Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (13 page)
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Authors: Simon Reynolds
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Because of Ecstasy and the mingling and fraternization it incited, the living death of the eighties – characterized by social atomization and the Thatcher inculcated work ethic – seemed to be coming to an abrupt end. ‘Everyone was vitalized,’ says Gray. And yet, for all the self-conscious counterculture echoes, acid house was a curiously apolitical phenomenon, at least in the sense of activism and protest. While the tenor of the peace-and-unity rhetoric ran against the Thatcherite grain, in other respects – the rampant hedonism, the fact that Ecstasy was priced out of the range of the unemployed – acid house’s pleasure-principled euphoria was very much a product of the eighties: a kind of
spiritual materialism
, a greed for intense experiences. As far as the sterner pop-culture critics were concerned, acieed was escapism, pure and simple: Stewart Cosgrove argued in
New Statesman and Society
that acid house’s ‘pleasures come not from resistance but from surrender.’ A year later, Tim London of the politicized dance-pop band Soho railed: ‘Summer of Love? What a load of old bollocks. Summer of Having a Good Time, more like! Just like kids have always done, since the days of
Saturday Night Fever
. All this bollocks about the E culture, it’s just people projecting their ideas on to something that’s always been there: mindless hedonism.’
spiritual materialism
, a greed for intense experiences. As far as the sterner pop-culture critics were concerned, acieed was escapism, pure and simple: Stewart Cosgrove argued in
New Statesman and Society
that acid house’s ‘pleasures come not from resistance but from surrender.’ A year later, Tim London of the politicized dance-pop band Soho railed: ‘Summer of Love? What a load of old bollocks. Summer of Having a Good Time, more like! Just like kids have always done, since the days of
Saturday Night Fever
. All this bollocks about the E culture, it’s just people projecting their ideas on to something that’s always been there: mindless hedonism.’
Acid house’s biggest impact was in the domain of leisure; it caused a shift from alcohol to Ecstasy-and-soft-drinks, created a mass recreational drug culture, and stoked a craving for all-night-dancing that would rub up against the antedeluvian club licensing laws. The energy liberated by Ecstasy felt revolutionary, but it wasn’t directed against the social ‘stasis quo’. Acieed was more like a secession from normality, a subculture based around what Antonio Melechi characterizes as a kind of
collective disappearance
. ‘One of the things I found exhilarating at that point,’ confirms Louise Gray, ‘was the idea that there was this whole society of people who lived at night and slept during the day. This carnival idea of turning the ordinary world completely on its head. Like slipping into a parallel universe, almost.’ London was transformed into a magical city, transected by new pathways and highly charged itineraries. ‘During the day, Charing Cross and The Strand and the journey to South London would mean one thing – I might go to the bank or Sainsbury’s – but once the sun went down, it was a
route
, stretching from Heaven to Shoom to Clink Street.’
collective disappearance
. ‘One of the things I found exhilarating at that point,’ confirms Louise Gray, ‘was the idea that there was this whole society of people who lived at night and slept during the day. This carnival idea of turning the ordinary world completely on its head. Like slipping into a parallel universe, almost.’ London was transformed into a magical city, transected by new pathways and highly charged itineraries. ‘During the day, Charing Cross and The Strand and the journey to South London would mean one thing – I might go to the bank or Sainsbury’s – but once the sun went down, it was a
route
, stretching from Heaven to Shoom to Clink Street.’
By autumn 1988, it was possible to virtually live in this parallel universe, full time. There was a party every night. Fridays, there was The Mud Club and then A Transmission at Clink Street. Saturdays, the raver faced a dilemma – Shoom or The Trip – followed by RIP at Clink Street right through til dawn. Sunday night offered the mellow, coming-down-from-the-night-before vibe of Confusion, Nicky Harwood’s club in Soho. Monday was Spectrum; Tuesday, you could go to the gay club Daisy Chain, at The Fridge in Brixton. Wednesday, the Pyramid at Heaven; Thursday, a new Heaven night called Rage. If this regime of bliss wasn’t enough, there was a host of other acid nights around town like Babylon, Love, Loud Noise, Enter the Dragon, Elysium and even the tacky old Camden Palace; at the weekends, there were also the one-off warehouse parties. Back then, remembers Barry Ashworth, ‘You was
arseholed
four, five nights a week.’
Keep Taking the Tabloidsarseholed
four, five nights a week.’
Alongside the reinvocations of late sixties psychedelia, the acid-house revellers often compared the feeling in the summer of 1988 to punk rock – the same explosion of suppressed energies, the same overnight Year Zero transformation of tastes and values. All that was missing was the mass media’s discovery of the new subculture, and the inevitable ‘moral panic’ over what the kids of today were up to.
When the newspapers finally discovered the acid-house explosion, their coverage was initially quite positive. The
Sun
described the scene as ‘cool and groovy’, printed a guide to the slang, and even ran a special offer for Smiley T-shirts, priced at a very reasonable £5.50. But a few weeks later, the tabloid abruptly changed its tune with a story entitled ‘Evil Of Ecstasy’. Readers were warned that MDMA could cause heart attacks and brain damage, and (incorrectly) that the drug was often cut with rat poison, heroin and embalming fluid. The
Sun
’s resident doctor, Vernon Coleman, spared no efforts in his attempt to deter Britain’s ‘pill potty’ youth, conjuring up the prospect of horrendous hallucinations lasting up to twelve hours, panic attacks and flashbacks, and the probability of being sexually assaulted while under the influence.
Sun
described the scene as ‘cool and groovy’, printed a guide to the slang, and even ran a special offer for Smiley T-shirts, priced at a very reasonable £5.50. But a few weeks later, the tabloid abruptly changed its tune with a story entitled ‘Evil Of Ecstasy’. Readers were warned that MDMA could cause heart attacks and brain damage, and (incorrectly) that the drug was often cut with rat poison, heroin and embalming fluid. The
Sun
’s resident doctor, Vernon Coleman, spared no efforts in his attempt to deter Britain’s ‘pill potty’ youth, conjuring up the prospect of horrendous hallucinations lasting up to twelve hours, panic attacks and flashbacks, and the probability of being sexually assaulted while under the influence.
In the following weeks, the
Sun
ran further exposés like ‘Acid House Horror’, prompting its tabloid rival the
Mirror
to pitch in with ‘£12 Trip To An Evil Night of Ecstasy’. As the newspapers engaged in a contest to see who could come up with the most luridly distorted reportage, acieed’s ‘folk devil’ revealed itself not to be the poor deluded youth themselves (as was the case with the mods, punk rockers, skinheads and football casuals) but the sinister figures behind the parties and the pill pushing: the ‘Acid House baron’, a mercenary Pied Piper figure luring the children of England into a world of bad trips and orgiastic delirium.
Sun
ran further exposés like ‘Acid House Horror’, prompting its tabloid rival the
Mirror
to pitch in with ‘£12 Trip To An Evil Night of Ecstasy’. As the newspapers engaged in a contest to see who could come up with the most luridly distorted reportage, acieed’s ‘folk devil’ revealed itself not to be the poor deluded youth themselves (as was the case with the mods, punk rockers, skinheads and football casuals) but the sinister figures behind the parties and the pill pushing: the ‘Acid House baron’, a mercenary Pied Piper figure luring the children of England into a world of bad trips and orgiastic delirium.
The Ecstasy-related death of twenty-one-year-old Janet Mayes on 28 October provided the tabloids with the ‘killer drug’ angle they’d been waiting for. On 2 November, the
Sun
’s front page pointed the finger at a jailbird/boxer turned bouncer who, it was alleged, was the ‘Mr Big Of Acid Parties’. Inside, the paper announced that it was withdrawing its Smiley T-shirt offer, and offering instead free ‘Say No To Drugs’ badges, with a frowning Smiley. A cartoon, ‘Trip To Hell’, depicted a devil-in-disguise handing out pills like candy and ushering kids into the ‘Acid House’; in the next frame, the welcome mat turns into a trapdoor, dropping the youths into the flames of Hades.
Sun
’s front page pointed the finger at a jailbird/boxer turned bouncer who, it was alleged, was the ‘Mr Big Of Acid Parties’. Inside, the paper announced that it was withdrawing its Smiley T-shirt offer, and offering instead free ‘Say No To Drugs’ badges, with a frowning Smiley. A cartoon, ‘Trip To Hell’, depicted a devil-in-disguise handing out pills like candy and ushering kids into the ‘Acid House’; in the next frame, the welcome mat turns into a trapdoor, dropping the youths into the flames of Hades.
Chiming in with the grand tradition of yellow-press scare stories about cocaine and ‘reefer madness’, the tabloids were obsessed with Ecstasy’s utterly mythical aphrodisiac powers. Readers were warned that they might end up in bed with ugly people, or find themselves in a writhing tangle with several nude strangers; an Ecstasy-dabbler testified that he kept getting slapped for stroking people’s faces, then found his girlfriend caressing a strange man’s chest. At one acid club, the
Sun
’s reporter hallucinated ‘OUTRAGEOUS sex romps taking place on a special stage in front of the dancefloor’.
Sun
’s reporter hallucinated ‘OUTRAGEOUS sex romps taking place on a special stage in front of the dancefloor’.
The fact that the new music was called ‘acid house’ led to some confusion on the newspapers’ part about exactly which demon drug they were decrying. ‘The screaming teenager jerked like a demented doll as the LSD he swallowed an hour earlier took its terrible toll,’ declared one
Sun
report. ‘The boy . . . had become sucked into the hellish nightmare engulfing thousands of youngsters as the Acid House scourge sweeps Britain . . . Callous organizers and drug dealers simply looked on and LAUGHED . . . DJs encouraged the frenzied crowd with chants of “Are you on one? Let’s go MENTAL, let’s go FATAL.” ’
Sun
report. ‘The boy . . . had become sucked into the hellish nightmare engulfing thousands of youngsters as the Acid House scourge sweeps Britain . . . Callous organizers and drug dealers simply looked on and LAUGHED . . . DJs encouraged the frenzied crowd with chants of “Are you on one? Let’s go MENTAL, let’s go FATAL.” ’
Inflamed by the tabloids, the backlash began in earnest. Radio One DJ Peter Powell described acid house as ‘the closest thing to mass zombiedom’; Sir Ralph Halpern banned Smiley T-shirts from 650 branches of his Top Shop and Top Man retail chain; pop stars – including a few veterans of early Shoom – reeled out the platitudes about how you didn’t need to take drugs to have a good time, kids, honest. And the police began to crack down on warehouse parties, raiding events by Kaleidoscope and Brainstorm, and using frogmen to assault a pleasure boat rave in Greenwich. Police attempted to blockade the entrance at another massive party in Greenwich but after negotiations, the party went ahead. The
Sun
reported the Guy Fawkes allnighter as ‘Acid Raid Cops Flee 3000 At Party: Drug Pushers Carry On’, describing how the police, fearing a riot, left the ‘freaked out’ youngsters to carry on ‘raving it up at the sex-and-drugs orgy’;
News of the World
upped the ante with the headline ‘CRAZED ACID MOB ATTACK POLICE’.
Après Nous, le DelugeSun
reported the Guy Fawkes allnighter as ‘Acid Raid Cops Flee 3000 At Party: Drug Pushers Carry On’, describing how the police, fearing a riot, left the ‘freaked out’ youngsters to carry on ‘raving it up at the sex-and-drugs orgy’;
News of the World
upped the ante with the headline ‘CRAZED ACID MOB ATTACK POLICE’.
All the scaremongering tabloid coverage, plus TV reports like
News At Ten
’s exposé of an Apocalypse Now warehouse party, did not have the intended effect of discouraging the youth of Britain. If anything, ‘it just helped it grow even bigger,’ says Mark Moore. ‘It was like what Bill Grundy did for the Sex Pistols.’ The result was an influx of younger kids and suburbanites into the scene.
News At Ten
’s exposé of an Apocalypse Now warehouse party, did not have the intended effect of discouraging the youth of Britain. If anything, ‘it just helped it grow even bigger,’ says Mark Moore. ‘It was like what Bill Grundy did for the Sex Pistols.’ The result was an influx of younger kids and suburbanites into the scene.
Despite their populist rhetoric and antagonism towards traditional clubland élitism, the original Balearic scenesters were horrified by the arrival of the great unwashed and unhip. Oakenfold blames the tabloids: ‘They ruined it for us. Before, it was responsible people [taking drugs]. It wasn’t silly. It got silly when they made it commercial. And that’s when it got worrying ’cos you had young kids doing drugs’cos they were told by the press that that was what everyone was doing. They felt that was what they had to do, to be a part of it. Drugs became mainstream, and everyone became sheep. Our club was about individuals, characters. But it got watered down and it became horrible drugs, horrible people.’
The backlash against the johnny-come-lately acieed freaks was led by Boy’s Own, a clique of Balearic DJs and tastemakers – Terry Farley, Andy Weatherall, Cymon Eckel and Steve Mayes – who threw private parties under the railway arches near London Bridge, and put out the
Boy’s Own
fanzine, an irregular and irreverent publication dedicated to documenting the minutiae of music, clothes and football.
Boy’s Own
coined the famous slogan ‘better dead than acid ted’. The ‘acid ted’ was the timewarp kid who wasn’t hip enough to change with the times. The idea was that the neophyte ravers in bandanas and day-glo T-shirts, shouting ‘acieed!’ and dancing on the tables at Camden Palace, were the equivalent of the 40-year-old teddy boys with rockabilly quiffs, drainpipes and brothel creepers that you used to see in the High Street.
Boy’s Own
fanzine, an irregular and irreverent publication dedicated to documenting the minutiae of music, clothes and football.
Boy’s Own
coined the famous slogan ‘better dead than acid ted’. The ‘acid ted’ was the timewarp kid who wasn’t hip enough to change with the times. The idea was that the neophyte ravers in bandanas and day-glo T-shirts, shouting ‘acieed!’ and dancing on the tables at Camden Palace, were the equivalent of the 40-year-old teddy boys with rockabilly quiffs, drainpipes and brothel creepers that you used to see in the High Street.
The
Boy’s Own
aesthetic was an update of sixties mod: the same homosocial obsessions with the sharpest clothes, the obscurest import dance singles from Black America, and the pills that allowed you to skip sleep and spend the weekend dancing. In the sixties, the dapper mods were at war with the scruffy rockers, greasy-haired bikers who were descended from the fifties’ teddy boys. Journalist Gavin Hills says of the eighties football ‘casual’ milieu that spawned
Boy’s Own
, ‘they were the equivalent of the mods – into music, a bit of football, a bit of violence. It was about a different kind of cool – “suss”, about being “sussed”, not being a
knob
. Knowing how to behave in certain ways, and a certain language, a way of talking.’ This mod versus rockers, Balearic versus ‘acid ted’ antagonism was grounded in an enduring class divide that runs through British pop history: an upper working-class superiority complex vis-à-vis the undiscriminating unskilled proles.
Boy’s Own
aesthetic was an update of sixties mod: the same homosocial obsessions with the sharpest clothes, the obscurest import dance singles from Black America, and the pills that allowed you to skip sleep and spend the weekend dancing. In the sixties, the dapper mods were at war with the scruffy rockers, greasy-haired bikers who were descended from the fifties’ teddy boys. Journalist Gavin Hills says of the eighties football ‘casual’ milieu that spawned
Boy’s Own
, ‘they were the equivalent of the mods – into music, a bit of football, a bit of violence. It was about a different kind of cool – “suss”, about being “sussed”, not being a
knob
. Knowing how to behave in certain ways, and a certain language, a way of talking.’ This mod versus rockers, Balearic versus ‘acid ted’ antagonism was grounded in an enduring class divide that runs through British pop history: an upper working-class superiority complex vis-à-vis the undiscriminating unskilled proles.
As well as a class struggle, the backlash against ‘acid teds’ was generational: the fatigued cynicism of veterans suddenly surrounded by johnny-come-latelys in the first flush of E’d up enthusiasm. ‘Even at that stage,’ says Hills of late 1988, ‘people were saying “E’s aren’t as good as they were.” People like Terry Farley were complaining “clubs are just full of kids now”. All the clichés that you’ve heard every year since were uttered at that time!’ But, as even
Boy’s Own
fan Barry Ashworth admits, ‘All the things that the acid teds did, the Boy’s Own types would have been doing themselves a few months before.’
Boy’s Own
fan Barry Ashworth admits, ‘All the things that the acid teds did, the Boy’s Own types would have been doing themselves a few months before.’
All of a sudden acid house was declared passé; Chicago deep house and New Jersey garage was the in thing. Not only acieed music, but the whole ‘mental’ attitude that the ‘acid teds’ had embraced and exaggerated was deemed unseemly. One Shoom newsletter beseeched the laddish element ‘please, don’t take your shirts off’; Ashworth remembers having to go round his own club ‘saying “put your top back on, man!” ’ Louise Gray admits ‘We
were
rather snotty about the teenagers who were suddenly coming through, swallowing handfuls of pills and going round gurning.’ As well as ‘acid ted’, another derogatory term used by Shoomers for the new arrivals was ‘lilac camels’ – lilac was a popular colour for sneakers, while ‘camel’ referred to the way these E’d up kids would masticate gum frenetically and loll their tongues out of their mouths.
were
rather snotty about the teenagers who were suddenly coming through, swallowing handfuls of pills and going round gurning.’ As well as ‘acid ted’, another derogatory term used by Shoomers for the new arrivals was ‘lilac camels’ – lilac was a popular colour for sneakers, while ‘camel’ referred to the way these E’d up kids would masticate gum frenetically and loll their tongues out of their mouths.
By late 1988, there was a return to style, a reaction against the ‘day-glo warriors’ who had turned the Balearic hooligan-meets-hippy anti-style into a uniform. ‘I remember the first Brainstorm party in autumn’88,’ says Mr C, ‘thinking, “There’s no acid teds in here, I can see hardly any day-glo.” Everyone was dressed up in their really good gear. The whole dress thing seemed to step up after that summer of ’88; people started to get a grip.’
Despite the Summer of Love-and-Unity rhetoric that everyone paid lipservice to, less than a year into its existence the scene had begun to stratify. On one side, there was the original Balearic crowd, with their intimate clubs and mellow eclecticism; on the other, the hardcore acieed freaks swarming to warehouse parties whose flyers promised ‘no balearic, just pure psycho-delic shit’. Up to a point, the Balearic backlash against the alleged ‘herd mentality’ of the acid teds was understandable: if the clubs that had once been full of familiar Faces (in the mod sense of the word) were suddenly mobbed with rowdy strangers, inevitably these people appeared faceless, de-individuated, sheep-like. But it was also a response to a power shift: the Balearics’ ‘subcultural capital’ (to use the theorist Sarah Thornton’s formulation) had suddenly gone public. The ensemble of sounds, gestures, rites and apparel that they had invented had become common currency, tarnished and tawdry. Panicked, the Balearics began the retreat from the populist premises that had originally defined their revolt against West End clubland, a retreat that would eventually lead them back to door policies, expensive designer clothes, and cocaine rather than Ecstasy.
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