Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (14 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Mental Mental Radio Rental
 
By the end of 1988, the scene had also lost some of its innocence – ironically, because of the influx of fresh-faced teenagers who were taking psychoactive substances they weren’t emotionally mature enough to handle. ‘The original people who got into acid house were largely an older crowd,’ says Louise Gray. ‘Mid-twenties onwards, people who’d had a history of experimenting with drugs . . . I remember being at Confusion and there was this sixteen-year-old girl from Upminster who’d taken acid, and her friends had left her, and she was completely cabbaged, very disorientated and upset.’
That said, many of the more experienced, original scenesters were also in a bad way. ‘You’d see people who were completely abusing it,’ remembers Mr C. ‘Seven or eight pills on a Friday, ten pills on a Saturday, and half a dozen on a Sunday.’ Amazingly, given the lack of knowledge about the drug and the need to avoid dehydration, there were almost no E deaths in 1988; physical damage was limited to weight loss and the continual mild flu that for many people lasted the whole summer. Most of the casualties in 1988 were
mindwrecks
. As their tolerance to Ecstasy built up and their intake rose, some were experiencing the typical symptoms of long-term and excessive drug use: moodswings, paranoia, feeling uncanny. ‘There were people that were having nightmares, and completely shot nervous systems,’ says Mr C. A few suffered mental breakdowns.
‘At the Mud Club one Friday, this girl came up and she was so off it that she was incapable of any rational conversation,’ remembers Gray. ‘She just sang this little refrain “Spectrum! Monday! On One, All day!” – ’cos it was the Bank Holiday coming and Spectrum was having an all-dayer.’ This girl – a well-known figure on the scene – was eventually ‘found wandering around the streets where she lived in her night-dress and ended up being put in a mental ward’. Says Mark Moore, ‘She shivers now when you mention house music, she says “It was never me, I was never there.” She’s into acid jazz now.’
Others just didn’t want to stop, despite the early warning signs around them. ‘That initial phase of taking Ecstasy, the pleasure of it is so unexpected, you just keep doing it,’ says Jack Barron, a rock journalist swept up in acid-house fever. His love affair with the drug reached a climax when he ‘took thirty-eight E’s in a week . . . I was completely convinced that there was this parallel universe which came to us in our dreams, and in which we all flew around . . . The separation between dream time and day time . . . well, there
wasn’t
any. I wouldn’t particularly recommend it.’ Amazingly, he didn’t crash for good after this seven nights of madness, but ‘just kept going’.
Motor City Madness
 
Despite all the freefloating idealism and energy triggered by Ecstasy, a surprisingly small amount of artistic expression survives the era. Apart from
Boy’s Own
, there was next to no fanzine documentation of the scene as it happened. People were simply too busy having fun. But it was a creative period, says Gray, ‘as far as short-term things went – design, T-shirts, flyers. The Olympics happened in 1988, and within
hours
of Ben Johnson being disqualified for drug use, there was a T-shirt with Ben Johnson going across the finishing line and the legend “Get Right On One, Matey!” Which we all thought was terribly witty!’
Home-grown house took a while to come through, too. The early British stabs at this Black American music were imitative, and often quite poor imitations. D-Mob’s ‘We Call It Acieeed’ got to Number Three in November 1988, and was something like the acid house counterpart of Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around The Clock’: self-reflexive title, a thin-sounding pastiche of the real underground black music. It didn’t even feature a proper Roland 303, and worse, came with a rap that disingenuously claimed that ‘acid’ wasn’t about a drug. The other early homegrown acid smash – ‘Acid Man’ by Jolly Roger (DJ Eddie Richards in disguise) – was a bit better, featuring genuine 303 squelch-a-rama and a prim matronly voice that commands, ‘Stop that infernal racket, I mean NOW!’ Better still, Humanoid’s ‘Stakker Humanoid’ – Number Seventeen in December 1988 – was a terrific surge of acieed-meets-techno, as lithe and deadly as a bionic cheetah.
As a British pop cultural explosion, acid house was unique in so far as it was based almost entirely around non-indigenous music. During 1988 – 9, the scene had three years’ worth of American house and techno classics to draw on, as well as all the new tracks streaming out of Chicago, New York and Detroit each week. Faced with this deluge of music made by Black American artists, it took UK producers a while to find their own distinctively British voice.
In its dependence on imports, acid house strongly resembled Northern Soul, the strange seventies cult based around sixties sub-Motown dance singles from the Detroit area. Baby Ford – buddy of Mark Moore and a then rising British house producer with near-hits like ‘Oochy Koochy’ – made this parallel in his album track ‘Poem For Wigan’. A homage to Northern Soul’s mecca the Wigan Casino, the song starts with a sample from a documentary on the early seventies scene: ‘To get enjoyment during their teens and twenties, they have to build, more or less, an alternative society, just to enjoy themselves, because they can’t within the normal channels . . . If you go to Wigan on Saturday night . . . people think we’re crazy.’ Like acid house, Northern Soul was all about uptempo Black American music and popping pills so you could dance till dawn; it revolved around name DJs, obscure tracks, and long-distance journeys to clubs that were worshipped as temples. In both cases, the raw material of a Black American music was transformed into a way of life, through a form of creative mis-recognition.
It was a Northern Soul connection that led to the domestic release of Detroit techno in Britain. Dance music entrepreneur Neil Rushton had been a ‘Northern Soul freak, into Motown’. Intrigued by the Detroit tracks simply because of where they came from, he contacted the Belleville Three and licensed their tracks for UK release through his label Kool Kat (soon renamed Network). Rushton then sold the idea of doing a Detroit compilation to Virgin subsidiary Ten Records. Detroit’s music had hitherto reached British ears as a subset of Chicago house; Rushton and the Belleville Three decided to fasten on the word ‘techno’ – a term that had been bandied around but never stressed – in order to define Detroit as a distinct genre. The single from the compilation – Kevin Saunderson’s Inner City track ‘Big Fun’ – was a huge hit; the follow-up, the glassy shimmer-funk of ‘Good Life’, was even bigger. Worldwide, both tracks sold over two million. While Saunderson and singer Paris Grey were being treated like stars, Juan Atkins’s Model 500 tracks and Derrick May’s ‘Strings of Life’ and ‘Nude Photo’ ruled the underground.
For the Belleville Three, it was something of a revelation to be embraced by the white European audience. ‘You gotta remember, we were brought up with this racial conflict thing, instilled in us since babies,’ says Atkins, describing Detroit’s unofficial apartheid of different neighbourhoods, different schools, different radio stations. ‘If you’re a kid in Detroit, [you might] never even have to
see
a white person, unless they’re on TV. The closest association I had with people outside my race was when I started travelling to Europe. The first time I went to the UK, man, I played for
five thousand white kids
. It really expanded my horizons.’
The revelation was tempered by certain reservations about how these crazy white kids had taken techno and made it a component of a totally different subculture. There was virtually no drug element to the Detroit party circuit. For the DJ – philosopher Derrick May, in particular, the deranged and debauched atmosphere of the British scene was a world away from his vision of the ideal techno audience of urbane aesthetes. Compare the druggy names of British clubs and warehouse parties (Brainstorm, Trip City, Hedonism) with the sober, lofty-sounding moniker of the Detroit club where May was then realizing his vision: The Detroit Musical Institution. (That was the original name: this legendary club has since come to be remembered as the Music Institute, while at the time its patrons called it the ’Tute). By the early nineties, May’s distaste for Brit-rave excesses had hardened into bitter contempt: ‘I don’t even like to use the word “techno” because it’s been bastardized and prostituted in every form you can possibly imagine . . . To me, the form and philosophy of it is nothing to do with what we originally intended it to be.’
May’s resentment is shared by Eddie Fowlkes, who talks of ‘cultural rape’ and titled an album
Black Technosoul
to stress the R & B roots that nourish Detroit’s music, and that European rave progressively severed. ‘Techno was a
musical
thing,’ he says. ‘There wasn’t no
culture
– no whistles, no E’s or throwing parties at old warehouses. A warehouse party in Detroit – it was swept clean, painted, mirrors on the wall, a nice sound-system. It wasn’t dirty and raunchy.’
Although Fowlkes means to indict, this comment could equally serve as a tribute to the British youth who took this imported music and built a
culture
around it, an entire apparatus of clothes and rituals, dance-moves and drug-lore. Eventually the cultural framework they built actually changed the music itself, mutated and mutilated the sacred Detroit blueprint, adding new inputs and intensifying certain elements that enhanced the drug sensations. And these transformations would be spawned above all in the ‘dirty, raunchy’ milieu of warehouse parties, and the massive one-off raves and rave-style clubs that followed in their wake.
Warehousing Benefits
 
Warehouse parties went back to the late seventies, to the reggae ‘blues’, shebeens and illegal after-hours drinking dens. In the eighties, the scene stretched from funk, soul and hip hop parties like The Dirtbox and Westworld, to the legendary events thrown in abandoned British Rail depots and derelict schools by The Mutoid Waste Company, an anarcho-punk collective who lived in caravans and constructed post-apocalyptic sculptures out of scrap machinery and salvage from skips. Some of the most mainstream house DJs of the nineties – Jeremy Healey, Judge Jules – cut their teeth at warehouse events like The Circus and Family Funktion.
Acid house mania incited an explosion of warehouse parties, as ravers looked to circumvent the restricted opening hours of licensed clubs. Alongside their regular weekend parties at Clink Street, the RIP crew went peripatetic in late 1988, organizing a series of Brainstorm events. ‘Snap the padlocks with bolt cutters and kick off the door, on the day,’ remembers Mr C of these one-night squat parties. Film studios and disused industrial hangars were typical locations. There was also a spate of riverboat parties, often kicking off in the Docklands area of East London. ‘Just get on a boat and everybody cane it,’ says Gavin Hills. Drifting down the Thames, ‘you’re not gonna get raided’.
According to Hills, these riverboat raves were controlled by the ICF, one of a number of football firms turned criminal syndicates, who’d realized just how much money they could earn through sinking their claws into the warehouse scene – not just from admissions, but from monopolizing the drug supply. While the firms were sometimes directly involved in parties from the ground up, often they would latch on to successful party organizers who’d already built up a following, then apply the pressure.
One East End party promoter who narrowly escaped the hoodlums’ clutches was Joe Wieczorek, the Dickensian figure behind Labrynth, the world’s longest running rave-club. Born in 1957, the son of a Polish-Jewish Auschwitz survivor, Wieczorek had a background in doing security for rock bands; at one point, he was employed as a double for his ‘spitting image’, Les McKeown of The Bay City Rollers. An ‘avid Spurs fan’, Wieczorek also had links to the football hooligan scene; in the mid-eighties, he’d run an East End pub called The Pickle House, which became a meeting point for Tottenham Hotspur fans when they had matches with Millwall or West Ham (the team supported by the ICF).
Wieczorek retired from the publican game, heartily sick of alcohol culture and the East End hard-man ethos that accompanied it. All this made him ripe for conversion to acid house; he was highly impressed when he ran into a former football enemy, a Millwall man, loved-up on E at a warehouse do near Kingsland Road. ‘The last time me and him met, he was sticking a great big blade in me back.’ As he got more involved in the scene, he found that a remarkable number of the people involved in parties were former football hooligans. ‘Quite a few of the DJs at the time, were ex-football-oriented, as well. And that amazed me – of all the sets of people to bump into after I’ve turned me back on it! The first time I saw all that West Ham lot doing security on doors, I thought “how did you lot get involved in
this
?” ’ Later, he discovered that the football firm/rave organizer crossover was a nationwide phenomenon: for instance, the people behind the pirate radio station Dream FM in Leeds were ‘that old Service Crew lot’.
From late 1988 on, warehouse parties were rife throughout the East End, partly because it was where a lot of the ‘acid ted’ newcomers came from, and partly because of the abundance of derelict, disused buildings. Wieczorek decided to have a crack at it himself. Advertised with hand-drawn flyers photocopied by his partner Sue Barnes on the sly at her workplace, the first Labrynth was at Vale Road, Manor House, in mid-October 1988.
The more cunning warehouse promoters had become adept at fooling the police into accepting that events were legit and fully licensed; they would brandish falsified leases and paperwork. Wieczorek made an appointment with Bethnal Green firestation, to discuss safety at rave events. ‘The guy left us in his office for five minutes, and all I did was pick up a piece of headed notepaper, folded it up and put it in me pocket.’ Brian Semmens, one of the Labrynth crew, used his computer skills to forge ‘a fire certificate’; no such thing existed, but it looked official, and it worked. At one party, ‘The chief constable at Tottingham and Haringay actually came and shook my hand and said “This is an extremely well run event.” The moment they saw the certificate, and the odd fire extinguisher, they were just not interested in stopping it.’

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