sadness. When Weatherall suddenly, unexpectedly died (on more than one occasion Johnston refers to his friend’s passing as “when Andrew got off”), everything changed. An ALFOS was scheduled for later that week at their now regular London home of Phonox. Johnston had to be persuaded to play (“Of course I did”), but upon reflection he’s glad he did.

“It was hard work,” he notes. “I was just crying through most of it. I would play things and it would just set me off and then I’d pull my shit together. I had a listen to the mix the other day actually and in the circumstances it wasn’t bad. I poured my heart into it. Yeah, it was a love letter to my friend. But it was fucking weird.”

Weird was followed by surreal. Whether or not the ALFOS right after Weatherall ‘got off’ could have been the final staging – he admits he was conflicted – was rendered moot by Covid. The enforced hiatus not only gave Johnston breathing space, but his online Emergency Broadcasts (five, six - sometimes more - hours of ALFOS goodness) also provided support to the community. Even today, people still thank him for those transmissions.

“When I’m in the supermarket, people I’ve never seen before come up to me and say: ‘Are you Sean? I just wanted to say thank you for doing those shows in lockdown.’”

And as for persisting, does he ever wonder what Weatherall would have wanted him to do?

“My gut feeling is that he would have liked me to continue,” he responds. “If our roles were reversed I would have certainly wanted him to continue. In the end it wasn’t a decision for either him or me, it was for the community. And that was a resounding ‘carry on, please’.”

The increased importance of ALFOS in the last five years – the joyous annual coming together at Convenanza, the Phonox shows and gigs around the country – will culminate in 2025 with the release of the first A Love From Outer Space compilation album. An abridged version of the night itself – 75 minutes as opposed to six hours – it’s nonetheless an ecstatic rendering of the ALFOS aesthetic. Featuring a raft of exclusive cuts, including the Neville Watson remix of The Blow Monkeys’ ‘Save Me’ that Weatherall used to play at early editions and Popular Tyre’s ‘Feel Like a Lazer Beam’, alongside some staunch ALFOS anthems like Cisco Cisco’s ‘If You Want Me’ (Jay Shepheard Remix) and Class B Band’s ‘Repli-can’, it’s summed up by Johnston thus: “It’s where we’ve come from, where we’re going – that kind of thing.”

As to where Johnston himself is going he admits he feels like Worzel Gummidge at times with the multiple heads he has to sport. “I’ve got a DJ head, a dad head and I’ve got a production head. I have to swap my heads around. Oh, and the job head.”

His productions and remixes as The Summerisle Six, featuring Andy Bell, Jo Bartlett and Duncan Grey, among others (check out the Balearic supergroup’s ‘This is Something’ for proof that a Waterboys-style dance track is always a good idea) and Hardway Bros keep astounding. His production talents are evidence of his furtive imagination: “Music is just a currency of ideas,” he responds. “If you’ve got an idea with the technology that’s available today the bar to entry is a lot lower than it was when I started.”

It’s A Love From Outer Space though where he’s most appreciated. Although he admits at age 58 (he looks a decade younger at least, mind), he can’t carry on forever, there are still plenty of ALFOS conversations to be had. “It’s a thread that I’m still pulling and it’s a thread that can still be pulled. If it reaches a point where I feel like I’m flogging a dead horse, then… but the open-endedness was kind of the genius of it really. We can pretty much – to a degree: no country and western – but most musical styles are woven into the picture.”

We? A slip of the tongue or a recognition that the night is still inextricably part of his friend’s legacy?

“No, it’s not a slip of the tongue. The night was something that we carved out together, along with the crowd. Consequently, I very much view ALFOS as a collective venture.”

Pleasingly, the ten years the pair played together – what Johnston refers to as a “proper apprenticeship” – have left him prepared for future excursions.

“I’ve said this before,” he concludes. “Andrew didn’t leave a map, but he did leave a very strong compass bearing for me. In a way, the many sets we DJed together seemed like a dialogue between us about what the ALFOS aesthetic should be. He left me well-schooled and oriented to follow the path.” 

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.