Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (18 page)
Read Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Online
Authors: Simon Reynolds
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
9.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
With Tony Wilson hyping the Mondays as the new Sex Pistols, the next step in the Great Rave ’n’ Roll Swindle was the conquest of America. Earlier in the year, he’d told
The Face
that he wouldn’t be bothered if any one of the Mondays died of pharmaceutical excess: ‘listen, [Joy Division’s] Ian Curtis dying on me was the greatest thing that’s happened to my life. Death sells!’ But such McLarenesque cynicism didn’t play so well in the USA. That summer, at the 1990 New Music Seminar in New York, Tony Wilson chaired a panel provocatively titled ‘Wake Up America, You’re Dead’. Here he expounded a potted history of the last three years of UK pop – Ibiza, Ecstasy, acieed, Madchester – and prophesized that the British groups would export back to White America the black dance music they’d ignored, just as the Stones and Beatles had done in the sixties.
The Face
that he wouldn’t be bothered if any one of the Mondays died of pharmaceutical excess: ‘listen, [Joy Division’s] Ian Curtis dying on me was the greatest thing that’s happened to my life. Death sells!’ But such McLarenesque cynicism didn’t play so well in the USA. That summer, at the 1990 New Music Seminar in New York, Tony Wilson chaired a panel provocatively titled ‘Wake Up America, You’re Dead’. Here he expounded a potted history of the last three years of UK pop – Ibiza, Ecstasy, acieed, Madchester – and prophesized that the British groups would export back to White America the black dance music they’d ignored, just as the Stones and Beatles had done in the sixties.
But what offended the audience of industry insiders wasn’t the way Wilson poured scorn on the US record biz for ignoring the revolutionary black music on its own doorstep, but his gleeful revelation that the Mondays were drug dealers, and the appearance of comedian Keith Allen in the guise of a Dr Feelgood who boasted of having ‘thousands’ of E tablets ‘in my hotel’. The joke fell on stony-faced ground, largely because ‘drug pusher’ had a different connotation in an America beset with gang-related bloodshed. In Britain, the image of the Ecstasy dealer as a harmless minor villain was soon to change; Wilson’s wind-up ricochetted back to haunt him when drug gangs started to bring guns into The Haçienda later that year.
Trip City‘Detroit and Chicago have been to us and other current groups, what Memphis and Chicago were to the Stones and the other white R & B groups of the sixties. Acid house was the first time I got excited about music that was happening in my lifetime.’
– Tim Burgess, singer of The Charlatans
The flaw in Burgess’s theory was that apart from the Mondays and the Roses, all the other North West of England bands sounded less like modern
equivalents
of the mod bands, and more like straightforward sixties beat revivalists. There was only the most tenuous relationship to modern dance music, and an alarming degree of attention to period detail. The Charlatans had the ‘baggy’, shuffle-funk beat, all right, but were morbidly obsessed with the milky, Ovalteeny tones of the Hammond organ (their keyboard player admired Jon Lord of Deep Purple). Inspiral Carpets exhumed the tinpot Farfisa organ, nasal harmonies and gormless page-boy haircuts of ‘96 Tears’-style garage punkadelia. Candy Flip – named after the slang term for an E and LSD cocktail – scored a Top Five hit with their ‘baggy’ version of ‘Strawberry Fields’. Other ‘scene’ bands – The High, Ocean Colour Scene, The La’s, Mock Turtles – were even more hopelessly classicist.
equivalents
of the mod bands, and more like straightforward sixties beat revivalists. There was only the most tenuous relationship to modern dance music, and an alarming degree of attention to period detail. The Charlatans had the ‘baggy’, shuffle-funk beat, all right, but were morbidly obsessed with the milky, Ovalteeny tones of the Hammond organ (their keyboard player admired Jon Lord of Deep Purple). Inspiral Carpets exhumed the tinpot Farfisa organ, nasal harmonies and gormless page-boy haircuts of ‘96 Tears’-style garage punkadelia. Candy Flip – named after the slang term for an E and LSD cocktail – scored a Top Five hit with their ‘baggy’ version of ‘Strawberry Fields’. Other ‘scene’ bands – The High, Ocean Colour Scene, The La’s, Mock Turtles – were even more hopelessly classicist.
If Manchester had really eclipsed London as the rave capital of the UK, where – you might have been forgiven for asking – the fook were the proper Mancunian house artists?! In truth, there were only two contenders – 808 State and A Guy Called Gerald. Of Caribbean parentage, Gerald Simpson had grown up on a mixture of electro (Afrika Bambaataa, Mantronix), synth pop (Yellow Magic Orchestra, Numan, Visage), art-rock (Peter Gabriel, Bowie) and jazz-fusion (Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Miles Davis). In the late eighties, Simpson hooked up with Graham Massey (a refugee from the avant-funk unit Biting Tongues) in a Brit-rap collective called The Hit Squad. The group practised in the basement of Manchester’s leading import-dance-and-indiepop record store, Eastern Bloc, which was co-owned by Martin Price. With Price supplying ‘concepts and images’, Massey and Simpson then formed an acid-house outfit which evolved into 808 State, named after the famous Roland 808 drum-machine so beloved by B-boys.
After working on
New Build
, an album of acid jams, Simpson quarrelled with the rest of the group over money and went solo as A Guy Called Gerald – but not before contributing heavily to a track called ‘Pacific State’. The next thing he knew, his erstwhile partners had recruited two teenage DJs, Andy Barker and Darren Partington aka The Spinmasters (famous for their sets at The Thunderdome and on Manchester radio), and ‘Pacific State’ was in the Top Ten. Rubbing shoulders with ‘Fool’s Gold’ and ‘Rave On’, ‘Pacific’ was the third Madchester chart smash in the closing months of 1989. Simpson tried to get an injunction against the record, eventually settling for royalties and a publishing credit. But he could take solace from the fact that he’d beaten 808 to the punch with ‘Voodoo Ray’, a Number Twelve hit in July 1989 and the first truly great British house anthem.
New Build
, an album of acid jams, Simpson quarrelled with the rest of the group over money and went solo as A Guy Called Gerald – but not before contributing heavily to a track called ‘Pacific State’. The next thing he knew, his erstwhile partners had recruited two teenage DJs, Andy Barker and Darren Partington aka The Spinmasters (famous for their sets at The Thunderdome and on Manchester radio), and ‘Pacific State’ was in the Top Ten. Rubbing shoulders with ‘Fool’s Gold’ and ‘Rave On’, ‘Pacific’ was the third Madchester chart smash in the closing months of 1989. Simpson tried to get an injunction against the record, eventually settling for royalties and a publishing credit. But he could take solace from the fact that he’d beaten 808 to the punch with ‘Voodoo Ray’, a Number Twelve hit in July 1989 and the first truly great British house anthem.
With its undulant groove and dense percussive foliage (Gerald was trying to get ‘a sort of samba vibe, I was listening to a lot of Latin stuff’), its glassy, gem-faceted bass-pulse and tropical bird synth-chatter, ‘Voodoo Ray’ looks ahead to the polyrhythmic luxuriance of Gerald’s mid-nineties forays into jungle, as do the tremulous whimpers and giggles of the blissed-out female vocal. The main hook – a siren-like voice chanting ‘Oooh oo-oooh / Aaaah – aa-hahah, yeaahh’ – was offset by a sinister male voice intoning ‘voodoo ray’: a mysterious phrase that suggests a shamanic figure or
voudun
priest, or possibly a mind-controlling beam. In fact, it was a happy accident: originally, ‘it was meant to be “Voodoo Rage”, but I didn’t have enough memory in the sampler so I had to chop the G off!’ says Gerald. ‘I had this idea of people locking into a beat, this picture of a voodoo ceremony. But instead of it being really aggressive, it ended up something really mysterious – sort of sucking you in.’
voudun
priest, or possibly a mind-controlling beam. In fact, it was a happy accident: originally, ‘it was meant to be “Voodoo Rage”, but I didn’t have enough memory in the sampler so I had to chop the G off!’ says Gerald. ‘I had this idea of people locking into a beat, this picture of a voodoo ceremony. But instead of it being really aggressive, it ended up something really mysterious – sort of sucking you in.’
Gerald followed ‘Voodoo Ray’ with ‘FX’, a track written for the soundtrack to
Trip City
(based on Trevor Miller’s experimental novel set in a near-future club scene where everyone is addicted to a hallucinogen called FX), and then, in early 1990, with his major label debut
Automannik
. But the deal with CBS quickly turned sour: the company wanted ‘ten more versions of “Voodoo Ray”,’ and Gerald’s tougher-sounding, conceptual album
High Life Low Profile
was never released. Disillusioned, Gerald disappeared into the rave underground, resurfacing in the mid-nineties as one of the most experimental producers in the jungle scene.
Trip City
(based on Trevor Miller’s experimental novel set in a near-future club scene where everyone is addicted to a hallucinogen called FX), and then, in early 1990, with his major label debut
Automannik
. But the deal with CBS quickly turned sour: the company wanted ‘ten more versions of “Voodoo Ray”,’ and Gerald’s tougher-sounding, conceptual album
High Life Low Profile
was never released. Disillusioned, Gerald disappeared into the rave underground, resurfacing in the mid-nineties as one of the most experimental producers in the jungle scene.
808 State fared somewhat better with major-label affiliate ZTT, maintaining a presence in the singles chart while prospering as an album-oriented act. With its cheesy, mellow-yellow saxophone and sampled bird-song, ‘Pacific State’ caught the crest of the vogue for Ambient or New Age house: ‘coming down music, a sound for when the sun’s coming up and the trip’s near its end,’ as Martin Price put it. The original idea behind ‘Pacific’, though, was an attempt at a modern equivalent of fifties ‘exotica’; Graham Massey was a big fan of Martin Denny, whose tiki music (quasi-Polynesian mood-music for suburban cocktail parties) often featured tropical bird-calls.
On the album
90
, ‘Sunrise’ was a far superior take on the same idea; tendrils of flute, mist-swirls of spectral sample-texture, and lambent synth-horizons conjure up a Polynesian dawnscape. On this track and the earlier ‘State Ritual’ (which sounded like aborigines trying to make acid house using flutes and wooden-gourds), 808 State are denizens of the ‘Fourth World’ (Jon Hassell’s term for a future fusion that melded Western hi-tech and traditional ethnic musics, as sketched on albums like
Dream Theory In Malaya
and
Aka-Darbari-Java/Magic Realism).
Later in 1990, 808 actually remixed ‘Voiceprint’, from Hassell’s hip-hop influenced album
City: Works of Fiction
, adapting it for the contemporary house dancefloor. Primarily a Miles-influenced trumpeter, Hassell was a veteran of the early seventies jazz-fusion era. 808 State gave props to Weather Report and Herbie Hancock, fusioneer graduates of Miles’s late sixties and early seventies ensembles. Darren spoke of ‘trying to create that big band image, that big sound onstage, but all we’ve got is just a few boxes. We want it so that from every corner of those speakers something’s coming out. Those bands were doing it then, and we’re doing it now.’
90
, ‘Sunrise’ was a far superior take on the same idea; tendrils of flute, mist-swirls of spectral sample-texture, and lambent synth-horizons conjure up a Polynesian dawnscape. On this track and the earlier ‘State Ritual’ (which sounded like aborigines trying to make acid house using flutes and wooden-gourds), 808 State are denizens of the ‘Fourth World’ (Jon Hassell’s term for a future fusion that melded Western hi-tech and traditional ethnic musics, as sketched on albums like
Dream Theory In Malaya
and
Aka-Darbari-Java/Magic Realism).
Later in 1990, 808 actually remixed ‘Voiceprint’, from Hassell’s hip-hop influenced album
City: Works of Fiction
, adapting it for the contemporary house dancefloor. Primarily a Miles-influenced trumpeter, Hassell was a veteran of the early seventies jazz-fusion era. 808 State gave props to Weather Report and Herbie Hancock, fusioneer graduates of Miles’s late sixties and early seventies ensembles. Darren spoke of ‘trying to create that big band image, that big sound onstage, but all we’ve got is just a few boxes. We want it so that from every corner of those speakers something’s coming out. Those bands were doing it then, and we’re doing it now.’
On their next album
Ex-El
, 808 State plunged even deeper into the realm of nineties fusion, revealing its pleasures and pitfalls. Tracks like ‘San Fransisco’ and ‘Lambrusco Cowboy’ offer a pan-global fantasia of reeling vistas and undulating impressionism. ‘Qmart’ is like a helicopter’s eye view of the savannah, with herds of antelope and wildebeest scattering hither and thither like shoals of tropical fish. Despite its Nubian/Egyptological title, ‘Nephatiti’ is urban to the core, a perfect in-car soundtrack; like the opening sequence of underpasses and flyovers in Tarkovksy’s
Solaris
, it makes you feel like a corpuscle in the city’s bloodstream. But elsewhere, there’s a tendency towards fusion’s cardinal sins: sterile, showboating monumentalism, florid detail verging on the rococo.
Ex-El
, 808 State plunged even deeper into the realm of nineties fusion, revealing its pleasures and pitfalls. Tracks like ‘San Fransisco’ and ‘Lambrusco Cowboy’ offer a pan-global fantasia of reeling vistas and undulating impressionism. ‘Qmart’ is like a helicopter’s eye view of the savannah, with herds of antelope and wildebeest scattering hither and thither like shoals of tropical fish. Despite its Nubian/Egyptological title, ‘Nephatiti’ is urban to the core, a perfect in-car soundtrack; like the opening sequence of underpasses and flyovers in Tarkovksy’s
Solaris
, it makes you feel like a corpuscle in the city’s bloodstream. But elsewhere, there’s a tendency towards fusion’s cardinal sins: sterile, showboating monumentalism, florid detail verging on the rococo.
Although
Ex-El
featured cameos from New Order’s Bernard Sumner and Bjork, for the most part 808 State’s music was faceless, text-free,
profoundly superficial
. But belying their image as knob-twiddling technicians with nothing to say, 808 State in person were mouthy, vociferous, and in Martin Price’s case, almost pathologically opinionated. They had bags of personality – it just wasn’t a particularly agreeable personality. The first time I interviewed Price and Massey, circa
90
, the duo were quick to define 808 State against the Cabaret Voltaire/A Certain Ratio/On U Sound tradition of avant-funk, despite Massey’s own background in that scene. Arguing that rave music had outflanked the egghead experimentalists, Massey declared: ‘Mainstream clubs are just so out there and futuristic in comparison. You get beer boys and Sharons ’n’ Tracies dancing to the weirdest crap going, at places like The Thunderdome, and they don’t know what’s hit ’em. Yer average Joe Bloggs is dancing to stuff that’s basically avant-garde.’
Ex-El
featured cameos from New Order’s Bernard Sumner and Bjork, for the most part 808 State’s music was faceless, text-free,
profoundly superficial
. But belying their image as knob-twiddling technicians with nothing to say, 808 State in person were mouthy, vociferous, and in Martin Price’s case, almost pathologically opinionated. They had bags of personality – it just wasn’t a particularly agreeable personality. The first time I interviewed Price and Massey, circa
90
, the duo were quick to define 808 State against the Cabaret Voltaire/A Certain Ratio/On U Sound tradition of avant-funk, despite Massey’s own background in that scene. Arguing that rave music had outflanked the egghead experimentalists, Massey declared: ‘Mainstream clubs are just so out there and futuristic in comparison. You get beer boys and Sharons ’n’ Tracies dancing to the weirdest crap going, at places like The Thunderdome, and they don’t know what’s hit ’em. Yer average Joe Bloggs is dancing to stuff that’s basically avant-garde.’
Seven months later, in the summer of 1990, Price railed against indie-rock/rave crossover bands like The Beloved, The Shamen and Primal Scream. ‘You’ve got totally non-credible acts cashing in on the sort of music 808 State have been doing for years.’ Deriding indie-rock as ‘peer group stuff . . . just another stupid way to get girlfriends by going round with a big question mark over your head,’ he ranted: ‘Now they’ve discovered that the better peer group is in the dance field and they want to change their whole fucking lives. But they don’t do it bravely, and say “All right, I made a mistake, I’m now totally into dance.” They stay stuck between two stools.’
‘Fucking Norman Cook on
The Late Show
saying “It’s like punk rock,” ’ frothed Price, referring to former Housemartins’ bassist Norman Cook, who’d recently got to Number One with his dubby-dance combo Beats International. ‘If somebody says [techno]’s like punk to my face, I’ll fucking smash ’em in the teeth. It’s nothing to do with punk. Nobody wants to see a load of idiots torturing themselves on stage with guitars any more. This is about machines, punk was about arm power. The muscles and sinews in dance music are when you’re sweating your bollocks off on the dancefloor.’
White Punks on EThe Late Show
saying “It’s like punk rock,” ’ frothed Price, referring to former Housemartins’ bassist Norman Cook, who’d recently got to Number One with his dubby-dance combo Beats International. ‘If somebody says [techno]’s like punk to my face, I’ll fucking smash ’em in the teeth. It’s nothing to do with punk. Nobody wants to see a load of idiots torturing themselves on stage with guitars any more. This is about machines, punk was about arm power. The muscles and sinews in dance music are when you’re sweating your bollocks off on the dancefloor.’
Although the equation of homespun house and punk rock
was
a little simplistic, the UK dance scene in 1990 was packed with old punks who’d traded in their guitars for the new technology: The Orb’s Alex Paterson, Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty of the KLF. Even former PiL bassist Jah Wobble returned from the wilderness, playing on tracks by Primal Scream and The Orb, and peddling, via his ethnodelic ensemble Invaders Of The Heart, a distinctly New Agey creed of ‘healing rhythms’, ‘redemptive chants’ and ego-melting ‘energy flows’.
was
a little simplistic, the UK dance scene in 1990 was packed with old punks who’d traded in their guitars for the new technology: The Orb’s Alex Paterson, Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty of the KLF. Even former PiL bassist Jah Wobble returned from the wilderness, playing on tracks by Primal Scream and The Orb, and peddling, via his ethnodelic ensemble Invaders Of The Heart, a distinctly New Agey creed of ‘healing rhythms’, ‘redemptive chants’ and ego-melting ‘energy flows’.
Punk’s negativism was really a poisoned Romantic utopianism. In the late eighties, that curdled idealism – blocked by the societal impasses and cultural dead-ends of the seventies – flowed free, thanks to Ecstasy and the feel-good factor engendered by the economic boom. Prefigured in Prince’s prattle about a New Power Generation, in Soul II Soul’s community-conscious funky-dredd anthems ‘Back To Life’ and ‘Get A Life’, and the ‘hippy-hop’ of De La Soul and other Native Tongue rap groups like Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest, positivity emerged as
the
pop ideology of the new decade. Drawing on diverse sources – American discourses of self-realization and interpersonal therapy, New Age notions of healing music and ‘abundance consciousness’, sixties flower power, deep house’s gospel exhortations – positivity heralded the dawn of a nineties zeitgeist that emphasized caring and sharing, a return to quality of life over standard of living, and green eco-consciousness. The anti-social egotism of the eighties, exemplified in pop terms by rap and Madonna, was eclipsed by a shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’, from materialism to idealism, from attitude to platitude.
the
pop ideology of the new decade. Drawing on diverse sources – American discourses of self-realization and interpersonal therapy, New Age notions of healing music and ‘abundance consciousness’, sixties flower power, deep house’s gospel exhortations – positivity heralded the dawn of a nineties zeitgeist that emphasized caring and sharing, a return to quality of life over standard of living, and green eco-consciousness. The anti-social egotism of the eighties, exemplified in pop terms by rap and Madonna, was eclipsed by a shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’, from materialism to idealism, from attitude to platitude.
Needless to say, the loved-up rave scene was a fertile climate for the proliferation of New Agey ideas. Between 1988 and 1990, there was a subtle modulation – from music to lose yourself in (acieed) to music to find yourself in (ambient house). Alongside 808’s ‘Pacific State’, there was S’Express’s ‘Mantra For A State of Mind’ (described by Mark Moore as ‘music to cleanse your mind’), Innocence’s ‘Natural Thing’, The Grid’s ‘Floatation’, The Beloved’s ‘The Sun Rising’, The KLF’s
Chill Out
and The Orb’s ‘A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of The Ultraworld’. This brief fad for dub-tempo house and beat-free chill-out music was accompanied by talk of giving up synthetics like MDMA in favour of ‘organic highs’: gurano, psychoactive cocktails, and ‘brain machine’ goggles whose flickering light-patterns induced mildly trippy trance states. On the fashion front, ravers started dressing all in white, signalling their newborn purity of soul. Oh, it was easy (and highly enjoyable, let me tell you!) to mock the nebulous naïvety of the positivity prophets. But clearly, the feeling of ‘something in the air’ stemmed from a genuine and deep-seated, if poorly grounded, idealism and hunger for change.
Chill Out
and The Orb’s ‘A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of The Ultraworld’. This brief fad for dub-tempo house and beat-free chill-out music was accompanied by talk of giving up synthetics like MDMA in favour of ‘organic highs’: gurano, psychoactive cocktails, and ‘brain machine’ goggles whose flickering light-patterns induced mildly trippy trance states. On the fashion front, ravers started dressing all in white, signalling their newborn purity of soul. Oh, it was easy (and highly enjoyable, let me tell you!) to mock the nebulous naïvety of the positivity prophets. But clearly, the feeling of ‘something in the air’ stemmed from a genuine and deep-seated, if poorly grounded, idealism and hunger for change.
Other books
Diamond Revelation by Sheila Copeland
Junkyard Dogs by Craig Johnson
Moonlight Kin: A Wolf's Tale by Summers, Jordan
Cast the First Stone by Margaret Thornton
One Chance by Paul Potts
Mulligan Stew by Deb Stover
Lost in the Echo by Jeremy Bishop, Robert Swartwood
The Road to Ubar by Nicholas Clapp
Severe Clear by Stuart Woods
All I Want for Christmas Is You (Short Story) by O'Keefe, Molly