Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  Gerald followed ‘Voodoo Ray’ with ‘FX’, a track written for the soundtrack to Trip City (based on Trevor Miller’s experimental novel set in a near-future club scene where everyone is addicted to a hallucinogen called FX), and then, in early 1990, with his major label debut Automannik. But the deal with CBS quickly turned sour: the company wanted ‘ten more versions of “Voodoo Ray”,’ and Gerald’s tougher-sounding, conceptual album High Life Low Profile was never released. Disillusioned, Gerald disappeared into the rave underground, resurfacing in the mid-nineties as one of the most experimental producers in the jungle scene.

  808 State fared somewhat better with major-label affiliate ZTT, maintaining a presence in the singles chart while prospering as an album-oriented act. With its cheesy, mellow-yellow saxophone and sampled bird-song, ‘Pacific State’ caught the crest of the vogue for Ambient or New Age house: ‘coming down music, a sound for when the sun’s coming up and the trip’s near its end,’ as Martin Price put it. The original idea behind ‘Pacific’, though, was an attempt at a modern equivalent of fifties ‘exotica’; Graham Massey was a big fan of Martin Denny, whose tiki music (quasi-Polynesian mood-music for suburban cocktail parties) often featured tropical bird-calls.

  On the album 90, ‘Sunrise’ was a far superior take on the same idea; tendrils of flute, mist-swirls of spectral sample-texture, and lambent synth-horizons conjure up a Polynesian dawnscape. On this track and the earlier ‘State Ritual’ (which sounded like aborigines trying to make acid house using flutes and wooden-gourds), 808 State are denizens of the ‘Fourth World’ (Jon Hassell’s term for a future fusion that melded Western hi-tech and traditional ethnic musics, as sketched on albums like Dream Theory In Malaya and Aka-Darbari-Java/Magic Realism). Later in 1990, 808 actually remixed ‘Voiceprint’, from Hassell’s hip-hop influenced album City: Works of Fiction, adapting it for the contemporary house dancefloor. Primarily a Miles-influenced trumpeter, Hassell was a veteran of the early seventies jazz-fusion era. 808 State gave props to Weather Report and Herbie Hancock, fusioneer graduates of Miles’s late sixties and early seventies ensembles. Darren spoke of ‘trying to create that big band image, that big sound onstage, but all we’ve got is just a few boxes. We want it so that from every corner of those speakers something’s coming out. Those bands were doing it then, and we’re doing it now.’

  On their next album Ex-El, 808 State plunged even deeper into the realm of nineties fusion, revealing its pleasures and pitfalls. Tracks like ‘San Fransisco’ and ‘Lambrusco Cowboy’ offer a pan-global fantasia of reeling vistas and undulating impressionism. ‘Qmart’ is like a helicopter’s eye view of the savannah, with herds of antelope and wildebeest scattering hither and thither like shoals of tropical fish. Despite its Nubian/Egyptological title, ‘Nephatiti’ is urban to the core, a perfect in-car soundtrack; like the opening sequence of underpasses and flyovers in Tarkovksy’s Solaris, it makes you feel like a corpuscle in the city’s bloodstream. But elsewhere, there’s a tendency towards fusion’s cardinal sins: sterile, showboating monumentalism, florid detail verging on the rococo.

  Although Ex-El featured cameos from New Order’s Bernard Sumner and Bjork, for the most part 808 State’s music was faceless, text-free, profoundly superficial. But belying their image as knob-twiddling technicians with nothing to say, 808 State in person were mouthy, vociferous, and in Martin Price’s case, almost pathologically opinionated. They had bags of personality – it just wasn’t a particularly agreeable personality. The first time I interviewed Price and Massey, circa 90, the duo were quick to define 808 State against the Cabaret Voltaire/A Certain Ratio/On U Sound tradition of avant-funk, despite Massey’s own background in that scene. Arguing that rave music had outflanked the egghead experimentalists, Massey declared: ‘Mainstream clubs are just so out there and futuristic in comparison. You get beer boys and Sharons ’n’ Tracies dancing to the weirdest crap going, at places like The Thunderdome, and they don’t know what’s hit ’em. Yer average Joe Bloggs is dancing to stuff that’s basically avant-garde.’

  Seven months later, in the summer of 1990, Price railed against indie-rock/rave crossover bands like The Beloved, The Shamen and Primal Scream. ‘You’ve got totally non-credible acts cashing in on the sort of music 808 State have been doing for years.’ Deriding indie-rock as ‘peer group stuff . . . just another stupid way to get girlfriends by going round with a big question mark over your head,’ he ranted: ‘Now they’ve discovered that the better peer group is in the dance field and they want to change their whole fucking lives. But they don’t do it bravely, and say “All right, I made a mistake, I’m now totally into dance.” They stay stuck between two stools.’

  ‘Fucking Norman Cook on The Late Show saying “It’s like punk rock,” ’ frothed Price, referring to former Housemartins’ bassist Norman Cook, who’d recently got to Number One with his dubby-dance combo Beats International. ‘If somebody says [techno]’s like punk to my face, I’ll fucking smash ’em in the teeth. It’s nothing to do with punk. Nobody wants to see a load of idiots torturing themselves on stage with guitars any more. This is about machines, punk was about arm power. The muscles and sinews in dance music are when you’re sweating your bollocks off on the dancefloor.’

  White Punks on E

  Although the equation of homespun house and punk rock was a little simplistic, the UK dance scene in 1990 was packed with old punks who’d traded in their guitars for the new technology: The Orb’s Alex Paterson, Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty of the KLF. Even former PiL bassist Jah Wobble returned from the wilderness, playing on tracks by Primal Scream and The Orb, and peddling, via his ethnodelic ensemble Invaders Of The Heart, a distinctly New Agey creed of ‘healing rhythms’, ‘redemptive chants’ and ego-melting ‘energy flows’.

  Punk’s negativism was really a poisoned Romantic utopianism. In the late eighties, that curdled idealism – blocked by the societal impasses and cultural dead-ends of the seventies – flowed free, thanks to Ecstasy and the feel-good factor engendered by the economic boom. Prefigured in Prince’s prattle about a New Power Generation, in Soul II Soul’s community-conscious funky-dredd anthems ‘Back To Life’ and ‘Get A Life’, and the ‘hippy-hop’ of De La Soul and other Native Tongue rap groups like Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest, positivity emerged as the pop ideology of the new decade. Drawing on diverse sources – American discourses of self-realization and interpersonal therapy, New Age notions of healing music and ‘abundance consciousness’, sixties flower power, deep house’s gospel exhortations – positivity heralded the dawn of a nineties zeitgeist that emphasized caring and sharing, a return to quality of life over standard of living, and green eco-consciousness. The anti-social egotism of the eighties, exemplified in pop terms by rap and Madonna, was eclipsed by a shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’, from materialism to idealism, from attitude to platitude.

  Needless to say, the loved-up rave scene was a fertile climate for the proliferation of New Agey ideas. Between 1988 and 1990, there was a subtle modulation – from music to lose yourself in (acieed) to music to find yourself in (ambient house). Alongside 808’s ‘Pacific State’, there was S’Express’s ‘Mantra For A State of Mind’ (described by Mark Moore as ‘music to cleanse your mind’), Innocence’s ‘Natural Thing’, The Grid’s ‘Floatation’, The Beloved’s ‘The Sun Rising’, The KLF’s Chill Out and The Orb’s ‘A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of The Ultraworld’. This brief fad for dub-tempo house and beat-free chill-out music was accompanied by talk of giving up synthetics like MDMA in favour of ‘organic highs’: gurano, psychoactive cocktails, and ‘brain machine’ goggles whose flickering light-patterns induced mildly trippy trance states. On the fashion front, ravers started dressing all in white, signalling their newborn purity of soul. Oh, it was easy (and highly enjoyable, let me tell you!) to mock the nebulous naïvety of the positivity prophets. But clearly, the feeling of ‘something in the air’ stemmed from a genuine and de
ep-seated, if poorly grounded, idealism and hunger for change.

  Not all of the positivity-punks were old: Adamski, rave’s first pin-up, was only eleven when he formed a punk rock band called The Stupid Babies in 1979. A big Malcolm McLaren fan, Adam Tinley pursued his passion for chaos in the confrontational Diskort Datkord (who often performed in the nude). After doing disco/noise versions of X-Ray Spex’s ‘Identity’ and Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’, Adamski became a big draw on the rave scene during the brief vogue for live performances by keyboard whizzkids, and scored a hit with ‘NRG’.

  ‘I liked the energy and the visual side of punk, but it was all just saying “no, no, no, no,” whereas now everybody’s saying “yes, yes, yes,” ’ Adamski told me in 1990. ‘I much prefer the positivity thing we have now.’ Ironically, he’d just scored his biggest hit with the gloomy and harrowed ‘Killer’, an awesome slice of techno-blues that cracked apart the jollity of Top of the Pops with its grievous ache of loss and longing. Sung and co-written by Black British singer Seal, ‘Killer’ was rave’s very own ‘What’s Goin’ On’, and in the summer of 1990 it annexed the Number One spot for nearly a month. The futuristic frigidity of its sound and the sci-fi imagery of the video (Adamski as a ‘nineties alchemist’ messing about in the laboratory) made me imagine Adamski as a Gary Numan for the twenty-first century: a nubile, Aryan petit prince, alone in the world with only his techno toys for company. Unfortunately Adamski blew it by following ‘Killer’ with ‘The Space Jungle’ (a throwaway cover version of Presley’s ‘All Shook Up’) and the pitiful album Doctor Adamski’s Musical Pharmacy, whose only faintly redeeming moment was the ultra-naif alphabet-song ‘Everything Is Fine’, which began ‘A is for adrenalin, amnesia and anything else that makes life easier’ and got worse.

  If Adamski degenerated into rave’s very own Captain Sensible, The KLF were much closer to his original reinvocation of the spirit of Malcolm McLaren. Back in the 1987 – 8 era of sample-based DJ tracks, KLF-ers Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty had formed a hip hop outfit called The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. Borrowed from Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus!, this was the name of an imaginary anarcho-mystic organization said to have been fighting Authority since the dawn of History; Mu means ‘chaos’. Their first effort, ‘All You Need Is Love’, pirated hefty chunks of the Beatles and the MC5, and the album 1987: What The Fuck Is Going On? had to be withdrawn after Abba, one of numerous sample victims, threatened legal action. As The Timelords the duo scored a Number One hit with ‘Doctorin’ The Tardis’, cobbled together out of the Dr Who theme and Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock ’n’ Roll, Part Two’. They then wrote a book about the experience, The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way.

  Growing sick of their reputation as sub-McLaren pop pranksters, and convinced that ‘irony and reference points are the dark destroyers of great music’, the pair – now named The KLF – decided rave was the way forward. ‘In all of us there’s a need for communal otherness,’ said Drummond. ‘When you’re at a rave and there’s thirty thousand of you in a field and a record comes on and you all love the record together, that’s a religious feeling.’ Dedicating themselves to a sound they called ‘stadium house’, The KLF recorded thrilling pop-techno stampedes like ‘What Time Is Love’, ‘3 AM Eternal’ and ‘Last Train to Trance-Central’, scoring four Top Five hits and a Number One between late 1990 and early 1992. Despite its populist appeal, The KLF’s output was still infused with their mystic, punks-on-E spirit of ‘zenarchy’. In the video for ‘3 AM Eternal’, The KLF are garbed in ceremonial robes and move in formation as though enacting a religious ceremony, while The White Room album featured songs like ‘Church Of The KLF’. And in 1991, the band held a pagan rave to celebrate ‘The Rites of Mu’ on the Hebridean island of Jura, burning a sixty foot high Wicker Man and forcing the assembled journalists and media folk to chant and cavort in white robes.

  While The KLF ultimately had too much of a sense of irony to really go the nouveau hippy route, other converts to rave were enthused with a born-again fervour. The Beloved were New Order clones until singer Jon Marsh experienced life-changing rave-alations at Shoom and Spectrum. ‘The whole of 1988 from March onwards is a complete blur,’ he told iD. ‘An orgy of parties.’ Shoom appears to have made mush of his brain, judging by the lyrics of ‘Up Up and Away’ on their breakthrough album Happiness: ‘Hello New day . . . Give the world a message and the word is YES.’ To be fair, their first hit ‘The Sun Rising’ was a rare shock of the sublime in the charts, with its beatific backwards guitar and madrigal vocals (sampled from A Feather on the Breath of God: Sequences and Hymns by the Abbess Hildegard of Bingen). But the follow-up, ‘Hello’ was a lazy list-song that juxtaposed Jean-Paul Sartre with crap comedians Cannon and Ball, a ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part Three’ for the MDMA generation.

  Then there was The Shamen, whose singer – guitarist Colin Angus hailed New Age as ‘the first modern Western spiritual movement’ and explained his self-invented ‘visualization technique’ for making wishes come true: ‘It’s hard work, you have to be positive and motivated nonstop.’ His partner Mr C added: ‘It’s not about willing something to happen. It’s about knowing it’s going to happen.’ The Shamen made a conscious decision to cut themselves off from all sources of negativity in the outside world, like newspapers or TV, and devote themselves to sustaining their own spiritually uplifting, parallel universe of pleasure.

  The Shamen began in the mid-eighties as a retro-psychedelic band, complete with phased-and-flanged guitars, Op Art back projections, and melodies that recalled The Electric Prunes’ ‘I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night’. Already interested in hallucinogenic altered states, Angus and co-founder Will Sinnot were among the first indie rockers to be drawn into rave culture. Where bands like Primal Scream and Happy Mondays depended on the dancefloor savvy of DJ – producers like Andy Weatherall or Paul Oakenfold to overhaul their basically traditional rock songs, Colin Angus painstakingly taught himself to program sampling and sequencer technology. By 1989, they had broken with the mould of the rock gig and were throwing mini-raves under the name Synergy (later Progeny), combining live techno bands and DJs, stunning light-shows and video-projections, and an array of sideshows ranging from ‘chill-out’ rooms to for-hire virtual reality equipment. Angus’s dream was for The Shamen to become a sort of twenty-first century Grateful Dead, creating a forum for communal freak-outs outside the musical mainstream.

  After an awkward transitional phase in which they combined anti-Amerikan agit-prop lyrics with trance-dance rhythms, The Shamen shifted to full-on positivity on their breakthrough album En-Tact (the name came from ‘entactogen’, the pharmacologist’s neologism for Ecstasy). Tracks like ‘Move Any Mountain’ and ‘Human NRG’ are affirmation therapy with a beat. Despite the fatuously uplifting sentiments, though, the electronic textures of ‘Possible Worlds’ and ‘Omega Amigo’ brim so rapturously, you gladly succumb to the utopianism of the text.

  The KLF may have joked about ‘The Church of the KLF’, but The Shamen actually had a distinctly high-minded attitude to getting high; Colin Angus, with his fastidious, desiccated manner, has something of the aura of a Presbyterian preacher. In a UK rave scene organized around ‘getting off your tits’ and ‘losing the plot’, the band talked earnestly of ‘a spiritual revolution’. Angus praised psychedelic-plant prophet Terence McKenna for his ‘very rational and lucid ideas about how there’s been longstanding human tradition of using psychedelic drugs.’ The Shamen then turned the bearded sage into an unlikely pop star when they included snatches of his pro-hallucinogen sermonizing on their Top Twenty hit ‘Re: Evolution’.

  White punk-on-E usually equalled nouveau hippy. Other dance-rock crossover bands offered a decidedly less pious and more delinquent take on rave ’n’ roll. Touted as London’s answer to Happy Mondays, Flowered Up were inner-city kids from the Regent’s Park Estate; their name was a metaphor for youthful idealism struggling up through the cracked paving stones of the urban wasteland. The
band had its very own Bez in Barry Mooncult, whose job was to cavort onstage dressed as a giant flower. Like Shaun Ryder, frontman Liam sang about the seamy side of Ecstasy culture in a gutteral working-class accent. ‘It’s On’ expressed the elation of pulling off ‘the biggest deal of your life’; ‘Phobia’ evoked the nocturnal paranoia caused by taking one E too many; the Top Twenty hit ‘Weekender’ was a heavy-riffing epic about the punishing syndrome of living for the weekend’s big blow-out, with Liam warning the party-hard hedonist not to get burned out, and samples from Quadrophenia underlining the rave-as-mod analogy.

  Flowered Up also threw wild parties, like their infamous three day squat-rave at a luxurious mansion block in Blackheath, which climaxed with the place being trashed (despite the fact that the owner was reputedly a hoodlum involved with gambling). ‘I remember sitting by this Victorian indoor swimming pool talking to some guy,’ says Jack Barron. ‘Suddenly this chair flew through the window section between the lounge and the kitchen, followed by a person.’ On a similar sixties-into-nineties mod tip as Flowered Up, EMF were a gang of West Country reprobates (the name stood for Ecstasy Motherfuckers) who’d started out throwing micro-raves in the Forest of Dean; their irresistibly swaggering ‘Unbelievable’ got to Number Three in the winter of 1990.

  Of all the post-Manchester crossover bands, Primal Scream were most successful in merging rock’s Romanticism and rave’s drug-tech futurism. Like fellow Scots The Shamen, Primal Scream began in the early eighties as psychedelic resurrectionists attempting to distil the child-man innocence out of The Byrds, Love and the softer Velvet Underground. By 1988, the Scream’s testicles dropped catastrophically, and they veered off in an unconvincing blues direction, complete with raunchy on-the-road excess. During 1989, the band and other people from their label, Creation, started going to acid-house parties. ‘Contemporary rock ceased to excite us,’ singer and spiritual leader Bobby Gillespie said later. ‘At raves, the music was better, the people were better, the girls were better, and the drugs were better.’