Len Liggins

2025 stock This compilation was originally released as a 12 inch vinyl album on Berlin-based label MauerStadtMusik (MM018) in 2019 and features some of Len Liggins's earliest recordings. In the early 1980s Len lived in Leeds, in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. At the time, he couldn’t find a job, so he bought a very simple drum machine and a cheap electric guitar and started to write songs. He then borrowed a friend's Electronic Dream Plant ‘WASP’ synthesizer, a bass guitar that was allegedly played on Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’, and a 4-track cassette recorder – and began to make his own recordings at home. 

Len’s songs reflect this grim, monochrome time, with its real fear of nuclear war (‘The War Game’), the worry of being poisoned by lead from car exhausts (‘Lead’) and of having nothing to eat (‘Basil Purdy’s Fridge’). And so, from 1980 to 1985 Len created tracks of lo-fi, minimalist, post-punk experimental synth pop, submitting them to fanzines and underground cassette labels such as International Sound Communication, Real Time, Nuclear Terra. Len discovered from fanzines that there were other people also making lo-fi synth-based music in their bedrooms. It was a new movement!

This genre of music later became known as ‘minimal wave’. It was underground and cool, and a stark contrast to the glamorous and over-produced Duran Duran / Human League style of plastic pop that filled the charts. People were more aware of it in industrial cities like Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester where unemployment was common. This was all happening while an emerging class of rich young businesspeople in London made huge profits on money markets and lived cocaine lifestyles.