The first recorded evidence of these realigned allegiances emerged when Primal Scream asked their DJ friend Andrew Weatherall of the Boy’s Own posse to remix the Stonesy ‘I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have’. Using rhythm guitar, piano vamps, horn stabs, and other elements from the original, Weatherall built a new track over a chunky-funky, mid-tempo Soul II Soul style rhythmic undercarriage. Samples of Peter Fonda from Roger Corman’s bikersploitation movie The Wild Angels – “We wanna be free. We wanna get loaded and have a good time!” – gave the song its new title: ‘Loaded’. At once sepia-tinted retro and state-of-art – imagine a dub version of ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ – ‘Loaded’ got to Number Sixteen in early 1990, selling over a hundred thousand copies.
For the follow-up ‘Come Together’, Primal Scream recruited both Weatherall and Boy’s Own’s Terry Farley. The Farley mix puts looped breakbeats under the band’s Byrdsy twelve-string song; Gillespie celebrates rave-as-the-Swinging-sixties-all-over-again, breathlessly panting ‘kiss me . . . trip me / ride me to the stars / ohhh, it’s all too much’. But the Weatherall version dispenses with the group’s playing entirely, and adds churchy organs and a gospel choir, thereby transforming a sex-and-drugs ballad into a redemption anthem of spiritual unity. Samples of Jessie Jackson proclaiming ‘it’s a new day . . . together we have power’ plugged into a different aspect of the sixties, the Civil Rights struggle. ‘I see the song as a modern day “Street Fighting Man”,’ the inveterate rock-scholar Gillespie told me. ‘It’s certainly not a statement of vapid New Age optimism. I see Weatherall’s version as being tragic, like “If only the world could be as one . . . but I know it never will be.” ’
Watching Weatherall at work taught Primal Scream all about ‘rhythm and space . . . the sampler gave us a whole new palette of colours . . . a whole new world of psychedelic possibilities.’ The result was the band’s masterpiece, ‘Higher Than The Sun’. Here the band, in tandem with Weatherall and The Orb’s Alex Paterson, brilliantly merged two different traditions of psychedelic experience, acid rock and acid house. Shades of Primal Scream’s rock classicist past (Brian Wilson, Love’s Forever Changes) mingled and melded with influences from dub, techno, Tim Buckley and Sun Ra. Never one for hiding his own light under a bushel, Gillespie described ‘Higher Than The Sun’ as the most important record since ‘Anarchy In The UK’. Certainly the lyric (about being your own god) recalled the solipsistic sovereignty of ‘Anarchy In The UK’ (albeit fuelled by Ecstasy rather than amphetamine), but what Gillespie really meant was that ‘Higher’ was a rock-historical ‘cut-off record – it makes everybody else look ancient’.
While The Orb’s version was great, it was the two Weatherall mixes – ‘American Spring’ and ‘Dub Symphony’ – that were truly mindblowing. The former pivoted around an exquisite harspischord motif like a scattered handful of stardust. ‘Dub Symphony’ began with Gillespie’s effete, bliss-stricken gasp ‘I – I – I – I – I – I’m-I’m higher than the su-uh-uhn’, looped into a swoon of endless, unendurable rapture, over dub-detonating reports of snare-drum. Then Jah Wobble’s bass takes the song deeper in and further out, as spooky synth sounds beseech like interstellar sirens luring the starsailor to shipwreck in the asteroid belt.
With its are-you-experienced / you-don’t-live-today lyrics (‘Hallucinogens can open me or untie me / I drift in inner space, free of time . . . I’ve glimpsed, I have tasted / Fantastical places’), its cosmic narcissism and ravished, bliss-enfeebled vocals, ‘Higher Than The Sun’ is a blatant drug hymn. Gillespie preferred to see it as ‘a spiritual song, me disconnecting myself from everything, but being totally in touch with myself . . . I’m sure that when astronauts are up in space, they must get the impulse to just disconnect themselves from the ship and drift off into space and never come back.’
After ‘Higher’ and its sequel ‘Don’t Fight It, Feel It’ – pumping, drug-buzzy techno for which Gillespie ceded the mic’ to Brit-diva Denise Johnson – Primal Scream released the long-awaited Screamadelica . But when they toured the album in the last months of 1991, Primal Scream rediscovered their rock ’n’ roll hearts. Drifting away from the dancefloor and Ecstasy culture, they devolved towards raunchy rock ’n’ soul and harder drugs, signalled by the Dixie-Narco EP.
Through 1992 – 3, murky reports came through of the band’s apparent attempt to replay the misadventures of the Stones at their most wrecked and reckless in the early seventies. What had been so great about Primal Scream circa ‘Higher’ was the interface they’d forged between rock history and the dance present. When the band returned in 1994 with Give Out But Don’t Give Up – recorded with ‘legendary’ Rod Stewart/Cream/Aretha Franklin producer Tom Dowd and the ‘legendary’ Muscle Shoals rhythm section – it became horribly apparent that the Primals had removed the dance present, leaving just the rock history. Some wondered if Screamadelica all came down to the mixing-board genius of Andy Weatherall. But the symbiosis/synergy cuts both ways: the truth is, sans Scream, Weatherall never did anything half as good in his Sabres of Paradise guise.
After the Luv Has Gone
‘Y’know, two years ago, I’d’ve said legalize E . . . But now . . . I don’t know, like. ’Cos E . . . it can make ya nice and mellow but it’s also capable of doin’ proper naughty things to you as well . . . E can get you into big fookin’ bother . . . Fuck, if we legalized E, man, we’d probably have a race of fuckin’ mutants on our ’ands!’
– Shaun Ryder, talking to The Face’s Nick Kent, 1990
Hailed by the music press as the album of 1991 and winner of the prestigious music-industry Mercury Prize, Screamadelica was the highpoint of the rock/rave crossover era initiated by the Manchester bands. But by then, Madchester was already in its twilight. As early as July 1990, when the Roses’ ‘One Love’ failed to make Number One, you could sense that the moment had peaked. Frustrated by an invidious contract with their label Silvertone, the Roses went to court only to find themselves in legal limbo, unable to record or release a note. The case dragged on until May 1991, when the Roses were freed and immediately signed to Geffen in a huge deal. But Silvertone appealed the verdict, paralysing the band for another year.
While the Roses were tangled in litigation, Manchester’s funtopia turned to nightmare. In any drug-based pop scene, there comes a point when the collective trip turns bad, when the rush gives way to the CRASH. Trying to reach a higher high, ‘too many people take one too many,’ as Ian Brown put it. Drugs get adulterated as dealers try to maximize profit margins. The clientele turns to scuzzier substances, either to sustain the buzz (freebasing coke, injecting speed) or cushion the come down (heroin).
Once, remembers Brown, there was ‘a feeling of community strength’ in Manchester, ‘[you’d come] out of a club at the end of the night feeling like you were going to change the world. Then guns come in, and heroin starts being put in Ecstasy. It took a lot of the love vibe out.’ Drugs meant money; money meant warfare for market control between rival drug gangs from Cheetham Hill, Moss Side and Salford. The Roses actually saw one Mancunian gang-leader get shot at a reggae concert in mid-1990. But it was a series of violent incidents at Thunderdome and The Haçienda that most publicly announced the souring of the Madchester dream. ‘Before The Haçienda got gun-detectors on the door, you’d see sixteen-year-old baby-gangsters standing at the bar with a gun in a holster, right in view.’
Bad memories of this dark period inspired ‘Begging You’, the most thrilling track on the Stone Roses 1995 long-time-a-comin’ follow-up album Second Coming. A hyperkinetic rock – techno fusion of ballistic blues-riffs and looped beats, ‘ “Begging You”,’ explained Brown, ‘is like when you’re sat in a club and everything’s beautiful and you’re E’d up, and you’ve got some voice going in your ear saying how they can get you a gun or an ounce of this-or-that.’ With its churning centrifugal groove and almighty turbine-roar guitar, the song sounds exactly like the panic rush of an E’d up raver wondering how and why the rave-dream’s dying a
ll around him. Right to the end, the Roses got their impetus from rave culture – it’s just that with this song, the energy was dystopian rather than utopian.
There had been intimations of doom as early as 14 July 1989, when sixteen-year-old Claire Leighton collapsed at The Haçienda and later died, reportedly from an allergic reaction to E. In early 1990, new national legislation came into force in the Manchester area, making club licences easier to revoke; the local police force had already set up Operation Clubwatch to monitor the drug trafficking in The Haçienda and other Mancunian rave clubs. In December of 1990, Konspiracy lost its licence. Always a seedy, nefarious place, the club had rapidly become over-run by the drug gangs, who hawked their wares brazenly on the dancefloor and stairways, and intimidated the staff, demanding huge amounts of free liquor and brutalizing anyone who obstructed them. As well as the usual gunplay and fights between rival gangsters, innocents got caught in the fray: one student was stabbed.
Facing the same fate as Konspiracy, The Haçienda hired a top barrister and managed to get a licence hearing delayed until early in 1991, giving them time to clean up the club and install a £10,000 security system that included metal detectors and video surveillance cameras. Inevitably, this ruined The Haçienda’s atmosphere and led to declining attendance, but it did mean that at the start of 1991 the club was given a six-month reprieve by the licensing authority. But a month later, The Haçienda closed voluntarily, after an incident in which hoodlums threatened a door manager with a hand-gun.
When the club reopened in May that year, attendance was poor, and violent incidents continued to sour the atmosphere, like the time a Salford gang sneaked into The Haçienda and stabbed several bouncers as a reprisal for being barred entrance. By this point, the city’s media image had decisively deteriorated from ‘Madchester’ to ‘Gunchester’; there’d been scores of shootings in Manchester’s ghetto zones, including one in which a twelve-year-old boy was shot through the eye. In February, Cheetham Hill gangleader ‘White Tony’ Johnson was killed with a bullet through the mouth and his sidekick ‘Black Tony’ was wounded. That month, Robert Parsonage, a student, died of internal bleeding after taking five Ecstasy tablets and collapsing at a party in Stalybridge. There were similar problems throughout the North West; Quadrant Park’s famed all-nighter The Pavilion closed voluntarily, following incidents of stabbing and robbery, and another Ecstasy death. The free party scene had disintegrated thanks to the police crackdown. When a series of illegal parties in Cheshire woodland were stopped by the authorities in early 1991, desperate ravers ventured even further afield, into the wildernesses of the Lake District and Wales.
The latter was where some of the Stone Roses had relocated. Manny, so long the ‘rogue Rose’, moved to a small village in South Wales. ‘Heroin and methadone, fourteen deaths in a year for me, and that’s fucking outrageous,’ he said circa Second Coming. ‘Kids I’d known since I was seven. I’ve seen people I’ve never ever thought would take the drug, fucked. Me, I’ll turn my back on them people, however much it hurts me. That’s why I moved out of Manchester, I don’t wanna be near it.’
Hardcore hedonists even before rave, Happy Mondays stuck with it to the bitter end. Released late in 1990, the hit album Pills ’N’ Thrills and Bellyaches was a summation of the Madchester era. With its glossy, neat-and-tidy Paul Oakenfold production, the album’s contents were tame compared with the dishevelled Rave On EP. But there were three Mondays classics. ‘Loose Fit’, slow-burning funk with a shimmering Beatlesy guitar-motif, was Ryder’s manifesto of baggy bad taste and spiritual laissez-faire: ‘Doesn’t have to be legit / ’S gotta be a loose fit.’ Starting with the sound of a charter plane taking off, ‘Holiday’ showed that the Mondays’ version of ‘politics of Ecstasy’ had nothing to do with the Tim Leary/Terence McKenna style ‘spiritual hedonism’ of The Shamen, but was rather modelled on the boorishly orgiastic antics of British youth in Mediterranean sunspots. ‘Holiday’ segued into the guitar-solo epic ‘Harmony’, a debauched and delirious parody of the Pepsi Cola vision of world unity, with Ryder hollering ‘what we need is a big big cooking pot’ in which to cook up a broth of ‘every wonderful beautiful drug . . . we got.’
Happy Mondays’ pipe-dream of taking a permanent vacation became hellish reality, when the band attempted to record their fourth album in Barbados. Progress on the record was agonizingly slow: Bez trashed several jeeps and broke his arm, while Ryder, fresh from quitting a long-standing heroin habit, succumbed to the cheapness of drugs in the Caribbean, and got into crack cocaine. In the drug dens where he spent most of his days acquiring a thirty to fifty-rock per diem crack habit, the hyped-up natives played dancehall reggae records at an insane 78 r.p.m.; sadly, none of that mania and derangement made it into the Mondays’ new music. Despite the gimme-gimme-gimme, ‘more E, Vicar?’ attitude of the title Yes Please! the music was enfeebled by its drugginess rather than galvanized. At best, it recalled the oceanic funk of late Can or John Martyn’s One World, at worst, the Island Records jet-set funk-muzak of Steve Winwood.
Costing over a quarter of a million pounds, Yes Please! put Factory out of business, disappointed the fans, and was promptly followed by the band’s break-up. But amazingly, Ryder and Bez got their second chance at the big time after hooking up with a Mancunian rapper called Kermit to form Black Grape. At 1996’s Tribal Gathering megarave, the band were greeted as heroic survivors when they headlined the main tent. Despite the rockier sound and ostensibly abstemious title of Black Grape’s It’s Great When You’re Straight . . . Yeah, Shaun and Bez were still every raver’s favourite drug-fiends.
FOUR
’ARDKORE YOU KNOW THE SCORE
THE SECOND WAVE OF
RAVE, 1990 – 92
As the first acid house generation burned out, by 1990, a second, much larger wave of British youth was tuning in, turning on and freaking out. Although illegal raves had been largely suppressed, a thriving circuit of commercial raves had emerged; at the same time, the relaxation of licensing laws allowed for the growth of all-night rave-style clubs. Rave spread from the original metropolitan cliques in London and Manchester to become a nationwide suburban/provincial leisure culture.
1990 also saw the genesis of a distinctively British rave sound, ‘hardcore’, which decisively broke with the mould of Detroit and Chicago, and ended the dependence on American imports. The proliferation of cheap computer-based home-studio set-ups and sampler/sequencer programs like Cubase fomented a do-it-yourself revolution reminiscent of punk, and was accompanied by an explosion of independent labels. By 1991 this underground sound – actually a confederacy of hybrid genres and regional styles – was assaulting the mainstream pop charts. Despite next-to-no radio play, the rave scene hurled anthem after anthem into the Top Twenty. With its raw phuturism, coded lingo and blatant drug references, hardcore was as shocking and alien(ating) to outsiders as punk had been. But many punk veterans, now in their late twenties and early thirties, decried the new music as a soul-less, machine-made noise devoid of poetry; mere apolitical escapism for E’d up zombies. Zapped by a new generation gap, these former rebels now found themselves fogies who just didn’t get what was going on. Those who did rallied to the slogan, ‘hardcore, you know the score’.
Throughout the history of dance culture, ‘hardcore’ designates those scenes where druggy hedonism and underclass desperation combine with a commitment to the physicality of dance and a no-nonsense funktionalist approach to making music (‘tracks’ rather than ‘songs’). Although the intransigent attitude remains the same, musically ‘hardcore’ means different things at different times and in different parts of the world. Between 1990 and 1993, hardcore in Britain referred by turns to the Northern bleep-and-bass sound of Warp and Unique 3, to the hip-house and ragga-techno sounds of the Shut Up And Dance label, to the anthemic pop-rave of acts like N-Joi and Shades of Rhythm, to Belgian and German brutalist tekno, and, finally, to the breakbeat-driven furore of hardcore jungle.
Weirdly, Bri
tish hardcore was simultaneously ‘blacker’ and ‘whiter’ than the original Chicago and Detroit music. Because of unbreachable racial divisions, the idea of ‘hip-house’ never really took off in America. But in the more integrated UK hip hop and house music were part of the same continuum of imported ‘street beats’; Jamaican sound-system culture had long established roots. Influenced by reggae and hip hop, hardcore producers intensified the sub-bass frequencies, used looped breakbeats to funk up house’s four-to-the-floor machine-beat, and embraced sampling with deranged glee. But as well as gritty, B-boy funk, British hardcore also brought a white rock attack to the Detroit blueprint. Following the lead of the bombastic Belgians and Germans, UK producers deployed riff-like ‘stabs’ and bursts of blaring noise.
Detroit had never been a rave scene, never been about drugs; techno had begun as a Europhile fantasy of elegance and refinement. So you can imagine the originators’ horror when real Europeans transformed techno into a vulgar uproar for E’d up mobs: anthemic, cheesily sentimental, unabashedly drug-crazed. The British and their allies on the Continent shed the pall of cool that restrained Detroit, and raised the music’s temperature to a swelter. No wonder anti-hardcore hipsters and Detroit-nostalgics always complained about ‘sweaty ravers’.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 15