Back in the dim and distant past of summer 2025, Toronto-based musician JC grame coined a new term to describe his music. Laptop twee, he mused, was a way of describing an emerging musical underground where 1980s jangle pop and bedroom electronica collided in a glorious mishmash of lo-fi production, cheap synthesisers and heartfelt pop songs.
And now Sheffield has its very own little showcase of the stuff. Probably without realising it.
We’re all in.
First up is My Lo-Fi Heart, the musical alter ego of Ian Turley, a self-confessed hoarder of analogue instruments and 1980s synthesisers. He works his way through an eclectic collection of burbling synths, acid squelches and distorted guitars, conjuring up something that sounds like the earliest experiments of The Human League with a passing nod to the possibly long-forgotten World of Twist.
Two miniature disco balls perch atop his Korg synthesiser, scattering little beams of light across the ceiling. A refurbished guitar makes an appearance. There are songs about love.
Lots of songs about love.
Ian asks the audience to vote on whether he’d be better singing a song about kissing or one that isn’t about kissing. We employ the traditional democratic instrument of the clapometer.
Kissing wins.
He plays both anyway.
Democracy has its limitations.
Turley later tells me that if you’ve seen a gig in Yorkshire over the past two decades, chances are he was playing in the band at the bottom of the bill. But there’s something rather wonderful about that kind of perseverance. Keep making music, keep following your own peculiar path and eventually the world might come around to your way of thinking.
There’s still time for recent single We Can’t Fall, all pounding electronic beats and whispered Pet Shop Boys-style vocals. A procession of participants from the university DJ society, hosting a party in another room, wander in to investigate the source of the repetitive beats.
They leave looking suitably impressed.
Ladies Night follow, bringing a more polished synth-pop sound. Less lo-fi distortion, considerably more twee, and a collection of witty observations about love, growing up and the peculiar business of being a woman in a world apparently designed by somebody else.
This is pure C26 territory – the natural successor to the C86 bands – where irresistible pop melodies and charmingly everyday observations are considerably more important than looking cool.
With What Love Is, they’ve written the lost pop single you never knew you needed. A song about learning the meaning of love through the records of Five Star, Sonia and Sinitta. An education that will make perfect sense to anybody who grew up in the vicinity of a late-1980s television set.
It channels the best of Bis and Helen Love over an early Pet Shop Boys synth riff, while the lyrics read like a who’s who of teenage pop obsession.
It’s the song you’ll find yourself singing tomorrow while doing the washing-up.
Audience participation returns for Cut the Cord, as a doll attached to a long rope is passed from hand to hand around the room. The song concerns childbirth, and eventually somebody is invited to sever the connection with an enormous pair of scissors.
Unfortunately, the scissors are made of wood.
Nothing is actually cut.
But it’s the metaphor that counts.
They finish with a luscious rendition of The Passion’s I’m In Love With A German Film Star styled in it’s later Pet Shop Boys make over.
Torch songs for an electric generation.
Finally we get, Pink Opaque, a Yorkshire duo who have paid their dues in any number of winsome indie bands but have now armed themselves with lo-fi synthesisers, a laptop and a frankly impressive quantity of facial glitter.
More songs about love and life.
More audience participation.
This time they distribute tambourines containing flashing lights, transforming the audience into a temporary percussion section and possibly the world’s least threatening rave.
I had no idea illuminated tambourines existed.
They do.
Every home should have one.
Pink Opaque specialise in love and heartbreak delivered with a healthy dose of irony and a knowing wink at the essential absurdity of the pop song. Their synthesisers sound like they’ve wandered out of an early Sonic the Hedgehog game and accidentally joined an indie band.
Which isn’t entirely inaccurate.
A cover of Sugababes’ debut single Overload is constructed around samples from Super Mario Kart, liberating the song from its original brooding sophistication and sending it hurtling into a joyous, freewheeling pop universe.
Nintendo meets the girl group.
Somehow, everybody wins.
But the undoubted highlight is I Want to Be Like Lauren Laverne, which we collectively decide the titular presenter is probably aware of, although actual endorsement remains unconfirmed.
This is pop at its purest. Two minutes of glorious, eight-bit sugar celebrating the former Kenickie frontwoman turned broadcaster, and the universal desire to become somebody considerably cooler than yourself.
Bis must be furious they didn’t write it.
The synthesisers bounce, the melodies sparkle and somewhere in the middle comes possibly the greatest lyric ever committed to a pop song:
“I get all my information from Kenickie-pedia.”
Kenickie-pedia doesn’t actually exist.
An appalling oversight.
Somebody should do something about it immediately.
And so we disperse into the October rain, clutching our metaphorical lo-fi hearts, warmed by the possibilities of pop music, romantic optimism and the extraordinary things that can happen when somebody connects a battered synthesiser to a laptop and decides to make something wonderful.
No grand declarations. No cultural revolution. Just three acts finding their own little ways of making the world a slightly more interesting place.
And perhaps that’s a revolution of sorts.
We want an architecture that leads to daydreams.
Header image by Crawford Jolly. Because I didn’t take anything usable.
My Lo-fi Heart regularly releases new tunes and plays occasional shows. He is currently engaged in various remixing projects for a bunch of indie artists. Ladies Nite are from Leeds and don’t have Instagram because they are too old (so they claim). Pink Opaque make pop songs and do shows.
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