Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (19 page)
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Authors: Simon Reynolds
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Not all of the positivity-punks were old: Adamski, rave’s first pin-up, was only eleven when he formed a punk rock band called The Stupid Babies in 1979. A big Malcolm McLaren fan, Adam Tinley pursued his passion for chaos in the confrontational Diskort Datkord (who often performed in the nude). After doing disco/noise versions of X-Ray Spex’s ‘Identity’ and Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’, Adamski became a big draw on the rave scene during the brief vogue for live performances by keyboard whizzkids, and scored a hit with ‘NRG’.
‘I liked the energy and the visual side of punk, but it was all just saying “no, no, no, no,” whereas now everybody’s saying “yes, yes, yes,” ’ Adamski told me in 1990. ‘I much prefer the positivity thing we have now.’ Ironically, he’d just scored his biggest hit with the gloomy and harrowed ‘Killer’, an awesome slice of techno-blues that cracked apart the jollity of
Top of the Pops
with its grievous ache of loss and longing. Sung and co-written by Black British singer Seal, ‘Killer’ was rave’s very own ‘What’s Goin’ On’, and in the summer of 1990 it annexed the Number One spot for nearly a month. The futuristic frigidity of its sound and the sci-fi imagery of the video (Adamski as a ‘nineties alchemist’ messing about in the laboratory) made me imagine Adamski as a Gary Numan for the twenty-first century: a nubile, Aryan
petit prince
, alone in the world with only his techno toys for company. Unfortunately Adamski blew it by following ‘Killer’ with ‘The Space Jungle’ (a throwaway cover version of Presley’s ‘All Shook Up’) and the pitiful album
Doctor Adamski’s Musical Pharmacy
, whose only faintly redeeming moment was the ultra-
naif
alphabet-song ‘Everything Is Fine’, which began ‘A is for adrenalin, amnesia and anything else that makes life easier’ and got worse.
Top of the Pops
with its grievous ache of loss and longing. Sung and co-written by Black British singer Seal, ‘Killer’ was rave’s very own ‘What’s Goin’ On’, and in the summer of 1990 it annexed the Number One spot for nearly a month. The futuristic frigidity of its sound and the sci-fi imagery of the video (Adamski as a ‘nineties alchemist’ messing about in the laboratory) made me imagine Adamski as a Gary Numan for the twenty-first century: a nubile, Aryan
petit prince
, alone in the world with only his techno toys for company. Unfortunately Adamski blew it by following ‘Killer’ with ‘The Space Jungle’ (a throwaway cover version of Presley’s ‘All Shook Up’) and the pitiful album
Doctor Adamski’s Musical Pharmacy
, whose only faintly redeeming moment was the ultra-
naif
alphabet-song ‘Everything Is Fine’, which began ‘A is for adrenalin, amnesia and anything else that makes life easier’ and got worse.
If Adamski degenerated into rave’s very own Captain Sensible, The KLF were much closer to his original reinvocation of the spirit of Malcolm McLaren. Back in the 1987 – 8 era of sample-based DJ tracks, KLF-ers Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty had formed a hip hop outfit called The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. Borrowed from Robert Anton Wilson’s
Illuminatus!
, this was the name of an imaginary anarcho-mystic organization said to have been fighting Authority since the dawn of History; Mu means ‘chaos’. Their first effort, ‘All You Need Is Love’, pirated hefty chunks of the Beatles and the MC5, and the album
1987: What The Fuck Is Going On?
had to be withdrawn after Abba, one of numerous sample victims, threatened legal action. As The Timelords the duo scored a Number One hit with ‘Doctorin’ The Tardis’, cobbled together out of the
Dr Who
theme and Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock ’n’ Roll, Part Two’. They then wrote a book about the experience,
The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way
.
Illuminatus!
, this was the name of an imaginary anarcho-mystic organization said to have been fighting Authority since the dawn of History; Mu means ‘chaos’. Their first effort, ‘All You Need Is Love’, pirated hefty chunks of the Beatles and the MC5, and the album
1987: What The Fuck Is Going On?
had to be withdrawn after Abba, one of numerous sample victims, threatened legal action. As The Timelords the duo scored a Number One hit with ‘Doctorin’ The Tardis’, cobbled together out of the
Dr Who
theme and Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock ’n’ Roll, Part Two’. They then wrote a book about the experience,
The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way
.
Growing sick of their reputation as sub-McLaren pop pranksters, and convinced that ‘irony and reference points are the dark destroyers of great music’, the pair – now named The KLF – decided rave was the way forward. ‘In all of us there’s a need for communal otherness,’ said Drummond. ‘When you’re at a rave and there’s thirty thousand of you in a field and a record comes on and you all love the record together, that’s a religious feeling.’ Dedicating themselves to a sound they called ‘stadium house’, The KLF recorded thrilling pop-techno stampedes like ‘What Time Is Love’, ‘3 AM Eternal’ and ‘Last Train to Trance-Central’, scoring four Top Five hits and a Number One between late 1990 and early 1992. Despite its populist appeal, The KLF’s output was still infused with their mystic, punks-on-E spirit of ‘zenarchy’. In the video for ‘3 AM Eternal’, The KLF are garbed in ceremonial robes and move in formation as though enacting a religious ceremony, while
The White Room
album featured songs like ‘Church Of The KLF’. And in 1991, the band held a pagan rave to celebrate ‘The Rites of Mu’ on the Hebridean island of Jura, burning a sixty foot high Wicker Man and forcing the assembled journalists and media folk to chant and cavort in white robes.
The White Room
album featured songs like ‘Church Of The KLF’. And in 1991, the band held a pagan rave to celebrate ‘The Rites of Mu’ on the Hebridean island of Jura, burning a sixty foot high Wicker Man and forcing the assembled journalists and media folk to chant and cavort in white robes.
While The KLF ultimately had too much of a sense of irony to really go the nouveau hippy route, other converts to rave were enthused with a born-again fervour. The Beloved were New Order clones until singer Jon Marsh experienced life-changing rave-alations at Shoom and Spectrum. ‘The whole of 1988 from March onwards is a complete blur,’ he told
iD
. ‘An orgy of parties.’ Shoom appears to have made mush of his brain, judging by the lyrics of ‘Up Up and Away’ on their breakthrough album
Happiness
: ‘Hello New day . . . Give the world a message and the word is YES.’ To be fair, their first hit ‘The Sun Rising’ was a rare shock of the sublime in the charts, with its beatific backwards guitar and madrigal vocals (sampled from
A Feather on the Breath of God: Sequences and Hymns by the Abbess Hildegard of Bingen
). But the follow-up, ‘Hello’ was a lazy list-song that juxtaposed Jean-Paul Sartre with crap comedians Cannon and Ball, a ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part Three’ for the MDMA generation.
iD
. ‘An orgy of parties.’ Shoom appears to have made mush of his brain, judging by the lyrics of ‘Up Up and Away’ on their breakthrough album
Happiness
: ‘Hello New day . . . Give the world a message and the word is YES.’ To be fair, their first hit ‘The Sun Rising’ was a rare shock of the sublime in the charts, with its beatific backwards guitar and madrigal vocals (sampled from
A Feather on the Breath of God: Sequences and Hymns by the Abbess Hildegard of Bingen
). But the follow-up, ‘Hello’ was a lazy list-song that juxtaposed Jean-Paul Sartre with crap comedians Cannon and Ball, a ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part Three’ for the MDMA generation.
Then there was The Shamen, whose singer – guitarist Colin Angus hailed New Age as ‘the first modern Western spiritual movement’ and explained his self-invented ‘visualization technique’ for making wishes come true: ‘It’s hard work, you have to be positive and motivated nonstop.’ His partner Mr C added: ‘It’s not about willing something to happen. It’s about
knowing
it’s going to happen.’ The Shamen made a conscious decision to cut themselves off from all sources of negativity in the outside world, like newspapers or TV, and devote themselves to sustaining their own spiritually uplifting, parallel universe of pleasure.
knowing
it’s going to happen.’ The Shamen made a conscious decision to cut themselves off from all sources of negativity in the outside world, like newspapers or TV, and devote themselves to sustaining their own spiritually uplifting, parallel universe of pleasure.
The Shamen began in the mid-eighties as a retro-psychedelic band, complete with phased-and-flanged guitars, Op Art back projections, and melodies that recalled The Electric Prunes’ ‘I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night’. Already interested in hallucinogenic altered states, Angus and co-founder Will Sinnot were among the first indie rockers to be drawn into rave culture. Where bands like Primal Scream and Happy Mondays depended on the dancefloor savvy of DJ – producers like Andy Weatherall or Paul Oakenfold to overhaul their basically traditional rock songs, Colin Angus painstakingly taught himself to program sampling and sequencer technology. By 1989, they had broken with the mould of the rock gig and were throwing mini-raves under the name Synergy (later Progeny), combining live techno bands and DJs, stunning light-shows and video-projections, and an array of sideshows ranging from ‘chill-out’ rooms to for-hire virtual reality equipment. Angus’s dream was for The Shamen to become a sort of twenty-first century Grateful Dead, creating a forum for communal freak-outs outside the musical mainstream.
After an awkward transitional phase in which they combined anti-Amerikan agit-prop lyrics with trance-dance rhythms, The Shamen shifted to full-on positivity on their breakthrough album
En-Tact
(the name came from ‘entactogen’, the pharmacologist’s neologism for Ecstasy). Tracks like ‘Move Any Mountain’ and ‘Human NRG’ are affirmation therapy with a beat. Despite the fatuously uplifting sentiments, though, the electronic textures of ‘Possible Worlds’ and ‘Omega Amigo’ brim so rapturously, you gladly succumb to the utopianism of the text.
En-Tact
(the name came from ‘entactogen’, the pharmacologist’s neologism for Ecstasy). Tracks like ‘Move Any Mountain’ and ‘Human NRG’ are affirmation therapy with a beat. Despite the fatuously uplifting sentiments, though, the electronic textures of ‘Possible Worlds’ and ‘Omega Amigo’ brim so rapturously, you gladly succumb to the utopianism of the text.
The KLF may have joked about ‘The Church of the KLF’, but The Shamen actually had a distinctly high-minded attitude to getting high; Colin Angus, with his fastidious, desiccated manner, has something of the aura of a Presbyterian preacher. In a UK rave scene organized around ‘getting off your tits’ and ‘losing the plot’, the band talked earnestly of ‘a spiritual revolution’. Angus praised psychedelic-plant prophet Terence McKenna for his ‘very rational and lucid ideas about how there’s been longstanding human tradition of using psychedelic drugs.’ The Shamen then turned the bearded sage into an unlikely pop star when they included snatches of his pro-hallucinogen sermonizing on their Top Twenty hit ‘Re: Evolution’.
White punk-on-E usually equalled
nouveau hippy
. Other dance-rock crossover bands offered a decidedly less pious and more delinquent take on rave ’n’ roll. Touted as London’s answer to Happy Mondays, Flowered Up were inner-city kids from the Regent’s Park Estate; their name was a metaphor for youthful idealism struggling up through the cracked paving stones of the urban wasteland. The band had its very own Bez in Barry Mooncult, whose job was to cavort onstage dressed as a giant flower. Like Shaun Ryder, frontman Liam sang about the seamy side of Ecstasy culture in a gutteral working-class accent. ‘It’s On’ expressed the elation of pulling off ‘the biggest deal of your life’; ‘Phobia’ evoked the nocturnal paranoia caused by taking one E too many; the Top Twenty hit ‘Weekender’ was a heavy-riffing epic about the punishing syndrome of living for the weekend’s big blow-out, with Liam warning the party-hard hedonist not to get burned out, and samples from
Quadrophenia
underlining the rave-as-mod analogy.
nouveau hippy
. Other dance-rock crossover bands offered a decidedly less pious and more delinquent take on rave ’n’ roll. Touted as London’s answer to Happy Mondays, Flowered Up were inner-city kids from the Regent’s Park Estate; their name was a metaphor for youthful idealism struggling up through the cracked paving stones of the urban wasteland. The band had its very own Bez in Barry Mooncult, whose job was to cavort onstage dressed as a giant flower. Like Shaun Ryder, frontman Liam sang about the seamy side of Ecstasy culture in a gutteral working-class accent. ‘It’s On’ expressed the elation of pulling off ‘the biggest deal of your life’; ‘Phobia’ evoked the nocturnal paranoia caused by taking one E too many; the Top Twenty hit ‘Weekender’ was a heavy-riffing epic about the punishing syndrome of living for the weekend’s big blow-out, with Liam warning the party-hard hedonist not to get burned out, and samples from
Quadrophenia
underlining the rave-as-mod analogy.
Flowered Up also threw wild parties, like their infamous three day squat-rave at a luxurious mansion block in Blackheath, which climaxed with the place being trashed (despite the fact that the owner was reputedly a hoodlum involved with gambling). ‘I remember sitting by this Victorian indoor swimming pool talking to some guy,’ says Jack Barron. ‘Suddenly this chair flew through the window section between the lounge and the kitchen, followed by a
person
.’ On a similar sixties-into-nineties mod tip as Flowered Up, EMF were a gang of West Country reprobates (the name stood for Ecstasy Motherfuckers) who’d started out throwing micro-raves in the Forest of Dean; their irresistibly swaggering ‘Unbelievable’ got to Number Three in the winter of 1990.
person
.’ On a similar sixties-into-nineties mod tip as Flowered Up, EMF were a gang of West Country reprobates (the name stood for Ecstasy Motherfuckers) who’d started out throwing micro-raves in the Forest of Dean; their irresistibly swaggering ‘Unbelievable’ got to Number Three in the winter of 1990.
Of all the post-Manchester crossover bands, Primal Scream were most successful in merging rock’s Romanticism and rave’s drug-tech futurism. Like fellow Scots The Shamen, Primal Scream began in the early eighties as psychedelic resurrectionists attempting to distil the child-man innocence out of The Byrds, Love and the softer Velvet Underground. By 1988, the Scream’s testicles dropped catastrophically, and they veered off in an unconvincing blues direction, complete with raunchy on-the-road excess. During 1989, the band and other people from their label, Creation, started going to acid-house parties. ‘Contemporary rock ceased to excite us,’ singer and spiritual leader Bobby Gillespie said later. ‘At raves, the music was better, the people were better, the girls were better, and the drugs were better.’
The first recorded evidence of these realigned allegiances emerged when Primal Scream asked their DJ friend Andrew Weatherall of the Boy’s Own posse to remix the Stonesy ‘I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have’. Using rhythm guitar, piano vamps, horn stabs, and other elements from the original, Weatherall built a new track over a chunky-funky, mid-tempo Soul II Soul style rhythmic undercarriage. Samples of Peter Fonda from Roger Corman’s bikersploitation movie
The Wild Angels
– “We wanna be
free
. We wanna get
loaded
and have a good time!” – gave the song its new title: ‘Loaded’. At once sepia-tinted retro and state-of-art – imagine a dub version of ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ – ‘Loaded’ got to Number Sixteen in early 1990, selling over a hundred thousand copies.
The Wild Angels
– “We wanna be
free
. We wanna get
loaded
and have a good time!” – gave the song its new title: ‘Loaded’. At once sepia-tinted retro and state-of-art – imagine a dub version of ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ – ‘Loaded’ got to Number Sixteen in early 1990, selling over a hundred thousand copies.
For the follow-up ‘Come Together’, Primal Scream recruited both Weatherall and Boy’s Own’s Terry Farley. The Farley mix puts looped breakbeats under the band’s Byrdsy twelve-string song; Gillespie celebrates rave-as-the-Swinging-sixties-all-over-again, breathlessly panting ‘kiss me . . . trip me / ride me to the stars / ohhh, it’s all too much’. But the Weatherall version dispenses with the group’s playing entirely, and adds churchy organs and a gospel choir, thereby transforming a sex-and-drugs ballad into a redemption anthem of spiritual unity. Samples of Jessie Jackson proclaiming ‘it’s a new day . . . together we have power’ plugged into a different aspect of the sixties, the Civil Rights struggle. ‘I see the song as a modern day “Street Fighting Man”,’ the inveterate rock-scholar Gillespie told me. ‘It’s certainly not a statement of vapid New Age optimism. I see Weatherall’s version as being tragic, like “If only the world could be as one . . . but I know it never will be.” ’
Watching Weatherall at work taught Primal Scream all about ‘rhythm and space . . . the sampler gave us a whole new palette of colours . . . a whole new world of psychedelic possibilities.’ The result was the band’s masterpiece, ‘Higher Than The Sun’. Here the band, in tandem with Weatherall and The Orb’s Alex Paterson, brilliantly merged two different traditions of psychedelic experience, acid rock and acid house. Shades of Primal Scream’s rock classicist past (Brian Wilson, Love’s
Forever Changes
) mingled and melded with influences from dub, techno, Tim Buckley and Sun Ra. Never one for hiding his own light under a bushel, Gillespie described ‘Higher Than The Sun’ as the most important record since ‘Anarchy In The UK’. Certainly the lyric (about being your own god) recalled the solipsistic sovereignty of ‘Anarchy In The UK’ (albeit fuelled by Ecstasy rather than amphetamine), but what Gillespie really meant was that ‘Higher’ was a rock-historical ‘cut-off record – it makes everybody else look ancient’.
Forever Changes
) mingled and melded with influences from dub, techno, Tim Buckley and Sun Ra. Never one for hiding his own light under a bushel, Gillespie described ‘Higher Than The Sun’ as the most important record since ‘Anarchy In The UK’. Certainly the lyric (about being your own god) recalled the solipsistic sovereignty of ‘Anarchy In The UK’ (albeit fuelled by Ecstasy rather than amphetamine), but what Gillespie really meant was that ‘Higher’ was a rock-historical ‘cut-off record – it makes everybody else look ancient’.
While The Orb’s version was great, it was the two Weatherall mixes – ‘American Spring’ and ‘Dub Symphony’ – that were truly mindblowing. The former pivoted around an exquisite harspischord motif like a scattered handful of stardust. ‘Dub Symphony’ began with Gillespie’s effete, bliss-stricken gasp ‘I – I – I – I – I – I’m-I’m higher than the su-uh-uhn’, looped into a swoon of endless, unendurable rapture, over dub-detonating reports of snare-drum. Then Jah Wobble’s bass takes the song deeper in and further out, as spooky synth sounds beseech like interstellar sirens luring the starsailor to shipwreck in the asteroid belt.
With its are-you-experienced / you-don’t-live-today lyrics (‘Hallucinogens can open me or untie me / I drift in inner space, free of time . . . I’ve glimpsed, I have tasted / Fantastical places’), its cosmic narcissism and ravished, bliss-enfeebled vocals, ‘Higher Than The Sun’ is a blatant drug hymn. Gillespie preferred to see it as ‘a spiritual song, me disconnecting myself from everything, but being totally in touch with myself . . . I’m sure that when astronauts are up in space, they must get the impulse to just disconnect themselves from the ship and drift off into space and never come back.’
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