Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  Todd Terry’s own style was a bridge between the cut-up collage tracks of Mantronix and the sample-heavy house soon to emerge from Britain. Terry is a no-nonsense, whack-’em-out, I-wanna-get-paid-in-full kind of guy; he’s described himself as ‘more of a trackmaster . . . I’m not a writer of songs, they’re too much trouble. Plus you make twice the money off of tracks, [because] they’re quicker.’ Lacking both the artistic pretensions of the Detroit aesthetes and the soul-affiliated spirituality of the deep house and garage producers, Terry has proved that mercenary motives can result in great popular art like Royal House’s ‘Can You Party’ and ‘Party People’, Orange Lemon’s ‘Dreams of Santa Anna’, Black Riot’s ‘A Day In The Life’ and CLS’s ‘Can You Feel It?’

  Terry’s roots in hip hop block parties come through in early tracks like Black Riot’s ‘A Day In The Life’ and the pre-Vega/Gonzalez Masters At Work outings ‘Dum Dum Cry’ and ‘Alright Alright’: the sound is all jagged edits and stabs, scratch FX, toytown melody-riffs, sampler-vocal riffs à la The Art of Noise, blaring bursts of abstract sound, depth-charge bass and breakbeats. That rough-and-ready, thrown-together quality also characterizes Royal House’s ‘Can You Party’, a UK Number Fourteen hit in October 1988. With its ‘Can you feel it?’ invocations, sirens, and bursts of mob uproar (cunningly designed to trigger a feedback loop of excitement in the crowd), ‘Can You Party’ anticipates the rabble-rousing hardcore rave anthems of the early nineties. Basically a rewrite of ‘Can You Party’, ‘Party People’ intensifies the palsied atmosphere until the very air seems to be trembling with some intangible fever. The track turns around a Morse Code riff seemingly made out of heavily reverbed piano or audience hubbub, a riff that seems to possess your nervous system like digital epilepsy, inducing strangely geometric convulsions. Like much of Terry’s work, the track is jarring because it’s like a series of crescendos and detonations, a frenzy of context-less intensities without rhyme or reason.

  With their jagged edges and lo-fi grit, Terry’s cut-and-paste tracks were a world away from garage’s polished production and smooth plateaux of pleasure. On the Royal House album, Terry used funky breakbeats and jittery electro beat-box rhythms as well as house’s four-to-the-floor kick drum. Terry’s sound was hip house, a hybrid subgenre that was simultaneously being reached by Chicago producers Tyree and DJ Fast Eddie. Tyree told me in early 1988 that he was already working on a fusion of house and rap: ‘At my parties, I mix house tracks with hip hop records on 45 r.p.m. – it makes LL Cool J sound like a chipmunk!’ In early 1989, the first recorded examples of this hybrid came through. Some tracks simply layered rather feeble rapping over a house track. Others, like Fast Eddie’s ‘Hip House’ and ‘Yo Yo get Funky’, combined house rhythms and 303 acid-pulses with James Brown samples, sound effects, and breakbeats. Perhaps the best of the bunch was Tyree’s ‘Hardcore Hip House’, with its weird blend of funky drummer shuffle beats, house piano vamps, and Tyree rapping about how ‘hip house is soon to be / the giant in the industry’. It wasn’t, but the hybrid sound and the chant ‘I’m comin’ hardcore’ were prophetic of the breakbeat house/hardcore sound that would become the staple of the British rave scene in the early nineties.

  By 1989, then, Black America had generated four distinct and full-formed genres of electronic dance music: Detroit techno; the deep house/garage sound of Chicago and New York; acid house and minimal jack tracks; breakbeat-and-sample based hip house. Transplanted to the other side of the Atlantic, each of these sounds would mutate – beyond all recognition, and through a kind of creative misrecognition on the part of the British and Europeans.

  TWO

  LIVING A DREAM

  ACID HOUSE AND

  UK RAVE,

  1988 – 89

  In 1987, London clubland was as crippled by cool as ever. The Soho craze for rare groove (early seventies, sub-James Brown funk) represented the fag-end of eighties style culture, what with its elitist obscurantism (rare groove DJs covered up the labels with Tipp-Ex to prevent their rivals identifying the tracks) and its deference to a bygone, outdated notion of ‘blackness’.

  House music seemed to be a fad that had been and gone, at least as far as London clubland was concerned. ‘House never kicked off the way we thought,’ remembers Mark Moore, one of the few DJs who played Chicago and Detroit tracks. ‘I remember spinning Derrick May’s “Strings of Life” at the Mud Club and clearing the entire floor.’ House did have a toe-hold in the gay scene, at clubs like Jungle and Pyramid, where Moore spun alongside other house crusaders like Colin Faver and Eddie Richards. But most gay clubbers still preferred Eurobeat and Hi-NRG, says Moore, and reckoned the arty Pyramid crowd were ‘weirdos’.

  Ironically, straight audiences regarded house suspiciously as ‘queers’ music’. The only straight club that regularly played it was Delirium, run by Noel and Maurice Watson and modelled on New York’s Paradise Garage. But most of the club’s following were rare groove and hip hop kids who, according to Moore, ‘hated it when it went into house. They had to have a cage built around the DJ box so they wouldn’t get bottled by hip hop kids when they played house! The Watson brothers made a brave effort to make it kick off, but it just didn’t happen.’

  At the end of 1987, however, there were signs of life in the vogue for DJ-records – breakbeat-and-sample collages that eschewed rapping in favour of absurdist sound-bites and, tempo-wise, were closer to house than hip hop. Enabled by the arrival of cheap samplers like the Casio SK1, and usually recorded for next to nothing, these DJ records stormed the pop charts, starting with M/A/R/R/S’s Number One smash ‘Pump Up The Volume’ in late 1987 and continuing into early 1988 with Bomb The Bass’s Number Two hit ‘Beat Dis’ and S’Express’s Number One hit ‘Theme from S’Express’.

  S’Express was Mark Moore, and ‘Theme’ was a kind of reward from Rhythm King Records for the DJs unofficial A & R work for the label, which brought them successful club acts like Renegade Soundwave, The Beatmasters and The Cookie Crew. With its campy ‘I’ve got the hots for you’ hook and ‘suck me off’ samples courtesy of performance artist Karen Finley, ‘Theme’ was the vinyl expression of Moore’s irreverent and eclectic DJ sensibility. Although it was closer to a kitschadelic, postmodern update of disco than the Chicago sound, ‘Theme’ was received as one of the first British house records. More importantly, the track’s tacky euphoria chimed in with the anti-cool ethos of the new ‘Balearic’ clubs like Shoom and The Project.

  ‘Balearic’ referred to the DJ-ing approach of Alfredo Fiorillo, a former journalist who’d fled the fascist rigours of his native Argentina for the laid back bohemian idyll of Ibiza. ‘Balearic’ didn’t refer to a style of music but to a revolt against style codes and the very tyranny of tastefulness then strangling London club culture. DJ Alfredo’s long sets at Amnesia – which, like most Ibizan nightclubs, had no roof, so you danced under the stars – encompassed the indie hypno-grooves of The Woodentops, the mystic rock of U2 and The Waterboys, early house, Europop, plus oddities from the likes of Peter Gabriel and Thrashing Doves.

  ‘It was just the best of all kinds of music, and really refreshing, ’cos in London you were just hearing the same old sound,’ remembers Paul Oakenfold. In the mid-eighties, Oakenfold was involved in London’s hip hop scene as a DJ, club promoter and agent for Profile and Def Jam acts like Run DMC and the Beastie Boys. He first went out to Ibiza in 1985, where he discovered that the real action resided not in the touristic San Antonio, where British beer boys ran rampant, but in the more upmarket Ibiza Town on the other side of the island. Inspired by clubs like Amnesia, Pasha and Ku, Oakenfold and his mate Trevor Fung tried in late 1985 to start a Balearic-style club in South London, named The Funhouse after John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez’s New York nightspot. ‘It was exactly the same as what we did in ’87 , but we done it in ’85 and it didn’t work. People couldn’t understand the concept of playing all kinds of music together . . . It was something that we tried six months and lost a lot of money, so we just
shelved it.’

  The other element absent in 1985 was Ecstasy – which was readily available in Ibiza and helped open up minds to diverse, ‘uncool’ sounds. The turning point came in the summer of 1987. Oakenfold hired a villa in Ibiza and brought over a bunch of DJ friends to celebrate his twenty-sixth birthday: ‘I invited Danny Rampling, Johnny Walker and Nicky Holloway, and all three came over and experienced what I’d been through’ – the magic of dancing all night on Ecstasy.

  By this point, hundreds of British youth had heard about the scene in Ibiza Town. Kids like Barry Ashworth, a nineteen-year-old plasterer from the Streatham area. ‘We was in Majorca, still on that suburban thug-like thing, and then we left Majorca, about fourteen of us, ’cos we’d ended up in the biggest bar fight you’d ever seen. We had to leave the island, so we headed straight off to Ibiza. There was a handful of mates I’d been to school with who were already there and plotted up, already into it.’ The bloke who gave Ashworth his first E was a tough character, a former boxing champion – ‘but here he was on mescalin for three days at Amnesia – with all these goats in pens on the edge of the dancefloor, pissing and shitting everywhere . . . I flew back after a couple of weeks, then went back there literally every month for the rest of the season.’ Back in England, Ashworth got involved in putting on parties like Deja Vu, Monkey Drum and Naked Lunch; that summer in Ibiza, he says, set the framework ‘for the next seven years’.

  When Oakenfold returned to London, he and Ian St Paul reactivated the ‘Balearic’ concept they’d put on the shelf back in 1985 after the failure of The Funhouse. At Streatham’s Project Club, where he’d been DJ-ing on Fridays, he persuaded the owner to let him start an illegal after-hours event. When the regular night’s crowd had been turfed out at 2 a.m., the exit door would be opened to admit about 150 Ibiza veterans. Oakenfold flew in Alfredo to play and ‘invited all the main heads, the key people in London, from fashion to film to music to clubland’. What these prime movers encountered was a complete subcultural package of slang, behaviour and clothing, that had hatched during the summer in Ibiza. The look was a weird mix of Mediterranean beach bum, hippy and football casual – baggy trousers and T-shirts, paisley bandanas, dungarees, ponchos, Converse Allstars baseball boots – loose-fitting, because the Ecstasy and non-stop trance dancing made you sweat buckets. ‘Baggy trousers, baggy top, trainers – it wasn’t what you wore, it was your attitude that got you in the club. London clubs had always been about people drinking, trying to chat up girls, looking good but not dancing. All of a sudden we completely changed that around – you’d come down and you’d dance for six hours. The idea was “if you’re not into dancing, then don’t come down” ’.

  The Project all-nighters got so popular – ‘We had seven hundred trying to get in, it just got out of hand, we couldn’t keep it quiet anymore’ – that the club was soon raided by the police. So St Paul and Oakenfold started The Future, a Thursday night event at The Sanctuary, around the back of the huge gay club Heaven. Future was members only; the card bore the commandment ‘dance you fuckers!’ On his first visit to Future, says Mark Moore, ‘I remember thinking “This is it, this is the crowd for this kind of music.” It was exactly the same mix – early house, plus all that indie stuff – I’d been playing to the gay crowd, except this was a straight crowd.’ He took Philip Salon, doyen of eighties ‘style culture’ and the impresario behind The Mud Club, down to Future. ‘I told him, “This is the future, this is what it’s going to be like,” and he was saying “No, no, they’re all suburban norms.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but this music and this energy, this is the next thing that’s gonna happen, I’m telling you.” ’

  Around this time – November 1987 – Danny Rampling and his wife Jenni started Shoom, a tiny club located in a Southwark gym called the Fitness Centre, just a few hundred yards south of the Thames. Although Danny supplied the club’s musical vision (pure Balearic), the powerhouse behind Shoom is generally reputed to be Jenni Rampling. A formidable figure who’d previously been the manageress of the Bond Street branch of the shoe shop Pied À Terre, Jenni maintained the club’s membership scheme and newsletter, kept the press at arm’s length and controlled the door with a ruthlessness that became infamous.

  ‘We used to say that Jenni had the Battle of Britain spirit,’ recalls Mark Moore, ‘There was this kind of naïve pioneering spirit.’

  ‘The Ramplings were a very ordinary, upwardly mobile working class couple from Bermondsey,’ remembers journalist Louise Gray, an early Shoom convert. ‘Suddenly they were thrown into this fantastically trendy set where they had luminaries pounding on their doors, and they were being taken up by people like Fat Tony and Boy George – very queeny, nightlife sophisticates.’

  The first time Gray actually managed to get inside Shoom, ‘we arrived terribly early, about 10.30, and we couldn’t really figure out what the fuss was about. There was about twenty people, dancing wildly. I was sitting talking, and then this girl just appeared absolutely out of nowhere, plonked herself down on my knee, grabbed the corners of my mouth and pulled them up into a smile. She said ‘Be Happy!’ and then jumped off. I was completely nonplussed – I’d never experienced behaviour like that, and thought it quite crazed.’

  Suddenly the club filled up very fast – not just with people, but with ‘peasouper, strawberry-flavoured smoke, lit only by strobes. If you went on to the dancefloor, you could only see a few inches ahead. It was just exciting, there was a real contact high. I didn’t have any drugs that night, but that was when I realized that drugs had something to do with it.’ Drugs had everything to do with it: the name ‘Shoom’ was freshly-coined slang for rushing, for the surging, heart-in-mouth sensation of coming up on Ecstasy. The imagery on the flyers, membership cards and newsletters was blatantly druggy: pills with Smiley faces on them, exhortations to ‘Get Right On One, Matey!!!’

  Unlike your typical West End club, the Shoom scene was not about being seen, but about losing it – your cool, your self-consciousness, your self. Quoting T. S. Eliot, Gray describes the fruit-flavoured smoke as ‘the fog that both connects and separates. You’d have these faces looming at you out of the fog. It was like a sea of connected alienation.’

  Says Mark Moore: ‘Often it was so chaotic, you couldn’t really see in front of you, you couldn’t really talk to anyone. So a lot of the time you just spent on your own dancing . . . You’d have people in their own world, doing that mad trance dancing, oblivious to everything else. But then you also had blokes coming up who were, like, “yeah, all right mate!! Smile! Smile!” And hugging you.’

  Coming from the arty end of the gay scene, Moore was used to this kind of demonstrativeness. But at Shoom he encountered ‘this whole new mentality . . . It was all these suburbanites who – without wishing to sound élitist – it was as if they’d taken this Ecstasy and they were releasing themselves, for the first time. It was like they’d suddenly been let out of this box they’d been kept inside and they were just beginning to come to terms with the idea that, y’know, “I’m a man but I can hug my mate,” stuff like that.’ Gay behavioural codes and modes of expressivity were entering the body-consciousness of straight working-class boys, via Ecstasy.

  Oriented around communal frenzy rather than posing, Shoom was the chrysalis for rave culture, in so far as the rave in its pure populist form is the antithesis of the club. At the same time, Shoom was a club, more so than most Soho nightspots in fact, because it had a membership scheme. And Jenni Rampling’s door policy was as strict as Studio 54; as word of Shoom spread and people flocked down to find out what the fuss was all about, she rapidly acquired a reputation for being a ‘queen bitch’ who’d turn away people who only weeks earlier had managed to get in. ‘Saturday night at the Fitness Centre, and by eleven o’clock, a hundred people or more would just be absolutely ramming to get in,’ remembers Louise Gray. ‘It was a monumentally difficult door to run . . . She’d see the people she wanted to get in and they’d be virtually dragged through the crowd,
like through a bush backwards.’

  The Shoom ethos was love-and-peace-and-unity, universal tolerance and we-are-all-the-same. It was supposed to be the death-knell of clubland’s snobbish exclusivity, but there was an essential contradiction in the way that the Shoom experience was restricted only to the original clique and their guests, plus a few minor celebrities like Patsy Kensit and Paul Rutherford of Frankie Goes To Hollywood. As one of the many ‘blanked’ by Jenni, I can well remember the feeling of disillusion: don’t believe the hype, it’s just like any old West End nightclub.

  Then again, Shoom’s close-knit, we-are-family atmosphere depended on keeping at bay the influx of intrigued neophytes, not to mention the hooligan element. ‘They really pushed that whole love-and-happiness-and-bonding thing, really believed in it,’ says Moore. ‘People slagged Jenni off . . . but I admire her for doing what she thought was right. It’s fine to be all lovey-dovey, but there are certain people who you don’t want in your club, ’cos you won’t be able to achieve that vibe.’

  Those who did belong were treated to ice pops, fruit, badges and other giveaways. ‘One time Mark Moore and I decided to nip out and get a coffee and a bagel in Brick Lane,’ remembers Gray. ‘Jenni gave us fifty quid to buy around 500 bagels. We got there at about 4 a.m. and said “please can we have 500 bagels.” They thought we were mad! They filled up these binliners and we carried them back to Shoom, and the Ramplings went round handing out bagels.’ Members also received the Shoom newsletter, with the text typed in capitals and many headlines hand-drawn. Inside were sketchy record reviews and crudely drawn cartoons (like The Smileys, a stickman-and-woman who strolled around London spreading love-peace-warmth vibes), plus testimonials from Shoomers: ‘Let your pure inner self manifest and only then will you be shooming!’ ‘I Felt As If I Was Living A Dream.’