Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  The buzzwords of the era were revealing. Pleasure was expressed in a masochist slang of catatonia and brain-damage: on a good night, you’d get ‘faced’ (off your face), ‘sledgied’ (into a coma), ‘cabbaged’ or ‘monged’ (turned into a vegetable). Good tracks were ‘mental’, ‘kickin”, ‘bangin”, ‘nosebleed’ or ‘bone’ (as in boneheaded). Every European hardcore scene had its own variations: the Belgians called the music ‘skizzo’ (schizophrenic), the Germans used the term ‘bretter’ (as a noun, it means means ‘hard board’, as a verb ‘to beat’). The weekender side of rave had always fitted neatly into the traditional working class ‘culture of consolation’; with hardcore, it had now evolved into a culture of concussion, a regime of punishing bliss ‘strictly for the headstrong’.

  Hipsters grumbled about ‘cheesy quavers’ and ‘E-monsters’ losing it to 140 b.p.m. ‘nuttercore’. And the nutter stereotype really did exist: teenage boys with sunken cheeks, pursed lips and massively dilated pupils, T-shirts tied round their waist to reveal gaunt adolescent physiques emaciated further by excessive Ecstasy intake. In a 1991 research paper, ‘Raving and Dance Drugs: House Music Clubs and Parties in North-West England’, Dr Russell Newcombe noted the emergence of the ‘nutter’ as a minority within the rave scene. Dedicated to getting severely ‘cabbaged’, these headstrong youth resorted to ‘stacking’: taking from three to six tablets per session, and sometimes between ten and twenty E’s over the course of a three day weekend. These kids quickly became locked into a cycle of overdoing it, then paying for it with a grievous mid-week comedown; this savage depression could only be overcome by the thought that Friday would soon roll around, presenting the opportunity to do it all again. Unwilling to face the Saturday morning crash, these kids would pop more pills in order to stay awake right through till Sunday. Lacking the patience to wait the hour it takes to ‘come up’ on E, they’d eagerly assume that they’d bought a dud pill, and take another: an unbeatable recipe for disaster. Some would grind up two or three E’s and snort them because nasal ingestion was a faster-acting method of administration.

  As manufacturers responded to the massive escalation in the demand for Ecstasy caused by this Second Wave of Rave, police seizures of MDMA and other synthetic drugs rose dramatically. In 1990, the London Metroplitan seized 5500 kilos; in 1991, the figure was more than 66,000 kilos. Reflecting both increased numbers of people using Ecstasy and the rise of a reckless, nihilistic attitude to drug intake, the number of MDMA-related deaths began to escalate. From 1989 – 90, there were only two or three deaths linked to MDMA; in the second half of 1991, there were five. During the 1988 – 90 period, Guy’s Hospital in London reported an average of fifteen cases per month of adverse reactions due to Ecstasy; by 1991, they were receiving between thirty or forty distressed ravers per month, suffering effects like paranoia, racing heartbeat and the sometimes fatal condition of heatstroke.

  Metal Machine Music

  Hardcore crusaders like Renaat of R & S celebrated the way that techno had resurrected the generation gap, supplanting punk as the noise that parents, older brothers, and squares in general, just couldn’t accept as music. But hardcore also created a generation gap within rave culture, as acid house veterans and hipster élitists decried the new brutalism as a barbaric travesty of the original vision of Detroit and Chicago.

  British house producer Joey Negro lambasted hardcore not as punk rock but as equivalent to the Johnny-come-lately, lumpen-prole version of punk called Oi! Speaking to DJ, he described the Belgian style of techno as ‘young people’s fuck-off music. Latterday Sham 69, Angelic Upstarts or the UK Subs.’ A more common analogy was with heavy metal. In the same magazine, Claire Morgan Jones argued that rave, ‘the late twentieth-century reworking of sixties style peace, love and understanding’ had degenerated into ‘a knee-jerk club ritual many have started to call “the new heavy metal”.’ Noting the submerged homo-eroticism of working-class lads stripped to the waist and sniffing amyl nitrate like gay clubbers, she complained that, in the evolution of house into hardcore, ‘all the curve and swing [has] been squeezed out . . . all it seems to be about is boys, bass and bother’.

  When they started out, Warp Records and its artists all used the word ‘hardcore’ to situate themselves within rave culture; Steve Beckett declared in late 1989 that ‘we’re totally committed to [releasing] uncompromising, hardcore tracks’. But by 1991, Warp and its roster were at some pains to distance themselves from what they felt was a commercialized and conformist rave scene. Although Nightmares On Wax had been enthusiastic in 1990 about the ‘big bass sound’ of Belgium and Italy, the following year the duo were complaining about ‘heavy metal house’ and ‘soppy and poppy’ bubblegum rave played at ‘tacky Sharon and Tracey clubs’. NOW’s debut album A Word Of Science largely abandoned bleeps and clonks in favour of mellow ‘smoker’s delight’ grooves influenced by seventies funk.

  Former punks with a highly developed political consciousness, Orbital were as offended by the social implications of hardcore’s ‘nutter’ mentality, as by its lumpen sound. ‘It’s like a science fiction film,’ Paul Hartnoll told me in 1992. ‘You’ve got everybody going out on a Friday or a Saturday, or both, taking their so-called E’s’ – an allusion to the common belief that most Ecstasy pills really consisted of amphetamine and valium – ‘and they carry on through Sunday having a mad time, and by Monday they’re deadbeat zombies. For the rest of the week, they’re “yes sir, no sir,” and then by Thursday they’re waiting for the weekend again. It just subdues them. The drugs wear you down so you’re ready to accept the drudgery of working life.’

  Another standard accusation was that hardcore was ‘just’ drug-noise that was unlistenable if you weren’t off your face. Even CJ Bolland complained that ‘people have gotten so into the drugs that the music is made to cause a reaction on that drug. If you hear it when you’re straight, it won’t do anything for you. Most new tunes aren’t tunes any more, just a very hard kick drum and a very mad sound.’ Eventually Bolland’s label, R & S, backed away from hardcore’s bacchanalian bombast: Renaat started an ambient sub-label called Apollo. This was a nice, classically-informed touch, since Apollo is the polar opposite of Dionysus (the god of frenzy, intoxication, oblivion) and ‘Appollonian’ was Nietzsche’s term for contemplative, pastoral, dream-like art.

  While Warp and other bleep-and-bass pioneers turned their backs on hardcore, a new breed of British indie label emerged to cater to the headstrong. ‘Hard as fuck! It’s the rock of the future,’ enthused Caspar Pound, twenty-one-year-old boss of Rising High. Speaking to iD in early 1992, he rebutted his interviewer’s suggestion that hardcore was mere aural thuggery for ‘rave bootboys’, retorting: ‘It’s ridiculous, these are people who in the 1960s were scared of rock ’n’ roll and said it was the devil’s music . . . The best thing about hardcore is all the soul’s been taken out. We’ve had 200 years of human element in music and it’s about time for a change.’ He singled out the German scene for praise: ‘It’s stronger, it’s darker, it’s scarier . . . I don’t like going to a club and seeing 600 people waving their arms about with smiling faces. I like to see 600 people in a dark, hot place; it isn’t about happiness, it’s more aggressive, more intense.’

  Alongside labels like Kickin’, Vinyl Solution, Rabbit City and Edge, Rising High took their cue from the Belgians and created a British Brutalist sound. Like the sixties architectural style of the same name, it was all grim slabs of grey noise, harsh angularity, and a doom-laden, dystopian vibe. Recording as Industrial High and The Hypnotist, Pound specialized in Nietzschean grandiosity (tracks like ‘God of the Universe’, ‘A Modern Prometheus’) and rabble-rousing anthems (‘Hardcore You Know the Score’ and ‘Night of the Living E-heads’, which rallied a legion of zombie-warriors with the battle cry ‘Hardkore will never die!’). Of all the Rising High affiliated artists, the most important was probably the duo of Lee Newman and Michael Wells, who released a torrent of rave anthems via a plethora of pseudon
yms and labels: Tricky Disco, John + Julie, GTO, Signs of Chaos, Force Mass Motion, Church of Ecstasy and Technohead. Wells and Newman’s pinnacle was their John + Julie track ‘Circles (Vicious Mix)’. Starting with a madly gyrating carousel-melody and a dervish-diva vocal that goes ‘round and round / turning around’, ‘Circles’ lets rip a sub-bass riff, or rift, to make the Warp posse weep: a faecal, flatulent eruption of low-end frequencies, a sound like concrete liquefying.

  Kickin’ Records went even further towards fulfilling Pound’s vision of hardcore as ‘the rock of the future’. From the headbanging riffs to the imagery of madness, mass rally and Satanism (Messiah’s ‘You’re Going Insane’ and ‘20,000 Hardcore Members’, The Scientist’s ‘The Exorcist’), Kickin’ really were ‘heavy metal house’. Wishdokta’s ‘Evil Surrounds Us’ actually sampled Axl Rose’s gloating screech – ‘D’ya know where you are?!?’ – from Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, while Messiah were eventually signed by Rick Rubin’s hard rock label, American.

  The hardcore as ‘new heavy metal’ analogy had some validity. Sonically, the Belgian and British brutalists restored the mid-frequency sounds that dance music had dropped in order to boost the bass; the exact same mid-frequencies supplied by distorted electric guitars. ‘Historically it has been perhaps the bass that people danced to,’ said German DJ Westbam in 1992. ‘But at the moment it is the mid-frequencies that people scream along to . . . In techno music these have been turned up more and more . . . they are also the most aggressive sounds, the ones that penetrate the most and make you numb . . .’

  There were rock historical parallels too. In the late sixties and early seventies, British groups bastardized the blues, and their American imitators bastardized their bastardizations, and somewhere in all this, heavy metal was spawned. In the late eighties, black producers from Chicago and Detroit took Teutonic electronic music and turned it into acid house and techno; in the early nineties, Belgian and British youth took these elegant, Europhile sounds and spawned a mutant form – hardcore. The insults hurled at hardcore by 1988 – 9 nostalgics bore a striking similarity to the language with which aghast counter-cultural veterans greeted stadium rock: bombastic, proto-fascist, a degraded version of a noble tradition. Just as blues-bore purists had harked back to Cream while recoiling from Sabbath and Zep, so too did Detroit connoisseurs pine for Derrick May while flinching at the post-Beltram barbarians. By early 1992, the hipsters were busily erecting bulwarks of ‘good taste’ against the hooligan hordes. Some, in an unfortunate echo of prog rock, rallied to the banner of ‘progressive house’ (labels like Guerrilla and Hard Hands, artists like Leftfield and Spooky); others began to talk of ‘intelligent techno’ (B12, The Black Dog, Future Sound of London).

  What the anti-hardcore contingent missed was the crucial historical lesson to be gleaned from the ‘new heavy metal’ analogy: no one today listens to the purist blues boom or progressive rock bands of the early seventies. The much despised Sabbath, though, have achieved immortality as one of the most crucial sources for alternative music in the eighties and nineties, worshipped by everybody from Black Flag and the Butthole Surfers to the Seattle grungsters Nirvana and Soundgarden. ‘Maturity’ was always only one way forward for the music of the post-acieed/Detroit diaspora. Just as heavy metal distilled blues rock, hardcore took the essence of acid and techno (mind-evacuating repetition, stroboscopic synths, bass-quake frequencies) and coarsened and intensified it. Bad drugs (barbiturates like Mandrax and Quaalude for metalheads in the seventies, dodgy Ecstasy for hardcore ravers) helped these kids focus on and exacerbate that essence. For people who’d grown up on club culture, with its ethos of cool and discrimination, hardcore was a horror-story. But for rock-reared ears like mine, hardcore’s sonic extremism and insurrectionary fervour was thrilling.

  Around the time of the anti-hardcore backlash, some ravers began to deliberately mispell and mispronounce the word as ’ardkore – matching the uncouth, rabble-rousing snarl with which slogans like ‘ ’Ardkore, you know the score’ were chanted, intensifying the delinquent, underclass associations of the sound, and turning the supposedly uneducated taste of the nutty raver into a badge of pride. But the misspelt ’ardkore also served to emphasize the fact that this was a distinct and brand-new genre of music, not a bastardized offshoot. Far from hurtling down a dead end of noise and velocity (as the techno purists alleged), hardcore rave by early 1992 had smashed right on through, and was mutating into a barely imaginable new form of music light-years beyond Detroit. And at the core of that future-sound wasn’t bleeps or mentasm-riffs, but breakbeats and samples.

  Monsters of Rave

  While ’ardkore ruled the underground, Britain had already developed a rave overground that fulfilled The KLF’s fantasy of ‘stadium house’. Between 1990 and 1992, a circuit of commercial mega-raves evolved: Amnesia, Raindance, Kaos, Mayhem, Eclipse, World Dance, Heaven on Earth, World Party, Helter Skelter, Elevation, Fantazia, Dreamscape, Vision, and many more. These massive events drew crowds ranging from 10 – 25,000 plus to dance all night inside giant hangars or under circus-size tents in the open countryside. Flyers promised a no-expense-spared spectacle (‘intelligent lighting’, four-colour lasers, strobe flowers, sky-trackers, data-flash grids, ‘fully themed’ stage sets), sideshows (bouncy castles, funfairs, bungee-jumping, fortune-tellers, face-painting), food and merchandise vendors, and above all massive volume (100 K sound-systems with ‘bone-shaking bass’). In order to get a licence from the local authorities, they absurdly and disingenuously forbade ‘illegal substances’, promised stringent searches, and ‘firm but friendly security’. The two-hour queue, the humiliating body-frisk, and the surly bouncer, all became part and parcel of the rave experience.

  At these multi-arena events, the line-up included not just the big name DJs – Top Buzz, Fabio and Grooverider, Carl Cox, Ratpack, Ellis Dee, Slipmatt – but also artist PAs. These bands – N-Joi, Bizarre Inc, The Prodigy, Shades of Rhythm – had sets choc-a-bloc with crowd-pleasing anthems, and they put on a show, of sorts (usually it meant a couple of anorexic girl-dancers in Lycra, and an MC hollering himself hoarse). But crucially, for the first time there was a visual referent for the music, it wasn’t just ‘faceless techno bollocks’.

  As rave became big business, the rave transformed itself from a lawless zone into a highly organized space programmed for your pleasure. And rave culture itself became highly ritualized. There was a uniform – floppy chapeaux, hoods, woolly hats, white gloves, gas-masks; loose-fitting or stretchy clothes (baggy jeans and T-shirts for boys, Lycra for girls), along with accessories like whistles, air-horns, and fluorescent light-sticks. Hardcore youth evolved a choreography of geometric dance-moves and developed a drug lore of Ecstasy-enhancing tricks. Ravers smeared their naked torsos with Vicks VapoRub or sniffed on inhalers; the menthol fumes allegedly increased the buzz and brought on a rush. Herbal ointments and panaceas like Olbas Oil and Dr Bach’s Remedy enjoyed a vogue. Completing the subcultural package, there was an amiable repertoire of loved-up bonhomie: shaking hands and even hugging total strangers, cadging a sip of Evian water or Coke, enquiring ‘All right, mate?’ or ‘Where you from, what you on?’

  On the mega-rave circuit, a pop hardcore sound gradually emerged, fusing the piano vamps and shrieking divas of 1989-era Italo house with Belgian hardcore’s monster-riffs and Shut Up And Dance style breakbeats and rumblin’ bass. In 1991, this sound stormed the UK charts. For every major-label distributed crossover act like Shades of Rhythm and N-Joi, there were a dozen underground outfits who operated on shoe-string indie labels but nonetheless shared the same sound (affirmative, anthemic) and the same ambition (to make the charts). Some, like Congress’s ‘40 Miles’, cracked the Top Twenty; many got within spitting distance (Manix’s ‘Oblivion’ EP, Rhythm Section’s ‘Midsummer Madness’ EP); most remained underground anthems.

  Backed by the demographic heft of the ’ardkore nation, the most popular live PA acts – Shades of Rhythm, N-Joi and Bizarre
Inc – scored the biggest hits. Peterborough’s Shades of Rhythm – a DJ crew who’d started out throwing illegal parties in the summer of 1989 – debuted impressively with the sinister, twitchy double A-side ‘Homicide’ /‘Exorcist’, but were rapidly reduced to glossy rave-fodder like ‘Sweet Sensation’, ‘The Sound of Eden’ and ‘Extacy’ (a big hit in November ’91). Essex’s N-Joi made the Top Thirty earlier that year with ‘Adrenalin’, a track that begins with the sound of crowd uproar; played live, it triggered a feedback loop, as the raving massive respond to what they believe is their own excitement. Tracks like ‘Mindflux’ and ‘Anthem’ (Number Eight in April 1991) and the ‘live techno’ EP ‘Live In Manchester’ were populist rave at its most functional, all chugging, fartacious B-lines, whistle sounds and crowd-rousing appeals.

  After a year of sustained presence on the charts (some twenty-two Top Forty hits, ten of them in the Top Ten), the British rave explosion peaked in the last months of 1991. In November and December 1991, the Top Twenty was inundated with a series of anthems – covering the full spectrum from glossy pop-rave to Belgian brutalism to the emergent underground sound of breakbeat ’ardkore – by Moby, Altern 8, Bassheads, Bizarre Inc, Shades of Rhythm, SL2, Human Resource, Digital Orgasm, K-Klass, 2 Unlimited, and Shaft. On the outskirts of the Top Forty, tracks by Manix, T99, the Hypnotist, Quadrophonia, Ravesignal, A Split Second, Congress and UHF exacerbated the sense of a barbarian horde waiting to overrun the pop citadel. In terms of hit rate, this ‘golden age of hardcore’ compares with the punk/New Wave period of the late seventies. The record industry responded with a flood of cash-in TV-advertised compilations like Hardcore Uproar, Steamin’ and Kaos Theory with words like ‘slammin” and ‘bangin” liberally scattered on the sleeves. As with punk, fogies (in this case, punk veterans) responded to two or three hardcore tunes on each week’s Top of the Pops with the hardy perennial: ‘But it’s just not music!’ The producers of Top of the Pops evidently concurred with the Luddites, or so some people alleged. For it was around this time that the programme’s rules about miming to a backing tape were replaced by a new format geared around ‘live vocals’, a change deliberately designed, it was darkly hinted, to make techno bands look bad.