Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  MC no. 2 (increasingly deranged and demonic): ‘Doing it doing it with the poo. Sounds of the big cack-ooo. Going out to the buzzin’ ’ard crew. You know the koo, koo. Crispy like a crouton! Sounds of the’ot with an haitch. Getting hot in the place. Steamin’. Rollin’. You know the koo. Flex tops are doing the do. Respect is due. To you and your crew.’

  MC no. 1: ‘Sounds of the South, man. Buzzin’.’

  It loses something in transcription: the intonation, the grain of the voice, the instinctual syncopation and drugged slurriness. But I’m not taking the piss when I say that I rate this – and scores more snatches of phonetic poetry plucked from London’s pirate airwaves – among my favourite ‘cultural artefacts’ of the twentieth century.

  Fuck the Legal Stations

  ‘The future does not exist for them.’

  – Postmaster General Tony Benn, promising to outlaw

  Britain’s first wave of pirate radio stations, 1965.

  Pirate radio gets its romantic name not just from its flagrant flouting of government restrictions on the airwaves, but from its early days in the sixties, when unlicensed stations broadcast from ships anchored at sea just outside British territorial waters, or from derelict Army and Navy forts on the Thames Estuary. By 1966, Radio London claimed over eight million listeners, and Radio Caroline over six million; pirate DJs were cult stars and stations had their own fan clubs. But this first golden age of pirate radio came to an abrupt end when Harold Wilson’s Labour government instituted The Marine Broadcasting Offences Act in August 1967, making it unlawful to operate, finance, or aid in any way an unlicensed station. As a sop to public demand, the BBC launched its own national pop station, Radio One, and recruited many pirate DJs, such as Tony Blackburn, John Peel, Johnny Walker and Dave Lee Travis.

  In the early eighties, pirate radio entered its second boom period, with the rise of black music stations like Horizon, JFM, Dread Broadcasting Corporation and LWR, specializing in the soul, reggae and funk that Radio One marginalized. But the nautical connotations of ‘pirate’ had faded; the new pirates broadcast not just from the mainland, but from tower blocks in the heart of the metropolis. As the government closed loopholes in the law and increased the penalties, the illegal stations grew ever more cunning in their struggle to outwit the anti-pirate agents of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). The invention of the microlink (a method of relaying the station’s signal to a distant transmitter) made it harder for the DTI to trace and raid the illegal station’s studio-HQ. The result was an explosion of piracy; by 1989 – 90, there were over 600 stations nationwide, and 60 in the London area alone. And by 1989, a new breed of rave pirates – Sunrise, Centre Force, Dance FM, Fantasy – had joined the ranks of established black dance stations like LWR and Kiss.

  As in the sixties, the government responded with the double whammy of suppression and limited permission. In a weird echo of the pardons offered buccaneers and corsairs in the seventeenth century, pirate stations were offered an amnesty if they went off the air, and a chance to apply for one of the bonanza of licences being made available as part of the Conservative government’s policy of ‘freeing’ the airwaves. LWR and Kiss closed down voluntarily, but only Kiss won a licence. The legitimization of Kiss FM, in combination with an ultra-tough Broadcasting Act in January 1990, reduced pirate activity to its lowest since 1967.

  But in 1992, the London pirates resurged massively, as a crucial component of hardcore rave’s underground infrastructure, alongside home-studio recording, indie labels, white label releases and specialist record stores. Abandoning the last vestiges of mainstream pop radio protocol, the new ’ardkore pirates sounded like ‘raves on the air’: rowdy, chaotic, with the DJ’s voiceover replaced by a raucous rave-style MC (Master of Ceremonies), and with a strong emphasis on audience participation (enabled by the spread of the portable cellular phone, which made the studio location impossible to trace by the DTI). Despite the government’s fresh package of draconian penalties (the threat of unlimited fines, prison sentences of up to two years, and the confiscation of all studio equipment – including the DJ’s precious record collection), 1992 – 3 saw the biggest boom in the history of radio piracy. Undeterred, the pirate attitude was, in the words of a track by Rum and Black – ‘**** the Legal Stations’.

  Renegade Soundwaves

  Surviving as a pirate station in the nineties involves a mix of graft, skill and cunning similar to that possessed by their seafaring namesakes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Because it’s easy for the DTI to track a transmission back to its source, pirate stations use a microwave transmitter to ‘beam’ their programmes from the studio to a remote transmitter, where it is then broadcast to the public. Because these ‘micro-links’ operate by a line-of-sight, directional beam, the DTI can trace the signal back to the pirate studio only once they’ve got to the top of the tower block and located the aerial transmitter. The smarter pirate stations attach a cut-out switch to the roof-top door, which cuts the power supply and breaks the link. This ensures that the DTI can’t trace the beam from the top of the tower block back to the studio, and that all the pirate station loses in the raid is a transmitter worth a few hundred pounds. The pirate can then redirect its microlink beam to a back-up transmitter on top of another building.

  When the DTI comes down hard on a particular station, it can lose several transmitters each weekend. It’s an expensive business, and the pirates that endure are those with a sound financial infrastructure. Revenue comes from advertising (mostly for raves and clubs, specialist record shops and compilation albums). The rest of the money comes from the DJs, who – in a testament to the idealism and love-not-money amateur ethos behind pirate radio – actually pay a small fee for the privilege of playing.

  Right back to the sixties, pirate radio has been tarnished with a money-grubbing, criminal-minded reputation. In 1989, for instance, several Centre Force DJs were arrested for Ecstasy dealing, while accusations of gangster ties and coded, on-air drug transactions have often been levelled at the ’ardkore pirates. But for all their conspiratorial, clandestine aura, most pirates’ criminal activities are limited to the struggle to protect the station and stay on the air. According to legend, one station – Rush FM – turned the upper storeys of an abandoned East London tower block into a fortress so impregnable that the DJs had to abseil up the side of the building to reach the studio. They sealed the normal entrance with concrete, through which they’d inserted metal scaffolding. They then pumped the scaffolding’s metal tubing full of ammonia gas, and linked the scaffold to the electrical mains. When the local council turned up to break down the barricade, the man operating the pneumatic drill got electrocuted, the spark ignited the gas, and the concrete bulwark exploded, showering the workers with debris.

  Such paranoid/paramilitary strategies are exceptional. But cut-off switches, booby traps and alarms are used to protect transmitters – not just from the DTI, but from other pirates who will steal the equipment if given the opportunity. Reflecting the dog-eat-dog nature of nineties lumpen-prole life, there appears to be scant solidarity between the pirates, little in the way of a fraternal feeling that they’re all in the underground together. ‘A transmitter rig is worth about £300,’ says Marcus, a well-spoken eighteen-year-old formerly involved with legendary South London pirate Don FM. ‘If you see one and take it, it’s almost not seen as thieving. It’s part of the game.’

  But the main enemy is the DTI, whose official line (as one Trade and Technology Minister put it) is that ‘These stations not only cause radio and TV interference for the ordinary listener, but can seriously endanger life by disrupting the radio communications of the emergency services and airport control towers.’ In truth, most pirate transmissions are ‘crystal-locked’ to precise points on the FM frequency band, with no signal leakage. So why is the government dedicated to stamping out the pirates? Is it just the innate desire of state power to regulate all media? Or is there a fear of militant agit-prop being tr
ansmitted through the skies? Strangely, Britain has never seen much in the way of political ‘free radio’. But an Italian ‘free’ station, Radio Alice, played a major role in catalysing the anarcho-syndicalist riots in Bologna in 1977; a 15,000 strong ‘autonomist’ uprising so politically threatening and culturally offensive to the establishment (left- and right-wing), that the Communist Mayor of Bologna invited the army to use armoured cars to suppress it. In America too, pirate radio is mostly politically motivated, not music-oriented.

  If the concept of ‘resistance’ can be applied to British pirate radio, it’s clearly on the level of symbolic warfare, that old cultural studies notion of ‘resistance through rituals’, as opposed to overt protest. If the pirates are subversive, it’s because they hijack the mass media, the instrument of consensus, in order to articulate a minority consciousness that’s local, tribal, and utterly opaque to non-initiates. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of ‘minor language’ (versus ‘major language’) fits the way the pirates can seem to the outsider like mere sound and fury that signifies nothing, yet means everything to those who belong. It’s no coincidence that two of the big catchphrases used by pirate MCs in 1991 – 3 were ‘’ardkore, you know the score’ and ‘you know the key’ (the latter sometimes slurred and contorted into the even more cryptic ‘you know the koo’). Which brings us to the MC, the figure who marshals and sustains the subculture’s sense of itself as massive yet subterranean, a shared, secret underworld; the MC as master of ’ardkore’s occult ceremonies, as encryptor.

  You Know the Key

  ‘A million sparks falling from the skyrockets of Rimbaud and Mowgli – slender terrorists whose gaudy bombs are compacted of polymorphous love and the precious shards of popular culture.’

  – Hakim Bey, seemingly prophesying the ’ardkore jungle pirates

  The MC’s job is a difficult one. He (almost never a ‘she’) must generate infinite variations on a very restricted repertoire of utterances: all-praise-the-DJ exhortations, druggy innuendos, exclamations of intense excitement, and testifications of inexhaustible faith in the entire subcultural project. By finding rhythmic and timbral twists to the restatement of these themes, the MC creates that intangible but crucial entity known as ‘vibe’.

  From relative unknowns like former Don FM stalwarts Rhyme Time and MC OC, to top-ranking junglist chatters like GQ, Navigator, Moose, Dett and Five-0, the mark of a superlative MC is a certain combination of timing and grain-of-the-voice. Where the hoarse, rabble-rousing ’ardkore MC of 1991 was like a cross between a cockney street-vendor and an aerobics-instructor, the jungle MCs that supplanted these white working-class nutters draw on techniques and flavours from rap, from the DJ talk-over of seventies’ dub reggae, and from other Jamaican styles (toasting, dancehall chat).

  My favourite era of pirate MC-ing, though, is the transitional phase of 1992 – 93, when the music was described as ’ardkore jungle or jungalistic ’ardkore. The patois-rich patter of this era of MC-ing was a genuine creole tongue, a delirious mix of ragga chat (‘big it up!’, ‘brock out!’, ‘maximum boost’, ‘big up your chest’), E-monster drivel (‘oh-my-gosh!’, ‘buzzin’ ’ard’), American hip-hop slang (‘madding up the place! blasting bizness!’) and Oi!-like cockney yobbery (‘luvvit to the bone, luvvit like cooked food!’). At the furthest extreme, the MC’s druggy vocalese degenerated into non-verbal gibberish somewhere between Dadaist sound-poetry, speaking-in-tongues and early rap’s ‘human beatbox’ trickery, e.g. Rhyme Time’s vocal simulation of DJ techniques like scratching and the stuttering cut out effect caused by violent oscillation of the cross-fader or transformer.

  MC patter has a high level of ‘phatic’ elements – utterances that establish an atmosphere of sociability rather than communicate information or ideas. In everyday life, ‘phatic’ designates the hello’s and how-are-you’s that grease the wheels of social intercourse, that initiate or conclude the conversation proper. But whereas in everyday life, phatic remarks are empty rituals, devoid of emotional weight or even truth-value (how often do you answer ‘fine!’ when you feel like crap?), in rave, these utterances are impossibly intensified with meaning and conviction.

  MCs get round the semantic ‘impoverishment’ of pirate patter by utilizing an arsenal of non-verbal, incantatory techniques, bringing spoken language closer to the state of music: intonation, syncopation, alliteration, internal rhyme, slurring, rolling of ‘r’s, stuttering of consonants, twisting and stretching of vowels, comic accents, onomatopoeia. In pirate MC-ing, this excess of form over content, timbre over text, creates jouissance; for the listener, there’s an intense, sensual thrill in hearing language being physically distended and distorted in the throat. Like babytalk, toddler-speak and lovers’ sweet nothings, MC chanting is all assonance and echolalia, the voluptuousness and viciousness of primary oral/aggressive drives (twisted, extruded vowels/ staccato, percussive consonants).

  Pirate MC discourse isn’t just demotic, at its best, it’s democratic too, with a strong emphasis on audience participation. Witness the following Index FM phone-in session on Christmas Eve 1992.

  MC no. 1: ‘Sounds of the Dominator, Index FM. And it’s getting busy tonight, London. Rrrrrrush!!!

  ‘ ’Ello mate?’

  Caller no. 1: (slurred, giggly, very out-of-it) ‘’Ello, London, I’d like to give a big shout out to the Car Park possee, yeah? First, there’s my friend, my brother, Eli, then there’s my friend over there called Anthony, and he’s like, smasher, he’s hard—’

  MC no. 1: ‘Like you mate!’

  Caller no. 1: ‘Innit, of course!’

  MC no. 1: ‘You sound wrecked—’

  Caller no. 1: ‘Yeah, I’m totally wrecked, mate—’ [UPROAR, chants of ‘Oi, oi! Oi, oi!’]

  Caller no. 1: ‘My bruvva my bruvva my bruvva my bruvva my bruvva—’

  MC no. 1: ‘Make some noise!’

  Caller no. 1: ‘Believe you me, mate, ’ardkore you know the score!’

  MC no. 1: ‘Respect, mate! ’Ardkore noise!’

  Caller no. 1: ‘Oi, can you gimme “Confusion”, mate?’

  MC no. 1: ‘Go on mate!’

  Caller no. 1: ‘Gimme gimme gimme “Confusion”!’

  MC no. 1: ‘Yeah, we’re looking for it, mate!’

  Caller no. 1: ‘2 Bad Mice, 2 Bad Mice—’

  MC no. 1: (getting emotional, close to tears) ‘Last caller, we’re gonna have to go. Respect going out to you, mate! Hold it down, last caller, rude boy FOR YEEEEAAARS! Believe me, send this one out to you, last caller! From the Dominator! Send this one out to you, mate. You’re a bad boy, BELIEF!!! 90 – 3, the Index, comin’ on strong, belief!!!’

  MC no. 2: ‘Don’t forget, people – New Year’s Eve, Index FM are going to be throwing a free rave in conjuction with UAC Promotions. Rrrrrave, rrrrrave!!!! Three mental floors of mayhem, lasers, lights, all the works – you know the score. Absolutely free, just for you. So keep it locked for more info.’

  MC no. 1: (gasping feyly) ‘Oh goshhhh!!! Keep the pagers rushing! Come and go. OOOOOOH goshhhhh!! We’re comin’ on, we’re comin on strong, believe . . . Deeper! Deeper into the groove—’

  MC no. 2: ‘Keep the calls rushhhhing!’

  MC no. 1: ‘Yeah, London Town, we’ve got another caller, wants to go live!’

  Caller no. 2: (sounding rehearsed) ‘Hi, I wanna big shout to all Gathall Crew, all Brockley crew, Pascal, Bassline, Smasher . . . We’re in the house and we’re rocking, you be shocking, for ’92, mate!!’

  MC no. 1: ‘Believe it, mate!’

  Caller no. 2: ‘’ARD-KORE, you know the score!!!’

  MC no. 1: ‘Where you coming from, mate?’

  Caller no. 2: ‘South London, mate . . . Brockley—’

  MC no. 1: ‘Wicked. Shout to the South London crew. Respect.’

  Caller no. 2: ‘Oi, can you play 2 Bad Mice, “Six Foot Under”?’

  MC no. 1: ‘Yeah mate, we’ll dig that one out and stick it on, just for you.’

&
nbsp; Caller no. 2: ‘Nice one! Sweet as!’

  MC no. 1: ‘Index! Yeah, London, you’re in tune to the live line, Index FM, runnin’ t’ings in London right ’bout now. The one and only.’

  Rapt then and now by this phone-in session and others like it, by the listeners’ fervent salutations and the MCs’ invocations, I’m struck by the crusading zeal and intransitive nature of their utterances: ‘rushing!’, ‘buzzin’ hard!’, ‘get busy!’, ‘come alive, London!’, ‘let’s go!’, ‘time to get hyper, helter-skelter!’, ‘hardcore’s firing!’, and, especially prominent in the Index-at-Xmas session, the near-Gnostic exhortation ‘belief!!’

  Gnosis is the esoteric knowledge of spiritual truth that various pre-Christian and early Christian cults believed could only be apprehended directly by the initiate, a truth that cannot be mediated or explained in words. In pirate discourse, ‘the score’ or ‘the key’ is code for the secret knowledge to which only the hardcore, ‘the headstrong people’, are privy. And this is drug knowledge, the physically felt intensities induced by Ecstasy, amphetamine and the rest of the pharmacopoeia. The MC’s role, as encryptor, as master of the sacra-mental ceremonies, is to ceaselessly reiterate that secret without ever translating it. The MC is a potent inclusion/exclusion device; if you’re not on the bus, if you’re not down with the programme, you’ll never know what that idiot is raving about.

  The cold print of the Index-at-Xmas transcript can’t convey the electricity of everyone in the studio coming up on their E’s at the same time, by the NRG-currents pulsing down phone-lines and across the cellular-phone ether from kids buzzing at home. Listening to pirate phone-in sessions like this, I felt like there was a feedback loop of ever-escalating exultation switching back and forth between the station and the hardcore ‘massive’ at home. The whole subculture resembled a giant mechanism designed to generate fervour without aim. ‘Come alive, London!’, ‘coming on strong’: a power trip for the powerless, a mass hallucination of in-the-place-to-be grandiosity. Bastard children of Radio Alice, the pirates mobilize a goal-less, apolitical unity. Massification, excitation and amplification: this alone is the pirates’ raison d’étre. A massive could be just two kids at home, huddled ’round the radio, rolling spliffs and getting seriously ‘red-eye’. By maintaining lines of communication between all the micro-massives across the city, the pirate station keeps alive the idea of the macro-massive as a virtual presence, a latent potential, thereby shoring up the community’s belief in its own existence during the fallow, dead-time intervals before and after the rave.