Twenty years a raver

Revolutions, like wars, are often sparked by the most innocuous of events.

In 1987 four London clubbers, including DJs Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling, went to Ibiza and ended up changing the world. Not something you plan to do when you’re booking your trip in January, but they you are. How did they do this? By ingesting an obscure psychedelic drug called ecstasy, dancing to house music and wearing ponchos in open-air nightclubs. They enjoyed themselves at exotic clubs like Ku and Amnesia so much they decided to recreate the experience back in England. The result was a movement called acid house, named after a particularly trippy strain of Chicago’s latest musical export. After it nothing was ever the same again.

Without doubt acid house – and its progeny, rave and clubbing – changed Britain forever in a way that punk could never have dreamed of. It was – and we can be certain about this – the last great social revolution with popular music as its catalyst. Since then we’ve had Britpop, grunge, dad rock, punk funk, grime (itself a child of garage house), no wave, electroclash, emo… and important as these scenes have been to their exponents, all of them have merely tweaked already-existing formulas.

Acid house (and I’m talking the movement here as well as the actual music) was completely alien to anything that had come before it. Look at some of the records that came out Chicago and Detroit. There was the beautiful space age disco of Derrick May’s It Is What It Is, the truly ecstatic Big Fun by Inner City and the glorious Your Love by Jamie Principal, later to provide a backing for Candi Staton’s You Got The Love. In Britain, homegrown records like Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald or Pacific State by State 808 showed we could do it every bit as well as the Americans.

Acid house unleashed a burst of creativity in British music that stretched from the arrival of those first imports from Chicago in 1986 to Oasis’s mega-gigs at Knebworth ten years later. In between, this scene with innovation hot-wired into its DNA gave birth to brand new genres like ambient, jungle (later renamed drum ’n’ bass) and trip-hop, plus a thousand sub genres too obscure to list. Without house, Primal Scream wouldn’t have made Screamadelica, Noel Gallagher would still be a roadie for the Inspiral Carpets, the Stone Roses would have stayed goth and Massive Attack, Portishead and Aphex Twin would all be working at same branch of Tesco somewhere in the West Country. Even Take That got in on the act, covering Dan Hartman’s Relight My Fire, an obscure disco 12” that had been resurrected by club DJs to become the club hit of 1991.

But house’s effects were not just musical. Before rave, clubs finished at 2am. If you wanted to stay out, you went to a house party. But when the M25 and M6 were buzzing with all-night raves, there was too much money to be made for things to stay the same, so all-night licenses were handed out like sweets to grateful promoters. The economies of cities like Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds were kick-started by the club boom of the early ’90s, football hooligans put down their Stanley knives, giant strides in musical technology democratised the whole process of making records (with, admittedly, often unforgivable results) and the world’s first acid house airline, Easyjet took us back to Ibiza where this whole thing started.

Of course, it’s not been all good. The country may be more tolerant and carefree than it was pre-1988, but there are too many parents out there whose last memory of their kids is them bidding farewell in their gladrags, unaware that the pill in their pocket will be the last thing they ever eat. Great mansions in Holland, Essex and Cheshire were built on the back of our increasing dependency on ecstasy, while the tablet that opened our minds also opened the door for cocaine to come and spoil the party. Then there was the annoying smugness about many in the scene, with too many lads with semi-permed bobs talking earnestly about shamanism and connecting with the earth through the power of trance (admittedly an achievement when you’re from Buxton). And don’t get me started on the “it’s not as good it was when it started” crew… the scene positively thrived on wanky one-upmanship.

Despite this, I’ll always be grateful to acid house – it really did change my life. Without it, I would never have started DJing as a 17-year-old in 1989, never have played records all over the world, never have moved to London to work for a music magazine, never released records and ultimately never have written for the likes of Arena. As I type, in my ears is the sound of the Night Writers’ astoundingly beautiful Let The Music Use You, a record that still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as it did when I first heard it nearly 20 years ago. I’m a man in my mid-30s who really should know better but right now I really feel like going out and… having it. Viva acid house!