The acid house thing was just bloody awesome really. I’d completely
forgotten.
The story goes that in 1987 Danny Rampling, Paul
Oakenfold,
Nicky Holloway and others found themselves in a swimming pool at dawn having
listened to, among others, Alfredo at Amnesia mixing up all sorts of music
from The Woodentops’ ‘Why Why Why’ to house and funk and the
idea of Balearic beats was born.
In the interim, house itself had been quickly mutating. Chicago artists and DJs such as Marshall Jefferson, Fingers Inc, Frankie Knuckles and Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley had been using record decks, drum machines, samplers and sound effects for a few years to create underground dance anthems like ‘Move Your Body – The House Music Anthem’, ‘Jack Your Body’ and ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’. In 1987 though, in the hands of Phuture and DJ Pierre and others house hit the Roland 303 freeway of weirded out helium-bubbling synth and basslines and ‘Acid Trax’ were born.
Meanwhile, the London DJs who saw a vision of the clubbing future in Ibiza tried to recreate the vibe on returning to England. Paul Oakenfold initiated The Project. Danny Rampling started Shoom (sic) as it was then called, and other clubs quickly sprouted: The Trip, Spectrum, Future, the dos at Clink Street and Queens. Later there was Deja Vu, Full Circle, Solaris, Flying, the Dungeons in the Lee Valley and the one-off clubs done by Boys Own, Pushka, The Pussy Posse, Blue Source and God knows what else.
Social and economic class, sexuality, race, football teams – the old traditions, values and belief systems, bigotry and long-nurtured resentments just seemed daft and so irrelevant in the grip of chemical camaraderie they melted away, albeit if only for a while. [Gavin Hills wrote about this time in Disco Biscuits, the anthology, shortly before he drowned].
The game shifted in other areas too. You no longer paid to gawp at some musician on stage, the whole club became your stage and your actions and behaviour was a vital part of the celebration. It was a holiday from all the things that had been bred into you, a feeling of no limits and a discovery of similarities not differences. The holiday mood was mirrored in the clothes and accessories: items of smile apparel, dungarees, bandanas, green slime, water guns, popsicles, fruit. The smileys et al soon grew tired but the vibe didn’t.
To be in Shoom swimming through hovering icebergs of smoke and flashed with electric storms of strobes while football hard nuts snogged transvestites and Danny Rampling spun the singularly suave ‘Sueno Latino’ or Dan Hartman’s ‘Relight My Fire’ or Adamski played along and there’s this woman you’ve never ever met before hugging you and screaming. This is the best night of my life, and this guy in a fluorescent silver wig and angels wings comes up to you because you’ve got nice eyes, well it just kinda made your day, punk. You just had to tell all yr friends about it, not surprisingly the scene grew exponentially.
Soon there was a kicking club or party to go to nearly every night of the week and this was mirrored in all the major conurbations around the country. Manchester was equally (if not in many ways more important) in the development of music than London. Mike Pickering and Graeme Park had pioneered acid house in the UK at The Hacienda. The city’s musicians who frequented the club were profoundly affected. They took the ideas of Chicago and Detroit and wrote a whole new score of emotional textures. 808 State’s ‘Pacific State’ and A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Voodoo Ray’ were two of the best examples.
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I can distinctly recall the first time I heard a number of tunes that are included on the Disco Biscuits CD: 808 State ‘Pacific State’ in The Hacienda, Leftfield ‘Not Forgotten’ at Deja Vu in The Soundshaft, Future Sound of London ‘Papua New Guinea’ played by Andrew Weatherall at Boys Own and so on. These were tracks as important to their period as ‘White Riot’ to punk or ‘My Generation’ to the 1960s but they spoke through the rhythm rather than words, a manifesto of sound rather than lyrics. |
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One night in particular stands out, the first time I heard A Guy Called Gerald ‘Voodoo Ray’. It was a party. The Jesus and Mary Chain, Creation Records boss Alan McGee, members of Primal Scream and a Northern deputation of Mondays’ associated folk were there among others. ‘Voodoo Ray’ was popped on the deck and out came this granddad-buggering tune as strange as a space insect landing on your line of MDMA and hovering it up. It just flew and flew. The party was memorable as well because it marked a distinct coming together of the more open-eared factions of rock and dance. Not long afterwards Paul Oakenfold was remixing Happy Mondays ‘Wrote For Luck’ and Andrew Weatherall was pushing Primal Scream’s buttons with ‘Loaded’.
By then the scene had exploded out of the underground like some neon ballistic missile. The large parties or raves such as Sunrise, Energy and Biology were happening and with them came acres of tabloid coverage of the Acid House Barons Ate Freddie Star and Shat him Into A Burger Which Poisoned My Hamster variety. The law started to crack down and just getting to and from a rave without being pulled by the bill became another part of the buzz (another theme in Disco Biscuits, the book).
ACID HOUSE was awesome in the way it fired the heads, hands and feet of a generation, yet paradoxically amounted to nothing more than a 24-hour party that stretched over a few years. Those not going up – arguably the party is still going on in various multi-splintered forms around the UK and world – are coming down and no doubt on occasions wondering what it was about.
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The Ball, The Rocket; Raindance, Barking (1991 Jonathan Fleming) |
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A few good times, chemical communion, the obligatory blinding lights, international hedonism, damaged nervous systems, ripped relationships, flyer art and now literature, speeding round the M25 and avoiding the bill, what else is there to tell your grandchildren or would you even bother? Yes, sprogs, we got on one for a few years – and it shouldn’t be forgotten that it made us all illegal in the eyes of the law as Steve Aylett caricatured in ‘Repeater’ in Disco Biscuits – and the ride ultimately went to nowhere.
Every generation creates its own soundtrack and discovers a suitable drug and sows its seeds of discontent just to watch the crop whither into cultural weeds through commercialisation. Joe Strummer and The Clash had a handle on it a decade earlier when they sang about, “Turning rebellion into money.” This is, ironically, one of the leitmotifs that burrows through many of the short stories in Disco Biscuits, an anthology which exposes the bullshit, as much as celebrates the history.
A film/video director friend of mine, Wizz, recently posed the question: “What does the Ecstasy generation know about itself?” The answer he came up with was: “It didn’t realize the power or potential it had.”
So what would he like to have happened?
"Oh, the lot, Revolution,” said Wizz, “Mass insurrection, the storming of Buckingham Palace, the overthrow of the government, the redistribution of wealth.”
Nice. I had to laugh, but I know what he meant…dare to imagine…There was a point in the summer of ’91 when it looked like it might all kick off. Prisoners in Manchester’s Strangeways and lock-ups all around the country were rioting. Happy Mondays were in the charts, and what had started in small clubs some years earlier – acid house – had suddenly reached mega proportions sound-tracked by pirate radios peppered around the dial, illegal parties in every warehouse in town and outdoor raves.
The collective energy at these raves was unbelievable, the potential for anarchy quite serious. Even the supposedly cool Glastonbury organizers couldn’t handle the deal of multitudes dancing throughout the night. The authorities thought so too and despite a bit of rear guard action from Spiral Tribe and others – Tony Couston-Hayter of Sunrise organized a Fight For Your Right To Party demo in Trafalgar Square but nobody was going to trust him, for sure – laws were eventually passed that banned raves.
The fun had gone and so too had the moment when it seemed that everything was possible EVEN – dare to imagine it – CHANGE. Those who had the money went abroad to Koh Phangan, Thailand [described in Alex Garland’s debut short story which appeared in Disco Biscuits] and Goa, or to Berlin for The Love Parade, or out into the American desert. The music reflected this by becoming harder and faster with corresponding oriental textures or motorik technoid beats.
Those who couldn’t afford it went back underground to small spaces like the one under the kebab shop in Edgeware Road that Charlie Hall writes about in ‘The Box’. Or they formed fantastic bands like Underworld (check ‘Rez’). I remember seeing Goldie in that Edgeware Road basement a few times and through people like him and LTJ Bukem the music has kept evolving with drum ‘n’ bass taking over the darker, psycho side of ‘Inner City Life’ [see Q’s jungle poem in Disco Biscuits].
Acid House has now been exported abroad. The symbols, language and sounds of dance culture are all pervasive in society from advertising and fashion to food and drink designed especially for clubbers. There are hundreds of individuals associated with acid house who have done well in their chosen fields. You can also point out what a fine time we had at Tribal Gathering in 1996 and there are still excellent clubs like Stealth….but…
There’s a big crack running through this all so far as I can see, and it’s getting bigger. A real flaw. A lot of people I know from then have smack/rock/alcohol habits. It’s sad, a high price to pay. They’ll get clean or die young. But that is only part of the problem.
I’m lucky when it comes to clubbing. There are six venues within a five-minute walk of where I live. They cover trip hop, drum ‘n’ bass, trance, techno and jazz. Any time I visit one of them though, I seem to pass ever more people sleeping in the street.
It just seems wrong, criminal. And then The Spice Girls have come over all Tory telling us that Margaret Thatcher was the first Spice Girl. Maybe I’m missing something here, or perhaps I am just a bit naive, but is it any wonder that when I, for one, recall acid house and what it seemed to promise, I am left with small change and the thought: Is that it then?
Disco Biscuits: The Book
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