GLOBO BIOGRAPHY 2026
Globo are electronic music’s great outliers. The Norwich-London force that is Globo emerged in the early 1990s as one of the UK underground’s most singular acts, rarely overlapping neatly with any of the scenes around them. Often mentioned alongside contemporaries such as Underworld and Meat Beat Manifesto, Globo occupied a far more fractured, satirical and confrontational space. Their ingrained DIY approach is cultural noise filtering in action, combining breakbeats, samples, found sound, pop melodies, media collage and avant-garde electronic production.
Flirting with club culture without ever being strictly designed for the dancefloor, Globo’s sound has drawn both critical acclaim and a cult following. Globo was founded by Paul Thompson, Mark Wernham, Steve Appleton and Ian McGregor, and over the decades, the group’s wayward trajectory has remained purposefully unconventional – as ever, life imitates art.
Embracing technology while remaining resolutely human, and treating live performance as installation and intervention, Globo’s DIY ethos runs through every aspect of their work. Long before remote collaboration became commonplace, Globo’s early material was exchanged between Norwich and London using floppy disks, samplers and data transfers. Tracks were built on Akai samplers, digital synths, drum machines and live mixes recorded directly to DAT.
Globo events during the 90s often blurred the boundaries between concert, club night and art installation. Toilet cubicles were covered in silver foil; cassette players were hidden in transitional spaces broadcasting atmospheres and found sounds. The audience moved through Globo’s world, rather than simply playing witness to it.
After signing with Hydrogen Dukebox in November 1993, Globo released their debut single ‘Beautiful Feeling’ – ambitious, slightly surreal and entirely self-directed – in April 1994. A second single, ‘Autosleeper’, followed in July 1994. In April 1995, Globo released their debut album, ‘Pro War.’ The record arrived during a landmark period for British electronic music, but stood unselfconsciously apart from much of what surrounded it.
‘Pro War’ is electronic music as a sequence of interconnected ideas, exploring conflict, media, belief, memory, pleasure and power. From the hypnotic downbeat emotion of ‘Adult Channel’ to the upbeat pop tones of the indie smash ‘Onward’, ‘Pro War’ was a visceral reaction to what Globo saw around them. With a title conceived as a darkly comic inversion of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s ‘War Is Over (If You Want It)’, ‘Pro War’ reflected on the conflicts that shaped the early 1990s, including Rwanda, Bosnia and the aftermath of the Gulf War. Offering no slogans or certainties, Globo instead turned a satirical, dancefloor-adjacent lens onto humanity’s recurring attraction to conflict itself.
The same year, Globo reached a wider audience when they wrote the theme music for Stewart Lee and Richard Herring’s BBC2 comedy series ‘Fist Of Fun’, which aired in 1995. Later that year, the band released the single ‘Thirteen’. The record generated complications due to its use of sampled police interview tapes, an early example of the legal and practical challenges facing artists working with extensive found audio material.
In January 1996, Globo signed to North South Records and immediately began recording their second album, ‘This Is London 1966’. Sessions took place during January and February, followed by the release of the single ‘Independent Music Enthusiast’ in March. The album expanded on recurring Globo preoccupations; themes of nostalgia, media overload, imagined histories and the uneasy relationship between past and present. The relationship with North South proved short-lived. By November 1996 the band had parted company with the label. ‘This Is London 1966’ remained unreleased, although Globo retained the master tapes.
A lengthy hiatus followed between 1997 and 2000. Globo briefly resurfaced in 2000 with the release of ‘This Time It’s Globo’, a collection of alternative versions, remixes and archival material. The release generated renewed interest, although the band remained inactive as a live project.
The next significant chapter arrived in 2006. Globo brought Mark Mothersbaugh’s Postcard Diaries exhibition to the UK, marking the Devo founder’s first British exhibition. The band performed live at the opening event and returned to occasional gigging throughout 2006 and 2007.
In November 2007, Globo released a cover of Devo’s ‘Whip It’, featuring guest vocals from Japanese musician Kaoru Sakurai. Soon afterwards, work began on one of the band’s most ambitious projects: a complete reinterpretation of The Fall’s ‘This Nation’s Saving Grace’, created with a wide network of collaborators.
Released in 2008, Globo’s ‘This Nation’s Saving Grace’ culminated in a memorable appearance at the University of Salford’s Messing Up The Paintwork symposium, where the band found themselves spending the evening in the company of Mark E Smith’s family. That year also brought the long-delayed release of ‘This Is London 1966’ through Burning Shed, finally allowing listeners to hear the band’s lost second album more than a decade after its creation. In May 2009, Globo performed ‘This Nation’s Saving Grace’ in its entirety at Norwich Arts Centre. They have never repeated the feat.
A second and much longer hiatus followed. Between 2009 and 2026, Globo largely disappeared from public view while remaining creatively active.
Income from an Italian television advertisement using a Globo recording helped fund the creative studio in a former Norwich fish market. Although largely absent from public performance, Globo continued recording. Some of this material surfaced in 2015 under the title ‘Mid-Century Modern’, receiving a limited digital release.
In 2013 Mark launched and continues to helm the successful monthly print magazine Electronic Sound, while both Steve and Paul spent four years at the Norwich University of the Arts and were awarded MAs in illustration and film, respectively. They continue their creative practice as fiercely independent community artists.
In 2026, Globo rise once again. The upcoming release of ‘Pro War (Redux)’ revisits and reinterprets material from their debut album for a new generation of fans. Long-time collaborator Kaoru Sakurai formally joined the group, expanding Globo into a four-piece alongside founding members Paul Thompson, Mark Wernham and Steve Appleton.
More than thirty years after their formation, Globo are still electronic music’s great clairvoyants, simultaneously looking forward, back, and straight down the barrel of the here and now. Their music anticipated a world of media saturation, fragmented communication, recycled culture and permanent information overload. Built through improvisation, limitation, curiosity and DIY invention, it remains a distinctive body of work from a https://sites.google.com/view/globobandband that consistently prefers exploring the margins to occupying the centre.
