As the big promoters competed to lure the punters, flyers were emblazoned with increasingly extravagant and highly technical claims about the raves’ spectacular sound-systems and lights: 80 K pro-quadrophonic sound, turbo bass, water-cooled four-colour lasers, golden scans, terrastrobes, arc lines, varilights, robozaps, ad absurdum. According to Joe Wieczorek, these boasts were ‘nine out of ten, total crap. Space filler. Fanny. For a long time, one of the things that let this whole scene down, was if you didn’t have and you couldn’t afford, you put down that you did.’ A lot of the fancy-sounding verbiage was actually made up. As well as brain-frazzling sound-and-visuals, the raves promised side-shows and added attractions, like fairground rides, gyroscopes, fireworks and the soon-to-be-infamous ‘bouncy castle’.
If the original Balearic crowd had been dismayed by the acid teds, the orbital raves were even more repugnant. Shoom had organized a few excursions to the countryside: at one, Down On The Farm, the local fire brigade were hired to come down at the height of the party and pump foam into the dancefloor, turning it into a giant bubblebath. Boy’s Own also ventured outside London in August 1989, throwing a lakeside party at East Grinstead, complete with a pantomime cow. But with only 800 people in attendance, this was far from the mega-raves, which were now closer to stadium rock concerts than warehouse jams.
In 1988, the word ‘rave’ was in common parlance, but only as a verb, e.g. ‘I’m going raving at this warehouse party.’ A year later, ‘rave’ had become a noun, while ‘raver’, for many, was a derogatory stereotype, an insult. Where ‘raving’ came from Black British dance culture and ultimately from Jamaica, ‘raver’ plugged into a different etymology. The Daily Mail used it to describe the boorish antics of trad jazz fans at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in 1961; a few years later, a TV documentary employed the word to evoke the hysterical nymphomania of teengirl fans and groupies. There had also been an ‘All Night Rave’ at the Roundhouse in October 1966, a psychotropic spectacular featuring Pink Floyd and The Soft Machine.
With its multiple connotations – delirium, madness, frenzied behaviour, extreme enthusiasm, the Black British idea of letting off steam at the weekend – ‘raving’ perfectly described the out-of-control dancing of the acid scene in 1988. But by 1989, the Balearic crowd had coined the derogatory term ‘cheesy quaver’; the ravers’ rowdy rituals of abandon and joyous uniformity of attire now signified a ‘herd mentality’, something that clubbers defined themselves against. For Shoomers, orbital raves were ‘mass, teenage . . . One didn’t do it,’ says Louise Gray. ‘Sod the fields, the outdoor bollocks!’ is how Mr C encapsulates the RIP posse’s attitude. ‘We’d always been into doing it in the city, as far into the centre of the city as we could possibly have. Because it’s urban, it’s for Londoners . . . and we don’t like sheep!’
Mr C DJ-ed at a few Sunrise, Biology and Energy events, but ‘wasn’t generally impressed. It was bit too impersonal.’ The competition between rave organizations for star line-ups meant that ‘you’d get twelve DJs playing in twelve hours, and each DJ would only get an hour. In an hour, you’re only going to fit in ten or fifteen records, and you’re gonna play the biggest fifteen records in your box – in order to make the people scream the loudest. So it was no longer about how psychedelic and challenging the music was, it was about how big and loud it was.’
Where a club DJ might play a two or three hour set, taking you on a journey through peaks and troughs, the structure of raves was transforming the music and the scene, orienting it around anthems – instantaneous, high-impact, sensation oriented. In a break with the DJ-DOMINATED club ethos, you were starting to get live rave performers: there was a craze for keyboard whizzkids like Adamski, Guru Josh and Mr Monday. ‘Adamski was a bone of contention, whether he was any good or not,’ remembers Gavin Hills. Boy’s Own spoofed Adamski’s album LIVEANDIRECT – a live house album for Christ’s sake, how rock ’n’ roll – as LIVEANDIRE. The Balearic backlash intensified, taking the form of a return not just to clubs, but to clubland in its pre-acieed form: dressing flash, ‘quality sounds for quality people’. The vogue for deep house and New Jersey garage – Turntable Orchestra, Blaze, Phase II, Adeva – strengthened.
Paul Oakenfold, meanwhile, was beginning his transition into the West End, doing ‘real trendy parties’. In years to come, he would defy the rave-driven trend towards harder-and-faster extremes and push a downtempo sound – a mix of dubby tracks by Massive Attack and On U Sound, plus the new indie-dance crossover stuff emerging out of Manchester. The culmination of this anti-rave stance was Oakenfold’s ludicrous 98 b.p.m. movement (the idea being that the tempo of dance music should never rise into three figures).
Musically, there was still some crossover between the Balearic scene and the rave circuit: tracks like Nightwriters’s ‘Let The Music Use You’, Lil Louis’s orgasmotronic epic ‘French Kiss’, Ce Ce Rogers’s ‘Someday’ and 10 City’s ‘Devotion’ were anthems on both sides of the divide. But by late summer, the ruling sound at the big raves was the almost preposterously uplifting Italo-house sound – all oscillating piano vamps and shrieking disco divas – that had been hatched in Adriatic resorts like Rimini and Riccioni. Starlight’s ‘Numero Uno’ and Black Box’s ‘Ride On Time’ were the big chart hits. When ‘Ride On Time’ – whose vocal was pilfered wholesale from Loleatta Holloway’s ‘Love Sensation’ – annexed the Number One spot for six whole weeks in September 1989, it felt like a victory for the rave nation, the climax of the second Second Summer Of Love.
Raving Mad
By this point, though, the orbital rave scene was beginning to unravel. The police’s Pay Party Unit had built up a massive computer database on the major rave organizers; they were setting up phone taps, eavesdropping on pirate radio, and deploying helicopters. Out in the country lanes, the police were playing cat and mouse with the convoys of ravers, and twisting the arms of landowners to renege on the deals they’d struck with the likes of Sunrise and Energy. The ravers were beginning to get disenchanted: not only were there more and more rip-off events with shitty sound-systems, no-show DJs and none of the advertised facilities, but there was a good chance the raves wouldn’t happen at all.
‘Biology was the one that was a disaster,’ recalls Helen Mead, referring to a hubris-foredoomed megarave in the Guildford area in October 1989. ‘It was supposed to be the first million pound party. I just remember driving around all night ’cos they had to change the site three times.’ The strategy of the Pay Party Unit was attrition: wear down the spirits of the ravers, make them so sick of the wild goose chases and the bitter anti-climactic disappointment when an event was quashed, that they’d return to the guaranteed pleasures of licensed clubs. As well as the dangers of inadequate fire-and-safety precautions and the debauchery of mass teenage drug consumption, the police were concerned by the fact that major criminal organizations were muscling in on the orbital scene, trafficking in drugs and attempting to extort their slice of the massive takings.
‘Rave’ also carries a faint connotation of ‘rage’. The ravers weren’t going to let go of their good thing without a fight. ‘I remember one event, down near Watford,’ says Gavin Hills. ‘We knew that the rave was on, but the police had sealed it off. Bouncers started beating up the police, and everybody charged in. I remember getting chased by all these police through these fields, and I jumped in the air, ’cos there was this barbed wire fence coming, ripped my baggy trousers, sliced my legs, and ended face up in the mud. But everybody cheered ’cos I’d got into the field.’
There was an attempt to take the resistance into the political arena. With the tabloids stoking public concern, Graham Bright, Conservative MP for Luton South, drafted a private member’s bill to increase the penalties for unlicensed parties. Faced with the prospect of £20,000 fines and six month prison sentences, Tony Colston-Hayter and his libertarian sidekick Paul Staines attended the Conservative Party’s annual conference in November, where they announced the formation of the Freedom To Party campaign
. Although all the leading rave promoters were involved, the movement petered out after a few not-very-well attended rallies – seemingly yet more proof of the apolitical, unmotivated character of the Ecstasy generation.
With the big rave almost extinct – at least in the South of England – and Graham Bright’s Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Bill heading inexorably towards its passage into law (‘defending raves is like defending leprosy at the moment’, commented Staines at the time), the general feeling was that it was all over, for good. Exacerbating the sense of brutal comedown was a sudden drought of Ecstasy; anecdotal evidence suggests that at the end of 1989, the drug supply dried up for about eight months. ‘Clubs were empty in early 1990,’ Hills recalls. ‘Around the summer of 1990, pills started appearing again. Then you had proper techno, and most people got into rave in 1991. The gap between those two things is entirely chemical based.’
The living dream of rave was too alluring to fade away, even after the setback of the Bright Bill. Rave resurged, but with a different inflection. Local authorities began to adopt a more liberal approach to giving out permits to commercial rave promoters. Licensing hours were finally liberalized (although regional variations remained), allowing for the growth of rave-style clubs where you could party til 6 a.m., 8 a.m., sometimes even noon the next day. Spreading to every provincial corner of the UK, rave culture became a highly organized leisure system, and an enormously lucrative economic infrastructure. Still underground, in terms of its atmosphere, it was at the same time the norm: what Everykid did, every weekend.
THREE
TWENTY-FOUR -HOUR PARTY PEOPLE
MADCHESTER, POSITIVITY
AND THE RAVE ’N’ ROLL
CROSSOVER
‘The black kids always had something going, ’89 was the year the white kids woke up.’
– Ian Brown, singer of The Stone Roses
‘Whitey could dance, with a pill in him.’
– Mani, bassist of The Stone Roses
Manchester has long been Britain’s number two Pop City after London. But in the post-punk era the city’s musical output tended to be synonomous with the un-pop hue of grey: The Buzzcock’s melodic but monochrome punk ditties, The Fall’s baleful intransigence, Joy Division’s angst-rock, New Order’s doubt-wracked disco. Dedicated to their own out-of-time, sixties notion of pop, The Smiths defined themselves against contemporary, dance-oriented chart fodder. ‘Panic’ was an anthem for disenfranchised discophobes, Morrissey railing ‘burn down the disco / hang the blessed DJ’. The crime? Playing mere good-times music that said ‘nothing’, lyrically, about real life.
Disco and DJ culture had the last laugh, however. Thanks to house clubs like The Haçienda, Thunderdome and Konspiracy, Manchester transformed itself into ‘Madchester’, the mecca for 24-Hour Party People and smiley-faced ravers from across Northern England and the Midlands. By 1989, the famously grey and overcast city had gone day-glo; Morrissey-style miserabilism was replaced by glad-all-over extroversion, nourished by a diet of ‘disco biscuits’ (Ecstasy).
With its combination of bohemia (a large population of college and art students, and the biggest gay community outside London) and demographic reach (around fifteen million people live within a couple of hours drive of the city centre), Manchester was well-placed to become the focus of a pop cultural explosion. Manchester’s ghetto district, Moss Side, is a major drug distribution junction for the North West of England. House – which was played as early as 1986 on local station Piccadilly Radio by DJ Stu Allen – chimed in with a long- standing regional preference for uptempo dance music, as seen in the seventies with the amphetamine-driven Northern Soul scene.
The Haçienda was founded and funded by New Order and the boss of their record label Factory, Anthony H. Wilson: a sort of Northern equivalent to punk svengali Malcolm McLaren, and fuelled by a similarly potent mix of neo-situationist pranksterism and bottom-line interest in generating cash from chaos. The nightclub’s name was inspired by the situationists’ utopian slogan ‘The Haçienda Must Be Built’. Converted from a yachting warehouse showroom, the Haçienda was initially industrial and dystopian in ambience. The atmosphere perked up when DJs like Martin Prendergast and Mike Pickering started to add house to the mix. Pickering, an ex-Northern Soul fan and member of Factory avant-funk band Quando Quango, had experienced the fervent vibe at The Paradise Garage, thanks to Quando’s popularity in New York.
In July 1988, The Haçienda started a Wednesday night event called Hot with a Balearic feel. On the first night, there was a swimming pool and sun lamps; punters danced in beach wear. Then, with Pickering and new DJ Graeme Park on the decks, Friday’s long-established Nude became the mental night. As the fervour for acid house swelled, weekday nights at The Haçienda followed, with names like Void and Hallucienda. Rival clubs like Thunderdome and Konspiracy opened, attracting a rougher audience from the more working class North Manchester. Here the soundtrack was harder: ‘like punk, almost . . . real Acid stormtrooper stuff,’ according to Martin Price from local house crew 808 State. For serious edge-walkers, there was also The Kitchen in Hulme, a sinkhole of urban deprivation. An illegal squat-club in a derelict housing estate, The Kitchen was a murky, multi-tiered warren of rooms, created by knocking through the walls between flats. ‘Dodgy,’ is how Helen Mead describes it. ‘It was gangsters, drugs and guns . . . You’d hear about rapes going on there, stuff like that.’
Throughout the North West of England, clubs sprang up that modelled themselves on the Madchester vibe. Blackpool had Frenzy, Stoke-on-Trent had Delight, and Liverpool stepped into the fray when its own Haçienda-scale mega-club, the 2400 capacity Quadrant Park, went house in early 1990. In October that year, ‘Quaddie’ opened Britain’s first weekly legal all-nighter, called The Pavilion and located in the basement below the main club. And as with the London house scene, the demand for raves spilled out into the countryside of Lancashire and Cheshire, in the form of illegal parties like Joy, Live The Dream and Blastoff, often held in abandoned mills. With its industrial estates, Blackburn became a hotbed for warehouse parties; at its peak, ten thousand kids arrived in cars every weekend, in search of the rave. 24-Hour party people who didn’t want to stop after the 2 a.m. shutdown at licensed clubs also held impromptu parties in the car parks at Knutsford and Charnock Richard motorway service stations.
Acieed Casuals
‘Nowadays it’s just the normal Joe comin’ in and doing his thing, all the ponceyness has gone.’
– Paris Angels
With the right sound and the right drug in place, all that was needed was a fashion look, and some local heroes. The pop media came up with the term ‘scallydelia’ to designate both a laddish breed of Mancunian band – Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets, Northside and Paris Angels – and the style of clothes they sported. It was actually something of a misnomer, since the ‘scally’ (short for scallywag) was strictly speaking a Liverpudlian archetype. The Mancunian counterpart was the Perry boy, named after their Fred Perry shirts. The Scally/Perry look began on football terraces as early as 1984, when ‘casuals’ – hooligans into expensive designer-label fashion and vicious confrontations with followers of rival teams – started to wear flared jeans and jumbo cords. Mancunian clothing emporiums like Joe Bloggs started making 24-inch flares and their even more voluminous denim counterpart, ‘parallels’. By 1989, the scallydelic wardrobe encompassed anything baggy (hooded tops, long-sleeved shirts, old cricket hats) and brightly hued (pastel or lilac coloured Kickers and Wallabees, psychotropic patterns). This penchant for flower-power garishness reflected the scally’s twin tastes for Pink Floyd-style acid rock and acid house; loose-fitting clothes were better for dancing, gaudy colours looked good when you were tripping. These ‘acieed casuals’ stopped wearing T-shirts with ostentatious designer-logos in favour of ones emblazoned with Madchester-patriot slogans like ‘And On The Sixth Day God Created Manchester’, ‘Woodstock ’69, Manchester’89’, ‘This Is Not Manchester This Is A Trip
’, or band T-shirts like the Inspiral Carpets’ infamous ‘Cool As Fuck’ series.
Thanks to the benign influence of E and ‘draw’ (marijuana), the 1989 – 90 football season became what academic Steve Redhead called ‘the Winter of Love’, celebrated in chants like ‘Oh! we’re all blissed up and we’re gonna win the cup.’ Violence on the terraces dropped dramatically, with many fans taking E during matches to heighten the homosocial camaraderie and rowdy sentimentality. That summer New Order sneaked the cheeky line ‘E is for England’ into their World Cup song ‘World In Motion’ (their first Number One hit, in tandem with the England football squad).
There are other connections between football and pop music. Both are traditional escape routes for glory-hungry working-class jack-the-lads, and both offer possibilities for male bonding through shared passion for something ‘objective’ (and therefore legitimate). Football and rock also enable the cultivation of connoisseurship: facts, figures, changing line-ups, discographies. One medium for all this partisanship and pride-in-knowledge is the fanzine. Inevitably, ’zines emerged that combined both masculine passions. The first and most famous of the soccer – music ’zines was Liverpool’s The End, which was founded in the early eighties and co-edited by Peter Hooton of The Farm, a band that scored Top Ten hits in the early nineties (‘Groovy Train’, ‘All Together Now’) when it added a house undercarriage to its sixties-influenced guitarpop. The End was a big influence on the cockney neo-mods behind Boy’s Own.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 12
