summer
Trust games at a Tribal rave: ‘You fall back and I’ll catch you... probably!”
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“acid house had arrived: the whole place was day-glo!”
Words Bill Brewster
endless summer
It’s 20 years since the acid house Summer of Love changed the world forever. What happened? Why did it happen? And could it happen again?
The Haçienda: the stuff of legends
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people stopped taking themselves so seriously and learned how to love each other. It was when black and white danced together, gay and straight hung out in the same clubs and the posh and poor called a ceasefire on the class war to dance to daft records by The Woodentops and Chris Rea. It was the year in which the twin alchemical forces of ecstasy and Chicago house were unleashed, with dramatic consequences not just for dance music but for British youth culture as a whole. The second Summer of Love (the name was first coined to describe the original ‘hippie’ youth movement of 1967) began on June 4th 1988 when The Trip opened at the Astoria in Charing Cross. That same week an article documenting the nascent scene was published in i-D magazine. Nicky Holloway’s night was a deliberate to attempt to tap into the buzz created by parties like Shoom, Hedonism and Future. “The Trip was the first place I went to where I felt like everyone was on the same buzz. It was absolutely insane. Lots of the old football hooligans were there and the last time that lot danced was probably to a Beatles record, so to see them really dancing and not giving a damn about it, that’s when I knew it
was something special. I knew it was big. I knew it was going to change my life.” Genesis promoter Wayne Anthony’s reaction may seem dramatic, but it demonstrates the stark contrast between The Trip and how London clubs had been only a few months earlier. “I used to play house at a club called Fever at the Astoria,” explains Mike Pickering. “I got booed off. There were a lot of black guys there and they were shoving notes into my face saying, ‘Stop playing this fucking homo music’. About six months later I played for Nicky Holloway at the Trip, also at the Astoria, and they were all wearing smiley T-shirts, and I was like, ‘wait a minute, what’s going on here…?’” Nicky Holloway, along with Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling and Johnny Walker, had been coaxed over to Ibiza by acid house trailblazer Trevor Fung the previous summer. They had all returned determined to spread the word of this powerful combination of ecstasy, house and Balearic beats. Rampling had launched Shoom, Oakenfold and Fung were involved in Future with Fung’s cousin Ian St Paul, and now Holloway entered the fray. The group returned as acid house and ecstasy evangelists. “We were the best salesmen,” chuckles Walker. “We
Illegal raves were low-rent, but big fun
Pymca, peter j walsh
Up on the hill in the distance, as the bruised bass and hi-hats cut through the evening air, it was as clear as day. A cow was dancing. The cow, part of a nearby herd, had clearly been affected by the music. It twitched its legs rhythmically to one side, and then the other. “That cow’s dancing,” said one of the partygoers. Gradually all 400 dancers stopped and turned to watch. As if magically drawn to the music, the cow steadily began to dance down the hill in their direction; its legs still shonkily wiggling away. As it got nearer it was obvious that the cow wasn’t simply dancing, it was actually jacking, as though gripped by the spirit of Frankie Knuckles. One by one people started getting freaked out by it, until they realised it was a pantomime cow. With Flowered Up’s Barry Mooncult inside it. At the same party, recalls Terry Farley, there was a small lake next to the venue. “These geese came down, a flock of them, through the mist – schhhhhhh! – and all of a sudden everyone started clapping, as though they were acid house geese and we’d trained them.” 1988 was the year of the pantomime cow and acid house geese. 1988 was the year of Kickers, baggy jeans and smiley T-shirts. It was when British
Classic acid house couture at The Trip in 1988
should have been on commission, we’d be millionaires now. Every club we went into, we were like, ‘Have you tried this, it’s unbelievable!’ People saw us running about having a good time and thought, ‘Mmm, that looks interesting; what are they up to?’ Gradually it started to happen.” This spread of joyfulness was in stark opposition to the culture of the day. Some parts of Britain still felt as though they was in the throes of rationing. The grey seemed to cling to buildings and people like moss. Thatcher was in power. A housing slump had been sparked by the 1987 Stock Market crash. Even London’s West End seemed to be largely populated by snotty cliques dressed in Zoot suits, jazz dancing to 1950s bebop. It was easier to get into a nightclub dressed as Louis XIV or Humpty Dumpty than it was in a pair of trainers and jeans. The summer of 1988 was not one big explosion but a series of bush fires breaking out all over the country: Slam in Glasgow, Frenzy in Brighton, Tonka in Cambridge, Bristol’s Vision, Hooch in Edinburgh, The Warehouse in Leeds, The Garage in Nottingham and the Haçienda in Manchester. Sasha, then a wannabe DJ and Haçienda regular, remembers the jarring changes that occurred from spring 1988. “I didn’t go for a couple of months, but when I did, acid house had arrived, and the whole place was day-glo with smiley faces and everyone was doing this trance-dancing. My chin hit the floor. It was just amazing, the energy in the room. The music sounded like it was from another planet. I’d never seen a group of people behave like that before.” Graeme Park, whose reputation had grown dramatically as a champion of house at Nottingham’s Garage, replaced a holidaying Mike Pickering at the Haçienda. “It was the three most incredible weeks I’ve ever had in my life. I was playing the records I’d been playing for the past few months, but getting this unbelievable response. I’d get there at nine in the evening and there’d be a queue, and by ten the club was full and the atmosphere so intense. It was electric. Every time I lit a cigarette, I was worried I was going to make the place ignite.” The term ‘acid house’ was derived from one particular record released the previous year: ‘Acid Tracks’ by Phuture, a trio featuring DJ Pierre, Spanky and Herb Jackson. It was a happy accident august 2008 049
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Wayne Anthony, back in the day
The Trip at The Astoria, ’88
World Dance rave, held in a Surrey field
timeline ’88 050 august 2008
January Pioneering London club Shoom adopts the Smiley face in its flyers and literature
February The first Hedonism rave, a series of free parties in London that were to herald the Summer of Love
Radio Rental at The Trip
April 11 Opening night of Spectrum April 14 The first RIP party, with Mr C
may An article is published in i-D documenting the new scene May 29 The final Hedonism party takes place
June 4 The Trip opens at The Astoria
“I got a rush out of being in The Trip or Camden Palace and seeing thousands of people all together. I thought that if I got involved I’d want to do big ones so we’d all go on this fantastic ride together. My inspiration wasn’t money; I already had a few quid. It was the thrill.” This group of promoters (which also included Jarvis Sandy’s Biology) were the ones who would take acid house overground and into mass acceptance. After few well-received nights under the banner of Apocalypse Now, Colston-Hayter threw his first Sunrise party at Wembley Film Studios. TV cameras came down to film it and a bunch of Shoom die-hards led by Danny Ramping’s then wife and promoter Jenni tried to dissuade people from going in, afraid that their tight-knit scene would soon be diluted and ruined. “It was Shoom’s militant
Wayne Anthony’s first Genesis party was in London’s Aldgate East. “We did it on a shoestring budget. We nicked a load of tarpaulin to cover the windows. Anton The Pirate and [future Kiss FM DJ] Sarah HB helped me decorate the walls with Sarah’s UV nail varnish. The party got stopped early because of the fire alarm in an adjoining building going off. Once I’d done that I knew that that was it: I was hooked. It was almost like a challenge just to do them.” The attentions of the authorities made party promoters much more cautious, so flyers no longer carried venue addresses, just mobile phone numbers (the latest fad among the overpaid). The parties also moved out of the cities where it was easier to outwit the police. Sunrise’s first rural party was at an equestrian centre in Buckinghamshire where Colston-
Shoom, 1988: hot hot heat Breaking down barriers at a Tribal Dance rave near East Grinstead, one of the M25 orbital raves of ’89
“foam poured in a torrent into the old barn. it was fantastic!”
pymca
Nice Wayfarers, shame about the sweatshirt
popular spins for DJ Alfredo in Ibiza, like ‘Shout’ by Tears For Fears, or obscure indie records that had been previously overlooked in the UK, like The Woodentops’ ‘Well Well Well’. Barry White’s ‘It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next To Me’, for very obvious reasons, was popular. “I used to play Jackie Wilson’s ‘Sweetest Feeling’ every week at Spectrum,” laughs Terry Farley. “People would go, ‘That record! Fuckin’ hell, I never realised it was about E!’” Towards the end of the summer, Shoom threw a party on a farm somewhere near Brighton. “It was the most extraordinary thing that I have ever been to,” recalls Jon Marsh, whose band The Beloved had just won a recording contract. “They bussed everybody down, six coaches of people. Somebody with a torch guided us up a path to a big cowshed. It felt like the apotheosis of all of those parties because everybody you’d seen around was there. They’d got some mate of theirs who was in the Fire Brigade to pump the place full of foam. Nobody had seen this done before, and it just poured in a torrent down the middle of this old barn. People were drowning in foam. It was fantastic!” Acid house was not music that invited fence-sitting. There was a burning fervour in the parties that was so rare in the outside world that people’s realities became distorted and refracted through this new phenomenon. “There was a period at Shoom where a group of people was trying to hail me as this new messiah,” recalls Danny Rampling. “It quite frightened me because it became so intense. One guy who opened a page in the Bible and said my name was in this particular paragraph. He was shouting, ‘This is you! This is you! This is what’s happening now!’ And that completely flipped me out.” But those who could cope with this world in which rules melted away and the old society appeared not to exist thrived and were inspired. It threw up so many possibilities. Suddenly, if you declared that you were going to make a record or invade Luxembourg or open a wind farm, no-one questioned you. Among the people profoundly affected by it were future rave promoters like Tony Colston-Hayter, who had discovered acid house through Shoom, and Genesis promoter Wayne Anthony:
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wrought out of the Roland TB-303, a bassline machine originally designed to accompany solo guitarists. As DJ Pierre recalls, “I started turning the knobs up and tweaking it and they were like, ‘Yeah, I like it, keep doing what you’re doing.’ We did just that, made a beat to it, and the rest is history.” ‘Acid Tracks’ is little more than a kick drum and out-of-control bass oscillations meandering wildly all over the track, but its effect was stunning and it spawned hundreds of imitations, several of which were banned by the BBC, who had swiftly become jittery about the word ‘acid’ in so many titles. The first record to be banned was Jolly Roger’s ‘Acid Man’, produced by house pioneer ‘Evil’ Eddie Richards (it still reached the top 30), while D Mob’s faintly dim ‘We Call It Acieed’ reached a somewhat improbable No 3. But many of the records played under the colours of acid house were neither acid nor house. Many were revived pop records that had been
wing,” quips Danny. The ensuing TV report showed clubbers buying pills, alongside a damning report by a London University academic which claimed that a bad trip on ecstasy was worse than anything experienced on LSD. The honeymoon period was over. Prior to this the attitude of both press and police had been benign; The Sun even sold acid T-shirts. “When we did one of the early Boys Own parties,” remembers Terry Farley. “The police came up and said, ‘What time are you finishing?’ We said, ‘Er…. Eleven?’ ‘Alright then,’ they said. ‘See you, lads!’ A year later they were using truncheons!” Now police were actively raiding parties, spurred on by tabloid headlines fingering Colston-Hayter as the “Acid House King” and promoter of an “Evil Night of Ecstasy”. While it may have killed off the early purism of the first parties, the tabloids did act as a recruiting sergeant for the raves, which became the focal point of 1989. “I remember going home to see my mum,” says Trevor Fung. “She said, ‘Trev, you don’t do any of these drugs and play music to these crazed people do you?’ ‘No, come on mum, don’t be so stupid,’ I said. At that same time there was a news story about acid house and they focused in on the disc jockey and I’m standing there DJing…”
July 1988 The death of 19-year-old Ian Larcombe is the first recorded ecstasy death in Britain
Hayter had told them he was throwing a garden party (he gave them £500 for their troubles). Steve Proctor played and Andrew Ridgeley turned up and insisted on paying to get in. After Proctor had played Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ as his last tune at 8am, a farmer appeared. “We were sitting there cross-legged and plaiting each other’s hair and singing and dancing,” Colston-Hayter’s sister Charlie told writer Sheryl Garratt in her book Adventures In Wonderland. “It Stacking boxes: The Trip in ’88
August The Sun publishes its ‘Scandal of £5 trip to Heaven’ exposé Tony Colston-Hayter throws his first Apocalypse Now party
September 10 Jolly Roger’s ‘Acid Man’ enters the charts
October 8 The first Sunrise party October 15 ‘We Call It Acieed’ charts October 24 The BBC bans records that mention ‘acid’
November 4 Operation Seagull targets acid parties. Police raid two boat parties in Greenwich, making 18 arrests. Organisers are later sentenced to 10 and six years for ‘conspiring to manage premises where drugs were supplied’
December 28 The year ends with a huge Genesis/ Sunrise New Year party for 4-5,000 people, a harbinger of the next few years of mega-raves across the country. The underground is now overground
august 2008 051
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pymca,
they went on to drive dance music for the next 15 years was beautiful sunshine, birds singing, dew on everything and it was sparkling and wonderful, a new day. All of a sudden a tractor came round the corner. This bloke had probably driven that tractor round that corner every day for 45 years, and now he’s hit by bedlam. Boys and girls in tie-dye, dancing with flowers in their hair. You should have seen his face.” Wayne Anthony saw the year out in conjunction with Tony Colston-Hayter, when the pair joined forces to throw Genesis/Sunrise. The party stretched out over most of the Christmas and New Year period. “That was one of the best parties I’ve been to in my life,” reflects Rob Acteson, resident DJ at the nearby Dungeons. “They did Christmas Day, Boxing Day and the 27th. Then they had 28th to 30th off and did New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. The police didn’t touch it. Amazing.” The Summer of Love impacted on relatively few people, but they were the ones who went on to drive dance music for the next fifteen years: DJs, promoters, producers (and drug dealers). Its shockwaves were still being felt nearly 10 years later when it rippled out into the corporate world. The Post Office took acid house as a cue, when it adopted ‘Sorted’ as its slogan. Dance music became the soundtrack to everything. When D:Ream’s house tune ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ was adopted in 1997 as the Labour Party’s election anthem, it seemed fitting that the music of this new community was helping to boot out of power the Tory party and their disheartening view that ‘there is no such thing as society’.
London’s gurning: Trip at The Astoria Stairway to heaven: Shoom, ’88
could the summer of love happen again?
Dancing at dawn became the norm
www.mixmag.net
Maybe we’re in a summer of love already. There are well over 50 dance music festivals in the UK alone this summer, which means it’s likely that far more people are dancing in British fields than at any time in history. The environment has changed, of course. Ravers are no longer considered outlaws – today’s sanitised, controlled, ‘boutique’ festivals are tolerated, even welcomed, by the locals and more often than not ‘supported’ by a clutch of corporate sponsors. Maybe the powers that be decided that it was better to have ravers inside the (dance) tent pissing out. It may be infuriating sometimes that the revolution has been co-opted, televised and used to sell everything from mobile phones to beer (OK, and magazines) but maybe it means the battle has been won – now you can stay up all night dancing without stigma or repression.
Maybe the events of 1988 changed things here to the extent that there is no need for it to happen again – at least not in the same way. The UK in 2008 is certainly not perfect, but neither is it the fractured, tribal society of the 1980s. There is, arguably, less to push against now. There’s certainly less of a generational gap – look at the range of ages who read Mixmag, or who marched against the Iraq war, or who have daft haircuts. The internet and a sensation-hungry media mean that scenes have little time to develop and grow – if Shoom happened today it would be chewed up and spat out by the Sunday papers’ style supplements by the next morning. Perhaps most importantly of all, there are no new drugs, like the contraceptive pill and acid in 1967, or ecstasy in 1988, to fuel a new movement. But that’s not to say that the energy of the Summer of Love is lost to us forever. It’s said by many that the tyranny of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime in Serbia was overthrown in the end not just by NATO intervention or EU sanctions, but also by a protest movementcum-party that has since become the Exit Festival. Perhaps the next Summer of Love will happen in China, or Uzbekistan, or wherever needs it most. Maybe we should relax and enjoy what we’ve got right now, but be ready. We might just be needed again. Duncan Dick
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Tripping the light fantastic at The Astoria in London, 1988 One love, bruv, at The Trip
Danny Rampling at Shoom, 1988
It’s good to talk Talk to promoters who’ve done something similar, both on forums and directly. Most people will be glad to help and share ideas – and warnings of potential banana skins.
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first,find your field… Fancy kicking off your own Summer of Love? If you dream of throwing a rave or festival in 2008 then take our advice...
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Find a likely site Give the local council’s licensing department a ring to identify whether your target field is council or privately owned. If not, visit www. landregistry.gov.uk to pinpoint the owner. If it’s private, negotiate with the landowner and you won’t need to apply for a license. If councilowned, you will need to agree on a hire fee and purchase a Temporary Event Notice (£30), entitling you to sell alcohol and host musical acts on public land. To turn your rave into an out-and-out festival (with more than 500 attendees), you must apply for a full licence as a limited company, advertise in local papers, be OK’d by
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the head of the local police and have your proposal considered by a licensing committee. Phew. Check your bassbins The 1999 ‘Pop Code’ legislation states that until 11pm music should be heard at a maximum of 65 decibels in the nearest back garden, and just audible thereafter. The government also recommends a limit of 1KW per 100 attendees. An Environmental Health Officer will undertake a noise risk assessment but will also monitor noise levels at the event, which will dictate your start and finish times. “A sell-out festival with amazing acts and production can be completely ruined by low sound restrictions,” says hard dance don Alex Kidd, organiser of Kiddstock. His solution is to hold a daytime festival: music can be louder and restrictions looser than at night.
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Safety first As little as one steward per 100 party-goers is recommended by law, but when deciding on a security company, make sure they have rave experience and expect to pay about £15-22 an hour per steward. An ambulance with at least two staff is recommended for clumsy revellers. Cost: approx £400. Call 08700 10 49 50 to be put through to your nearest St John Ambulance.
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Round the bend The government recommends at least one portaloo per 100 people. www.toptoilets.co.uk charge approximately £65 per unit.
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Now the hard part The choice of line-up, publicity, organisation and financial risk we leave up to you. Remember to let us know so we can list it for you!
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pymca
Girls had previously dominated the dancefloors of mainstream British discos while boys stood around like lemons at the edges. What acid house did was bring everyone together. Male awkwardness was banished by this new wonder drug; dancefloors became integrated; acid house warped our cultural vista. Anything was possible: gas fitters became remixers, drug dealers became promoters, public schoolboys became DJs. “I don’t think I could have become a journalist if it wasn’t for dance music,” confesses former Mixmag editor Dom Phillips. “I don’t have a degree. A lot of people were like that. Some of the people who made records might have been in prison, yet they were able to produce incredible sounds from inside their heads. I don’t think Sasha would’ve been a pop star. He would’ve worked in a clothes shop or something.” After the Summer of Love, boys learned to make friends with girls, straights hung out with gays, blacks danced next to Asian and white kids. We found out the similarities were greater than the differences. Wayne Anthony believes that ecstasy, in particular, had a profound effect on our culture, and especially for men: “It was the first time we were able to break away from the conditioning of our fathers and our environment. We were conditioned to be homophobic. We were conditioned to protect our emotions. It was a huge release for men to be able to express themselves. It would have taken decades of race awareness campaigns to bring us all together. MDMA did more for multiculturalism than anything the government has ever done.” Suddenly, thanks to some silly noises emanating from a Roland 303, we were no longer lonely. www.djhistory.com
Natalie Odell
www.mixmag.net