Felix da Housecat comes to The Great Northern for a night of revelry and dance It's become a truism to say Felix Da Housecat has nine lives, but honestly he's probably experienced a lot more than nine times what the average person has - even if he can't remember large sections of it. He was present and participating in the birth of house music while still a kid, made anthems for multiple musical movements, remixed everyone from Madonna and Britney Spears to Nina Simone, recorded with Lee "Scratch" Perry, partied with Tommy Lee - and is somehow still standing, older and wiser perhaps, but still as funky, as fired up and as articulate as he ever was. It's almost four decades since he first recorded an electronic bassline, but as his newest material amply demonstrates, his love for the groove is absolutely undimmed. Felix grew up in the Chicago suburbs with a yin and yang influence on his life. His mother was "the educated, responsible one who whooped my ass to keep me in line", while his father was "street educated", hustling odd jobs and playing saxophone in a band. His dad encouraged him to play clarinet in the junior high school orchestra, which Felix did with aplomb, never reading music, just playing by ear, but graduating to playing lead. When he moved up to high school, everything changed: house music took over the whole culture of Chicago. "WBMX, The Hot Mix 5, Farley Jackmaster Funk, Mickey Mixin' Oliver, Mike Hitman Wilson - they was being played non stop on the radio. Every lunch hour, every night, being blasted out on big speakers and boomboxes. House was everywhere. These were our rock stars!" It didn't just take over the culture, it took over Felix's life. All he wanted was to make house - and he hassled and hassled his mom until she bought him a keyboard, drum machine and four-track cassette recorder. The first track he made was called "House Beat" - super generic, with a "h-h-h- house beat" voice cut-up - but the second was something else: it was the instrumental that would become "Fantasy Girl". He called himself Housecat - as friends already called him Felix the Cat after the cartoon - and still aged just 14 walked the school halls with his tracks on a Walkman and a spring in his step. Until a senior named Jeff stopped him and said "I hear you making beats". Jeff was HOUSE. People would say "oh he HOUSE" because of his sneakers, hair and clothes - and he and his friends snuck in to Ron Hardy's Music Box to dance. And Jeff knew DJ Pierre, who lived a suburb away. At this time, "Acid Tracks" only existed as a tape, played in the club by Hardy, but that alone was enough to give it - and Pierre and his bandmates in Phuture - legendary status. Jeff asked if he could take Felix's tape to Pierre, who called that same night and said "do you want to make a record?" It took some convincing that this was for real, but soon after, Pierre came to Felix's house, recorded him, wrote some lyrics and called up his singer friend JR. They went to the studio and recorded the track properly, with Pierre making the acid line on top of the bass line that Felix played live - then Pierre sent it, credited to Pierre's Pfantasy Club, to Mike Hitman Wilson and it blew up. By the time it came out and he was 15, Felix was a star at school, with girls asking him for autographs - overwhelming for a bashful teen - and he started playing keyboards on stage with Pierre. He only made $300 from the record but for a couple of years he had a taste of stardom. But his parents had other ideas, pressured Pierre to replace him, and made sure he went off to college - at Alabama State University. Away from Chicago, he lost touch with house music, and turned his hand to hip hop instead - but when he flunked out after two years and came home, he was shocked to discover the scene more thriving than ever. Still under pressure from his parents to stay away from music and clubs, he got a pizza delivery job and restarted his studies to keep them off his back but hustled for studio time whenever he could. The producer Spinnin' Wheel Bill showed real generosity, and in the time he could grab through 1990 and 91, Felix made a clutch of tracks including "Thee Dawn" and "Thee Light" in the free studio space Bill lent to him. Pierre, now working at Strictly Rhythm, signed “What You Want”, cut Felix a cheque, and told him he needed to visit London, where this music was exploding. Even though he had college exams, Felix dropped everything, got a passport, got on a plane - and that's when everything changed. He had no plan, beyond being able to sleep on Phil Cheeseman from Strictly Rhythm UK's floor - but the late, great Phil Asher happened to be round Cheeseman's house and offered to take him round some labels. The first they tried turned them away, but the second place they tried was Guerrilla Records - they were just about to close up, but Felix shouted "hey I just arrived from Chicago, I'm DJ Pierre!" which piqued their interest enough to let him in. Thankfully Dick O'Dell who owned the label with William Orbit saw the funny side, let him play his tape, and signed "Thee Dawn" on the spot. Felix hadn't even considered a proper artist name, so just said his old nickname "Felix Da Housecat" with an alter ego of "Aphrohead" for the remix and that was that. From that moment on, the momentum was unstoppable - "literally I was on the rollercoaster from that day to when Covid stopped everything" says Felix with all seriousness. He signed more tracks, returned to Chicago with $10,000 and told his parents he was dropping college once and for all. He eventually moved to Essex, just outside London, learned to DJ properly (coached by fellow Chicagoan Marshall Jefferson) and kept pouring out an endless stream of long, dark tracks that appealed equally to the house and techno scenes of the UK and Europe. This crossover was cemented when Dave Clarke remixed "Thee Light" - something Felix almost nixed, still angry that Clarke had given another of his tracks a bad review, but thankfully he relented, as this then became his breakthrough track in the US too, with the likes of Junior Vasquez and Danny Tenaglia playing it. He rode that wave for all it was worth - his Radikal Fear label became a staple for Euro techno DJs and he'd play clubs in Belgium and Germany every weekend right through the 90s. But for all his productivity he never just churned out to a formula - a true musician at heart, he wrote each track like a song, with chord sequences, structure and drama. And that proved incredibly valuable when, around the turn of the millennium, the scene took a dramatic shift away from repetition of techno and cheesiness of mainstream house and towards the bright colours and punky performance values of electroclash. Felix still hates the term, but whatever you call it, he was all over the 80s synth revival. As a child, his family had been the first Black family in the neighbourhood to get MTV and he was dazzled by the strangeness of the likes of Annie Lennox and Flock Of Seagulls and Duran Duran - it was a million miles from the Stevie Wonder and Teddy Prendergrass records his parents played and he loved it. And he had always been a Prince fanatic. So when a huge album deal to make house tracks for London Records went wrong and he connected instead with Damian Lazarus and Phil Howells at City Rockers, he went full on "Princed up on some 80s shit" and started recording what would become Kittenz and Thee Glitz. 1999's "Cosmic Pop" was the start - it was made as Thee Madkatt Courtship, in collaboration with Tommie Sunshine, who turned Felix on to International Deejay Gigolos, Ladytron, Miss Kittin and all the other artists who were on a similar electropop tip. And then the floodgates opened. Felix chasedMiss Kittin down to Geneva, got her in the studio and on the first day recorded "Madame Hollywood" and on the second "Silver Screen Shower Scene". And it blew all the way up. At first the success in Europe was much like what Felix was used to - but then it started selling in the USA, "and that's when people like Britney, Nelle Hooper, Madonna and Dallas Austin started calling, and shit just got crazy. That's when I thought 'I guess you done made it, Felix!'" The rollercoaster truly hit top speed now. Felix was endlessly in demand worldwide, and for the next decade and a half, he went from party to party to party, from Ibiza to Tokyo and London to Tokyo, in a haze of mezcal and codeine, with increasingly little perspective on what damage he was doing to himself and his life. Remarkably, though, not once in this time did he lose his creative mojo. Where so many others of his generation resorted to formulaic sounds to please identikit clubs, every record that Felix made through the 21st century finds new ways of re-drawing the rules of house, funk, punk, electropop and psychedelic electronica. Every one bristles with the same inventiveness, musicality and rawness that set him apart from the age of 14. But inevitably he burned out. By the time of 2015's Narrative of Thee Blast Illusion album (featuring the eerie, and perhaps confessional, "Codeine Cowboy"), his health was wrecked physically and mentally, and he realised he needed to straighten out and face responsibilities for the first time in his adult life. The enforced shut down of all touring when Covid hit was the break he truly needed, and he even considered stepping away from music completely - but as he faced the never-ending Zoom calls of corporate life while doing some consultancy work he quickly realised he needed to be back in the studio. He didn’t know just how much he needed it, though. Offered a rough and ready apartment space in LA, he moved down there from Montreal where he’d been living, and immediately flew into one of the wildest creative hot streaks of his life. With the clarity of sobriety, he documented the overwhelm and disorientation of this new environment, and the weirdness and sleaze of the neighbourhood outside his window. His classic new wave seedy glamour was given a new edge of realness – and his production and song structures gained new, sharper edges too. Rather than revisiting past glories, or trying to keep up with the bombast of modern, post-EDM dance music, Felix found he could chase the groove as he’d always done, but realise it more effectively than ever. It didn’t stop there. If his creativity through the party years had been a torrent, now it was a firehose. From his borrowed apartment, he moved to the more refined surrounds of Studio City sharing a house with his friend the Australian Nicky Night Time, and continued working at the same relentless rate. The music would become full of LA’s swagger and strangeness, but this time from a confident, settled point of view, rather than that of a boggled outsider. His music is a document of personal transformation as much as anything, a rebirth and rediscovery of the stranger corners of the artist’s own mind after the sensory overload of the new city and new creative processes. And so Felix emerges blinking out into the wider world with a truly extraordinary body of work to share. After such a long absence, expectations and scrutiny will obviously be intense, but this music is going to blow a lot of minds. Everything from his previous work is present and correct: the funk, the 80s alienness, the cinematic presentation, the evolving song structures that aren’t beholden to any formula, yet make instant sense whether on headphones or club system, and underlying it all the elemental, eternal house pulse of Chicago. It’s as weird, funny and potent as ever.