Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  Revolution in Progress

  The democratic promise of the Balearic ethos could not be kept the preserve of the chosen few for long. In the spring of 1988, Oakenfold took it to the next level when he launched Spectrum as a Monday night club in the 2000 capacity Heaven, round the corner from where The Future had taken place. ‘Everyone said to us, you can’t do a club on a Monday. But we did a deal with Heaven so that as long as we broke even, it was okay. After two weeks, we owed twelve grand. The third week, they were all set to close us down, but we broke even. And from then on, it just got bigger and bigger.’

  Spectrum’s subtitle was ‘Theatre of Madness’, and this was no idle boast. ‘I was quite shocked, almost appalled, actually,’ remembers Nick Philip, a hip hop fan who was intrigued enough to check out Spectrum at its height. ‘Just the hedonism, and how out of line everyone was getting. Back in the late eighties, the club scene was quite uptight, you had to wear exactly the right clothes to get in, and you might see the odd person there who was really out of it, but it was not the general rule. But at Spectrum, everyone looked like they were from fucking Mars. Drenched in sweat, wearing baggy shit, and all just looking at the DJ with their arms in the air, like it was some really weird religious ceremony. I was quite freaked out by it.’

  The atmosphere was even more deranged at The Trip, a club started by Nicky Holloway in June 1988. Instead of the laid-back, sunkissed Balearic vibe, the music was full-on acid house. The location – The Astoria, in the heart of London’s West End – signalled the scene’s emergence into the full glare of public consciousness. When The Trip closed at 3 a.m., the punters would pour out into Charing Cross Road, stopping the traffic and partying in the street. ‘Then the police would come,’ remembers Mark Moore, ‘and the sirens would get turned on. Everyone would crowd around the police van and chant “acieed!”’ – the war cry of 1988 – “and dance to the siren”. The police didn’t know what to make of it, it was like, “what the fuck is going on?!?” ’ Then everyone would troop en masse to the municipal multi-storey car park near the YMCA in Bedford Street, where they’d dance around their vehicles to house music pumping out of the car stereos.

  Because of Britain’s antiquated club licensing laws, the night’s mayhem ended prematurely. One result was the chill-out scene. ‘The chill out was good, ’cos that’s when you’d invite complete strangers back to your place and that’s when you’d make new friends,’ remembers Moore. If you wanted to carry on dancing through the night, you had to turn to the illegal warehouse parties or after-hours, unlicensed clubs like the legendary RIP at Clink Street.

  RIP was the brainchild of creative-and-romantic partners Paul Stone and Lu Vukovic. He had been involved in organizing dub reggae parties in Portsmouth; she was an idealistic former anarcho-punk. Stone recruited the DJ team of Kid Batchelor, ‘Evil’ Eddie Richards and Mr C, who had been running Fantasy, one of the first straight house clubs in London. The first RIP party took place in April 1988 at a tiny underground location in Eversholt Street, Euston. A couple of months later, RIP started up again at Clink Street, a dingy building in South East London that had once been a jail.

  ‘It was used as an illegal drinking den before we got our hands on it,’ says Mr C, later to become a pop star as the rapper in The Shamen. ‘And there was a recording studio in there, which we used as the DJ booth.’ In one room, Eddie Richards and Kid Batchelor played; in the other Mr C spun, followed by the Shock Sound System, another bunch of early house supporters who included future Brit-house luminary Ashley Beedle. ‘We started off RIP every Saturday night, and within a month it was choc-a-bloc. Then we started the Friday night as well, which was called A Transmission – for Acid Transmission. Then we did Zoo on Sundays, so we’d have all weekend at it.’ The parties would go until nine or ten in the morning.

  Many people thought RIP was an acronym for Rave In Peace. It actually stood for ‘Revolution In Progress’. The phrase captures the near-militant underground attitude of the music policy and the slightly sinister atmosphere of the club, a world away from the teddy bears and ice lollies of Shoom. ‘If Shoom was “underground” and “edgy”, Clink Street was dark as fuck, sound-in-Hell!’ laughs Mr C. ‘It was pretty heavy in there – there was a lot of soccer thugs, and villains. Saying that, next to them was some of the most beautiful people you ever saw in your life. All types of people from all walks of life just came together to get completely nutted. It was complete madness.

  ‘We never had any trouble. But people were completely up for it. Everybody was on something. And back then, it wasn’t just about E. LSD was just as popular. It was an equal mix, and a lot of people taking E and acid together as a synergy thing, what used to be called “candy flips”.’ The music was tripped-out, too, a long way from Balearic. ‘Unless Colin Faver was playing Shoom, it was generally namby pamby sort of stuff, lightweight gear,’ sneers Mr C. ‘Clink Street was about the intense, underground side of house.’

  That said, many people frequented both clubs, especially since they were less than a mile apart in South East London. ‘Clink St is within spitting distance of Shoom,’ remembers Louise Gray. ‘To get there you’d have to go through the fruit and vegetable market. All the costermongers would be there in the small hours, taking in the cabbage supplies from all over rural England, and suddenly they’d be confronted by this army of psychedelic kids in their cut-off T-shirts and cut-off jeans, marching through the market to Clink Street. It must have been an incredibly bizarre sight!’

  Absolute Beginners

  Ecstasy had been available in London since the early eighties, but the supply was highly restricted. You had to know someone who brought it over from America, where it was legal until 1985. There was something of an Ecstasy scene at Taboo, Leigh Bowery’s club for fashion freaks, but nobody had discovered its application as a trance-dance drug. Instead, small groups of friends were using it for private bonding sessions.

  In 1988, Ecstasy became much easier to get hold of, though it was still rather pricey at around £20 a tab. In the spring of that year, Louise Gray had her first Ecstasy experience at a Hedonism warehouse party in West London. ‘I remember at one point feeling immensely hot and claustrophobic, having to go outside and lie down, and thinking that I might throw up. People figured out pretty soon that Ecstasy did something to your stomach, during the initial rush. Some people had to shoot off immediately to the loo, ’cos they were going to get the runs; others were sick. After Hedonism, I remember being put in a taxi by my friend, and lying on the floor of this cab at five in the morning, telling this cabbie my life story!’

  Nobody really knew much about Ecstasy, about how it worked or what was the best way to take it. People quickly worked out that alcohol dulled the E buzz; at Shoom, Lucozade became the beverage of choice, partly because it replenished energy and partly because it was the only drink available at the Fitness Centre. Myths sprang up around the new drug, like the notion that Vitamin C killed the buzz, which ruled out orange juice. There was also considerable confusion over Ecstasy’s legal status, and nobody knew if it was an addictive substance or not. The other big Ecstasy myth concerned the drug’s aphrodisiac powers. ‘All these strange reports were coming through that it turned you into a sex fiend,’ says Gray. ‘But if anything it was the complete opposite. Very little sex happened that year. People were very cuddly, and that was very nice: you could be cuddled by complete strangers in a very non-threatening way, ’cos you knew nothing was going to happen. If you got upset about something, this crowd of strangers’ hands would descend on you. It was touchy feely, an amorphous sensuality – but it wasn’t a sexuality.

  ‘That’s one of the reasons the Ecstasy scene was so docile – the libido had actually been sublimated into a completely different form. People weren’t going out to pull. You might meet someone there who was nice and then you’d see them and then sex would happen at some other stage. I think that was one of the reasons why you could have such an extraordinary mix of people – male gays, b
ut also working-class boys who hadn’t had any contact with the trendy culture, and maybe in another life they might have gone queer-bashing or Paki-bashing. Suddenly they were thrown into this environment where everyone was kissy-kissy, but it didn’t matter, they weren’t threatened in any way.’

  Love Thugs

  Thanks to Ecstasy, all the class and race and sex-preference barriers were getting fluxed up; all sorts of people who might never have exchanged words or glances were being swirled together in a promiscuous chaos. One of the most striking changes was the way that the territorial rivalry between areas of London – largely expressed through supporting different football teams – was dissipated. Almost overnight, the Stanley-knife wielding trouble-maker had metamorphosized into the ‘love thug’, or as Brit-rapper Gary Clail later put it, ‘the emotional hooligan’.

  ‘You were getting a lot of the football firms down at Spectrum and The Trip,’ says Moore. ‘The bouncers were quite close to the street and they kept saying “It’s gonna kick off in here,” ’cos of there being rival firms in the same club. But they were all on E so they were just hugging each other, they couldn’t be bothered to fight.’

  Before the summer of 1988, a typical night out for your average working-class lad consisted of ‘getting drunk, chatting up a bird, or having a fight with another area,’ claims Barry Ashworth. ‘Leading up to that time, it was a pretty violent period in football. And then thoughout the country everybody started necking pills, and then people started going to the terraces necked up too.’

  This interface between football fanaticism, with its ritualized inebriation and hand-to-hand combat, and acid house, with its anti-alcohol bias and hippy-dippy pacifism, seems on the surface an extremely unlikely upshot. Actually, there are quite a few parallels between football and raving. In the eighties, with mass unemployment and Thatcher’s defeat of the unions, the football match and the warehouse party offered rare opportunities for the working class to experience a sense of collective identity: to belong to a ‘we’ rather than an atomized, impotent ‘I’.

  In Among The Thugs, Bill Buford argues that the spatial organization of the football stadium – fans are shunted like cattle down narrow dark passages into packed ‘pens’ – is almost deliberately designed to generate a herd-mentality. Crammed tightly into intimate physical contact with strangers, the spectators gradually lose any sense of separate self-hood and instead melt into crowd-consciousness. As the match proceeds, the game’s rhythms of tension and release traverse the crowd-body in the form of shared, physically felt sensations: catching your breath in anticipation of a goal, then exploding in euphoria or (rather more often) sighing in anti-climax. On the rare occasion of a goal being scored, total strangers often embrace each other.

  The experience of going to The Trip and Spectrum, or even better to the bigger-scale warehouse parties like Apocalypse Now, was not dissimilar to a football match: collective fervour, bodies pressed together, the liberation of losing yourself in the crowd. The big difference is that football is a remarkably inefficient ‘desiring machine’ compared with the acid party, where the DJ offers an endless sequence of crescendos. Given the tendency of the football match to result in a no-score or low-scoring draw, there is far more scope for frustration rather than relief.

  Like a sort of avant-garde of football fandom, the thugs evolved ways of intensifying the game’s sensations of tribal unity. In Buford’s account, by the mid-eighties football hooliganism was a neo-pagan cult of sacrificial violence, complete with shamanic warrior-priests (called ‘generals’), tribal markings (team or star player tattoos, instead of cabbalistic symbols) and rituals of self-intoxication. Like Viking berserkers, hooligans use alcohol, chanting, and sprinting en masse, to generate a mob-will. The result is a collective adrenalin-surge that propels them over the brink between normality and running amok. Buford describes his own experience of participating in one street battle as a Dionysian transport: time slows down, perceptions become ultra-vivid, there’s an access to ‘an experience of absolute completeness’. The thugs themselves talk of these exalted moments using the language of drugs (‘the crack, the buzz, and the fix’) or spirituality (‘it’s a religion, really’).

  In 1988 – 9, soccer hooligans discovered that E offered an even better buzz than the adrenalin-and-endorphin rush of hand-to-hand combat, and they temporarily gave up their carefully strategized confrontations. Instead of gouging each other in the face with broken glasses, supporters of rival teams fraternized in pubs after the match, scored drugs off each other, and trooped off to raves. Irvine Welsh’s novel Marabou Stork Nightmares tells the story of a thug who is transformed into a New Man thanks to E and rave. But, as Welsh has pointed out, when the MDMA-buzz inevitably faded in the early nineties, many hooligans reverted to their old, tried-and-true techniques of getting a rush.

  Mantra for a State of Mind

  Back in 1988, the Love Thug was a crucial element in the myth-in-progress that was popularly dubbed ‘The Second Summer Of Love’: the heartless hoolie turned loved-up nutter was proof that Ecstasy really was a wonder drug, the agent of a spiritual and social revolution.

  Flooded with idealism and will-to-belief, some members of the first Ecstasy generation were latching on to ideas about spirituality and the New Age, struggling to articulate the overwhelming Ecstasy-induced feelings coursing through their nervous systems. ‘A lot of people were born again,’ marvels Mark Moore. ‘They gave up their relatively normal lives, ’cos they thought “Why am I doing this shitty job?” You got all these people suddenly deciding to go off and travel. People I’d known for years were suddenly dressing all ethnic and getting spiritual. The whole New Age thing surged forward.’

  For most, the back-to-the-sixties/dawning of the Age of Aquarius imagery was tongue-in-cheek, a figleaf for pure hedonism. But many felt utterly transformed. ‘I remember getting prophet books myself, the Bhagavad-Gita,’ says Ashworth. ‘All kinds of things that I certainly wouldn’t have bothered with, coming from my kind of background. Growing up in that background, nobody can quite express themselves: a man was a man, nobody actually speaks. The way you communicated was literally by your force, by acting macho. And all of sudden, you started saying things to people that you would never ever have said . . . “I loooove you!” ’ MDMA was a miracle cure for the English disease of emotional constipation, reserve, inhibition. And it wasn’t just about telling your friends you loved them, it was about telling people who weren’t your friends you loved them!

  Because of Ecstasy and the mingling and fraternization it incited, the living death of the eighties – characterized by social atomization and the Thatcher inculcated work ethic – seemed to be coming to an abrupt end. ‘Everyone was vitalized,’ says Gray. And yet, for all the self-conscious counterculture echoes, acid house was a curiously apolitical phenomenon, at least in the sense of activism and protest. While the tenor of the peace-and-unity rhetoric ran against the Thatcherite grain, in other respects – the rampant hedonism, the fact that Ecstasy was priced out of the range of the unemployed – acid house’s pleasure-principled euphoria was very much a product of the eighties: a kind of spiritual materialism, a greed for intense experiences. As far as the sterner pop-culture critics were concerned, acieed was escapism, pure and simple: Stewart Cosgrove argued in New Statesman and Society that acid house’s ‘pleasures come not from resistance but from surrender.’ A year later, Tim London of the politicized dance-pop band Soho railed: ‘Summer of Love? What a load of old bollocks. Summer of Having a Good Time, more like! Just like kids have always done, since the days of Saturday Night Fever. All this bollocks about the E culture, it’s just people projecting their ideas on to something that’s always been there: mindless hedonism.’

  Acid house’s biggest impact was in the domain of leisure; it caused a shift from alcohol to Ecstasy-and-soft-drinks, created a mass recreational drug culture, and stoked a craving for all-night-dancing that would rub up against the antedeluvian club licensing laws. The ener
gy liberated by Ecstasy felt revolutionary, but it wasn’t directed against the social ‘stasis quo’. Acieed was more like a secession from normality, a subculture based around what Antonio Melechi characterizes as a kind of collective disappearance. ‘One of the things I found exhilarating at that point,’ confirms Louise Gray, ‘was the idea that there was this whole society of people who lived at night and slept during the day. This carnival idea of turning the ordinary world completely on its head. Like slipping into a parallel universe, almost.’ London was transformed into a magical city, transected by new pathways and highly charged itineraries. ‘During the day, Charing Cross and The Strand and the journey to South London would mean one thing – I might go to the bank or Sainsbury’s – but once the sun went down, it was a route, stretching from Heaven to Shoom to Clink Street.’

  By autumn 1988, it was possible to virtually live in this parallel universe, full time. There was a party every night. Fridays, there was The Mud Club and then A Transmission at Clink Street. Saturdays, the raver faced a dilemma – Shoom or The Trip – followed by RIP at Clink Street right through til dawn. Sunday night offered the mellow, coming-down-from-the-night-before vibe of Confusion, Nicky Harwood’s club in Soho. Monday was Spectrum; Tuesday, you could go to the gay club Daisy Chain, at The Fridge in Brixton. Wednesday, the Pyramid at Heaven; Thursday, a new Heaven night called Rage. If this regime of bliss wasn’t enough, there was a host of other acid nights around town like Babylon, Love, Loud Noise, Enter the Dragon, Elysium and even the tacky old Camden Palace; at the weekends, there were also the one-off warehouse parties. Back then, remembers Barry Ashworth, ‘You was arseholed four, five nights a week.’