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.’
After this, there was no stopping Wieczorek and Co, and they launched themselves on an astounding run of weekly parties, pulling off around 120 illegal warehouse events at some 47 different venues. Sites were easy to find. ‘I used to go out in the daytime, with wirecutters, piece of plastic, whatever . . . Half of them, you don’t have to break into, you just open them . . . Always disused, always not taking anyone’s bread-and-butter.’ By this point, the Old Bill had cottoned on to the fire certificate and fake lease ruses, and thwarted about nine parties. ‘The feeling after you’ve spent eight hours clearing up a warehouse . . . Moving the boxes, filling in the holes, sorting out the toilets, decorating it, putting in the sound-system, lights and laser. And then Plod comes along and goes “caught ya!” That feeling was like, you’re so close but you’re so far.’ Since the average event cost a couple of grand to set up, the arrival of the police was a financial calamity as well; after one period of heavy police pressure, the Labrynth crew came close to giving up. ‘Another two weeks and we’d have had to move somewhere else, we’d have owed so much money to too many people.’
Like other rising 1989 promoters, Labrynth stuck with the previous year’s ‘Second Summer of Love’ spirit, even as the original Balearic crew were reneging on its promises of unity and universal brotherhood. A picture of a mustachioed and mystic-looking George Harrison with an eye in his palm became the Labrynth logo. G
rainy black-and-white snapshots of the crowd appeared on the flyers for their ‘Every Picture Tells A Story’ events, spelling out the fact that the audience was the star; the E was circled, a heavy hint that ‘only the happiest of people need apply’ (the Labrynth motto).
All through 1989, Labrynth was the number two East End party organization, after Genesis. The other prime mover was the pirate radio station Centre Force, which ran a club called Echoes and was reputed to have shady connections with the ICF. Then RIP started doing regular nights at a literally subterranean venue called The Dungeons: a labyrinth of tunnels connected to a pub and a courtyard. Despite the competition, Genesis maintained their reputation for throwing the most impressive parties in East London; Wieczorek reckons they would have grown into major legitimate promoters. But they threw in the towel, he believes, because of the very gangster pressure that Labrynth managed to sidestep. ‘The very people you’d grown up with and trusted and respected, who’d perhaps been your elders on the manor, these were the very people who were taking your bread and butter. Who could you turn to? The only way out was to slip out of it by using your head.’ Wieczorek says he can remember ‘the actual conversation where I was told that they’ – a syndicate of former ICF football thugs – ‘were taking over the warehouse party scene. It seemed like they did what they wanted where they wanted. Every other manor, their firms or what-have-you’s, didn’t count.’
After attempting to sweet-talk Labrynth into their fold, the gangsters attempted a hostile takeover, using threats and intimidation. Barnes was ‘pulled up when she was out shopping. [They] turned up at my house and one of ’em pulled out a shooter.’ The pressure reached an ugly climax at a Labrynth party in Silvertown on 29 April 1989: Joe’s birthday, and nearly his death day. Early in the night, Wieczorek spotted some dodgy characters he remembered from Canning Town days. He bundled Barnes out of the building and into their van, telling her to go and give out flyers in Old Street. As he was returning to the party, his mobile phone rang. It was Evenson Allen from the DJ-MC team Ratpack, in tears, screaming ‘What’s happening, man? Who are these people?’ A gang of thugs had rushed the dancefloor wielding machetes, and attacking ‘every black geezer in there’, to make it look like a racial bias attack. Wieczorek believes it was a reprisal for his having refused a protection arrangement in which he would have had to hire security men ‘at 185 pound a man per night, and we had to have ten men, all that cack.’ One Labrynth associate lost an eye; Wieczorek believes, ‘If I had been there, I’d have been dead.’
This and other incidents convinced Wieczorek and Barnes there was too much aggro in the illegal party game. It was time to go legitimate. Further incentive came from the police, who had formed a special ‘acid squad’ to wipe out the warehouse scene, and later unsuccessfully prosecuted the pirate station Centre Force for running a drug-peddling ring. One of the acid squad, claims Wieczorek, ‘came to see me and said: “If you don’t stop doing warehouse parties, we’re going to put you in prison or find a way to sort you out.” ’ Not long afterwards, Labrynth took up residency at Dalston’s Four Aces club, a suitably labyrinthine warren of corridors and caverns, where it remained until it moved to bigger premises next door in 1997.
Into Orbit
The involvement of the criminal football gangs in the warehouse scene was a sign of the times. The characters who took acid house to the next stage – massive raves in aircraft hangars, grain silos and open fields, mostly at sites near the M25 orbital motorway that encircled London – weren’t subcultural movers and shakers; they were underworld figures or entrepreneurs not averse to breaking a few laws. Unlike the original Balearic and acieed figures – DJs and scenemakers – the new breed of promoters weren’t motivated by musical concerns. They might have developed a taste for E, might even have genuinely gotten into the music and the vibe, but the impetus to make the events bigger and more spectacular was primarily profit-driven. Transforming an underground scene into a mass movement had the happy combined effect of amplifying the atmosphere of loved-up communion while raking in the tax-free income.
The spirit underlying this next phase of the acid house revolution was anarcho-capitalist. If the Summer of Love rhetoric ran against the Thatcherite grain (the Prime Minister had infamously proclaimed ‘there is no such thing as society, just collections of individuals’), the people behind the emergent organizations like Sunrise, Energy, World Dance and Biology were generally loadsamoney types whose audacity was utterly in tune with the quick-killing spirit that fuelled the late eighties economic boom. Sunrise’s Tony Colston-Hayter turned Tory ideology against Tory family values, protesting ‘Surely this ridiculous 3 a.m. curfew on dancing is an anachronism in today’s enterprise culture?’ His associates at Sunrise included former football casual Dave Roberts and Paul Staines, a Libertarian Conservative whose day job was acting as an assistant to rabid freemarket ideologue and Thatcher-adviser David Hart.
Unlike the Oakenfolds and Ramplings, these new promoters tended not to have any background in club promotion. Colston-Hayter’s CV included setting up his own game machine companies while still a schoolboy, and stints as a professional black-jack gambler. World Dance’s Jay Pender was a foreign exchange broker. ‘I realized rave was a sort of “power to the people” thing, where you could just do it if you had some contacts and the bottle,’ he says. Attending the Sunrise 2000 party at an equestrian centre in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, Pender’s money-making instincts were piqued by the number of people milling about outside asking for spare tickets. After having a blinding time at the rave, he went home and ‘phoned an old colleague in the city. I said, “Have you seen the papers?” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “All these warehouse parties.” I told him I wanted to put together the biggest rave yet, and what I needed was a green field site on the M25. He phoned me back in half an hour with a location. I visited it the next day, and it was perfect. We put the whole thing together, but this first site fell through the day before the rave. We hadn’t applied for permission, but we argued with the police that we didn’t need any, because it wasn’t a public event. You had to be a member to get in. Of course, to become a member, all you had to do was fill in your address and give us fifteen pounds – so it was a bit of a wobble!’
The rave-as-private-party concept was Colston-Hayter’s idea; in true Thatcherite spirit, he had found a loophole in the law. (Also in that fuck-society spirit, Sunrise’s profits would be siphoned to an offshore tax-haven.) Colston-Hayter’s other great stratagem was using the British Telecom Voice Bank system as a method for outwitting the police. Flyers advertised only a phone number, not an address. The Voice Bank allowed for a series of rendezvous locations to be updated remotely via mobile phone; party-goers would drive to these meeting-points and be told where to go next. The convoy would descend upon the site, presenting the police with a de facto rave that couldn’t be dispersed for fear of a riot. Only then would the exact location be posted on the answering machine.
Hitherto, warehouse parties had mostly drawn in the region of three or four thousand; the orbital rave dramatically upped the ante, as organizers competed to throw the biggest and most dazzling events. On 24 June 1989, Sunrise established a new record with its 11,000 strong ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ event at an aircraft hangar in White Waltham, Berkshire. They also attracted the attention of the tabloids, who had forgotten all about the Acid House barons. The Sun’s front-page story painted a lurid picture of ‘thrill-seeking youngsters in a dance frenzy’, complete with absurd details like ‘ecstasy wrappers’ strewn on the floor afterwards. Home Secretary Douglas Hurd promised to draft legislation to ‘stop the menace of acid parties’. In response, a news-sheet distributed outside London clubs declared ‘House parties will rock all summer and the Old Bill, the establishment and the gutter press can go fuck themselves.’ The stage was set for a summer of fun and trouble.
For many, 1989 was the year it really kicked off. The combined thrills of cocking a snook at the police and exp
eriencing the sheer scale of the raves was addictive. The magical routes that had traversed and transformed London the previous summer were now shifted outside the city limits, into the semi-rural Home Counties. ‘1989 was the real explosion,’ says Gavin Hills. ‘The raves were very special. In some respects it was still underground, still something of a special club, even though it was a mass movement. It was Us against Them. Going out and trying to get past roadblocks, having a laugh. It was an adventure.’
Attending a huge Energy rave in April 1989, says Jack Barron, ‘had just as profound an effect on me as any of the early clubs. More so, in fact, ’cos you’ve suddenly got a sense that this thing is spreading.’ For Barron’s friend, journalist Helen Mead, dancing with ten thousand people ‘on Ecstasy’ was ‘completely fucking mindblowing compared with doing it in Shoom with two hundred people . . . And I never remember any sense of worry at those big events. You’d maybe gone with five people, and you’d be in these absolutely massive places, and you’d always be wandering off – whether it was ’cos you’d had your eyes closed and then found you’d danced half a mile away, or going to the loo, navigating your way through these huge places, absolutely off your tits. But I never remember feeling lost, or stuck anywhere, or not knowing where I was going.’
For Brooklyn DJ Frankie Bones, accustomed only to clubs with a few hundred capacity, the sheer size of the orbital events blew him away. After making his UK debut at 6 a.m. in front of 25,000 people at an Energy mega-rave, he wrote the track ‘Energy Dawn’ as a tribute, telling iD: ‘England is fantasy land.’ For the rest of the summer, he became a regular on the British rave circuit, spending two weeks in New York then two weeks in the UK. ‘It happened so big and so fast that nobody knew what it was right away, everything was peace, love and unity,’ he says now. ‘The M25, that was a sick time . . . You could basically go on the M25 and find raves back in ’89, there’d be carloads of people driving around.’ For many, the build-up to the rave, and the aftermath, was just as exciting as the event itself. Motorway service stations became the scene for impromptu parties; like the post-Trip car park scene in the summer of 1988, people would be dancing around their car stereos. For a couple of months, there were mass post-rave chill-out sessions on Clapham Common in South London.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 11
