Hercules & Love Affair today releases ‘Danseur PT 2’ via Stratasonic Records, completing the full eight-track ‘Danseur’ project. Led by Andy Butler, the second installment features Faris Badwan of The Horrors on “Pirouette” and “Heaven,” Hips & Lips on “Night on the Town,” and Albrecht Van Doornik on “Flip Flop.”
Across ‘Danseur’, Butler draws from the clubs, artists, and figures that shaped queer nightlife on both sides of the Atlantic. The project channels the worlds of London’s Blitz and Taboo, while the ‘PT 1’ cover of Book of Love’s “Boy” pays tribute to New York’s BoyBar. On ‘PT 2’, “Night on the Town” looks further back, telling the story of two women living openly in the 1960s, while “Pirouette” closes the project with a tribute to visionary producer SOPHIE and Butler’s longtime collaborator Aerea Negrot, who passed away within months of one another.
The history informing the music also runs through the physical edition’s liner notes and imagery. ‘Danseur’ is dedicated to Taboo resident DJ and acclaimed queer photographer and filmmaker Jeffrey Hinton, whose personal archive of late-’80s and early-’90s nightlife appears throughout the package. Images from spaces and scenes including Heaven and Alternative Miss World survive in part as scans of printed photographs, giving the collection the intimacy of a personal record from inside the culture.
Hinton and Princess Julia, one of the scene’s most vivid figures, each join Butler in Q&As about the queer underground’s relationship with electronic music, while Butler’s accompanying photography references portraits from the Blitz era. An additional Q&A with Pet Shop Boys considers how synthesizer music transformed nightlife and the culture surrounding it. Together, these elements connect the record to the people who lived the history behind it, bringing their memories and images into dialogue with the present.
Like last year’s ‘Someone Else Is Calling’ project, ‘Danseur’ was created with Elín Ey of Hips & Lips and Quinn Whalley of Paranoid London, extending the chemistry the trio found through their shared love of acid house, disco, and darker electronic music. Badwan and Van Doornik expand that world on ‘PT 2’, helping carry the project from the club-facing immediacy of its first half toward its final, more reflective moments.
For nearly two decades, Hercules & Love Affair has used dance music to explore queer identity, intimacy, loss, and collective release. ‘Danseur’ gathers those threads into one body of work: a record shaped not only by the mythology of formative nightlife institutions, but also by the testimony and archives of the people who made them matter.
Hercules & Love Affair’s ‘Danseur’, including both ‘PT 1’ and ‘PT 2’, is out now via Stratasonic Records.
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