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I-D Magazine - December 1987 - Acid House Fever
(via acidgrandads)
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A Guy Called Gerald - Voodoo Ray (Rham!, 1988)
Officially, dancing is a means of touching the opposite sex without having to take them to a Harrison Ford film first. Unofficially, it is the most essential social activity after eating and complaining. For as long as there have been communities, people have had a basic need to get together in groups, dress up in ridiculous clothes, consume whatever hallucinogens are at hand - be it coca leaves, Martini or something that dropped off the lucky village cat - and dance until they feel better. In 1988, Britain was coming out the arse-end of the longest danceless period since Queen Victoria’s day, when any young woman who danced was lashed to the mast of a bounty ship and sailed out to serve as a jig-a-jig girl in a men-only colonial fort. Disco was an embarrassing memory, soul and jazz funk were minority sports and Five Star didn’t count.
It had got to the point where most people didn’t dance, and didn’t think they ever would. Dancing was for the terminally flash, people who left a pheromone slick behind them. Furthermore, the dances were all too hard. Look at the speed with which breakdancing and bodypopping caught on - enormous fun, but you had to be a twelve-year-old boy with your clothes on back to front, and if you tried it for more than twenty minutes your spine would shatter and you’d have to be carried round on a spade.
None of the musical cults could get everybody on the floor. Rare groove was by definition for the few. There were the New Romantics, but they didn’t so much dance as lurch like shop dummies in an earthquake. Rap and hip-hop weren’t exactly a hedonistic laugh riot. When they weren’t posing in old Ford Zephyrs that smelled of snails, rockabillies with names like Jez and Tab got to throw each other round the room in an earthy jump jive, but there were only ten of them. Psychobillies certainly let it all out, but is was more an illegal boxing match than a pleasant social interaction: headbutting your partner with your ten-inch steely quiff.
Hello, Mr Acid hands-in-the-air House: get out there and don’t worry if you make a prat of yourself. In fact, go out there and make a prat of yourself. No rhythm? Here, have this one. Woo! Funny patterns in the strobes! Before house, speakers were something you avoided, thanks to that eighties obsession with everyone being deaf by thirty from pop’s crazy beat. Once you’d experienced the all-body surround sound of house, speakers were for drilling your head into.
(from Once in a Lifetime: The Crazy Days of Acid House and Afterwards — Jane Bussman, 1998)
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Ritual of the Dance
GENERATION RAVE
Revered Rave photographer Donovan Pennant has launched a website showcasing photos and videos from his 10 years working in the music industry. Documenting Acid House, early Hardcore and photographs of DJ’s and artists, Pennant is currently working on “Ritual of the Dance”, which aims to be a pictorial exploration of the UK’s Dance Culture.
Visit www.generationrave.com and witness some of the most important early Rave photographs ever taken.
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Mix: Summer Madness '89 Part 4
An hour of Suburban Knight, EON, KC Flightt, Inner City, Renegade Soundwave, Dee Holloway, and many others — just the thing to brighten your day. Tracklist and download on SoundCloud.
classof808: Great mix from a chap called Richie K - digging deep!
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Abe Duque ft. Blake Baxter - Disco Lights (What Happened?, Abe Duque Records, 2004)
“House music to me is nothing more than an extension of disco,” says Juan Atkins, the senior representative of the “Belleville three”, the founding fathers of Detroit techno, who hailed from suburban Belleville (Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson completed the troika). “Chicago came out with its own version of techno a couple of years down the road with Larry Heard and Marshall Jefferson, but they didn’t call it techno because we already had the term, so they called it acid house.” Atkins adds: “It was a little take-off. I think there was somebody there trying to emulate a Detroit record… It seems like an awful coincidence that our records were selling so well in Chicago and all of a sudden acid house came on the scene.”
— Tim Lawrence, Acid: Can You Jack? (2005)
Club nights, disco lights… laser lights light the way… to the dance floor.
(footnote: track appears as “Disco Nights” on the 2006 mix CD, When The Fever Breaks)
