The nightclub which made Leeds the worldwide centre of goth music

It opened in 1979 and ran for more than 25 years

Leeds was once the centre for goth music around the world, and one club here in the city was the place where it all began.

Le Phonographique, known to locals as The Phono, used to sit below the Merrion Centre in Leeds city centre following its opening in 1979. It stayed open until around 2005, becoming a centre for goth and alternative music.

It is considered the world’s first goth nightclub, proving popular with young people across the city. The nearby Duchess of York pub, which closed in 2000, also proved popular, hosting concerts from bands like Nirvana before they achieved international fame.

Emma Scobie-Scott was one frequent visitor to the club, even working behind the bar for a spell in the early 1990s. She said: “We went there to listen to the music.

“Leeds was very musically tribal, it was a whole thing of which tribe you were in sort of helped you build your identity as a teenager. So you were a goth or an indie kid, or an alternative kid, or a metaler, or, heaven forbid, you listened to chart music, that was the one thing you couldn’t do.”

She added: “I went to The Phono and I fit in with everybody else. It’s like weird wasn’t something to be embarrassed of, it was an entry requirement.

“That was the thing about the place, it was the place where teenagers went that they found their tribe, they found where they belonged.”

It was a popular place for artists too, with Marc Almond DJing there and Leeds band The Sisters of Mercy drinking at the club. Despite its popularity, The Phono was a small club inside, and was famous for a large concrete pillar right in the middle.

Emma has been doing research on The Phono and other parts of Leeds in the 1990s as she works on her book, a piece of autofiction dramatising her time in Leeds. As part of her research she discovered that the concrete pillar may have a legacy of its own.

She said: “It’s said, it’s quoted, and it’s written about that this pillar is actually why goths danced in the way they did. That sort of shuffle, two steps forward, two steps back, but it wasn’t a dance made out of goths listening to music and interpreting it.

“Goth culture sort of arrived from Leeds and the one place they could go listen to the music was The Phono, and it had a tiny, tiny dance floor with a great big pillar. So that was the only way they could dance to it.

“So it’s like you’ve got this entire subculture and the dance behind it that’s made out of inconvenient structural engineering, which I just love.”

It wasn’t the only famous feature either, as Emma adds: “You went down the stairs, the bar was to the left, the dance floor was to the right with the world’s stickiest carpet because the drink that all the goths drank was snakebite and black.

“So it was a lethal mixture of lager, cider, and blackcurrant cordial.”

There isn’t much to remember the club by these days, and the area is now a retail storage unit. Emma hopes there’ll be more one day to remember it and the origins of goth culture by, adding: “Manchester would have built a museum and just never shut up about it.

“We’ve got one blue plaque by the Duchess and that’s it. It’s like okay, that’s the entire culture, we were all too busy wearing black and trying to be cool stood at the back to notice that this massive cultural shift was going on.”

Emma writes under the pen-name Mallory Jones, and you can find out more about her book here.

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