DJ HELL at The Golden Lion

It’s a faintly ridiculous booking on paper: a figure who helped define German techno and electroclash, who has played the major clubs of the world and built one of electronic music’s most influential labels, playing in a tiny former mill town in the Calder Valley. But The Golden Lion’s long been punching above its weight, transforming a low-slung pub in Todmorden into the kind of cult venue to which Andrew Weatherall, Joy Orbison, The Orb, Groove Armada, Goldie and Jarvis Cocker have all pilgrimaged. What makes it such a draw? Because it has the rare thing Hell himself seems to prize: a communal, oddballs-and-misfits energy that no amount of budget could manufacture.

Born Helmut Josef Geier, DJ Hell has been central to club culture since the 1980s – not just as a DJ and producer, but as someone who understood electronic music as a whole aesthetic world. His debut single ‘My Definition of House Music’ became a club hit, and with the founding of International Deejay Gigolo Records he didn’t just help name electroclash – he built the conditions for it to exist, releasing era-defining tracks by artists including Miss Kittin & The Hacker, Fischerspooner and Tiga. The result was a scene that fused new wave, punk, techno, fashion, camp and machine-made sleaze into something deliberately provocative, stylish and full of attitude.

That sensibility runs through 2009’s Teufelswerk, widely considered his magnum opus: a sprawling, two-part work split between ‘Day’ and ‘Night’, moving from ambient, cinematic compositions into tougher, club-focused material. It’s a record that treats electronic music less as a tool for the dancefloor and more as a space for atmosphere, narrative and contrast – euphoric yet introspective, mechanical yet deeply human, with guest appearances from the likes of Bryan Ferry adding a surreal, lounge-lizard counterpoint.

More recently, with Neoclash (2025), Hell has returned to that territory – not as nostalgia, but as a riposte to a club culture he sees as increasingly flattened, over-optimised and drained of risk. Drawing on Italo disco, new wave, techno and more avant-garde club sounds, the album doesn’t revive electroclash so much as rebuild it for the present: updating its sound, widening its influences and treating it less as a timestamped scene than a way of working. The original movement fused machines, pop and provocation into something knowingly artificial and seductive, and Neoclash treats that collision as unfinished business – reintroducing friction, personality and a sense of danger into a landscape that has, in his view, become too sanitised to mean all that much.

That makes The Golden Lion feel like a very good place to watch him. Todmorden’s much-loved pub, venue and outsider-dancefloor has little of the polish Hell seems suspicious of, and plenty of the character, sweat and local energy that good nights out still need. Infrared Beam residents CP & ES warm up the main room, while Dance Therapy take over upstairs with house from Karl Roscoe and Martin McNulty of Kindergarten.

For one night, the Golden Lion becomes a little laboratory for one of club culture’s great provocateurs.