Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  At the time, ’ardkore really did seem like some monstrous, amorphous creature, sucking in sound and regurgitating great vomit-gusts of anonymous, white-label brilliance. Looking back now, it’s possible to map out a cartography of creativity, trace the trajectories of key producers and identify the house style of crucial labels. Some of these prime movers – fledgling labels like Moving Shadow, Suburban Base, Reinforced, Ram, Formation, and producers like Rob Playford (Kaotic Chemistry/2 Bad Mice), DJ SS, Andy C (Desired State/Origin Unknown), Goldie (Rufige Cru), DJ Hype, Krome and Time, Hyper-On Experience – went on to become recognized and respected auteur-figures in the jungle scene. But many more fell by the wayside or drifted off into other genres when the hardcore boom went bust: labels like Ibiza, Third Party, Big City, outfits like Bodysnatch, Sub Love, Sudden Def, DJ Trax, Criminal Minds, Citadel of Kaos, Holy Ghost Inc, Satin Storm, Mixrace, Phantasy and Gemini.

  Of all these, the mysterious trio Noise Factory warrant a special mention, if only for their by-name-by-nature approach to churning out tracks: in a little over a year, their production-line spat out around a dozen underground anthems on almost as many EPs, all released via Ibiza and Third Party. Tracks like ‘My Mind’, ‘Futoroid’, ‘Breakage #4’, ‘Survival’ and ‘Straight From the Bedroom’ were haywire contraptions of jittery breaks, mad noises, and grainy, low-resolution samples: ruff-cut patches of orchestral arrangement, dislocated shrieks of ambiguously pitched diva-bliss, plaintive roots reggae incantations and dancehall ragga chants.

  The music on Third Party, Ibiza and Big City mirrored the subcultural underside of the commercial pop-rave explosion in 1992: a black economy of rip-off raves, dodgy drugs, desperate pleasures and bad attitudes (muggings at raves, bouncers who frisked you for illegal substances then re-sold them inside the venue). Ibiza’s first release, the ‘Happy Hour EP’, featured Low Noise Block’s ‘Rave In A Bedroom’, which sampled Rik from The Young Ones’ incredulous complaint – ‘five pounds to get into my own bedroom! What’ve you done, turned it into a roller-disco?!?’ Kicks Like A Mule’s Top Ten hit ‘The Bouncer’, with its tersely intransigent bouncer samples of ‘not tonight, you’re not coming in’, provoked Bodysnatch’s answer record ‘Revenge Of The Punter’: a litany of murderous malevolence (‘now you’re taking liberties’, ‘step to this, if you wanna be done’) synched up to fitful death-funk rhythms. Noise Factory’s ‘The Fire’ twisted Stevie Nicks’s mystical FM-rock classic ‘Sara’ into the plaint of a neophyte raver whose insides are ablaze with the scalding bliss of unusually pure E: ‘Wait a minute, baby, stay with me a while / Said you’d give me light, but you never told me ’bout the fire.’

  This new London-based version of ’ardkore was like a reprise of Shut Up And Dance’s urban realism, but stripped of overt politics or any shred of ‘change will come’ hope. It was music for ravers who knew the rave dream was a lie, but carried on taking the bad medicine. ‘I bring you the future, the future, the future’, stammered the vocal-riff on Noise Factory’s ‘Breakage #4’, and this was no idle boast. Ibiza’s record sleeves bore the prophetic word – JUNGLIZM.

  White Label Fever

  Something tells me that British hardcore’s golden age circa 1991 – 2 will one day be remembered as fondly as the American garage punk of the mid-sixties. The parallels are striking. Both genres were the domain of untrained teenagers fixated on gimmicky sonic effects: wah-wah and fuzz-tone with garage, swarming sampler-noises with ’ardkore. Both were oriented around the riff: in the sixties, there were a million variations on ‘Train Kept A Rollin’ ’ or ‘You Really Got Me’, in the early nineties, a myriad takes on the ‘Mentasm’ stab or on the Morse Code riff first heard on Landlord’s ‘I Like It’ and Todd Terry’s CLS classic ‘Can You Feel It’. The drugs and drug-vibe were similar too: a heady blend of euphoria, aggression and tripped-out disorientation.

  Sixties punk was a do-it-yourself movement of bored kids getting together to jam in the garage, just as their nineties ’ardkore equivalents gathered round the Amiga or Atari computer in a bedroom. Released on indie labels, their rough-and-ready lo-fi recordings might become regional hits, then – if they were really lucky – go nationwide. Billboard smashes like Count Five’s ‘Psychotic Reactions’ and The Seeds’ ‘Pushing Too Hard’ seemed to come out of nowhere, just like Urban Shakedown’s ‘Some Justice’ and SL2’s ‘On A Ragga Tip’. And in both eras, for every hit there were a hundred obscure one-off bursts of inspiration.

  The biggest parallel between ’ardkore and the ‘punkadelic’ music of 1965 – 7 is that both were utterly despised by hipsters at the time. Just as hippy snobs worshipped Cream and sneered at the garage bands for their lack of musicianship, the techno connoisseurs rallied to the art-wank of Future Sound Of London while dismissing ’ardkore for its low production values. Years later, garage punk was rehabilitated through the fanatical advocacy of writers like Lester Bangs and musicians like Lenny Kaye. After Kaye’s celebrated Nuggets anthology of lost one-hit wonders, there followed a deluge of compilation series – the most famous being Pebbles, Mindrocker and Back From The Grave – dedicated to plucking from History’s dustbin all the one-miss blunders from American garageland. Already, there are signs that a similar rehabilitation process is underway with ’ardkore: there’s a collector’s market for the original 12-inch singles, and a few 1991 – 2 compilations have become available. Who knows, a future form of techno may reinvoke the ideas and attitude of ’ardkore, in the same way that the punks of 1976 staged a partial return to the stark riffs and dynamic minimalism of sixties mod and garage punk. ’Ardkore was partly determined by the limited computer memory and ‘sample-time’ producers had at their disposal. But constraints can be energizing: today’s better-endowed producers often seem to drown in the mire of options, creating hopelessly cluttered and over-nuanced music.

  Juvenile Dementia

  In every pop era, there are those hipsters who are seeking some kind of art status for the music they love. And in every era, ‘valid’ art-music is defined against ‘mindless trash’, which may be too polished and commercial, or too raw and anti-musical, but either way is deemed immature and lacking in depth. For sure, ’ardkore was one-dimensional music. But for my money, ’ardkore commands that dimension with a single-minded intensity that is as close to the primal essence of rock ’n’ roll as you can get. What’s the essence? Not sex or drugs or dance, but any or all of these in so far as they’re about intensity, a heightened sense of here-and-now.

  To live in the now, without memory or future-anxiety, is literally child-ish. For those with an investment in techno’s maturation as an art form, one of the most offensive aspects of ’ardkore was its regressive streak. Hits like ‘Sesame’s Treet’ were only the tip of the infantilistic iceberg: there was Bolt’s ‘Horsepower’, based around the wonderfully stirring theme music from the kids’ TV series Black Beauty, and Major Malfunction’s ‘Ice Cream Van’, with its music-box chimes and little girl singing ‘we all scream for ice cream’. The greatest Ibiza track of all, Bad Girl’s ‘Bad Girl’, features a sped-up she-sprite sing-songing a playground paean to ‘ ’erb an’ weed, weed an’ ganja, ganja an’ weed, an’ ’erb an’ marijuana’, her prepubescent voice lurking amidst a grotto of globular bass-goo. 2 Bad Mice’s ‘Drumscare’ starts with a looped entreaty – ‘E-wanna-E-wanna-E-wanna-E-wanna-E’ – that sounds like a spoilt child demanding sweeties. It’s surely no coincidence that many of the brands of Ecstasy at this time played on this regressive craving for oral gratification, taking their names from bygone seventies candy (love hearts, refreshers), or school dinner desserts (rhubarb-and-custards).

  Citing the childhood game of spinning round and round to induce ‘a dizziness that reduced [the] environment to a sort of luminous chaos’, Virilio reminds us that ‘child-society frequently utilizes turnings, spinning around, disequilibrium. It looks for sensations of vertigo and disorder as sources of pleasure.’ This idea of dervish-whirling your way into blissful disorientation permea
ted ’ardkore in the form of dozens of samples that refer to spinning round, like Noise Factory’s ‘My Mind’: ‘spinning round, you’re dancing like a hurricane / round and round, we search for love in a world gone insane’. And every big commercial rave had funfair attractions like whirligigs and bouncy castles.

  Alongside its juvenile craving for thrills and spills, the other threatening aspect of ’ardkore was its naked drugginess. This was emblazoned in sniggery double-entendres like Skin Up’s ‘Ivory’, with its ‘give us an E please, Bob’ sample from Blockbuster, a TV game-show based around spelling out words, or Lenny D Ice’s ‘We Are I.E.’, which sampled an African chant and turned it into an affirmation of collective identity through MDMA. But the drugginess is also brazenly apparent in the sound of ’ardkore, the way the music seemed to bypass the aesthetic faculties and take effect by direct neurological interface. Critics who liked to deal with rock as a surrogate form of literature were the most perturbed by this anti-humanist noise. But dance cognoscenti looking to establish techno’s status as a ‘progressive’ artform were also embarrassed. Just as it seemed possible to make the case that electronic music could be more than a soundtrack to drugging and dancing, along came ’ardkore: not so much music as a science of inducing and enhancing the E-rush. Could you even listen to this music ‘on the natural’, enjoy it in an un-altered state? Well, I did and do, all the time. But whether I’d feel it, viscerally understand it, if my nervous system hadn’t been reprogrammed by MDMA, is another matter. Perhaps you only need to do it once, to get sens-E-tized, and then the music will induce memory-rushes and body-flashbacks.

  Rage to Live

  For many, ’ardkore was a depressing manifestation of rave culture’s nihilistic escapism, scantily garbed in the gladrags of a vague and poorly grounded idealism. What interests me about hardcore was the way it simultaneously affirmed rave’s utopianism yet hinted at the illusory nature of this heaven-on-earth, which can only be sustained by artificial energy and capsules of synthetic happiness. Tracks like Rhythm Section’s ‘Dreamworld’ and Desired State’s ‘This Is A Dream’ conjure up a poignant vision of paradise even as they remind the listener of its vaporous and transitory unreality.

  ’Ardkore was really just the latest twist on the traditional contours of working-class leisure, the latest variant on the sulphate-fuelled 48-hour weekend of mod and Northern Soul lore. There’s an even earlier precedent: the Tanzwuth (dance-mania) or St Vitus Dance, in which medieval youth jigged their way out of their constrictions to the raucous soundtrack provided by itinerant minstrels. Helped along by fasting, sleep-deprivation and binging on wine, these proto-ravers would get swept up in ‘fits of wild dancing, leaping, hopping and clapping that ended in syncope [mass fainting]’, according to an essay in The New England Journal of Medicine which sought a precedent for outbreaks at rock concerts of hyperventilation, palpitations and mass swooning. ‘Syncope’ shares etymological roots with syncopation, the defining rhythmic quality of the ’ardkore breakbeat. Just like raves, Tanzwuth carnivals were feared by the authorities as ‘demoniacal festivals for the rude multitudes’, despite the fact that they probably served an ultimately conservative function by dissipating the tensions and frustrations created by the hierarchical, regimented nature of medieval society.

  In 1992, a slice of rap circulated through ’ardkore’s sample gene-pool: ‘can’t beat the system / go with the flow’. On one level, it was just a boast about how much damage the sound-system can inflict. But perhaps there’s a submerged and enduring political resonance in there too: amidst the socio-economic deterioration of a Britain well into its second decade of one party Tory rule, where alternatives seemed unimaginable, horizons grew ever narrower, and there was no constructive outlet for anger or idealism, what else was left but to zone out, go with the flow, disappear? In their quest to reach escape velocity, ’ardkore youth ended up in the speed-trap: a dead-end zone where going nowhere fast becomes a kind of hyperkinetic stasis, strung out between spasm and entropy.

  Yet there’s an inchoate fury in ’ardkore, a protean rage, that still feels affirmative to me rather than nihilistic; an urge for total release from constraints, a lust for explosive exhilaration, that incites me like virtually no other music. ’Ardkore seethes with a RAGE TO LIVE, to cram all the intensity absent from a week of drudgery into a few hours of fervour. ’Ardkore frenzy was where the somnambulist youth of Britain snapped out of the living death of the nineties, and grasped a few moments of fugitive bliss. As the chorus of Xenophobia’s ‘Rush In The House’ put it, ‘E come alive E come alive E come alive’. ’Ardkore’s speedfreaks were literally rushing away from their problems, and who could really blame them?

  FIVE

  FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHT TO PARTY

  SPIRAL TRIBE AND THE

  CRUSTY-RAVER

  MOVEMENT

  It’s 11 p.m. on a Saturday night, 23 May 1992. We’re cruising along a country lane somewhere in the English West Country, when the abnormally – one might even say suspiciously – heavy traffic comes to a halt. Someone up ahead has stopped to take a leak. Suddenly, from almost every car, boys emerge to follow suit. It’s an image I’ll never forget: irradiated in the gleam of a hundred headlights, innumerable arcs of urine spraying into the hedgerow, as far as the eye can see.

  An hour earlier we’d been hurtling down the motorway, en route to my first Spiral Tribe outdoor rave. The Spirals are part of the crossover between the rave scene and the ‘crusty’ subculture – crusties being squat-dwelling anarcho-hippy-punk types named after their matted dreadlocks and post-apocalyptic garb. At the bottom of the crusty spectrum are destitute idlers who panhandle for a living; at the top end are more enterprising types who organize illegal parties, deal drugs, or make and sell artifacts and clothes.

  My friends have Tribal connections, and one of the clan’s DJs has cadged a ride. He tells us about ‘doets’, a new drug in circulation, which he says is a super-potent cocktail of speed, LSD, E and ketamine that propels the user on a thirty hour trip with ‘amazing visuals, man!’ Then he plays a tape of Spiral Tribe’s debut EP. The killer track, ‘Doet’, is a juggernaut of noise kickstarted by a nursery rhyme – ‘If you’re at a rave and you can’t score an E / you must be / buzzin’ / on acid’ – and the rabble-rousing exhortation ‘Rush your fucking bollocks off!!!’ This is Spiral Tribe’s slogan of the summer. The insolent, uncouth voice on ‘Doet’ belong to MC Scallywag, whose mischievous rewrite of The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ (‘Ectsasy, it’s really got me now . . . got me so I don’t know what I’m doing’) is the hook in Xenophobia’s ‘Rush In The House’, another of that summer’s ’ardkore anthems.

  Gradually, we realize we are no longer alone; our car has become part of a convoy, and the breathless anticipation, the sense of strength-in-numbers grows until almost unbearable, as does the fear that the police will thwart the rave. Our destination is Castlemorton Common in Worcestershire, not far from the border with Wales. This year it is the site for the Avon Free Festival, one of the dozen or more summer festivals attended by ‘New Age travellers’ – basically nomadic crusties.

  Travelling as a lifestyle began in the early seventies, as convoys of hippies spent the summer wandering from site to site on the free festival circuit, which included the Rainbow Festival, Cantlin Stone, Ribblehead, Inglestone Common, Rough Tor, Magic Mushroom, and Cinsbury Ring Free. Gradually, these raggle-taggle remnants of the original counter-culture built up a neo-medieval economy based around crafts, alternative medicine and entertainment: jugglers, acrobats, healers, food vendors, candle makers, clothes sellers, tattooists, piercers, jewellers, and drug pedlars. The New Age traveller first burst into public consciousness as a modern ‘folk-devil’ in June 1985, thanks to The Battle of the Beanfield. Police diverted the Convoy en route to the Stonehenge Free Festival (the traditional site for Summer Solstice celebrations) and went on the rampage, trashing vehicles and clubbing men and women alike. The then Home Secretary Douglas Hurd referred to th
e travellers as ‘medieval brigands’, while Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared ‘I am only too pleased to make life as difficult as possible for these hippy convoys.’ Despite persecution from the authorities, the travelling movement not only survived, it grew. As squatting became a less viable option and the government mounted a clampdown on welfare claimants, many urban crusties tired of the squalor of settled life and took to the roving lifestyle. By the end of the eighties, some estimates put the number of travellers at 40,000.

  At the 1990 Glastonbury rock festival, crusties and hippies danced to house and techno sound-systems like Club Dog and Tonka, while outside the festival bounds, there was confrontation as travellers (who’d hitherto been let in for free) railed against the high ticket price and demanded a free camp site. 1990 also saw ravers – sick of commercialized, rip-off raves – turning up at the free festivals, where techno was gradually eclipsing the hippies’ previous staple (cosmic trance-rock of the Hawkwind/Here and Now/Magic Mushroom Band stripe). Sound-system collectives, like Nottingham’s DiY, formed and started to throw free parties at abandoned airfields or on hilltops, drawing a mixed crowd of urban ravers and crusty road-warriors.

  Spiral Tribe started hooking up with the travellers in the summer of 1991, and rapidly became prime movers on the scene, luring thousands of urban ravers to party at disused airfields and abandoned quarries; often, the events coincided with traditional free festivals. Gradually, the Spirals – alongside similar sound-system outfits like Bedlam, Circus Warp, Techno Travellers, Armageddon, Adrenalin, and Circus Normal – fermented a peculiar symbiosis between the straight rave scene and the anarcho-hippy nomads; the ’ardkore weekenders brought an infusion of money generated by working in the straight world, the travellers provided an environment for freaking out. There were tensions, initially: some older travellers, used to folk and acid rock, disliked the harsh new techno soundtrack. Inevitably, there was mutual suspicion based on differences of lifestyles, look and outlook: the travellers with their dreadlocks and shaved patches of scalp, hessian jackets, camouflage fatigues, DM boots and ring-piercings galore; the fashion-conscious middle-class ravers; the baggy-trouser-and-T-shirted ’ardkore proles. But as they discovered common ground in drugs, dance and the desire to have a wild time dirt-cheap, travellers and ravers formed what cultural critic Lawrence Grossberg calls an ‘affective alliance’: the affect, in this instance, being an exhilarating feeling of freedom, combined with the belief that freedom ain’t really free if you have to pay for it.