Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  Marc Cohn was not amused when he heard ‘Raving I’m Raving’. Admitting, hands in the air, that they’d raided his song, SUAD offered to give the proceeds to charity, but Cohn wouldn’t budge. The record was instantly deleted.4 Shut Up and Dance, mercurial heroes responsible for the birth of jungle, drum and bass and, in turn, UK garage and dubstep, were hit by a bunch of other claims by the copyright-protecting MCPS for more uncleared samples. The phone never stopped ringing. The news was never good. The brown envelopes piled up. The label simply folded.

  Smiley later recalled how in 1992 the major labels ‘didn’t even know what a sample was, they were like “Who? What?” Even trying to speak with the publishers, no one knew what anything was. Now you’ve got whole departments set up just to sit down and deal with it – whether it’s a sample or you’ve re-played it or whatever. Back then they didn’t know what the hell you were on about. So we were just sort of ten years too early.’

  * * *

  Once the term ‘acid house’ had entered the public domain, it became inevitable that it would prick up the ears of the enduring hippie subculture. This had lived on since the early seventies in West London squats, and in semi-rural Britain where people could smoke dope in peace. By the late eighties a loose agglomeration of hippies, anarcho-punks, new-age travellers who favoured crusty rock groups like the Levellers, and urban squatters started to band together at places like Club Dog5 in Finsbury Park. After punk and before acid house, ‘hippie’ had been a term of abuse, yet now it was being used in band names (A Homeboy, A Hippie and A Funki Dredd scored two minor hits in 1990), and groups like the Shamen – psychedelic revivalists with a political slant in the late eighties – could safely grow their hair and come out into the open. What all these factions agreed on was that free festivals, and the drugs you took to get you through the inevitable mud and the rain, were good things: hippie travellers had the network; ravers had the music and the drugs. The two came together in a crew called Spiral Tribe. In 1991, with shaved heads, combat gear and a decent sound system, Spiral Tribe permanently travelled around the country, pitching up at camp sites, in gypsy caravan sites, at a disused dog-food factory in Greenwich, or in the car park of the Camelford festival, where Hawkwind were headlining.

  In the summer of 1992 they arrived at Castlemorton Common near Malvern, where, along with other travelling sound systems and twenty-five thousand hippies and ravers, they staged a five-day impromptu free festival that wound up not only local residents and the police but also old-school hippies who just wanted to get a bit of peace and quiet. Spiral Tribe were unrepentant, the first sound system onto the site, the last to leave: ‘There are some people who moan and they do moan very loudly,’ Spiral Tribe founder Mark Harrison told i-D magazine, ‘but as far as we know free festivals are about playing music non-stop. Techno is folk music. We play the people’s music. Anyone who comes down and asks us to turn it down, I’m sorry, we’re not going to. Turn it up if anything. If you’ve got a voice, shout. Our attitude is “Make some fucking noise”.’

  With the introduction of the Criminal Justice Act in December 1993, designed to ensure another Castlemorton couldn’t happen, house took over in the nightclubs (which prospered, leading to superclubs), while rave, refusing to become so restricted, reluctantly moved into a number of exclusive legal venues (such as the Blue Note in Hoxton Square, where jungle morphed into drum and bass and became rhythmically tricksier) and smaller-scale illegal parties. Dance now had a separate rave culture (served by magazines like Eternity and Ravescene, bought and sold at raves) and a club culture (covered by Mixmag, Muzik and Jockey Slut, which you could buy in W. H. Smith), with the two areas attracting quite different crowds, and little overlap. The government’s plan to eradicate ‘repetitive beats’ didn’t work but did split the scene and – at least temporarily – weaken the camaraderie.

  Another splinter of dance music, one which suited people who didn’t really like clubbing, was electronica. Sheffield’s bleep label Warp became the major purveyor of undanceable but studiously cool music. In ’92 they signed Cornishman Richard James, aka Aphex Twin. While the ambient Orb were grinning loons, smirking through their Top of the Pops appearances, Aphex Twin was much stranger and genuinely intriguing. He had a smile that was familiar to loved-up clubbers but would also have suited a police photofit for a Dartmoor escapee. He played on his otherness – the Kernow upbringing (even though he lived in Islington), his home-made keyboards (even though no one ever saw them), the endless pseudonyms (Caustic Window, Polygon Window, AFX, Blue Calx, Martin Tressider). He told Melody Maker that he had roughly a thousand unreleased recordings: ‘Every time I go back to Cornwall my friends play me tapes of tunes I gave them, stuff I haven’t heard in years. In their cars I’ll find cassettes of material that I haven’t even got copies of.’ No one doubted any of this, possibly because they wanted a genuine auteur, a techno Mike Oldfield to emerge from the anonymous pack. The highlights of his alleged pre-fame career made up Selected Ambient Works 85–92. He claimed to sleep for only two or three hours a night – sleep, he said, was ‘a bit of a con’. On stage, he hid behind a curtain, prodding a laptop, the dullest thing you’d ever seen, but he was wise enough to know his fans would love him all the more for it. (‘Was that even him behind the curtain?’ ‘I thought he was taller.’) He was pop’s own Chris Morris, a prankster and something of a genius.

  Aphex Twin never had a major hit (‘On’, no. 32 ’93; ‘Come to Daddy’, no. 36 ’97; ‘Windowlicker’, no. 16 ’99) but he was an MTV regular, he sold a ton of albums and his debut single was extremely influential: Aphex recorded 1992’s post-acid ‘Didgeridoo’ at a breakneck speed, 160 bpm, crazily fast, deliberately creating something you could never dance to. But clubs like Rage caught up with it immediately, and within weeks records sped up to match his gag. Using Shut Up and Dance’s template – subsonic dub basslines, reggae samples, ever faster beats – the music was now being created to match the speedier drugs people were taking. The battle cry nationwide was ‘Hardcore! You know the score!’; the cry at Rage was ‘Jungle!’ At Rage, Fabio and Grooverider would play 33 rpm singles at 45, mix Belgian rave tracks like Joey Beltram’s ‘Mentasm’ in with East London hardcore dubplates, Kevin Saunderson’s breakbeat-based Tronik House singles and Underground Resistance’s hard-edged, second-wave Detroit techno; often they played two records at the same time to create a mind-melting hybrid. The crowd were hands in the air, gloves off, tops off, no stilettos. Once time-stretching – where a sample could be sped up or slowed down without altering the pitch – was used on records like Rufige Kru’s ‘Terminator’, it created a distorted, grainy, snaking and disturbing sound. Darkcore was the sound of British rave in late ’93 and a lot of people, girls especially, were turned off. The bpm had reached 180, the time-stretching made everything sound like a horror movie. Rage closed down as so many of its regulars were repelled by this punishing experimentation.

  People yearned once again to hear something as simple and joyous as Bizarre Inc’s ‘Playing with Knives’ (no. 4 ’91), and happy hardcore’s moment had arrived. It reignited the greatest record of the breakbeat era, Baby D’s ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’, and sent it all the way to number one at the end of 1994. Originally recorded in 1992, it was a love song to rave itself, floating on chords that were John Barry via Aphex Twin: ‘I’ll take you up to the highest high,’ it went, and it was somehow incredibly sad. Hot on its heels, peaking at number two in early ’95 was N-Trance’s similarly celebratory but much more visceral ‘Set You Free’. Not shy, it opens with the sound of falling rain, massed airhorns and a silky three-note piano motif before the breakbeat kicks in and pushes Oldham-born teenager Kelly Llorenna to even higher heights of passion than Baby D: ‘When I hold you baaaay-beeeeeehh, feel your heartbeat close to meeee, wanna stay in your arms forever,’ she roars as if this was the only three minutes she’d ever get to be with her man. She has to get it all out, has to let the world know. And then she really lets rip. ‘OOOOOOONL
Y LOVE can SET you FRRREEEEEE!!!’ What a beautiful, daft, emotional, exciting record. Kelly Llorenna sounded twenty storeys high.6

  Apart from happy hardcore, the mid-nineties dance scene was the era of handbag house (initially a derogatory term – as in music for girls, therefore it can’t have much substance). This revived house piano and diva vocals: the look was fluffy bra tops and short skirts, the crowd was girls and gays. It was just like disco – the good times were back. The natural home of handbag house was the superclub7 – urban, legal and huge – which rose in direct response to the Criminal Justice Act. Superclubs didn’t just offer a good night out but clothing, merchandise, CDs. Ministry of Sound in Southwark had been opened by city boy James Palumbo in September ’91. It had the first twenty-four-hour licence in London, largely because it was in the middle of nowhere, a dead zone between London Bridge and Elephant and Castle. Palumbo’s record collection was entirely classical, but he had the funds to bring in every legendary DJ he wanted to the new venue: DJ Pierre, Frankie Knuckles, Larry Levan. By 1998 Ministry of Sound had a turnover of £20 million.

  Before Ministry changed the rules, mixtapes from Camden market were the way to take your DJ kicks home. Quite often the sound quality was grisly but, like copies of Ravescene, they had a DIY charm and bypassed any industry watchdog. Ministry of Sound compilations looked smart, like portfolios, and sold tens of thousands – you wondered why no one had had the idea before. Other superclubs soon followed: Leeds had Back to Basics; Sheffield had Gatecrasher; there was Renaissance in Mansfield and Cream in Liverpool. Unlike most of their house-era predecessors, the superclubs all negotiated with local police to ensure they could build a reputation, like a regular business, and not get shut down overnight. On Cream’s behalf, former Big in Japan singer Jayne Casey argued to the council that clubbers were filling hotel beds and bringing economic regeneration to a city still recovering from severe industrial decline. Like the Haçienda in 1989, Cream became a magnet for students: in a 1996 survey, seventy per cent of students at Liverpool’s John Moores University said they chose to go there because Cream was around the corner.

  When ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’ reached number one in November ’94 (keeping the Stone Roses’ comeback single ‘Love Spreads’ at number two), it provided much-needed oxygen for dance music in the chart. Along with house, Eurodance had waned, with 2 Unlimited, Capella, Haddaway, Snap and Culture Beat all scoring their last Top 10 hits in the spring of ’94. The only new Euro name on the scene was Danish girl Whigfield, whose ‘Saturday Night’ (UK no. 1 ’94) straddled a line between playground chant and Eurovision. As rave had waned, 1994’s Top 40 had been dominated by soft reggae (Ace of Bass, China Black), soul ballads (All-4-One, Boyz II Men) and rock ballads (Aerosmith, Wet Wet Wet – whose ‘Love Is All Around’ clocked up fifteen weeks at number one over the summer), but by April ’95 the Top 10 was ringing once again with the house-piano hooks of Grace’s ‘Not Over Yet’, Strike’s ‘U Sure Do’ and the Nightcrawlers’ ‘Push the Feeling On’. The Bucketheads’ ‘The Bomb! (These Sounds Fall into My Mind)’ recalled the giddy joy of Deee-Lite, and there was even room for an acid revival: Josh Wink’s ‘Higher State of Consciousness’ (UK no. 8 ’95) was based around a familiar Roland 303 sound which started at a low pitch then moved up, higher, higher still, to a place no one had gone to back in ’88. It was regressive but it was enjoyably exhausting, and felt like it was carrying on unfinished business.

  It seemed that every time the dance scene started to calcify (as with the great misnomer of ‘progressive house’, circa ’91), or drift too close to aimless noodling (the Orb and their ambient brethren), or decide it was time for a Grand Statement (Goldie’s extraordinary but overly tasteful seventy-two-minute drum-and-bass symphony Mother, from 1998), then the breakbeat would return, the basslines would once more jump to the fore and the essence of Shut Up and Dance’s floor-filling noise would reinvigorate dance music. By the mid-nineties, away from happy hardcore’s strongholds in Scotland and the north of England, the breakbeat was also being reborn, twisting into something new in the Home Counties.

  Hip-hop fans Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons had met at Manchester University and were regulars at the Haçienda. Originally they called themselves the Dust Brothers in a spectacularly direct tribute to the Beastie Boys’ production team; when their American namesakes objected, they became the Chemical Brothers. Rowlands was a dead ringer for The Magic Roundabout’s Dougal, and was as musically unschooled as the canine puppet. This didn’t matter at all, as they opened up a new, cavernous, rock-friendly side to breakbeat. Making their name as DJs at London’s Sunday Social, a basement club beneath the Lord Albany pub on Great Portland Street, the Chemical Brothers mixed the Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ in with hip hop and Philly soul (Love Unlimited’s ecstatic ‘Under the Influence of Love’ was their classic ender), creating a psychedelic stew. Soon they added DIY recordings of their own, primitively recorded on a Hitachi midi system. One track, ‘Chemical Beats’, used one of the ultimate legal no-nos: it sampled the Beatles, taking the off-rhythm of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and underlining it with hip-hop beats. Crunching, elastic and hypnotic all at once, released in January ’94 it was thrilling enough to become the blueprint for a whole new genre – ‘Chemical Beats’ was the birth of big beat.

  In the meantime, without jungle’s media-unfriendly handle, drum and bass finally began to gain press attention. Soon you had ‘intelligent drum and bass’, which shoehorned in jazz moves and, as jazz moves are wont to do, sucked all the fun out of it. Roni Size and Reprazent won the Mercury Music Prize in 1997, the equivalent of the hardest kid in school receiving a handshake and a book voucher from the headmaster. The whole scene wilted with grief, died overnight, killed by well-meaning liberals. In its place, back in the clubs of Clapton, Stoke Newington, Dalston and Hackney, the beats had been simplified, pared and sweetened; vocals were back and UK garage was born. The whole process was repeated (too much champagne, not enough street feel and the emergence of Craig David being the steps too far in 2000), and grime appeared. And so on, and so forth. SUAD’s ragga/hip-hop amalgam was still the source – the music adapted, moved on.

  * * *

  In 1993 Matthew Bannister was chosen as the new Radio 1 controller, replacing Johnny Beerling, who, rather shockingly, had worked at the station since its birth in 1967. The old guard who refused to play the Prodigy’s ‘Everybody in the Place’ were swept away and in came NME writer and indie geek Steve Lamacq and R&B aficionado Trevor Nelson from Kiss, while Pete Tong (who had broken records like Orbital’s ‘Chime’ on his Friday early-evening show) and hip-hop DJ Tim Westwood would be poached from London’s Capital Radio. Slowly, for the first time in years, the industry started to listen to what pop fans actually wanted.

  In March ’97 the Chemical Brothers had a UK number one with ‘Block Rockin’ Beats’. It sampled a Schoolly D line and the bassline from 23 Skidoo’s ‘Coup’; the Sunday Social underground was now entirely overground, and big beat was all over the charts – Fatboy Slim (‘Praise You’) and the Prodigy (‘Firestarter’, ‘Breathe’) scored further number-one hits. And, significantly, as these acts crossed over into traditional rock and pop fields, the major labels finally got a handle on how to sell and promote dance music. Crucially, they sold albums. They made money for the industry.

  By 1997 Shut Up and Dance, having kept their heads down for a few years, were once again selling twelve-inch singles from the back of a car, on their new Red Light label. A single called ‘The Burial’ sampled Tracy Chapman. But this time they wouldn’t get shut down – now there were entire legal teams to deal with samples. The industry had caught up and, if they hadn’t tamed dance music, they’d still turned it into a manageable, album-format genre. PJ and Smiley weren’t bitter. They were aware of their place in the scheme of things. ‘It’s how you do things,’ said PJ. ‘You just have to be clever with things, and obviously be careful … but, y’know, you must express yourself.’

 
1 Some holders of the mechanical rights to recordings demanded up to a hundred per cent of any royalties generated by the new song. The Verve came unstuck by releasing ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ (UK no. 2 ’97) without first clearing its string-sample hook, taken from David Whitaker’s arrangement for the Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s ‘The Last Time’. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards copped all the publishing.

  2 The differences between hardcore, jungle and drum and bass would be fluid and negotiable. In 1993 and ’94, after Rage closed, all three co-existed separately, with jungle largely an East London phenomenon (girls dressed in short skirts, boys in heavy jewellery), drum and bass at LTJ Bukem’s Speed night in the West End, and hardcore still ruling most mainstream clubs.

  3 This was recorded after Derrick May sulked in Muzik magazine that ‘Guys in England had started making their own music … it seemed like we weren’t invited to the party any more.’ Shut Up and Dance ribbed the innovator with a hardcore track that sampled May’s protégé Carl Cox (‘And I’ll return a stronger man’) over the classic breakbeat from the Winstons’ ‘Amen, Brother’.

  4 Shut Up and Dance hurriedly recorded a new ‘Raving I’m Raving’ without the samples and with altered lyrics. It bears almost no resemblance to the hit, but it remains the only commercially available version. ‘Raving I’m Raving’ had been number one on the Thursday midweek chart, which is when stocks ran out. The label had pressed two hundred thousand copies. On the Sunday, KWS’s cover of KC and the Sunshine Band’s ‘Please Don’t Go’ enjoyed its fifth and final week at number one; it’s unlikely that its sales that week would have topped two hundred thousand. Conspiracy theorists who suspect another ‘God Save the Queen’-type situation would ask how the BPI and BBC could allow a record to be number one that you couldn’t go out and buy? ‘It was scary to be honest,’ said Smiley. ‘We were novices in the business, we weren’t businessmen, never wanted to be. And we were in the middle of the biggest hype, as if it was a Hollywood blockbuster, like Spider-Man, not just a rave tune! It outsold everything that week.’