Michael Cook – a tribute

Cookie Monster, Mickey Love, Count Cookula, Mickey Particular, Bedward, Captain Cocinero, me dad, The Grumpy DJ, The Hairy Cornflake… (and possibly a few more). Nobody gets that many nicknames without being either an evil mastermind or an unusually warm human being. Michael Cook was both. On the evil side, his humour could lacerate – like his Glastonbury T-shirt: “JUGGLING IS SHIT”. Or signing up to 4chan just to troll nazis (relentlessly); Or supporting Palestine Acton. Or punching you at 11am on a two-day bender because you won’t do another line. If shit got serious he was not a man to be crossed. Hell hath no fury like a Cookie scorned. Uncompromising.

On the warmth side of the ledger, he was alarmingly kind. Moral, generous and loving. Warm-hearted with every drop. Always happy to give up his time or advice, to send you a track, install a dodgy dongle, tune up your skateboard or rescue a hard drive. He’d give you as long as it took, although there would be grumbling.

Michael gave his life to music. His passion flamed on as a kid hearing Led Zeppelin stoned on fat seventies headphones, and he never looked back. His foundational tastes weighed towards the deep and the awkward: Beefheart, Can, dark dub and dirty house, but he was truly omnivorous and could stitch together an impeccable R&B mix like his 2005 “Some Girls Might”, a Big Chill cool-down like his brilliantly named “Podcarsed” (frequency: “When I can be arsed”), or a deep-cut reggae selection fine enough for Don Letts to tip his hat to, as easily as he could rock Sancho Panza at Carnival, or slay with a stonking off-the-deep-end house set at Low Life.

His superskill was a sense of occasion. When people praise a DJ they often remember particular sets, but with Michael it’s more precise. He gave you moments. It’s staggering how many people recall him playing a particular track on a particular night, or giving them a song that stayed with them all their life. He was a huge influence on younger DJs because he showed them taste. He could turn a dancefloor round with a single brilliantly chosen record, then lead you wherever he wanted through the power of selection.

I’ll never forget when he carefully built a whole Mexican New Year’s Eve up to an explosive airing of the DFA mix of Gorillaz’ “Dare”, milking every second from its crazily relentless distortions. Or meandering chuggily up to the bombshell of Booka Shade’s “Body Language” in the bunker at Low Life – the first time anyone in the room had heard it. Dropping William Orbit’s “Water From a Vine Leaf” at Big Chill to introduce Roisin Murphy, that fat bassline slaying a field of sunshine. Or closing his set at Low Life’s “Law and Order” party with the incendiary original of “I Fought The Law”. He was always early with new monsters and he put in the thought to make great tracks count. He could sweep you along for hours in ten different genres then knock you for six with a weapon new to the world. Sensitive, deep, generous and complicated, the music and the man.

He had the same attitude to life: Michael lived to cultivate moments and he came prepared, a boy scout for fun. He made sure to have the implements to make the mischief go better. A Swiss party knife with a killer quip, a dark pun and an evil smile; his Big Flask of absinthe and lemonade (the cloudy kind) and a pharmacopeia to rival Hunter Thomson’s. To kickstart special occasions he would hand you a two-shot of tequila con verdita, a complicated juice made to his exacting recipe. At Glastonbury he once pitched two tents, one backstage in hospitality and one as a quiet crash pad over towards Shangri-La. He loved careful preparation if it might encourage a bit more laughter and naughtiness.

Best known in the UK as a big-hitting festival DJ and stalwart of party collectives Low Life and Sancho Panza, Michael’s DJ career took off – with a bang – in Los Angeles. In October ’86 he left Manchester and took his skateboard to LA, only to see acid house kick off back home. Realising his slip-up he decided to import the vibe, adding Deadhead LSD and dayglo paint, and became pivotal in building the west coast rave scene. He’d been DJing indie, industrial and electro before he left and with his genuine MCR credentials became one of the biggest names there, DJing at phenomenal desert raves, private islands, movie star’s houses and Indian reservations: Alice’s House, Moonshine, Double Hit Mickey, Truth, Dream, Paw Paw Patch, Narnia & Gilligan’s Island, as well as hosting Los Angeles’ first underground dance radio show on KXLU with Jason Bentley. In 1990 he brought the Happy Mondays, Adamski and A Guy Called Gerald over for their first left coast gig, at the Hollywood Palladium (808 State were originally meant to join). He was tour DJ for 808 State, Happy Mondays, Gotan Project, Thievery Corporation and many others, and his mixes were a fixture of the early days of Ibiza Sonica. In later years, Brazil and Mexico became second homes. Cookie, always a talented sunbather, played for several seasons in Rio, and in Rob Garza’s club, La Santanera in Playa del Carmen.

He DJed backstage behind the Pyramid at Glastonbury for many years. And I joined him for a lot of them. This was back in the glory days, when Pete and Kate would stumble through in green wellies and Jarvis would be making shapes on the floor. I remember Dot Cotton gracing my dancefloor, and paper cups of tea with Will Young. But as ever, Michael had the more spectacular story. He was dancing there, high as the sky, when “Blue Monday” came on, giving him an ecstatic moment he thought couldn’t get much better. Then through his blurry vision he spotted a pretty girl dancing beside him. She caught on to his bliss and danced closer. It was Kate Moss. 

One of the sets of my life was playing eighteen hours together there on the wettest Glastonbury ever, after an all-nighter at Windings Lake Farm. Reasoning the booth was the dryest place we had access to, we started playing at 8am on the Friday and went through til 2am on Sat. Playing to the bedraggled-but-up-for-it meant we could keep the energy slow and low and still make it ferocious. Michael was never better.

His recorded output was written largest in a pre-streaming age. His impeccable mix CDs abound. His edit of Blondie’s “Rapture” is truly definitive, a ten-minute meditation on an already great track. But his dub of The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” is a stone classic, played and praised by the great and the good, and used as a hymn for at least one wedding. Completists should note his brief career as a lead singer. Deadpan Tractor were Huddersfield’s answer to The Birthday Party; they supported Sonic Youth and played a miners’ benefit. Their 1985 “Grumble” EP includes a brilliantly gravelly cover of Captain Beefheart’s “Big Eyed Beans From Venus”.

Skating was an important part of Michael, the reason he went to LA. He was already riding vert, sponsored by Alva, when he left the UK in ’86, to hook up with the Z-Boys. Very few over-30s look good on a skateboard, but Michael flowed like water into his 62nd year, right until his myalgia put an end to it this past summer. Ever the urethane evangelist, he would drag a bunch of geriatric newbies onto longboards to bomb down the hill in Finsbury Park. He’d watch the weather forecast like a hawk and when the tailwind was perfect would call us to order.

He met Prince, he DJed Madonna’s birthday, he lived in a Frank Gehry house on Venice Beach next to Dennis Hopper. He drank with Mark Smith. Shaun Ryder gave him his first pill.

He was a devoted United fan, and watched their post-Fergie fall with good humour, but would rage at the cluelessness of their many managers. The last few years he was consistently number one in an obscure league for guessing the starting line-up. Their first match after his death they turned over a 1-0 deficit to win against Crystal Palace. Michael is clearly now pulling some strings.

He soundtracked the human body in the Millennium Dome, he ran a music for film company M62 and sound design studio in Fitzrovia. He had a long residency at The Player in Soho, and programmed music for retail stores and fashion shows, including several for Joseph. He was musical director for the Street Feast group, where he continued playing incredible four-hour sets, never repeated, two, sometime three times a week for many years. All fed by days and days sifting new music. Musically, he was in his element here, playing a wild melange of wonderfully well-chosen tunes, from background to peak. If these sets had been streamed or even recorded, they would have been an incredible body of work.

But sadly they weren’t, and his audience was more interested in their pulled pork, so this often thankless residency served drip by drip to alienate him from the music he loved, and precipitated a dramatic departure from DJing. For several years, in typical Michael scorched-earth fashion, he banished music from his life entirely.

His big heart worked in colour, but his brain ran in spirals. This combo worked brilliantly most of his life, but started tripping him up when the world turned insane. He saw civilisation as a battle between empaths and psychopaths, and he took a front row seat to watch it falling to the psychos. While the rise of small-dick fascists gave his mates a steady stream of caustic commentary and hilarious shadenfreude, it didn’t endear him to the future.

He rallied in the summer and fell back in love with music, although he still refused Bill and my many requests to DJ again. He doggedly continued living a southern Californian lifestyle on the beaches of Stoke Newington, but the skies turned grey and the nights drew in. Last time we hung out we watched the Butthole Surfers’ movie and in typical Cookie-Zelig style, after watching them on screen throwing one of the most deranged gigs of their career at a festival in Amsterdam, he told me his band had opened for them that night.

The sad, sad news he has left us should be seen in light of his many dimensions of pain. If you knew him well in recent years, you’ll understand it was neither a surprise nor a tragedy. As stubborn as a mule, for Michael it was the only way. He knew people loved him, his friends did everything we could to help him outrun his demons. But after some harsh kicks in the teeth in his last month he decided he’d run out of road and carved off into sky. Mickey Particular has finally found peace and a good night’s sleep.

He was my big brother. He’d lived several lifetimes before I met him, and carried on full throttle with us through several more. His raspberries to our baby girl, his snowboard leading me and Paul into the powder, watching Arthur Lee in the sun in the sixties together, playing Sa Trinxa on Bill’s 50th, 4am in Cheshunt lakes waiting for the northern lights. I’m so grateful to have swung into his mighty gravitational pull for a quarter century of adventures, learning from his music, his tan, his chilis, his joy, his humility, his olympic sarcasm and his bull-headed savoir faire. Love you Cookie.

Frank Broughton

Thanks’s to Cookie’s innate modesty, we’d known him for several years before we realised how central he had been to the Californian rave scene. A full six years after the first edition of Last Night A DJ Saved My Life came out, Frank sat down with Michael and his extensive flyer collection.

Interviewed by Frank in London 16.8.05

I moved to LA in October 86. Not long after I got there I met Randy Moore who I credit with starting the whole acid and rave movement in Los Angeles. He got together with this guy Mr Kool-Aid and myself. There were a lot of Loft parties with acid house music and weirdness and stuff that were the forebears, all done by these guys Randy Moore and Steve Ennis who DJed as Mr Kool-Aid. I met them both when I was working in Bleecker Bob’s record store on Melrose Avenue. It was starting to sell some acid and house records, and these guys used to come and shop there. Randy was from Chicago but had been living in LA for a while and in ’87 had been to London and hung out with Oakenfold and Mark Moore. Sextasy was pretty much the first acid house event in LA, which was 1987. Then Alice’s House in 1989. which was really the first serious rave style party.

So there was a British influence, even though Randy was from Chicago?
Oh yeah, absolutely. Personally, I’d left Manchester just at the ideal time not to leave Manchester. With impeccable timing, I ended up in entirely the wrong place at the right time. I was going to the Haçienda fairly religiously for years before I left. Pickering was starting to play a lot of house and acid stuff before I left. Which I wasn’t particularly into at the time. I was more of a hip hop and funk fan; my background was indie into hip hop into everything else. The house thing I wasn’t particularly enamoured of it until a friend sent me a tape of his favourite acid house records and I necked acid one day [laughs] and really got into it. Personally I was trying to help create, be part of something that I was hearing about back in London.

You knew there was something going on and you wanted to see…
…if we could make something similar happen there.

Did you go to his first party?
Yeah. I think there were about 40 people. It was in a little bar type club. There were lots of other interesting parties around that time. OAP started, which was this guy Solomon, a DJ called Steve LeClair.

You reckon this was the first?
First house party that I’m aware of. But of course there was a strong gay scene, and people mixing house into that, but it didn’t really take off with the west cost gay crowd for quite a while, they were still very much into hi-energy. OAP was much more a funk and hip-hop style vibe.

Any visuals?
Very little. Just strobes and fog machines.

So, focused on the music?
Yeah.

And drugs? Were there Es down there?
They weren’t that widely available. I know they were around. But hard to get. So for the very earliest parties it was acid, that was what people took. They’d heard about acid house and they assumed you were supposed to take acid. The ecstasy thing filtered in about ’88-’90 I guess. When it became more widely available. I didn’t do ecstasy until that Mondays tour. Shaun Ryder gave me my first pill. And it was certainly available before then. I could have taken it but I just didn’t fancy it.

People took the name literally from the scene in the UK and thought it was about LSD?
I think a lot of people did. The people involved on the scene, the DJs and promoters were certainly aware that the drug that people were taking in the UK was ecstasy, but I think a lot of the punters had just heard the term, and were kind of intrigued. Certainly a lot of the parties that myself and Randy and Steve Ennis were involved with had very trippy names and visuals. A lot of them would have a paint room. A fluorescent paint room, black lights with pots of day-glo paint in it, and people would paint each other.

Naked?
Not necessarily naked but by 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning, essentially everybody in the party, whether they wanted paint on them or not, had paint either all over their clothes, their faces or whatever.

I guess acid is a very much a west coast staple.
Yeah. Very quickly after, it became an ecstasy scene as well. And a lot of mushrooms. The whole vibe of it in LA was very psychedelic visually.

Did much come of these events?
That begat a lot of things. The 40 people at that early party became quite focal, whether they were promoters or club kids. There were a lot of wacky characters around that became the centre of this ever-expanding scene. It’s amazing how quickly it happened really. From a little club holding 40 people struggling to pay for itself, to Alice’s House which was maybe a thousand people. It only ran for about six shows, which I think were monthly – but they could have been weekly, I don’t recall.

They were big outside things?
No, they were in a venue called La Casa in downtown LA. That party scene grew up around downtown because a lot of people were living down there. Steve Ennis was living in a loft on 7th Street. They were essentially rent parties. This is all in the downtown area of LA, the old meatpacking area. There were never any police around, never anybody there after 7 or 8 o’clock at night, except homeless people, so you could get away with murder. We were breaking into abandoned warehouses and throwing parties there. And the police just weren’t that interested. For at least the first year and a half there were all these fairly small illegal parties, holding 300 to 500 people, never got bothered. Make it safe, make it so people couldn’t sneak in. Charge $5 on the door, put a sound system in there. Very renegade.

What’s the chronology here?
That was all happening in ’88 and ’89. Alice’s House in 1989 was the first time we’d done anything that was overground, because that was a rented venue where it was supposedly legal for us to throw parties. After Alice’s House a lot of people hired that place and for a couple of years it was rave central. It was a community building with a huge hall on the ground floor, and lots of meeting rooms, in a very run down part of LA. Just on the fringe of downtown.

And you DJed in New York around ’91, at Limelight?
That was horrible. Really fucking hardcore. Pogoing.

Did you have much connection with what was going on in San Francisco?
There really wasn’t that much going on in San Fran. I started getting SF gigs myself I would guess around 1990 or ’91, I think Tonka started doing stuff around that same time. But the SF thing definitely came after those initial things in LA. I had a monthly residency at the 1015, on 1015 Folsom. from around 1990. There were a few American kids doing one-off raves around there in 1990, ’91. This was before Garth and Jeno and those guys arrived [Wicked Crew].

How big were these early parties?
Initially the scale, the number of punters you could expect was tiny. The first parties I was doing, Alice’s House was the first to do around a thousand people.

What was the demographic?
It was totally mixed. The interesting thing was that at the beginning in LA it was about 50% gay and 50% straight. But fairly quickly the raves became a lot more macho and the music got a lot harder. For me the golden time was ’89 to ’91 when it was a real mixture of different people. But slowly the gay crowd stopped coming. They always made it more entertaining, more flamboyant. And it got younger. Initially I’d be 23, and most of the people there were the same age as me or older. And then over the next two years you’d see more 18, 19-year-olds, and even 12-year-olds at the raves.

The candy ravers.
The thing with Alice’s, there were all these little warehouse parties, thrown together, a lot of dry ice and a lot of strobes and not much else, but Randy had fantastic production ideas, just stuff he couldn’t afford. The guy that made Alice’s possible, was an entrepreneur and slumlord called Joel whose surname I can’t remember, this guy fronted the money for Alice’s house. And he lost money cos the production value was so high.

What did you do?
Just a lot of lights. And lasers and projections. Projections were a very big part of the early scene, just crazy stuff.

What sprang up from there?
Randy and Steve carried on doing parties. Then a little after Alice’s House there was Moonshine, which was the Levy brothers, who then did Truth at a place called the Plaza in downtown LA, which were more overground. The weird thing was, to do it legally was impossible if you didn’t have money, ’cos of venue prices, so that’s when it started moving to warehouses. Or you’d get dodgy real estate agents who would rent you a house they were supposedly selling, without their clients knowing. They’d be creaming some money off for renting these, sometimes quite luxurious Malibu mansions.

Did you play any?
Yeah, lots of them. Very druggy. All kinds of stuff going on behind closed doors. They were fantastic.

What existed before all this. The LA club scene?
There was a club called Power Tools, really well known, indie and industrial with occasionally a bit of hip hop, which was kind of the background I came from. That’s what I was mixing before I came to LA. There were also lots of very small, arty party events. Gallery owners would throw parties on a Saturday night and you’d turn up and there’d be a punch containing varying degrees of acid and whatever else they’d got. They were great parties, and that was all happening beforehand. A guy called Gary Blitz was doing a lot more industrial stuff, mostly in Orange County. There was a real convergence of all these different scenes: the gay scene, the industrial scene and OAP which was much more white, funk…

Sort of rare groovey?
Yeah.

Did they switch to being more ravey?
The promoters changed. It seemed like everybody was copying the Alice’s style. Certainly of visual presentation, not necessarily musically, but after Alice’s it started to grow quite quickly. The numbers got up to 3000 and you would start getting events out in the desert or out in weird places. There were a couple of parties in water parks which were great. Once you started getting bigger numbers, around 3000 there were people who saw there was a lot of money to be made, especially if you linked the party with selling the drugs. There was a transition between Alice’s and the early part of ’91, and it was all a very, very friendly scene. Everybody was very helpful to each other. Then you started getting a lot more competing parties on a Saturday night, with not so nice people fronting the money for them. It degenerated quite quickly to where rival promoters were calling the fire marshals. That started happening around ’91.

We got a lot of Latin kids coming to the party, who were great. DJs like Joe Curl, lots of lovely Mexican kids, but then the people who ran the drugs in those areas started getting into it and would be putting the money up for various promoters who had suddenly come onto the scene, and they would likely be the ones who called the fire marshals. It was quite a pure movement until ’91, then all of sudden there were lots of people trying to outdo each other. It got quite childish quite quickly. The kiddie rave thing hit, the themes of the parties…

Where did that come from?
I don’t know.

It was the same in New York. Were they seeing pictures from London and getting the wrong end of the stick?
Very quickly people started to latch onto themes. Another promoter from Orange County, Les Borsie, always seemed to come up with themes, quite funny at the time. Steve Ennis did Double Hit Mickey, based on Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse on drugs, so that cartoony and childlike element came into it from that. The younger element, if they were going to a party with a name like that they wanted to dress the part. There was a guy called Daven who called himself The Mad Hatter, and he did a lot of childlike themed parties. He even got married at his own rave. Did the Mad Hatter’s tea party. People did a lot of artwork. Cut-out stuff and painted stuff. There were all these fluorescent trippy looking teapots on the wall, and of course by three in the morning all these teacups and teapots and other Alice in Wonderland associated stuff had found their way onto the dancefloor and people were waving them in the air.

What about open-air parties?
Initially in downtown you could get away with throwing semi-legal loft parties, or fully illegal warehouse parties ’cos the police didn’t patrol. It was only when they started getting to sizeable numbers, a thousand or so, it became an issue that the police were interested in. The fire marshals, that was how they’d close you down, whether they were concerned about you getting burnt alive or not. They would count the size of the exits and the number of heads in there.

Around the same time there’d be parties in warehouses with map points. You would buy a ticket in a record shop then you would have to go to a map point and collect a map, and the map point would only be available via a phone number. These raves were still happening downtown; they were just trying to keep one step ahead of the police.

So everyone’s driving around back to where they probably started anyway.
Yeah. There was one night, maybe one of Steve Ennis’s nights, where the police tried to raid one of these map points, and the people who’ve paid all their money to buy a map don’t want the police stopping the party. There was a mini riot and somebody got shot. Shot dead I think. Or at least paralysed. Which was a real turning point, probably ’89. A punter, a Mexican kid if I remember rightly. And Alice’s House got raided by the ATF for selling booze illegally. ’Cos it was buy a ticket to buy your booze. Essentially I think that was the end of Alice’s House. Joel wasn’t prepared to throw any more money at it.

Then it started going a lot further afield. You might drive for three hours. There were parties on Indian reservations, where the police couldn’t go after you. In California. I remember driving three hours south, to a fantastic venue. This particular place was just bizarre, like you imagined somewhere built by people who built communes in the ’60s, with lots of weird rooms and trailers people had built out of junk in the middle of nowhere.

There was an event called Narnia, maybe ’93, it was halfway between LA and San Diego, a San Diego promoter, and that was on an Indian reservation. There was no threat of the police coming in. It just felt great to be on sacred land. Some of the inhabitants would come and check it out and be like, “What the fuck is this?” But yeah, that was a great swerve.

Music? Who did they get to DJ?
LA, musically was always changing, and it also depended on the size of the events. It got quite hardcore and techno-ey quite quickly.

About 1991?
Yeah, maybe even before. Initially the parties that Randy was doing were kind of acid house meets the start of rave. Rave in the UK was huge in ’90, and musically it was pretty similar to the UK. I imagine it was the same. All the DJs were reading the same magazines. At the time we started doing parties I’d recently married an American girl and I couldn’t leave because of my residency permit, so I didn’t leave for two and a half years.

Did you have DJs from different cities.
Around 1990 there was a real wave of English DJs – and an English crowd – coming to the raves.

Cos they’d heard about it back home?
Yeah. Maybe after Alice’s House there was an increasingly large English contingent, and English DJs, people like Mark Lewis, he was a recent ex-pat, he was DJing for Moonshine, for the Levy brothers. Marcus Wyatt, he was American, not sure where he’s from originally. He was one of the American DJs. Dom T, who was part of the Wild Bunch, Nellie Hooper, still doing remixes and stuff. John Williams who came over with a group of English guys and did a party.

No effort to get known superstars?
Their budget wasn’t enough to bring people over, so it relied on locals, or people who were in LA at the time. It was after it got bigger and up to 3000, when people could actually make money, was when they started bringing DJs over. And acts. There was more of an interest in bringing the people that were making the records, rather than the DJs initially.

Was there any effort to connect with the original New York and Chicago house people?
I can’t remember there being that much interest in east coast DJs. Frankie Bones certainly came over and played quite a lot. And his younger brother Adam X. They came across. One of the things they attribute to him in the US rave book is throwing a party and pretending it was a movie. “Were shooting a movie”. That didn’t come from New York; that was LA. That was our excuse.

I co-promoted a party with the Happy Mondays in 1991 in the Hollywood Palladium. An event like that was costly, you couldn’t afford to risk it getting busted. It was great, probably the first successful legal rave with bands, that had happened in LA. It was originally meant to be Happy Mondays, 808 state and Adamski, but 808 pulled out and we got Gerald instead.

Tell me about the Happy Mondays and the Grateful Dead
If only…

That would have changed the world.
Totally. It was possibly on that tour, or when they recorded Pills Thrills And Bellyaches at Capitol studios, Nathan McGough met with various people and the idea of a Happy Mondays and Grateful Dead tour, or series of events, was mooted. Shame it never happened. It was a year or two after the summer of love in England, but the whole vibe of the events at that time was very hippyish, very positive. I naively thought we were changing the world with all this stuff.

Like a lot of people.
Ultimately you only really change yourself.

Obviously San Francisco has that tradition, was it as strong in LA?
It was very evident in the first few years.

When did you come back to the UK?
I left LA in ’95. I got really disillusioned with it in about ’94 I didn’t stop DJing but got really tired. In the early to mid ’90s it just became more and more public knowledge, so this scene that had started in a divey room in LA with abut 40 people, by 1992 had grown into events for 20,000, in Universal Studios and places like that. I got really tired of that. I personally think once you get above 2000 people it stops being intimate; you can’t get people to react, you can’t make eye contact. It was a real turn-off. Because at the start of it I did believe we were changing the world, through the use of chemicals. Everybody’s life was gonna be better. Once it got to 20,000 kids with snorkels and oven gloves on…

Oven gloves?
Oven gloves [creasing up]. I’ve seen oven gloves in raves in LA. And those giant mickey mouse hands…

…on 14 year olds. Where were they doing these huge ones?
At theme parks, places like Universal.

So there was a point when it became legal.
It was forced to be legal. More and more frequently events were getting busted, so there was this horrible time around ’92 where kids were paying however much for tickets and getting busted, and it was fruitless. So the smarter promoters started taking it overground. In theme parks or going back to the clubs. Which is a shame cos the clubs weren’t interested in it at the start. There was a promoter called Tef Foo, he relocated to SE Asia, and he’s still doing things, events with a conscience. But yeah, it went very overground and very large and very silly.

That’s America I guess.
Around the time when a lot of parties were getting busted, midway through an event Devan got some fake fire marshals to come and bust the party and turn the music off, and then they did this whole theatrical thing. All these kids were like awwwwww. But they suddenly started the music back up and these firefighters started taking their clothes off. He’d hired strip-a-gram people.

Was Doc Martin from LA?
No San Francisco. The scene wasn’t happening in SF if he had to move to LA to make it. After he left the Tonka crew moved in and started doing their parties.

Were they the ones who made the difference in SF?
Its weird. These things became very political as soon as there was a lot of money and SF had its own politics. But after the Wicked parties established themselves they had a very hands-off approach. They wouldn’t put anybody else on apart from their own DJs. Wouldn’t book people from outside of San Francisco.

And Wicked started when?
I’m guessing ’91 ’92. A bunch of people involved in Tonka came to San Francisco and started doing parties as TDK which was Tone Def Krew. Alan McQueen the guy I ran into. And Future, these people, John Williams and his mates who were essentially trying to do the same thing at the same time but in LA. John Williams came over with these people called Future and they brought Rozalla over. They just had a series of disasters. This Rozalla thing got nobody and they’d spent all this money.

What was the best party you remember? Gilligan’s Island?
That one was certainly one of the most out-of-control parties I’ve ever been to. Gilligan’s Island was on Catalina Island and they hired out the ferries to take people over. It’s essentially a place for wealthy retirees. It’s got a 1920s casino and ballroom on the harbour and they rented that out and then rented a private beach for the morning. I think they got it under the guise that it was a wedding for some loaded semi-celebrity, and got all these ravers, most of whom by the time they got there were completely bollocksed. Half of them had dropped their drugs before they even got on the boat, the sea crossing was really choppy. They had oil-drum litter bins on the deck and you had four people stood around each of them puking into the bins.

I’m DJing on the boat and the boat is swaying up and down and it was a very shiny table the decks were on. I’m trying to cue up a record and as I’m doing it the turntable is slipping off the table. We get over to the island at one in the morning; there’s a sound system there and everything, and it was then that the people who managed the ballroom realised it wasn’t quite the party they were expecting. And the owners or management were pretty strict Mormons, and this unholy crew of people had landed on their island and taken over the ballroom.

The police were called at one stage because a couple were fairly inebriated on a mini riser on one part of the dancefloor and a couple were having full sex in front of a cheering and chanting, air-punching crowd, and the police were called and arrested them, one of whom turned out to be underage, and the guy was charged for statutory rape. They had the most insane punch at this party. I had a swig of it and it was just ridiculous. I don’t think I came round properly for a couple of days afterwards. From one swig. And MTV were there filming it.

There was a club nutcase called Dave 7 who thought he was the second coming. He would go to clubs dressed in a gold lame loincloth and while we were waiting for the boats to take us back he’d cut his foot on some glass at the beach party. By the time he’s got it bandaged, the second of the two boats was about to go, they’d lifted the ramp and he’s waving at them to try and get them to wait, but they wouldn’t pick him up, so he had to go and stay in the church on Catalina Island and ask a priest to lend him the money to get back to LA. Dressed as gold lame Jesus.

© Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton