House music is more than 40 years old, and it still shapes what we hear in clubs, at festivals and on the radio every week. Its story starts in a small building in Chicago, runs through Ibiza and London warehouse parties, and reaches right into Leeds and West Yorkshire. Here is how it happened.
Chicago and The Warehouse
House music takes its name from The Warehouse, a club at 206 South Jefferson Street in Chicago's West Loop. The promoter Robert Williams, who knew New York's disco scene well, leased the building in 1976 for a new DJ-led dance venue, The Warehouse, which occupied it from 1977 to 1982. Williams looked for a resident DJ in New York, and on the recommendation of Larry Levan he offered the job to Frankie Knuckles, who arrived in Chicago in March 1977.
The Warehouse drew a largely Black and gay crowd, and as its reputation grew it became one of the first venues in the city where gay and straight clubgoers of different races and ethnicities shared a dance floor. Knuckles played disco, soul and gospel records, but he did not simply play them. He re-edited and extended tracks, splicing reel-to-reel tape, and in the 1980s added programmed beats from drum machines such as the Roland TR-909 to give the music a steady four-to-the-floor pulse.
The name came from the club itself. Knuckles later recalled seeing a sign outside a tavern around 1980 or 1981 that read "We play house music". When he asked what it meant, his friend told him it was the music he played at his club. The City of Chicago's landmark report on the building says that, although there is some debate, most music historians agree the term comes from The Warehouse.
In 1983 Knuckles parted ways with Williams and opened his own club, the Power Plant. Williams rebranded The Warehouse as the Music Box at a new location and hired DJ Ron Hardy as resident. The friendly competition between the two DJs helped push the sound forward.
From the dance floor to vinyl
At first, house was something you could only hear in the clubs. That changed as drum machines, synthesisers and samplers became cheaper, and a wave of young Chicago DJs and producers started making their own records. Among them were Jesse Saunders, Vince Lawrence, Marshall Jefferson, Larry Heard, Adonis, Steve "Silk" Hurley and Farley "Jackmaster" Funk. The Chicago radio station WBMX also played a part, as one of the first to broadcast DJs performing live house mixes, with its Hot Mix 5 line-up.
The record frequently cited as the first house track released on vinyl is "On and On" by Jesse Saunders, made with Vince Lawrence in 1983 and released at the start of 1984 on the Jes Say label. Saunders made it, using a Roland TR-808 drum machine, to replace a record that had been stolen from him: a bootleg disco megamix, also called "On and On", that had been his signature tune as a DJ.
In 1987 the group Phuture released "Acid Tracks" on Trax Records. Its bleeping, squelching bassline came from the Roland TB-303, a bass machine designed to accompany solo guitarists, and the group first took the track to Ron Hardy to play at the Music Box. It became a foundational record of acid house, especially in the UK.
Frankie Knuckles moved back to New York in 1986, co-founded the Def Mix production company with David Morales, and in 1998 became the first winner of the Grammy for Remixer of the Year, Non-Classical. He died in 2014. On 21 June 2023 Chicago City Council designated the building at 206 South Jefferson Street, known as the birthplace of house music, an official Chicago landmark, protecting its facade and roofline from alteration or demolition.
Acid house arrives in Britain
By 1987 house music had become popular in the UK and several other European countries. Five DJs associated with the early British house scene said they were inspired to start their own events after holidaying in Ibiza in the summer of 1987. Clubs from 1987 and 1988 such as Shoom (run by Danny Rampling), Future and Spectrum (Paul Oakenfold), Trip (Nicky Holloway) and The Haçienda in Manchester (Mike Pickering and Graeme Park) became the home of the new sound.
What followed was the "Second Summer of Love" of 1988 and 1989, when acid house and parties in fields and disused warehouses spread from London to places such as Blackburn and Nottingham, and then across the UK. Parliament responded with the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act 1990, which raised the penalties for unlicensed events.
Leeds and Yorkshire club culture
On 23 November 1991 Dave Beer and Alistair Cooke launched Back To Basics on the top floor of a building on Lower Briggate that was then called The Chocolate Factory, later The Music Factory. About 80 people came to the first night; within weeks there were queues of thousands. DJ Mag describes the party as a reaction against the increasingly commercial acid house scene. Basics picked up the inaugural DMC award for Best Club in 1992, ran as a weekly event for some 20 years, with Ralph Lawson playing the first record and staying on as a resident, and celebrated its 30th birthday in 2021. DJ Mag credits it with raising the city's profile in the early 1990s and starting Leeds's long transformation into a cultural hub.
What makes a record "house"?
House is built on a driving four-to-the-floor beat, and the sound Knuckles developed combined disco, electronic, soul and gospel music, with emotive vocals. By the end of the 1980s it was popular on dance floors across Europe and North America and had given rise to styles such as acid house and deep house. Much of today's electronic dance music traces its origins back to it.
House music on LDC Radio
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