SAMPLE CHAPTER

Acid House: I've Lost Control
(from Last Night A DJ Saved My Life)

The night your mate danced like a tree.

The night the whole club thought they’d been up in a spaceship.

The night you met all the people who are now your best friends.

The night everyone’s name was Doug.

The night you gave away your Gucci boots ‘cos they were annoying you.

The night it was all about being underwater.

The night you thought you’d lost everybody but they were just hiding.

The night you danced in a car park.

The night you gave up trying to get promoted.

The night you decided to make clothes instead.

The night we stroked people’s hair for drinks.

The night you talked about losing your dad and cried and finally understood.

The night you twisted your ankle but didn’t tell anyone in case they made you go home.

The night everyone ended up in Chester – speaking in Scottish accents.

Fun.

Suddenly it was important.

Acid house was when Britain shook off the grey dust it had been wearing since the war. A nation built on acceptance and duty started asking a few questions. Though there weren’t many answers, it started to be a very different place. There’d been plenty of sunny moments before, but none as weirdly, disruptively, creatively universal. In the sixties you could tune in, turn on, and drop out, but only if you were a hip photographer or if daddy kept up the rent on the King’s Road flat. This time, a voyage of discovery was opened up to nearly everyone. Gas fitters became record producers, market traders launched fashion labels, cooks started magazines; and all over the country boys and girls stopped wanting to grow into cool, successful Armani-suited adults, and settled gleefully for being boys and girls. At the tail end of a decade which had been about greed and shoulder-pads and black marble office blocks, along came a youth culture of smiley faces and togetherness and talking bollocks. Like puppies tumbling around the garden, we found the best way to learn about our world was to play. It taught us a lot we might have missed otherwise – most importantly that while the things that make people different are pretty fucking obvious, the things we all have in common aren’t that hard to find either.

If you’re reading this in Britain you live in an acid house shaped world. If you’re under 30 you need to know how shit it was before. Pubs closed at 11, bars didn’t exist except for wine bars full of yuppies whining, clubs kicked out at two – if you were lucky. Recreational drugs didn’t go much further than booze, speed and weed, and the latter two were usually tricky or scary to buy. We didn’t even have Red Bull for god’s sake. And clubbing was far from the accessible mainstream thing it is today – the dance cultures in previous chapters were largely the preserve of music-obsessed weirdos; ordinary people had Cinderella Rockerfella’s. Finally, if you lived anywhere other than a major city, none of this applies, because the only entertainment going was eight pints of Watney’s Red and a fight. Your world is the way it is because 20 years ago a generation made clubbing the centre of their lives.

Acid house was cultural revolution. You couldn’t fully understand today’s Britain without knowing the changes it brought. As Margaret Thatcher swept away the post-war community ideal and replaced it with the free market and its cult of selfish individualism, here was a youth movement that proposed the opposite. Here was music that meant little unless you shared it, and a drug that reminded its users that humanity’s greatest achievements are social. A drug that took away the fear of others, that eased communication and made scared, lonely people step happily into each other’s lives. A drug that was nearly called ‘empathy’.

Strictly speaking, ‘acid house’ refers to a few records made using the distinctive mewlings of a distressed Roland 303 bassline machine, the productions of the Chicago kids who were looking to the future rather than merely reheating disco. After Phuture’s ‘Acid Tracks’ set the mould, a bleeping flurry of similar records followed, both imported and UK-made. However, with most listeners ignorant of any distinctions, ‘acid house’ was soon shorthand for house, techno and even Balearic tunes as a whole. The acid records were the name-makers because they were the weirdest of the lot, the tunes most likely to upset your parents, and because they held that all-important drug reference (even though it was the wrong drug).

So while ‘acid house’ began as a specific musical sub-genre, in Britain it became a blanket name for this new electronic dance music, and then for the whole culture this ushered in when it joined forces with ecstasy.

For the majority who tried it, the ecstasy/house combination brought intense feelings of freedom and communion. After this powerful epiphany a generation began to redefine itself around the emotions and etiquette of the dancefloor. When this experience became mainstream, these new nightlife rules swept Britain clean and ‘An Englishman’s castle’ became ‘All back to mine’. For a country based on division (of class, of geography, of race, of accent, of football team), the acid house experience – dancing with thousands of smiling friends you’d never met before – was genuinely revolutionary. Acid house was nothing less than a defining era of British social history.

Musical meteorites

The first explosion was loud, alien, devastating. It was the sound of hip hop announcing its British arrival: ‘Rappers’ Delight’, Flash’s ‘Adventures On The Wheels Of Steel’, Kurtis Blow, Tanya Winley, Funky Four, and most radical of all, the stark electro of ‘Planet Rock’.
DJ Maurice Watson was hit square in the chest by the blast: ‘Blew me away. What the fuck?!’ On hearing Flash’s ‘Adventures...’ his brother Noel jumped on a plane to New York to buy records, unable to do anything else until he understood more about this music. Matt Black of Coldcut, DJ and UK house pioneer was similarly stunned, ‘It just blew apart conceptions of what a song should be like. It was so far out, so radical.’

‘Everyone was completely like... “Oh my god, what is this?” ‘ recalls Dave Dorrell, DJ and another early UK house producer. ‘Rap, hip hop, was way beyond anything that you were accustomed to, or able to comprehend. It was a foreign language. What are these people doing? How do they do this? And what would it be like to see them doing it? It had just arrived here, and it was causing mayhem. Devastation. All of a sudden it was like, “How can we get more of this drug?”'

The second impact, a few years later, came from house. Another alien musical language, equally explosive – ‘Jack Your Body’ and ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’, ‘Acid Tracks’, ‘I’ve Lost Control’, ‘Nude Photo’, ‘Your Love’, ‘Move Your Body’...

‘House just had a phenomenal impact,’ says Black. ‘Even straight away you realized that here was a new kind of music. As soon as you heard it you realized that here was a new form of energy that had materialised.’

This wasn’t just the latest batch of hot tunes from the States. This was a new dawn. This was music that belonged to the disc jockey as never before, envisaged, created and produced by the DJ, with little regard for musical traditions, and with the sole purpose of shaking up the dancefloor. As these new forms arrived in the UK they shocked club culture to its foundations.

Hip hop immediately drew a thick, inky line between the open-minded who – even though they didn’t understand it – still got excited by its slaughtered beats, and the diehards in Blues And Soul who screamed ‘This isn’t music,’ who couldn’t believe the chiselling sound of scratching was rhythm, or that rhyme could replace singing. They didn’t get it; they just couldn’t find its soul.

And house? House was even more divisive. House upset established taste so much that DJs were abused, threatened, even attacked, for introducing it to British dancefloors. The brave few who began playing it quickly realised they were handling something truly incendiary. Dave Dorrell remembers the first three acid house records he got his hands on – Phuture’s ‘Acid Tracks’, and Armando’s ‘Frequency’ and ‘Land Of Confusion’. As soon as he played them, he knew how powerful this music would be.

‘It was like a caveman with a spaceship. In the world of music, acid house was so far out there that it was beyond anything. There were no direction signs.’ Not only did they clear the floor, but these records kept it empty for a full 30 minutes, even as the human pressure on the edges of the dancefloor grew to breaking point. Finally, he gave in and played them something they knew. ‘I had to play, I think, “Across The Tracks”, and they literally ran onto the dancefloor. I thought, boy, this music is going to do something.’

© Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, 2006