Nightlife force: don't tell Larry Tee that clubland is dead

Interview, Nov, 2004 by Leslie Cafferty

Before Larry Tee became the emperor of electroclash, the 44-year-old Brooklyn-based DJ, musician, club promoter, and Mogul Electro record label owner was reinventing international nightlife. The Atlanta native moved to New York in 1989 with friend RuPaul--for whom Tee wrote the curio hit song "Supermodel (You Better Work)"--and founded several of the city's legendarily bacchanalian club nights, which became hubs of creativity. Since then, the frenetic nightlife force helmed the Electroclash and Outsider Electronic Music festivals, discovering and promoting talent like the Scissor Sisters, art-rock impresarios Fischerspooner, and nouveau wave girls W.I.T. His current crop of collaborators includes manic performance artist Phiiliip, New York pop DJ Jon Jon Battles, and Conrad Ventur, a musician, performer, and photographer who documented the early 2000s downtown scene in the book ElectroDiscoPunks, due out next year. That Tee's influence extends from New York to London, Berlin, Tokyo, and beyond is de rigueur: He's long known that the New York club scene operates on a global scale. What he didn't know was how many artists, musicians, photographers, and personalities he would launch along the way.

Leslie Cafferty is a New York City-based writer.