Keep Taking the Tabloids
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.” ’
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 Deluge
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.
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.
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.
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.’
All of a sudden acid house was declared passé; Chicago deep house and New Jersey garage was the in thi
ng. 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.
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.
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’. Intr
igued 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.’
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 10
