by Dave Haslam
He heard about the State on Dale Street. James went there once, appreciated the music and the laser lightshow (and especially the fact there was no fighting), and he became a regular. He liked the alternative music night on a Thursday. He recalls you’d see members of Liverpool bands there. James would be in the other corner, though. ‘That was the alternative crowd. Mine was a bit more scally, trainers, jeans. We were “casuals”, that’s the right word.’ He stuck around at the State, got to know the DJs Steve Proctor, Andy Carroll and Mike Knowler as the music evolved, and the goth hits were relegated to the back of Andy Carroll’s record collection. At the State in 1987, from Thursdays to Saturdays, you’d hear Public Enemy and then ‘Pump up the Volume’.
If you were to draw a timeline for the ten months from the autumn of 1987 to mid-summer 1988 you’d track a steady rise in the production and profile of house music. The clubs playing the music started underground, mostly at venues off the radar. Radio shows playing the music were few, but included Jazzy M’s Jacking Zone on the pirate station LWR, and Stu Allan on Piccadilly Radio (later known as Key 103). The music from 1987 onwards leaped forward as Chicago house garnered a harder-edged brother, Detroit techno. Then, by the end of 1987, the new sounds that had only been available on import were getting licensed to UK labels and appearing on compilations. All the while the music was challenging the other club scenes, but then, during the early months of 1988, it was clear that the arrival of ecstasy was making the big difference. This is the view of Sasha, one of the first high-profile DJs of the 1990s: ‘I don’t think the scene would have happened without it. The music was there, but the music fed off it. They went hand in hand.’
Ecstasy use changed clubs forever, as we’ll see through and beyond the next chapter of our story. In London, one episode hastened the dawning of a new era, and that was a trip to Ibiza by a group of London DJs in the summer of 1987. Paul Oakenfold had met Trevor Fung on the soul scene and Fung had got him a DJ gig at Rumours, a wine bar in Covent Garden. In 1987 Oakenfold was working in club promotions, taking time out at the end of August 1987 to go to Ibiza to celebrate his twenty-sixth birthday, meeting up with Nicky Holloway, Steve Walsh, Johnnie Walker and Danny Rampling. Rampling was a painter and decorator who’d made a success of DJing in disco pubs in south London. Nicky Holloway had been organising parties and events, and had become one of the most energetic and prolific promoters in London, running events he called ‘Special Branch’ nights.
The lads went to a club called Nightlife in San Antonio where they bumped into two girls who Nicky Holloway recognised as Special Branch regulars. The girls suggested everyone should take some ecstasy and go on to Amnesia where, in the open air, they listened to Amnesia’s resident DJ Alfredo. The experience under the stars made a deep impression. Alfredo’s DJing, incorporating rock and disco, was the kind of mixture these London soul boys and funkateers hadn’t heard before. The drug delivered an extra sense of warmth and communality. The lads came back with a mission to recreate that vibe at home in London.
Paul Oakenfold set up Ibiza reunion parties at Ziggy’s wine bar in Streatham playing records by the Cure and Woodentops (‘Why Why Why’), plus import dance records. The Project, as it was called, was held from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. and lasted for five or six weeks. Carl Cox supplied the sound system. ‘I loved the energy,’ he said later. ‘People dressing how they wanted to dress, dancing how they wanted to dance, sweating and not giving a shit what they looked like.’
Noel and Maurice Watson had worked with various people hosting hip hop and rare groove parties, and then they took Saturdays at the Astoria, establishing a night called ‘Delirium’, founded alongside Rob King, Nick Trulocke and Spencer Style. It started out as a hip hop night (the opening night, in September 1985, featured live performances from Run DMC, Beastie Boys and LL Cool J – admission was £5). There were films and lightshows, even a forty-foot helter-skelter on one occasion and, on others, mud wrestlers and girls dressed as Pink Panthers on high trapezes. Divine performed, as did Roxanne Shante, Whodini and Salt ’n’ Pepa.
As the first house records made their way across from the States, Maurice was particularly keen to play them at the Astoria, but the rare groove and hip hop crowd were resistant. Eventually Maurice moved to New York and Noel, with promoter Rob King, took Delirium to the main room at Heaven and repositioned Delirium as a house music club. For the opening night Rob King brought over the Godfather of House, Frankie Knuckles, from Chicago. The music was right but the timing wasn’t; it was always a struggle for them to make money doing Delirium and the night lasted less than a year, but during that year if you lived in London and were into house music, chances are you were at Delirium.
At this time the playlists of Paul Oakenfold and music favoured by the Balearic crowd he’d gathered at the Project was less dominated by house music than Delirium and some of the gay clubs in the capital, but the attitudes, the prevalence of ecstasy and the fashions were more indicative of what was becoming known as acid house. Oakenfold took the 300-capacity back room at Heaven in November 1987, calling the night ‘Future’. Two friends, Lisa McKay and Nancy Turner, who had been enjoying summer in Ibiza for a couple of years, took the names Lisa Loud and Nancy Noise, and began DJing at Future. ‘You weren’t intimidated, you felt comfortable,’ says Lisa. ‘You weren’t surrounded by inhibitions and barriers and bad attitude.’
Among all London clubs of this era, it’s Shoom that’s most often pinpointed as the one that knocked clubland off its axis and created the blueprint for acid house. It was started by Danny Rampling, along with his wife Jenni, at the end of 1987 in a fitness centre on Southwark Bridge Road, not far from London Bridge Station. The fitness centre didn’t have much going for it, although the nature of the venue and the decor (or lack of it) at least ensured the experience of visiting the club night would be very different to visiting the Wag. But there was more. Rampling was also keen on creating a fun, looser atmosphere different to the trendy West End clubs, with an eclectic and Balearic soundtrack. It was full-on and loud. The strobe light was relentless, and a smoke machine pumped out strawberry-flavoured smoke. Mark Moore describes the club like this: ‘There were these fresh-faced people completely mashed on drugs. It was just chaos; you never knew if the next DJ was actually going to make it for his set.’
Ecstasy, the ‘hug drug’ as it was known, was clearly having a big part to play; behaviour and attitudes were different from what people had previously experienced in clubland. A night at Shoom or Future wasn’t about drinking, trying to chat-up girls; it was about dancing. The clothes the audiences wore – colourful tie-dye, loose T-shirts, Kickers and flares – played havoc with nightclub dress codes and proved a cultural jump too far for some of the established club big cheeses used to more fancy, individual, flamboyant dressers parading their cool rather than losing it. Other people loved what they experienced on their first visit to Shoom, as future member of the Beloved, Helena Marsh, later recalled: ‘That first night was the defining, life-changing moment of my life. All my values, my opinions, everything changed.’
In March 1988 ‘RiP’ (Rave in Peace) was launched in a warehouse on an abandoned Thames-side wharf on Clink Street, close to where the reconstructed Golden Hind is now on show. The DJs – including Kid Batchelor, ‘Evil’ Eddie Richards and Mr C – played unsparing, relentless house and techno to an edgier crowd than the one at Shoom. Ashley Beedle was a regular at the RiP parties and began to DJ in the back room of the venue. ‘The sound was very much a very heavy black sound, very Chicago. There was a lot of ne’er-do-wells down there. A lot of football types, definitely. A lot of rude boys, black kids. But there was no trouble. I think a lot of that was to do with the pharmaceuticals that were going around . . .’
There was a definite change in the Haçienda around February 1988. By this time Graeme Park was DJing every Friday with Mike Pickering. At the Garage in Nottingham, Graeme’s eclectic style had gained a very decent following and he introduced more house into his
playlist. When Graeme moved on to the Haçienda, he was struck by how the playlist was similar, but the atmosphere was more chaotic. He soon realised this was mostly the result of the prevalence of ecstasy in the club. ‘A packed club, everyone going absolutely crazy, but it was only like half past nine or something.’
It’s worth remembering how secret and underground a lot of this activity was – and uncharted. There were no role models, no media coverage, no online videos; people didn’t know how to dance to this music, and no one had laid down laws about what was cool and what wasn’t – it was very liberating. In London, the guys who’d prided themselves on their regular attendance at hot-shot clubs had a big wake-up call. Readers inclined to be dismissive of the notion that acid house triggered a music and cultural revolution are urged to consider the significance of at least two developments. First, acid house challenged not just the notion of dress codes but the belief that an expensive jacket counted for anything. Terry Farley was an ex-Crackers regular who, with others, including Andy Weatherall, had a music, fashion and football fanzine called Boy’s Own. He knew a character called Graham Ball who ran what Farley describes as ‘very, very trendy clubs’. Then Mr Ball visited Shoom with some friends. ‘They were in Gaultier suits one week and next minute they were, like, very spiritual and on one mate,’ says Farley.
As Lisa Loud identified and enjoyed, one feature of these pioneering clubs was that the atmosphere appeared to be more female-friendly than many versions of nightlife. Many discotheques had the reputation of being so-called ‘cattle markets’. Journalist John McCready later described the era like this: ‘It wasn’t like anything you’d ever experienced in a club before. At the Haçienda it was almost as if a generation breathed a sigh of relief, having been relieved of the pressure of the chase. The baggy clothes desexualised the whole environment.’
Perhaps all this and the relaxed style of dressing, as well as the lack of bad attitudes, were responsible for the second undeniable change in these years, other than the Gaultier-related one. I once had a conversation with Nile Rodgers about his first visits to Britain in the 1970s. Apart from recalling the terrible weather, and the weird regional accents, he recalled how in every club he went there were girls dancing round their handbags. Girls stopped dancing round their handbags at the acid house clubs; they danced on podiums, they danced on packed dancefloors, they danced facing the DJ, they danced queuing for the toilets, but they never danced round their handbags.
There had been numerous events like Dirtbox and Shake ’n’ Fingerpop in found spaces and warehouses, but in early 1988 some of these events became specifically ecstasy-driven, including ‘Hedonism’ – illegal warehouse parties in a west London industrial estate, featuring DJs including Colin Faver and Slinkey. Norman Jay had done more than his fair share of house parties and warehouse gigs but he re-evaluated everything after a trip to Hedonism. ‘It made a change to have a warehouse party that had no funky music. In one night, everything that went before it was gone, redundant.’ Some months later he partnered Patrick Lilley and they launched ‘High on Hope’, which, at Dingwalls, featured quality US house DJs on their first visits to the UK, including Tony Humphries and Terry Hunter.
Paul Oakenfold and friends had been hosting Future in the back room of Heaven. Then, in April 1988, Paul took up an offer of a main-room night. It was daunting – a Monday night and a 1,000-plus capacity – but through the efforts of Oakenfold, Ian St Paul and Gary Haisman, Spectrum, as the night was called, was soon packed, pulling people not just from Future, but also Delirium on Thursdays. Oakenfold, arguably, was at his most creative as a DJ, taking chances, creating a night like no other. On one occasion all the lights were switched off and, with the club in darkness, he played an extract from Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
The Soul Mafia were still plying their trade in London and the Southeast and at soul weekenders. But at events like the Prestatyn Soul Weekender in April 1988 it became clear that the older generation of DJs like Chris Hill and Robbie Vincent didn’t relate to the new era. Nicky Holloway, however, embraced it and his adventures as a club promoter continued. At the end of May 1988 he opened the Trip at the Astoria. His timing was just right. A year earlier, Noel and Maurice Watson had tried to convert the Astoria to house music but now, fuelled by features on acid house in i-D and The Face, crowds descended on the club, in dungarees, bandanas and smiley T-shirts.
The gap between the Haçienda as it had been and the Haçienda in the new era kept building week in, week out, and a new night was instigated on Wednesdays. ‘Hot’, launched in the second half of 1988, was the quintessential Summer of Love experience piloted by DJs Mike Pickering and Jon Dasilva. It was like a mini-midweek Ibiza, with a swimming pool next to the dancefloor, and bleepy Detroit techno, airhorns and thunderstorms and pianos filling the air.
Jon Dasilva also took Dean’s place on Saturday nights. Park had joined Pickering. For a while in the middle of 1988 there were just the four of us who DJ’d every week at the club. From that time and for several years afterwards, there was only ever a handful of guest DJs at the Haçienda. Rather than booking them, Paul Cons was always looking at other ways of ramping up the excitement. Thinking a swimming pool in the club every Wednesday maybe wasn’t enough, he would throw some random entertainment into the mix. On one occasion, Cons flew in a contortionist from New York and put her on the stage. It was a Saturday night. I had to stop the music for ten minutes while she tied herself in knots.
Over the last chapters we’ve had examples of music made by people inspired by nights out listening to DJs and bands, and we’ve seen how inspiration might lead to other vocations apart from music-making. When people are inspired to participate and create, then going to clubs moves from being a passive experience to an active one, and the culture takes off. Mark Moore was among those who understood this was important. In 1987 he was given an opportunity to write about the new era in the Virgin Rock Yearbook. ‘Roll on the future when the new wave of British club-goers start turning out their own music.’
His prophecies were on the way to coming true. T-Coy had released ‘Carino’, and various collaborators in Sheffield, including the singer Ruth Joy, had a hit as Krush (‘House Arrest’). Evil Eddie Richards and Mr C (calling themselves Myster E) released the single ‘Page 67’, which – befitting the deep vibe at their RiP parties on Clink Street – was a darker record than ‘Carino’ or ‘House Arrest’. And then there was Mark Moore’s own ‘Theme From S-Express’, which was Number One in April 1988.
In Manchester, a crew into hip hop and electro, calling themselves the Hit Squad, metamorphosed into 808 State, working as a trio: Martin Price of the Eastern Bloc record shop; Graham Massey, who was well known in the city as a member of Biting Tongues; and Gerald Simpson. In January 1988, taking their name from the Roland TR-808 drum machine, they recorded the album Newbuild, which included songs like ‘Narcossa’ and ‘E Talk’, followed by the profound and ground-breaking ‘Pacific State’ single. You can hear the influence of tracks like ‘Open Our Eyes’ by Marshall Jefferson, but ‘Pacific State’ manages to be both full-on and chilled-out; machine-soul with an emotional soprano saxophone melody.
Meanwhile, taking time away from his work with 808 State, Gerald, consciously working out ideas based on what he was hearing at the Haçienda, wrote and recorded ‘Voodoo Ray’. One Wednesday night in the club, he gave Jon Dasilva a near-final mix on a cassette. Jon unleashed it peak-time; the crowd response was so instantly positive, even Gerald was taken aback. Released in a limited run and then later re-released, the single reached Number 12 in the UK charts. In 1995, Gerald remodelled some of the original samples to create ‘Voodoo Rage’ for his Black Secret Technology album, while also including the tracks ‘The Nile’ and ‘The Reno’ in homage to the Moss Side clubs.
By the end of the 1990s, we’d be used to clubbing hours being extended as a result of the liberalisation of licensing laws, but late-night opening at venues like the Reno were a rarity in the 1980s. M
ost clubs back then shut at two, with some in London maybe closing at three. But demand for after-hours events increased, along with frustration that high street clubs in most towns outside the major cities weren’t embracing house music. In places in Lancashire like Blackburn, Nelson and Accrington there were abandoned warehouses and mill buildings – the remnants of the manufacturing industries that had once thrived in those towns – and from the end of 1988 some of these became settings for illegal rave parties, attracting people from the local towns but also the after-hours crowd from Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. In Blackburn, ravers even descended on an old abbatoir.
These illegal raves came with plenty of risks, including to the organisers. Two young men who were particularly active in Blackburn were Tommy Smith and Tony Creft, who were soon hosting parties attended by five or even ten thousand people. The success of their events attracted the notice of professional criminals, who tried to muscle in, and of course from the police. ‘It was beyond the rule of law, beyond anything,’ Drew Hemment, then a DJ, later recalled.
Illegal rave parties were becoming a feature of London nightlife too. ‘Sunrise’ was formed in 1988 by Tony Colston-Hayter and David Roberts. They ran parties dubbed ‘Apocalypse Now’ at Wembley Studios. One visitor was Paul Staines, who had a day job working for the right-wing Adam Smith Institute. ‘The first E I took was at Apocalypse Now at Wembley Studios,’ he later recalled. ‘I thought it was fantastic, I was so out of it, so in love with everybody.’