Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  Sixties Mod went from being based around import records to being focused around figurehead bands like The Who and The Small Faces. In Madchester, there soon emerged a similar demand for bands to follow. Ecstasy had catalysed an invincible feeling of change-is-gonna-come positivity, which was seemingly substantiated by events across the world like the downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Surfing these energy-currents of idealism and expectation, bands like The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays gave the new mood a focus, and to varying degrees articulated the Madchester attitude.

  ‘We’re Thatcher’s children.’ So Shaun Ryder, the Happy Mondays ‘singer’, was wont to claim. The Conservative leader’s assault on the welfare system and the unions was intended to train the working class in the bourgeois virtues of providence, initiative, investment, belt-tightening and holding out for the long term dividend. But a significant segment of working class youth in Britain responded to the challenge of ‘enterprise culture’ in a hand-to-mouth, here-and-now way; not by becoming opportunity-conscious but criminal-minded. The result was not so much a black economy as a blag economy, where survival depended on having an eye for the quick killing and being a fast talker.

  Eager to participate in the late eighties Thatcherite boom but excluded by mass unemployment, these kids resorted to all manner of shady money-making schemes: bootlegging (fake designer clothes, bootlegged records and computer games), organizing illegal warehouse parties and raves, drug dealing, petty theft, and fraud of all kinds (benefit fraud, credit-card fraud). Others claimed social security while raking in cash-in-hand doing short-term, no-security work. It was from this lumpen-proletarian milieu that the Happy Mondays emerged. The truth was that the band and its ilk were Thatcher’s illegitimate children: an unintended outcome, and operating on the wrong side of the law.

  By 1989, the Happy Mondays had already released two albums on Factory, Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out) and Bummed. Although rough-and-ragged, the Mondays sound – a cross between The Fall and fatback funk – fit fairly well into the Factory tradition of arty, angsty white dance. Squirrel was produced by ex-Velvet John Cale, Bummed by Martin Hannett, who had shrouded Joy Division and A Certain Ratio in the mausoleum-reverberant Factory sound.

  There was, however, a distinctively druggy aura to the Mondays’ woozy thug-funk. Bummed was recorded under the influence of Ecstasy, the band practically shoving it down Hannett’s throat. Shaun Ryder’s gargoyle voice leered out of the mix like a goblin, and his words resembled dosser-talk: querulously urgent but impenetrable, spittle-flecked discharge from scrambled synapses. Stealing its hook from The Beatles’ ‘Ticket To Ride’ ‘Lazy-Itis’ proposed a dole-age revision of psychedelia: ‘I think I did the right thing / In slippin’ away.’ Absenting themselves from productivity, from the obligation to make something of themselves, Ryder and Co just drifted: wasted youth who whiled away the days shooting rats with air rifles, going on trips to Europe to find flash clothes, and tripping, period. A haphazard accretion of hallucinactory images and crooked insights. Ryder’s lyrics were like a guttersnipe version of cut-up: phrases that lodged in his head while stoned in front of the TV, the drivel of acid-casualty mates. Where The Fall’s Mark E. Smith penned oblique observations of Northern underclass grotesquerie, Shaun Ryder’s drivel was more like the id of the lumpen-proletariat speaking its bloody mind aloud.

  By 1989, the Mondays had picked up a following of Ecstasy-guzzling love thugs. ‘Everyone in the place was on E and it made us look better and sound better,’ Ryder told iD some time later. ‘I know they were all on E because we used to go out in the audience selling E like T-shirts.’ If the ‘brains’ behind the Mondays was Ryder, in many ways the focal point and font of the group’s anti-charisma was Bez (Mark Berry). The son of a Detective Inspector, Bez played Vicious to Ryder’s Rotten. Strictly speaking, his contribution to the group was negligible (on the third album his credit reads ‘Bez: Bez’!). Onstage, he shook maracas and danced, a listless, moronic traipse that resembled a peasant crushing grapes. Bez’s real function was to incarnate the band’s debauched spirit, like a Keith Richards relieved of all instrumental duties. He was the subject in an experiment designed to determine just how far hedonism could be taken. As Ryder put it, ‘It was thru Bez with E . . . just “get ’em down yer throat, son! Move! Go on! Throw’em down yer neck!” . . . That’s how we really got to see how E can get you, like, right out there. You’ve just got to pelt it down yer.’ One journalist told me Bez confessed that he actually preferred lager to Ecstasy; when asked why he took so much E, Bez replied, dourly – ‘It’s me job.’ Whatever the truth, for the fans Bez became both a role model and their stand-in representative: the ultimate chancer, proof that any one of them could have been up there if they’d lucked out, enjoying all the drugs and ardent groupies.

  After a failed attempt at scoring a hit with a Paul Oakenfold house remix of the brilliant Bummed track ‘Wrote For Luck’, Happy Mondays finally got to Number Nineteen in December 1989 with the ‘Madchester Rave On’ EP. The lead song, ‘Hallelujah’, was a twisted stab at a Christmas single. A queasy merger of rock riffs and studio-programmed beats, ‘Hallelujah’ has Ryder jeeringly defining himself as an Anti-Saviour – ‘ain’t here to save ya / just here to spike and play some games’. ‘Rave On’ is even more a case of organized confusion. An oozy, ectoplasmic mess of mis-treated vocals, effects-wracked guitars, and background hubbub, the track wavers and ripples as if filtered through Bez’s E-addled ears. It’s like a sonic equivalent to the seeing-double effects and after-image light-streaks in the brilliant video for ‘Wrote For Luck’ (filmed at Legends, where Paul Oakenfold held a Manchester branch of Spectrum). Sounding at his most bleary and smeary, Ryder hollers a party-til-we-drop rallying cry in the chorus ‘need a massive boogie till we all pack out’.

  Although they most resembled an English answer to the Butthole Surfers, Happy Mondays were celebrated by the music press as a sort of Acieed Pogues gatecrashing Top of the Pops. (Funnily enough, the Pogues’ dentally challenged singer Shane McGowan had gotten into rave music in a big way, and around this time was attempting, unsuccessfully, to persuade his colleagues to record a twenty minute acid track entitled ‘You’ve Got To Connect Yourself’). The other big music press analogy was the Sex Pistols: the Mondays were acclaimed as the first, truly working-class band to emerge since punk, ‘real kids’ in possession of the truth that’s ‘only known by guttersnipes’ (as fake-proles The Clash had it).

  The Stone Roses – in the Top Ten at the same time as the Mondays with their breakthrough single ‘Fool’s Gold’ – were far closer to 1977 punk, or at least the John Lydon version of it: working class, self-educated, slightly arty, politically-aware, and angry, whereas the Mondays were lumpen-prole oiks on the prowl and on the make. Sonically, the Roses sounded a bit like Pistols if Beatles-fan Glen Matlock had managed to prevail over the use of minor chords. But beneath the Byrdsy chimes and Hendrixy flourishes of their self-titled debut album lurked class-war lyrics that were anything but hippy-dippy. The cuddly-sounding ‘Bye Bye Badman’ was targeted at a riot policeman: ‘I’m throwing stones at you, man’, singer Ian Brown cooed like he was whispering sweet-nothings. They even had their own equivalent to ‘God Save The Queen’ in ‘Elizabeth, My Dear’. ‘We’re all anti-royalist, anti-patriarch,’ Brown told me. ‘ ’Cos it’s 1989. Time to get real. When the ravens leave the Tower, England shall fall, they say. We want to be there shooting the ravens.’

  Crucially, the band – Brown, guitarist John Squire, drummer Reni and bassist Mani – exuded the right Manchester attitude, alternately lippy and laidback. ‘We hate tense people,’ Squire told me. ‘The tense people are the ones who are only interested in making money and who ruin things for everybody else,’ he explained, before defining his political ideals with an almost Lennonesque flair for contradiction: ‘Everybody should be a millionaire, everybody on the planet.’

  ‘Madchester’ replaced the w
orkaholic materialism of the eighties with a new spirit, encoded in the slang buzzword ‘baggy’: loose-fitting clothes, a loose-minded, take-it-as-it-comes optimism, a loose-limbed dance beat descended from James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’. But if there was one factor that sealed the Roses’ bond with their following, it was the band’s cockiness, proclaimed in anthems like ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ and ‘I Am The Resurrection’, and choruses like ‘the past is yours / the future’s mine’: a self-confidence that fit the turn-of-decade positivity like a glove, and briefly resurrected a heretical notion – that being young could be fun.

  In 1989, The Stone Roses spoke often of their boredom with eighties rock, and claimed that they only listened to seventies funk and house music. ‘I don’t think it’s unusual for our fans to be into dance music,’ Brown said. ‘Those dividing lines aren’t there any more. When you go to warehouse parties they play acid house and house beats, but they put Hendrix and the Beatles over the top. They’ve even started to use our stuff.’ And he put a political spin on rave. ‘That’s the thing about 1989. You see eleven thousand people dancing at a warehouse and really it’s basically that people are realizing that this is a cruel world and you’ve got to find people with similar attitudes and watch each others’ backs.’

  With its fatback shuffle-drums simulating the hypno-groove aesthetic of club music, its bubbling B-line and chickenscratch wah-wah guitar, ‘Fool’s Gold’ was the Roses’ first nod towards rave. Lurking low in the mix, Ian Brown whispered another baleful lyric of obscure emnity – ‘I’m standing alone . . . I’m seeing you sinking’ – doubtless aimed at the ‘tense twats’ of Thatcherite spiv culture.

  There’s a theory that people fall in love when they’re ripe, and project their latent amorousness on to the least unsuitable candidate to come along. In Manchester, E seems to have facilitated the bonding process. ‘We knew in early ’89 when we did gigs, you could just feel people willing you to go for it,’ Brown recollected six years later. This local hero status went nationwide by the end of 1989, as the Roses took on the mantle of the Great White Hope, plugging into Brit-rock’s perennial, in-built demand for a four-man trad-guitar combo that Means Something, à la The Jam and The Smiths.

  After the triumph of ‘Fool’s Gold’, 1990 saw the Roses struggling to articulate the perilously vague creed of ‘positivity’ that Manchester represented. Having already broken with the mould of the traditional rock gig by organizing quasi-raves at Alexandra Palace and Blackpool Empress Ballroom (at which they replaced support bands with DJs like Paul Oakenfold), they convened a 28,000-strong outdoor festival at Spike Island on 27 May 1990. But the pressure was getting to them. Manchester was now big news, and at the press conference the day before the festival, the Roses’s laconic, sullen demeanour enraged the representatives of the world media. When Spin’s Frank Owen, a Moss Side expatriate, protested that the band were treating the journalists like ‘fucking bullshit!’ Brown responded: ‘Sort your head out, man.’ A fight broke out between Owen and a Roses partisan in the audience, and the press conference ended in uproar. Spike Island itself was botched by bad organization and poor sound. Ian Brown came onstage shouting ‘Time! Time! Time! The time is now.’ But the Roses’ next single, ‘One Love’ – an insipid retread of ‘Fool’s Gold’ – failed to sustain the sense of momentum or define what was at stake.

  In April, Happy Mondays threw their own pseudo-rave equivalent of Spike Island, with a gig at Wembley Arena timed to coincide with the band’s and Madchester’s biggest hit yet, ‘Step On’ – a stomping, vaguely house-ified version of Johnny Kongos’s 1971 boogie smash ‘He’s Gonna Step On You Again’ – which stalled at Number Five. When Shaun Ryder lurched onstage, he greeted the throng of monged-out fans with the cryptic query ‘where’s me pickled herrings?’ By this point, the Mondays’ ‘significance’ had come to reside in precisely this kind of bathos. Music press mascots on account of their debauched exploits, the Mondays were esteemed merely for unprepossessing details: Shaun’s refusal to trim his untamed nose hairs and bum fluff, Bez’s glazed and gaunt vacancy. Somewhere along the line, the Mondays seemed to have degenerated from the radically mindblowing to the merely mindless – a massive levelling down of consciousness, a bovine pleasure.

  With Tony Wilson hyping the Mondays as the new Sex Pistols, the next step in the Great Rave ’n’ Roll Swindle was the conquest of America. Earlier in the year, he’d told The Face that he wouldn’t be bothered if any one of the Mondays died of pharmaceutical excess: ‘listen, [Joy Division’s] Ian Curtis dying on me was the greatest thing that’s happened to my life. Death sells!’ But such McLarenesque cynicism didn’t play so well in the USA. That summer, at the 1990 New Music Seminar in New York, Tony Wilson chaired a panel provocatively titled ‘Wake Up America, You’re Dead’. Here he expounded a potted history of the last three years of UK pop – Ibiza, Ecstasy, acieed, Madchester – and prophesized that the British groups would export back to White America the black dance music they’d ignored, just as the Stones and Beatles had done in the sixties.

  But what offended the audience of industry insiders wasn’t the way Wilson poured scorn on the US record biz for ignoring the revolutionary black music on its own doorstep, but his gleeful revelation that the Mondays were drug dealers, and the appearance of comedian Keith Allen in the guise of a Dr Feelgood who boasted of having ‘thousands’ of E tablets ‘in my hotel’. The joke fell on stony-faced ground, largely because ‘drug pusher’ had a different connotation in an America beset with gang-related bloodshed. In Britain, the image of the Ecstasy dealer as a harmless minor villain was soon to change; Wilson’s wind-up ricochetted back to haunt him when drug gangs started to bring guns into The Haçienda later that year.

  Trip City

  ‘Detroit and Chicago have been to us and other current groups, what Memphis and Chicago were to the Stones and the other white R & B groups of the sixties. Acid house was the first time I got excited about music that was happening in my lifetime.’

  – Tim Burgess, singer of The Charlatans

  The flaw in Burgess’s theory was that apart from the Mondays and the Roses, all the other North West of England bands sounded less like modern equivalents of the mod bands, and more like straightforward sixties beat revivalists. There was only the most tenuous relationship to modern dance music, and an alarming degree of attention to period detail. The Charlatans had the ‘baggy’, shuffle-funk beat, all right, but were morbidly obsessed with the milky, Ovalteeny tones of the Hammond organ (their keyboard player admired Jon Lord of Deep Purple). Inspiral Carpets exhumed the tinpot Farfisa organ, nasal harmonies and gormless page-boy haircuts of ‘96 Tears’-style garage punkadelia. Candy Flip – named after the slang term for an E and LSD cocktail – scored a Top Five hit with their ‘baggy’ version of ‘Strawberry Fields’. Other ‘scene’ bands – The High, Ocean Colour Scene, The La’s, Mock Turtles – were even more hopelessly classicist.

  If Manchester had really eclipsed London as the rave capital of the UK, where – you might have been forgiven for asking – the fook were the proper Mancunian house artists?! In truth, there were only two contenders – 808 State and A Guy Called Gerald. Of Caribbean parentage, Gerald Simpson had grown up on a mixture of electro (Afrika Bambaataa, Mantronix), synth pop (Yellow Magic Orchestra, Numan, Visage), art-rock (Peter Gabriel, Bowie) and jazz-fusion (Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Miles Davis). In the late eighties, Simpson hooked up with Graham Massey (a refugee from the avant-funk unit Biting Tongues) in a Brit-rap collective called The Hit Squad. The group practised in the basement of Manchester’s leading import-dance-and-indiepop record store, Eastern Bloc, which was co-owned by Martin Price. With Price supplying ‘concepts and images’, Massey and Simpson then formed an acid-house outfit which evolved into 808 State, named after the famous Roland 808 drum-machine so beloved by B-boys.

  After working on New Build, an album of acid jams, Simpson quarrelled with the rest of the group over money and went solo as A Guy Called Gerald – but
not before contributing heavily to a track called ‘Pacific State’. The next thing he knew, his erstwhile partners had recruited two teenage DJs, Andy Barker and Darren Partington aka The Spinmasters (famous for their sets at The Thunderdome and on Manchester radio), and ‘Pacific State’ was in the Top Ten. Rubbing shoulders with ‘Fool’s Gold’ and ‘Rave On’, ‘Pacific’ was the third Madchester chart smash in the closing months of 1989. Simpson tried to get an injunction against the record, eventually settling for royalties and a publishing credit. But he could take solace from the fact that he’d beaten 808 to the punch with ‘Voodoo Ray’, a Number Twelve hit in July 1989 and the first truly great British house anthem.

  With its undulant groove and dense percussive foliage (Gerald was trying to get ‘a sort of samba vibe, I was listening to a lot of Latin stuff’), its glassy, gem-faceted bass-pulse and tropical bird synth-chatter, ‘Voodoo Ray’ looks ahead to the polyrhythmic luxuriance of Gerald’s mid-nineties forays into jungle, as do the tremulous whimpers and giggles of the blissed-out female vocal. The main hook – a siren-like voice chanting ‘Oooh oo-oooh / Aaaah – aa-hahah, yeaahh’ – was offset by a sinister male voice intoning ‘voodoo ray’: a mysterious phrase that suggests a shamanic figure or voudun priest, or possibly a mind-controlling beam. In fact, it was a happy accident: originally, ‘it was meant to be “Voodoo Rage”, but I didn’t have enough memory in the sampler so I had to chop the G off!’ says Gerald. ‘I had this idea of people locking into a beat, this picture of a voodoo ceremony. But instead of it being really aggressive, it ended up something really mysterious – sort of sucking you in.’