by Bob Stanley
Growing in tandem, across the Great Lakes, the underground nature of Detroit’s techno scene made house seem like a Smash Hits Christmas party. Photos were pretty much unheard of. In a way it was the exact opposite of house; techno was developed in bedrooms by loners, whereas house was inspired directly by reactions on the dancefloor. Techno was more austere, more glacial and totally tonal – it sounded exactly like a science experiment that had escaped from the lab. People talk about electronic music as ‘cold’, but certain Detroit techno records do seem to cause a perceptible drop in the room temperature.
The three shy boys who birthed this new sound – Derrick May, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson – were wealthy black kids from the Detroit suburb of Belleville, and they only ventured out of their homes to DJ at debutante parties. Atkins and May got acquainted by playing chess; May’s masterpiece, ‘Strings of Life’, was written and recorded after he spent a year hibernating in his room, living on breakfast cereal, barely bothering to dress. Neither was exactly cut from Marvin Gaye’s cloth.
‘The thing is,’ said Atkins, ‘being in Belleville the next person I could play with was ten miles away. It was hard for me to get together with other musicians.’ Young Juan would walk around the house with a bass guitar round his neck at all times, until one day in 1980, when he was fifteen, his gran took him into a local music shop to buy spare parts for her Hammond B3 home organ. Sat in a room at the back of the shop was a Minimoog and a Korg MS10, the future sounds of pop. Juan begged and pleaded until the MS10 was his, and in no time he was making home demos. At college a few weeks later, Atkins played his home recordings in a show and tell, and freaked out a classmate and Vietnam vet called Rik Davis – the two soon formed a duo called Cybotron.
Davis was an out-there fan of Jimi Hendrix and sci-fi, and had changed his name to 3070 by the time the duo released ‘Alleys of Your Mind’ and ‘Cosmic Cars’ on Atkins’s own Deep Space label. They were local hits, pummelled by local radio jock Electrifying Mojo,6 the John Peel of Detroit, but – as with early hip hop in New York – this music meant nothing outside the city limits. Chicago DJs began to pick up on them, and by ’83 Cybotron’s third single, ‘Clear’, which sounded like Darth Vader guesting with Kraftwerk, placed on Billboard’s black-music chart. They followed it with their best record, the hugely atmospheric ‘Techno City’, which would soon lend its name to a whole genre. By 2010 Cybotron were featured on Grand Theft Auto – that’s a long trickle down, but then they had been ridiculously ahead of their time.7
Cybotron split in 1985, when Atkins decided to drop the few rock references they had and pursue something purely electronic. He reconnected with his old school pals. Juan Atkins was a spiritual benefactor, techno’s Curtis Mayfield. He was very shy, but he gave May and Saunderson confidence: if he was techno’s originator, then Derrick May became the innovator and Kevin Saunderson the elevator. There had been playground scraps – Kevin beat Derrick up after he reneged on a bet on the Superbowl, aged fourteen – but they were pretty tight. They would drive together through the streets of Detroit; they didn’t see ruins in its abandoned industrial zone, they saw pyramids. Robots had taken over in the automotive industry; for the Belleville Three, it was a natural transition for music in the city to do the same. After weeks, months, in his room May emerged with one cassette, a piece of music which would come to be called ‘Strings of Life’.8 ‘I didn’t know what I had done,’ he said later. ‘It scared me.’ It was quite beautiful, with near-atonal chords brushing up against jazz-piano runs that May rendered stunted and mechanical. Saunderson, not to be outdone, created the soulful ‘Big Fun’ (UK no. 8 ’88) and ‘Good Life’ (UK no. 4 ’88) and, under the name Inner City, took techno9 to the masses.
‘Jack Your Body’ had nudged the door ajar, but the biggest breakthrough for house and techno didn’t come from a track that anyone had sweated blood over. It came from an accident, a piece of malfunctioning, defunct technology.
DJ Pierre was a clarinet player from the Chicago suburbs. He was involved in local DJ battles, too shy to make many inroads into the Music Box crowd until his friend Spanky bought a cheap piece of gear called a Roland TB-303. It had been designed in 1982 to play basslines for buskers, but was fiddly, had failed commercially and had been pulled from the market in 1984. Spanky and Pierre discovered that no matter how much they turned the knobs and tweaked the controls, it sounded less like a bassline than an approximation of a melting brain. The batteries died, they put new ones in, but the brain-melting sound was still there – it just wouldn’t die. So they recorded it, over a beat that was already in the 303, called it ‘In Your Mind’, and gave a cassette of it to Ron Hardy. The first time he played it, ‘In Your Mind’ cleared the floor. A few spins later, at four in the morning, it caused a riot. People were screaming, on their backs kicking their legs in the air, slam-dancing into each other. Someone taped the mayhem and it got passed around Chicago on a bootleg cassette labelled Ron Hardy’s Acid Tracks.
House had been minimal, two steps away from conventional song structure, but acid house sounded like nothing on earth – atonal, disorientating, genuinely frightening. Spanky and Pierre released the freshly rechristened Acid Tracks under the name Phuture and invented a whole new subgenre which was as far removed from Trans-Europe Express as it was from James Brown. Just as Britain was deluged with first-generation house, Chicago started creating opportunistic skirmishes, all utilising the Roland 303, this weird contraption, a piece of junk neither Shep Pettibone nor Trevor Horn would give the time of day to. Phuture released the even heavier ‘Slam’; Bam Bam’s ‘Give It to Me’ repeated the title, deadpan, over a woman’s cry. All shared the random squelched melody generated by the 303. Charismatic and modern, these records were exported to the UK, snapped up by DJs eager to be seen with a new square foot of Chicago real estate, and it was chaos.
Partly because so much of it was instrumental, free of boundary-drawing linguistics, house and techno were the first truly international sounds of modern pop; they could be easily mimicked, exploited, expanded by musicians in any country. They transcended language and culture. Within ten years of making his first recording, fuelled by cornflakes, Derrick May had DJ’d in Bosnia, Jerusalem and at the foot of the Andes. Frankie Knuckles, interviewed on the BBC’s Dancing in the Streets documentary in the mid-nineties, remembered that Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ – a worldwide number one in 1990 – was, for him, the moment when house music was validated, when it became the people’s music that had been trumpeted on Mr Fingers’ 1986 single ‘Can You Feel It’:
‘I am the creator, and this is my house! And, in my house there is only house music. But, I am not so selfish because once you enter my house it then becomes our house and our house music! And, you see, no one can own house because house music is a universal language, spoken and understood by all. You may be black, you may be white; you may be Jew or Gentile. It don’t make a difference in our house.’
1 ‘Rock around the Clock’ had been dislodged by Dickie Valentine’s ‘Christmas Alphabet’; the Rolling Stones’ ‘Get Off of My Cloud’ by the Seekers’ ‘The Carnival Is Over’; the Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ by Tom Jones’s ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’; Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ by Brotherhood of Man’s ‘Angelo’. George and Aretha, meet your new neighbours.
2 Knuckles is known as the Godfather of House, which seems appropriate as he oversaw the scene, attaching his name to various projects without getting his hands too dirty. The Warehouse, by dint of timing, never played any Chicago-made house music.
3 The role of the UK as curator/creators in the eighties shouldn’t be underestimated. Hungry for new sounds and scenes, Britons collated exotic American dance music on compilations: Morgan Khan’s Street Sounds label released a series of electro compilations between 1983 and 1985, Brummie Neil Rushton put out Techno! The New Sound of Detroit in ’88, and even the Washington go-go scene (funk with brass riffs played endlessly) was briefly lionised by the NME in 1985, earning it
s own compilation. There was no American equivalent to these albums.
4 House pioneer Marshall Jefferson later told Frank Broughton: ‘It was Jesse who made everyone want to go and get a drum machine and start making records, because … Jesse’s shit wasn’t that good. It made it more accessible. It gave us hope, man … Jamie [Principle]’s stuff was too good. Nobody thought they could duplicate it. Everybody thought that Jamie was somebody from Europe.’
5 These essential primers were released on the London label, which – as an off-shoot of Decca – had done so much to get American rock ’n’ roll to the grey streets of fifties Britain. Now part of the Polygram group which had swallowed up Decca in the early eighties, it became, along with its FFRR offshoot run by Kiss FM DJ Pete Tong, a reliable sign of quality US and UK dance music from 1987 to 1991.
6 Like Rik Davis, Electrifying Mojo was also a Vietnam vet and a DJ out there during the war; back home in eighties Detroit his radio show went against the grain of hits-of-the-day black radio and got huge ratings. A typical show started with the Close Encounters theme followed by plenty of Prince, James Brown and Jimi Hendrix, with the occasional unlikely head-turner, like America’s ‘Horse with No Name’.
7 The name Cybotron came from Atkins, a blend of ‘cyborg’ and ‘cyclotron’. A true bedroom kid, he loved to invent his own futuristic language, and followed through with his Metroplex and Transmat labels.
8 Apparently Frankie Knuckles came up with the title ‘Strings of Life’ after Juan Atkins took it to him.
9 When Atkins and May heard that the NME’s Stuart Cosgrove was set to fly over and write a feature on the new Detroit sound, they realised they only had a few days to think of a name for the sounds they were creating. May wanted to call it hi-tech soul. Luckily Atkins won the fight.
58
SMILEY CULTURE: ACID HOUSE AND MANCHESTER
Roll on the future when the new wave of British club-goers start turning out their own music. Having experienced for themselves what actually makes people dance … The new music is coming sooner than you think.
Mark Moore, Virgin Rock Year Book, 1987
Different drugs soundtrack different eras. Rarely have music and narcotics been so intertwined as they were in the late eighties. MDMA, or Ecstasy, transformed the pop scene.
Amongst the UK’s earliest converts to E were Soft Cell, who had gone to New York in 1981 to record their first album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. A Brooklyn drug dealer called Cindy Ecstasy (whose flat vocals can be heard on ‘Torch’, a number-two UK hit in ’82) gave a white capsule of MDMA to Marc Almond as he listened to the Cure’s third album, the rainy-sounding Faith. He came up while listening to ‘All Cats Are Grey’, a sleepy, percussive, decidedly grey lament: ‘I remember thinking that it was the best song I’d heard in my entire life.’
The drug also flourished in Spain’s holiday resorts: with Franco’s despotic grip loosened to keep the tourists flooding in during the seventies, native outsiders – gays, hippies, artists – had made new homes for themselves in Torremolinos and on the island of Ibiza. By the early eighties the latter had become a thriving club scene for the rich and famous, Studio 54-on-Sea, and young working-class Britons went there for a cheap beach holiday, pressed their faces up against the window and wanted in. They took a pill at an after-hours bar called Amnesia1 which played new releases from Chicago, but blended them in with such unlikely records as Sting’s ‘Englishman in New York’ and Cyndi Lauper’s cover of ‘What’s Going On’; suddenly a record that would have seemed naff, too pop, at a suburban London soul night draped itself around them like a magical suit. The drug didn’t make the music any better or worse, it just annihilated snobbishness. Barriers that had been put up in the late sixties (by Brian Jones, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton) and stayed in place pretty much ever since (thanks to the likes of soul DJ Chris Hill) suddenly became permeable.
Danny Rampling was a funk and soul DJ who discovered Ecstasy on holiday in 1987. Returning from Ibiza, he got to hear the occasional house record in West End gay clubs, where the look was still black flying jackets and Levi’s 501s, the look of Thatcherite consumerism. Rampling and a few dozen other Ibiza veterans found brief solace at Paul Oakenfold and Trevor Fung’s Project club on Streatham High Road, playing Ibiza-style sets from two till six. But Rampling realised he needed his own night and started Shoom in late ’87. Its flyer read ‘the happy happy happy happy happy Shoom club’ and was decorated with a yellow smiley face that hadn’t been seen since the Nixon era. Shoom was based in a fitness centre in Southwark, and Lucozade – the only drink available at the centre – became the only drink anybody wanted. People were so obsessed with the music they tried to climb inside the speakers to get closer.
‘You’re so anti-fashion, so wear flares,’ Kevin Rowland had said at the beginning of a decade which would be dominated by style over substance. The Ibiza ravers wore flares. Flares, Lucozade, smileys, bandanas – it was a revolt against everything restrictive. Other Shoom DJs included Ibiza regulars Lisa Loud and Nancy Noise, their nicknames indicative of a general lack of studied cool. The February 1988 issue of The Face included a feature by Jon Savage about the seventies: ‘The Decade that Taste Forgot’. The end of taste, suddenly, seemed a good thing. Taste and style had disfigured the eighties, and they now gave way to utility. The eighties were being sent packing.2
Shoom’s major step forward – along with the functional dancewear, the flavoured smoke machines, the strobes, the darkness, the free ice pops, the hundred-per-cent humidity – was that people stumbled out into the morning light having made new friends. Since the sixties clubs had been about attitude, posing, territory and one-upmanship. Shoom didn’t set out to change the world, but it defined a new way of life; people who had previously stayed home, intimidated by style-mag decrees and post-Studio 54 door policies, and people who had been putting up with mediocre mid-decade indie jumped ship and found they were suddenly in (very) close proximity to many like-minded souls. Unsurprisingly, Shoom quickly outgrew its tiny venue. The next step was Paul Oakenfold’s Spectrum, which held fifteen hundred people, used a garish dayglo eyeball for a logo and played every available acid-house record; Chicago began to feed the demand with purpose-built records like Mr Lee’s ‘Pump Up London’, saluting the mania of ‘Notting-ham’ and ‘L-L-Leeds’. The scene grew exponentially.
Who was filling these clubs? Terry Farley was an ex-football hooligan, a soul boy with a taste for eighties West End club culture. At a club called Raid in late ’87 he saw ‘guys I knew from Millwall coming up in really dusty old shoes, Chevignon jackets and fucked-up trainers. Obviously they’d all come back from a mad Ibiza summer and they had the start of pony tails, with little top knots.’ By the summer of ’88 the pony tails were fully formed, and formerly violent, disenfranchised youth was united in a group hug.
Moral panic broke out in October 1988. Only two weeks after running a story about the giddy delights of acid house, the Sun linked the scene with rumours of new horror drug Ecstasy, bearing the headline ‘Evil of Ecstasy’ on October 19th. Other newspapers ran similar stories, many on their front pages, with photographs of writhing masses of sweaty teen agers. Short-lived tabloid Today’s headline squawked ‘The New Sex and Drugs Cult Exposed!’ alongside a picture of S’Express’s Mark Moore. One Sun photo caption read: ‘Night of ecstasy … thrillseeking youngsters in a dance frenzy at the secret party attended by more than 11,000.’ The ravers in the photo look hot, crazed and quite demented.
Acid house clearly wasn’t long for this world, but it had a few weeks of vital chart infiltration. As soon as Top of the Pops banned the word ‘acid’, D Mob’s half-cocked anthem ‘We Call It Acieed’ went as high as number two, and Jolly Roger’s ‘Acid Man’ made the Top 20 after languishing for weeks in the lower reaches of the Top 75. Acid remixes were everywhere: the Wee Papa Girl Rappers and Samantha Fox found Kevin Saunderson happy to twiddle his 303 for them, and even boy band Bros’s ‘I Quit’ was given an acid bath. House puri
sts quickly swapped their copies of ‘Pump Up London’ for the less tainted, fresh new techno sound of Detroit and acid was off the charts by the autumn, strangled by the sweaty hands of the Goss brothers. But ravers weren’t going away – if the sounds were now in short supply, then people would just have to create new material themselves.
The next wave would come from Manchester.
The Haçienda – otherwise known as FAC51 (like all Factory Records projects, it had its own catalogue number) – had opened in 1982, when Factory looked to build a post-Martin Hannett future based on the dance music that New Order were now creating. The problem was that, aside from New Order, Factory’s dance singles had been flat and forgettable: A Certain Ratio abandoned their impressively frosty post-punk (‘All Night Party’, ‘Flight’, ‘Forced Laugh’) for stone-cold jazz funk; 52nd Street, Biting Tongues and Quando Quango left no impression whatsoever.3 The club had survived, barely, as a regular gig venue: the Smiths had played there three times in 1983; Madonna had made her first UK appearance there on January 27th 1984, captured by Channel 4’s The Tube. But it wasn’t until 1986 that the club started to fulfil its ambitions with the Nude night on Friday, where DJ Mike Pickering (of Quando Quango, and later M People) played early house. Within a year it was full every night of the week, and – as had happened in Chicago – its denizens were inspired to go home and create more of the music they wanted to hear. 808 State were formed by Graham Massey, formerly of DIY act Danny and the Dressmakers, and contemporary-dance student Gerald Simpson: they broke through with the Balearic dreaminess of ‘Pacific State’ (no. 10 ’89), but not before Simpson had left and, as A Guy Called Gerald, released his own single, ‘Voodoo Ray’, in late ’88. Over a deep, echoed backing track, with keyboard whooshes like cars on wet streets, Gerald added cooing, wordless female vocals and a smidgin of house piano. It was midnight blue, rainy and mysterious (what, or who, was a Voodoo Ray?); it was the exact sound of the Haçienda. Almost on its own, ‘Voodoo Ray’ changed Manchester’s musical landscape. By the time it reached number twelve nationally in the summer of 1989, the city was Britain’s musical capital.
