In late 1983, while at Oxford University, I began to DJ for money. Exceedingly small amounts of money, it has to be said; a haul of £20 on one unusually busy night was as high as my bounty ever ascended. I played at what was at weekends a gay nightclub on the outskirts of Oxford, which attracted a Saturday crowd drawn from as far away as Reading and Aylesbury, hungry for Hi-NRG, poppers and what was referred to as ‘trade’. I learned a great deal about the undercurrent of gay influence on ostensibly hetero pop, how big, beaty hits by brassy figures such as Hazel Dean and the Weather Girls were often none-too-subtly coded gay anthems. And, despite the fact that men at the club were invariably referred to as ‘she’, there was an indisputable thirsty maleness about the Hi-NRG scene, a hardness about even the effete-looking Phil, who ran the decks, and as for the truck driver in voluminous pink drag, ‘Don’t even look at her, she’s murderous!’ warned Rod, the barman. These men danced hard and, in the booths, snogged hard. Any vestigial homophobic ‘shut that door’ notions I had about homosexuality were extinguished in those murky environs.
There was a thrusting girder directness about Hi-NRG, tracks like Lime’s ‘On the Grid’, Man Parrish’s ‘Hip Hop Be Bop’, Shirley Lites’s ‘Heat You Up (Melt You Down)’ (after which I named my own Tuesday club night, for all-comers, straight and gay – Meltdown). I published a manifesto for the night, posted on every noticeboard and toilet wall in every college in Oxford, in which I promised that Meltdown would be ‘greater and more beautiful than SEX’, though, pitifully, I wasn’t actually in any great position to make such comparisons myself at that stage.
Initially, the club was moderately successful. The competition was the Era Club in central Oxford, where they played Duran Duran, Bonnie Tyler, Howard Jones, the compromised Simple Minds, etc., in a vapid apology for hipness. I, meanwhile, played an electric, eclectic selection that included Afrika Bambaataa, Liaisons Dangereuses, the Peech Boys, the aforementioned Shirley Lites and Man Parrish, D.A.F., Kraftwerk, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Chaka Khan, Sharon Redd, the SOS Band, Cabaret Voltaire, as well as a selection of imported funk twelve-inches, bought for a student-grant-depleting £5 a disc, on labels like Tommy Boy and West End Records. If you didn’t like these discs at first, you damned well learned to; and if you accidentally left them by your radiator to warp, you put them under a pair of baggy trousers and ironed them back into shape, hoping for the best.
Who wouldn’t go to a nightclub with a playlist like that? In 1984, the answer, ultimately, was: almost everybody. Running that night was a rueful lesson in how even ostensibly hip punters are deeply attached to the very familiar. The risk-averse Era Club suffered no problems in this respect. Perhaps students and locals were wary of venturing into a gay nightclub, especially one that involved a mile-long walk. Or perhaps nothing fails like failure. As numbers dwindled, the club owner settled on a ruse. The sight line from the entrance led directly to the dancefloor. If he saw potential customers coming down the road, he would signal to me to pump the dry-ice machine up to maximum. They would look in, see the fog, the lights, hear the booming music, assume the joint was jumping and shell out their £3 … only to wander in and, as the dry ice lifted, realise they were the only people in the club. This worked, but just occasionally. Sometimes the only customers were a couple of plain-clothes police officers, wont to drop in for a late-night drink and chat at the bar, their interest in avant-funk from Sheffield pretty negligible, it seemed.
Merely to have a box of records and an ability to segue records without too many mishaps made one a DJ, however, and late in 1984, I was asked to do a DJing slot down in London, in a Soho basement, in what was, in retrospect, a forerunner of later rave events – a non-licensed, speakeasy-type club night, in which the only refreshments on offer were tap water and stacks and stacks of warm tinned lager. I was preceded by a couple of DJs playing slightly ball-aching, tasteful rare groove. I decided the joint needed to jump and dug in my box for the biggest, fattest grooves I could find. These culminated in Afrika Bambaataa’s ‘Looking for the Perfect Beat’ and Trouble Funk’s ‘Trouble Funk Express’. The joint did jump, a mixed, crowded room, a change from the floorboards I’d been used to staring down upon in Oxford. Then, a signal to switch the music off – a visit from the police. Finally, a signal to crank up again. They’d been bunged £80 and were on their way.
The mid-1980s were very much an in-between time for DJing. The club scene remained urban, esoteric: pre-hip hop, pre-house, pre-acid; slightly over-ripe electro-funk, big, fruity, phat and soulful. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and Prince represented the most advanced, voluptuous and successful take on the music – lush, velcro, landing on the dancefloor with a splashdown. Big voices, big synths.
What followed was a paring back, a retreat to basics, away from the sequins, cocktails and velvets to something more raw, unlicensed. Lofts in Chicago and basements in Detroit, where Derrick May, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson lay down the rails for techno with their earliest recordings. The club scene that developed from this was racially eclectic – a core of African Americans, plus Latinos and adventurous young Caucasians – but this wasn’t a case of returning to black roots. This was a music that shamelessly reversed the traditional borrowing by white artists from black sources. Techno was unabashed in citing everything from new-wave pop, like the B-52s, to Depeche Mode, to Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, to D.A.F. and Liaisons Dangereuses as influences. Its futurist mission involved jettisoning the trappings accrued by black popular music in the late 1970s and early ’80s in favour of a more minimal, streamlined, spacebound sound. It was a music that represented ‘black flight’ in other ways also – on the part of affluent African Americans who wished to disassociate themselves from the inner city of Detroit and its hapless inhabitants trapped in the first great American urban ruin.
Back in the UK, in 1985, the same year as Live Aid, another gathering took place: the infamous Battle of the Beanfield, a less celebrated cultural moment in its own right, a symbolic attempt to reclaim the land of England by those dispossessed by Thatcherism. The Stonehenge Free Festival had taken place since 1974 and over the years featured a range of bands across a variety of genres, from Dexys Midnight Runners to the Clash, from the Thompson Twins to Jimmy Page and Roy Harper. By 1985, however, a High Court injunction had been put in place preventing the festival from going ahead. The New Age travellers represented an affront to a Conservative establishment that brooked ‘no alternative’ and shamelessly used the police as a political arm with which to combat the perceived ‘enemy within’, as the striking miners had discovered to their cost at Orgreave months earlier.
The Battle of the Beanfield generated horrific images of visored police moving against festival-goers, including women and children, of young men under arrest whose bloodied faces suggested they had been subject to disproportionate, vindictive force. There were anecdotes about police, their IDs covered, setting about the travellers indiscriminately, with one heavily pregnant woman clubbed as she attempted to exit a coach. There was the spectacle of a chief constable swooping over the site in a helicopter, bellowing through a megaphone that the travellers were all under arrest. Of course, there were a few travellers who had responded violently, hurled missiles of their own; eight police were hospitalised. However, the subsequent comments of the driver of a police support vehicle, one David McMullin, that this was a battle between ‘anarchy and law and order’, suggested that the police response was political, existential even: Live outside the boundaries we prescribe, however peacefully, and you will come under the cosh. You are not free-born. Get jobs, mortgages, suits and shares, or be hunted down.
House was in its urban infancy, with techno and rave yet to emerge in 1985. Dance music belonged to the city, on licensed premises, behind velvet ropes, a lush, well-upholstered and urbane experience. Cocktails and lager. Suits, highlighted hair, frocks, heels and finery, and shades of androgny in between. Or there were the thumpingly loud but discreet gay bars. There were still vestiges of the tribal and the elitist about the urban club scene, with its rare grooves and door policies.
From the late 1980s onwards, however, dance music across the board began a process of paring back, as if conscious of having reached a baroque stage. Hip hop had abandoned the sequins and spangle of the early Sugar Hill era in favour of a more brutal, cropped, streetwise, minimal approach, starting with Run-DMC. House and garage were strikingly effective when reduced to basic clipped piano chords, the sort around which Derrick May, aka 1987’s Rhythim Is Rhythim’s ‘Strings of Life’ were born. Warp Records, born in Sheffield in 1989, would also bring dance music back to Meccano basics. The Sheffield avant-funk scene involving groups like Chakk, Hula and later Cabaret Voltaire felt laden with its own tropes, no longer quite right for the times; ditto the pop that had emerged from the city, ABC, Heaven 17 and the Human League, who, despite their eventual longevity, felt like they were making a statement about the year 1982.
And then there was acid house, in which the tribalism and occasional violent undercurrents of youth culture were dissolved in Ecstasy and replaced by a general inclusiveness, albeit with hedonism rather than late-1960s idealism back to the fore. The rise of rave dispelled a lot of the anger and despondency and pessimism that had been a by-product of the punk years’ culture of disaffection and mistrust of the Big Thing. Suddenly, there was a collective desire to gather together again en masse, hinted at by Live Aid, but in fields rather than in the city.
Rave was open, democratised, the velvet rope broken. An escape from the city, in discreet convoys, to hangars and abandoned spaces beyond the M25. It was an escape also from the licensed strictures of alcohol, that ultimately depressive drug, in favour of water, Lucozade and yellow pills that kept you up till dawn. Initially, raves merely consisted of the sort of big, popular music sneered at by metropolitan taste-makers – a typical mash-up of the period sees Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and its ‘Is this the real life?’ juxtaposed with Simple Minds’ ‘Theme for Great Cities’. However, rave found its signature squiggle with ‘Acid Tracks’, a freak noise yielded when DJ Pierre was messing with a Roland 303 and found among its presets the squelchy, neon-lit, plasticine noise that, stretched hither and yon over a basic beat punctuated by a clap track, was irresistible – sheer cosmic bubblegum, chomping, morphing, drilling and tweaking. It had precedents: Liaisons Dangereuses had alighted on a similar sound a couple of years earlier on their ‘Neger Brauchen Keine Elektronik’ (recorded under the name CH-BB). An Indian composer named Charanjit Singh, meanwhile, had issued an album called Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat in 1982, which uncannily prefigured acid house. You could go back further. As Simon Reynolds observes in Energy Flash, his study of the rave scene, the acid squiggle is akin to the wah-wah that suddenly denoted a shift in the counter-culture twenty years earlier in 1967. That sound felt like a squirt of psychedelic liquidity, an excess; the acid squiggle felt like it was a gremlin messing with your brain, scrambling your synapses. Or go back further still, to the trumpet sound of very early jazz trumpeter Freddie Keppard, whose cachinnating, yee-hawing breaks were in their own way as mischievous and disruptive as the 303 squiggle.
For many, myself included, rave created a generation gap. I was just twenty-five, but I was a creature of the city club scene, more at home with the juxtaposition of Michael Jackson, Earth, Wind and Fire, D.A.F. and Kraftwerk than the beat continuum of rave. 1982 had been my year – everything from Lipps Inc.’s ‘Funkytown’ to 23 Skidoo’s ‘Kundalini’. I wanted to drink wine and dance stiffly. I didn’t want to take drugs – be sold a bad batch and your statutory rights were very much affected. Rave felt like a threat to my own profession, a sheer stream of beats and vinyl, without faces or stories you could construct around those faces. If you worked in the music business, however, you had to admire the fact that here was an alternative industry – more egalitarian, more immersive, way less up itself – in which egos were submerged and a reconnection made with the euphoric collective for the first time in decades. The danger of obsolescence was palpable. In 1988, I’d asked Kurtis of Mantronix if he agreed that the future of funk lay in ideas generated by producers working in club caverns, trading in machinery and turnover as opposed to glamour.
‘I’d agree. Somebody said to me, “It’s the producer that controls the industry.” And I think that’s true. Who was it that said that to me …? Oh yes, my manager.’
Was this how it would be from now on? Nonetheless, I appreciated, from afar, the sheer proliferation of the scene’s minimalism, the new world of the young that was superseding me. I appreciated its illegitimacy, its existence outside of the laws which I myself had not only abided by, but as a staff writer for a weekly music magazine, a desk sergeant in the taste police, had a small hand in helping make.
The rave scene, however, was a product of British cultural circumstances. It could seem, from footage of the time, to have comprised a sea of white faces, but black MCs played a pivotal role in its early days, names like Everson Allen, Robbie Dee and Shabba D, whose improvised streams of patter not only channelled the mentalist energy of the crowds as they lost themselves in the largely lyricless pools of acid but were distinctively British in flavour (‘Oi, oi!’) rather than invidious efforts to mimic US rap. In America, the club scene that arose from, and was served by, the techno emerging from Detroit and Chicago was very much about the cities and the youth, particularly young African Americans, whose very existence made them automatic suspects in the eyes of the police, whether in the city or beyond its outer edges. In The Underground Is Massive, Michaelangelo Matos quotes Derrick May, who from 1989 onwards was experiencing problems in setting up techno club nights, telling the story of trying to throw parties in his loft in the middle of nowhere and attracting 800 or so people plus overspill, only to be raided. ‘I got citations,’ said May, ‘not from the neighbours because there are no neighbours where my building is situated, but from the police.’ When, as the officer wrote out a ticket, May protested that no one was complaining, the policeman replied, ‘I’m complaining.’ Therein was revealed the racial animus, as well as moral panic, that directed operations against black clubbers in America, an experience sadly familiar to those in the UK as well.
All of which made Tony Wilson of Factory Records fetching up in New York at the New Music Seminar in July 1990 to host his own panel by the name of ‘Wake Up America, You’re Dead’ more saddeningly ironic. Wilson was riding on the massive success not just of rave but of Madchester, in particular the success of the Happy Mondays, which unleashed a wave of uncouth, laddish, E-fuelled hedonistic energy. I went up to interview the Happy Mondays in late 1989 and was astonished at the extent to which Madchester was a palpable reality. Wilson drove me proudly around a city that appeared to be in the grip of a cultural insurrection, with flared jeans practically flapping from tenement windows like tricolour flags. The Mondays had been booked into a venue on the Saturday night that in every respect represented an underestimation of their appeal. For a start, it was all-seated (‘I hope they fookin’ tear those seats out,’ Shaun Ryder told me), while hundreds who’d hoped to gain entrance on the night found themselves locked out, pressed en masse against the entrance doors. Wilson was a deeply patriotic Mancunian who once told the NME that it deserved to be shut down for not having put the dance act K-Klass on its front cover. This was a moment of blue-sky delirium to match the black sky of doom he had also presided over with Joy Division.
At the American conference, Wilson had in tow, for some reason, Keith Allen, who was putting himself about everywhere in 1990, like a more intrusive Zelig. He was involved in New Order’s ‘World in Motion’, featuring the rapping of John Barnes, an early sign of football and rock music, once considered antithetical in the UK, merging as a popular force in a way they never had before. E was said to have had a transformative effect on fans across the terraces, providing a contrast to the notoriously violent 1980s, when the game had sunk to pariah status thanks to its subculture of organised, at times lethally violent hooliganism. The near-success of England at the 1990 World Cup, which had finished just nine days before the New Music Seminar, had had a transformative effect not just on perceptions of English football but on the culture as a whole. The untroubled, euphoric 1990s had been birthed, with a bawling Paul Gascoigne its physical representation.
There was a contrast between the hubris of Wilson and co., attempting to provoke the sort of transatlantic oneupmanship that occasionally erupts between America and the UK when Britain is feeling particularly cocky, and their more earnest US counterparts. Wilson said America had ‘forgotten how to dance’. But who was he addressing exactly? The US in its entirety, whose tastes were still defined by mountainous ranges of rock, from Kiss to Bon Jovi and, pretty soon, the emergent grunge scene? Or the club scene initiated by the likes of Derrick May, which was being aggressively and enthusiastically stifled by police forces across the country?
Allen’s role was as an accompanying jester. He bragged that he had arrived in America laden with thousands of Es, as if ready to strew them among America’s enervated, danceless youth at a moment’s bidding. Wilson, too, stressed that the re-emergence of the club scene in the UK was not down to the reconfiguration of the dance experience but instead was a result of the sheer amount of drugs suddenly being enjoyed by Britain’s liberated, upbeat youth. While E led to an at times risible response in the UK, from the tabloids especially – a Sun cartoon showed two fresh-faced young clubbers being ushered into a club by a pill-touting doorman, only for him to be revealed as Satan as the clubbers fall through a trapdoor into the flames of hell – in America, drugs were understood to be at the heart of the tragedy of African American life in particular, as later laid bare in the TV drama The Wire. (Wilson himself would have rued his chipper provocations when the Haçienda later had to be closed down, after local drug dealers made life at the venue impossible.)
Derrick May eventually responded with exasperation to Allen’s claims, exploding thus: ‘We – and I say we, I mean blacks – we all do something and you’ll come up behind us and turn it around, and add somebody singing to it or some sort of little funky-ass or weak-ass chord line or whatever, and get some stupid record company that doesn’t know jack shit about shit to put £50,000 behind it, and you got a hit because you shoved it down motherfuckers’ throats,’ only to find himself teased almost to the point of race-baiting by Allen. What ultimately emerged from the seminar is that while Britain, a small but pop-culturally hyperproductive country, could be swayed by a phenomenon like rave, in a larger, less fickle, more conservative country like America it would take a lot longer. The US was not ready to rave just yet.
In the early 1990s, fears were allayed that rave would replace the industry model in which both record companies and the music press had a stake. Characters and auteurs emerged from the scene, album makers also, such as the Aphex Twin and Orbital, alongside a resurgent guitar-music scene that had become a little neo-psychedelic and acid-fried in its own way, with groups like Curve (remixed by the Aphex Twin) and My Bloody Valentine, with their tremolo wipeouts. Still, traditional rock fans like those at Glastonbury were having difficulty taking the new music on board. Asked at a Melody Maker round-table discussion around that time whether Glastonbury was making any plans to cater for rave and dance fans, Michael Eavis explained that if loudspeakers played after midnight there would be fines; he would therefore arrange for an all-night radio station to broadcast rave music. ‘We’re asking people to bring headphones and transistor radios along.’ This idea was met with widespread scepticism in the room.
And then, in 1992, came Castlemorton, a culmination of rave culture in many ways, but one whose tribal assembly and determination to reclaim Britain’s green outdoors reminded one of the Battle of the Beanfield. Only the soundtrack to Castlemorton wasn’t Luddite troubadours strumming wistful ballads about old Albion but massive techno sound systems that shook the hills, not always to universal appreciation from festival-goers. These included Bedlam, Circus Warp, Spiral Tribe, Circus Normal, DiY and L. S. Diezel, their eclecticism perhaps lost on angry locals as far as ten miles away, to whom the electronic, amplified sound of the 4/4 beat resounded like war drums.
The Castlemorton site nestled in the Malvern Hills, Edward Elgar territory, as it happened, a renowned site of natural beauty that was enshrined in that eminent English composer’s tone poetry. To some, this would have only exacerbated the sense of defilement represented by the assortment of crusties, travellers and ravers whose decision to opt out of Conservative-run Britain represented a challenge and an affront to Middle England. However, the festival had only pitched up at Castlemorton after having been refused access to the site of the Avon Free Festival in Bristol by the local police force, who were determined to put a stop to an event that had taken place for several years, moving on the convoy of trucks and assorted rusty antique vehicles further north. The convoy settled on Castlemorton Common. There, they had the advantage of numbers and met relatively light resistance from the local force.
Gradually and spontaneously, the festival grew in size by word of mouth, with even Radio 1 giving it a shout-out. The sounds being pumped out ranged from classic early house to the more militant techno-drill of Underground Resistance, music that rolled like the giant occupying vehicles and juddered the marrow in a manner that was anti-bucolic, a reminder of the uneasy relationship between mechanical/industrial proliferation and production and the ecological ideal, between electronic modernity and its modern inconveniences – sanitation at the site ran to a sign instructing festival-goers to ‘bury your shit’. Spiral Tribe tried to reconcile these opposites in their self-description as ‘terra-technic’: techno as a means of excavating the true spirit of the land.
Nonetheless, there was an air of pop-up utopia about Castlemorton: the sweltering weather; the heavy, heady scent of weed carried on the air; the wide availability of a range of hallucinogens; the exclusion of the sort of overbearing commercial and corporate presences and brand names that would soon enough become ubiquitous at large-scale events; the short shrift given to anyone who attempted to rip off festival-goers – anyone who tried to overcharge for cigarettes, beer, water would find themselves beaten up by festival enforcers in what was described by one festival-goer as a system of ‘functional anarchy’ – summary rough justice dispensed to enforce the ultra-liberal values underpinning the festival. One recalls Bob Dylan’s line: ‘to live outside the law you must be honest’. Why not live like this? Was respectable society with its discreet, faraway zones of violence and misery run so much better? Was it worth it for the toilets?
However, there was inevitable friction with local communities, for whom the festival-goers might as well have been invading zombies – disfigured, ex-human species, some of whose dogs ran amok, while others left drugs paraphernalia, including needles, dumped in gardens. The Daily Mail reported one local complaining that he had seen ‘youngsters injecting heroin in a Renault 5’. The BBC covered the event, betraying its deep-lying middlebrow prejudices by stressing the Third World aspect of the assembled community on the ground with the sort of sombre gravitas used by Michael Buerk when reporting on Ethiopia: the ragged desperation, the police powerless, sheep lying dead, vets struggling, villagers under siege, fences torn up, windows boarded up. The emphasis is clear but the reporter tries to make amends with an exercise in ostensible BBC balance. First, three local women advance their grievances about loud noise, litter and drugs, offering stories of cars smashed to pieces and a policeman run over; there are also complaints from a local conservationist. And the noise, the noise. They’d had to wear earphones. They’d been driven into a frenzy by those repetitive beats. The reporter then turns to three far more mild-mannered, almost sheepish crusties who murmur promises that extensive clear-up operations are under way, that you always get a few bad people, to whose number they clearly don’t belong.
After four days, the festival did eventually die down, but Spiral Tribe were deemed to have outstayed their welcome, pumping techno out to the last, and as the numbers they faced dwindled, police moved in and thirteen members of the Tribe collective were arrested. Their trial, during which they initially wore T-shirts bearing the slogan ‘Make some fucking noise’, lasted four months and cost £4 million. They were eventually acquitted of all charges, but the high profile of the trial and the stand-off it represented gave rise to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, one of social conservatism’s last stands of the twentieth century.
The Act covered a great deal of ground. It actually legalised anal sex between heterosexual couples, thereby relieving from their position whoever had been responsible for checking up on deviancies from that law hitherto. Mostly, however, it introduced a broad range of measures against perceived social deviants, from squatters and unauthorised campers to protesters and free-festival-goers. Its most notorious, most risible section, though, was 63 (1)(b), which gave police officers the power to remove people from events at which music ‘wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’ was being played. This was an extraordinary effort to legislate against music, one which took specific exception to the mechanical mode of its production. No one had ever attempted to legislate against amplified electric guitars by specifying the raucous and irregular emissions of their free-form digressions, or against brass instruments for their exuberant tootling. Some deep-dyed phobia against electronic machinery lurked in the drafting of this bill.
The phrase ‘repetitive beats’, with all of its nonsensical implications, was seized upon gleefully by electronica artists. In a sense it was flattering for them to be thought of as generating a mode of music that had the power to make governments quail and the walls of cities shake. Simon Reynolds, who attended Castlemorton, certainly believes that the idea that techno had the power to ‘disturb “normals” and unlock the savage within’ would have had tremendous romantic appeal to the Spiral Tribes of this world. Autechre issued the three-track Anti EP, explaining in the notes that it had been ‘programmed in such a way that no bars contain identical beats and can therefore be played under the proposed new law. However, we advise DJs to have a lawyer and a musicologist present at all times to confirm the non repetitive nature of the music in the event of police harassment.’ Ironically, Autechre would become paragons of virtue in the eyes of the new law, moving towards scrupulously irregular beats on albums like 2003’s Draft 7.30. Orbital, meanwhile, released a ‘Criminal Justice Bill?’ remix of their track ‘Are We Here?’ which consisted of four minutes of law-abiding silence. The law was a piece of nonsense, rarely invoked save to break up the occasion, its only effect to bolster the renegade status of electronica artists who were in no danger of landing in court for their repetitive emissions, while making a mockery of what was increasingly looking like a dead government walking, about to be trampled in the impending onrush of Cool Britannia.
And yet that same sociopolitical drift towards a centrist prosperity was the undoing of the free-festival scene, of the crusty spirit of Castlemorton. The claims of trauma caused by the free festival turned out to be either exaggerated or unfounded. One local conservator who had complained to the press about the ‘irreparable damage’ caused by the site later admitted that the common had completely recovered in a short space of time. Nonetheless, there was no Castlemorton 1993, despite a cogent application from the Mean Fiddler organisation to stage it.
Meanwhile, the cultural mood shifted. The mood for togetherness in a field was transferred to indie rock, in particular Oasis, though UK dance was beginning to generate its own raft of superstars. Spiral Tribe moved on to continental Europe, taking with them their idealistic and somewhat hippy-dippy ideas, including a preoccupation with the number 23. Fellow travellers the Levellers bought up property in Brighton, turned it into a studio complex and, to their embarrassment, made a killing. A counter-cultural green margin, opened up during the 1960s, persisting through the 1970s and coming under siege through the 1980s, finally closed up almost entirely in the 1990s – in Britain, at any rate. There was, at last, no ‘alternative’, no opting out. Things, instead, could only get better. Fatboy Slim better. The spirit of Castlemorton – muddle-headed, ramshackle, medieval, idealistic, noisy, druggy, mud-caked and ecstatic – fizzled out and something in Britain died, and everybody was happy, as Britain instead gave way under Blairism to an extended programme of crusty-free postmodernisation.
In truth, however, reflects Simon Reynolds, ‘That whole traveller/squat/free-party subculture had the same contradictions as the 1960s counter-culture, insofar as it was at once a valid repudiation of aspects of conventional life (soul-crushing routine, exploitation, lack of joy, blinkered horizons) but still parasitic on the bounty of capitalist society, organised around economic growth, exploitation of nature, etc. So on the one hand there’s that romance of the idea of living on the outside of society, but actually in cold-eyed reality they were dependent on this well-organised, productive society and economy – for everything from the roads they travelled along to the petrol they put in their caravans or trucks.’
The energy of rave that had gathered up outside of the cities gradually returned to them; megaclubs like Ministry of Sound and Fabric became the established urban homes of modern dance; events became more organised, licensed, safely in house rather than in the wild outdoors. The industry breathed again.
*
Around 1995, while working at Melody Maker, I received a call from a press officer. He had an idea. He wondered if I’d be interested in interviewing one of his acts ‘in character’ as ‘Mr Agreeable’, a persona I had created for the paper, a dyspeptic columnist given to hurling foul-mouthed abuse at famous acts of the day. It seemed a pretty desperate and sorry proposition, a low moment of ignominy akin to Spinal Tap being billed below the puppet show. Who would be sad enough to subject themselves to such demeaning treatment?
The answer was, Moby. He had had a breakthrough hit in the early 1990s with ‘Go’, a reworking of the theme to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. In his wonderfully vivid and self-deprecating autobiography, Porcelain, he describes his first appearance on Top of the Pops, living the dream, jumping frantically and whacking his Octapad for a few minutes in sync with the single, before being ushered off by a stagehand, his time up. Was that it? Afterwards, he headed for the airport. He somehow imagined that having been emblazoned across the Thursday-night pop stratosphere, he would be mobbed by adoring fans. He was utterly ignored. He felt low, and utterly unlike a bona fide pop star. Perhaps he was just another of those white, funky-ass, weak-ass boys like Adamski whom Derrick May held in such contempt, on and now off the conveyor belt.
Moby struggled, predictably perhaps, to match the first flush of ‘Go’, and by 1995, he decided he would revert to a core of supposed authenticity, expounding on his militant veganism with the album Animal Rights, accompanied by a serrated, 4-real soundtrack of the hardcore punk that had been a formative influence in his youth. The album tanked, media interest in this has-been sinking to a low ebb. It was around this time that I received the call from his press officer.
In Porcelain, in which he looks back on his exciting life as a DJ/artist struggling to make it in New York in the late 1980s/early 1990s, Moby emphasises the seediness, the funkiness, the urban grime – the filthy windscreens of a cab, broken bottles, battered apartment futons, the old meat-packing plants with sloping floors to drain the animal blood that were now cheap living spaces, the steam heat from the radiators and the street gratings, the smell of ethnic cooking, discarded flyers for club nights on rainy sidewalks – all of which provided the thick urban ambience for a nascent NY rave scene. Having had his hit, he then reflects on the squalid sense of failure he endured as a support act for Soundgarden, playing to a handful of indifferent, often hostile punters night after night – a life that had descended into shit and mud. He considered rebuilding his life. He considered a career in architecture.
Instead, he made Play, which belongs to a whole new world of opulence and cleanliness. The sweeping, mechanically retrieved strings of ‘Porcelain’ function like windscreen wipers, while keyboard droplets fall as pure as mineral water. All that mud and shit and steam and stain was about to become a distant memory. Play is an impeccable mix of shiny chromium techno and sensitively sampled American roots music, plucked from the field recordings of Alan Lomax, including the repeated use of verses from African American gospel singer Bessie Jones’s ‘Honey’. It is hard to doubt that Moby intended to signpost and showcase this music with the utmost respect, but there were sceptics who suggested that he was just another in a tradition of white boys exploiting American roots music, transfusing it to compensate for their own anaemia, à la Led Zeppelin. Certainly, there’s an ironic stand-off in the music between notions of soil-based authenticity and frictionless modernity.
Play initially sold as disappointingly as had been expected. Daniel Miller of Mute had agreed to release it in the UK, but only because of Mute’s long-standing policy of loyalty to acts they signed. However, Moby had decided on an ingenious expedient to ensure that the album did not die away for want of exposure: he licensed every track for use in various films, TV shows and adverts, including for Volkswagen, American Express and Baileys Irish Cream. We were a very long way away indeed from the anti-corporate spirit of Castlemorton, it seemed. Seven years down the line, electronic dance music was marching towards the end of that sort of combative history.
Furthermore, there wasn’t the usual sense of sacrilege felt when, say, a Jimi Hendrix track crops up to sell denim. Moby’s music, sleek and open-ended, with its vague, distant, borrowed sense of the religious and its state-of-the-art technological assembly, was perfect late-twentieth- century soundtracking, to which goods were sold to the discreetly aspirational by appealing to both their sense of the material and the spiritual. In purchasing high-quality products you were somehow helping to nourish the world, to make it a more beautiful and refined place. Moby’s music was no longer buffeted by the frantic forces of the urban/underground music scene but a Mazda cruising smoothly along a deserted road on a Highland landscape bathed with the amber sunset glow that dominates 1990s advertising. Play sold millions, while millions more consumer items were sold as a result of its aural blandishments. It said something about the state of electronic dance music in particular that it had supplanted cheesy rock or MOR as the preferred accompaniment to leading-edge on-air salesmanship, from drum ’n’ bass’s injection of super-fast hipness to trip hop’s retro-elegant upholstery to Moby. Everyone was happy.
These were the late 1990s, in which the Anglo-American world was still surfing on a sustained crest of euphoria and prosperity following a series of collapses, from the Berlin Wall to apartheid, from Thatcher to eventually the seemingly interminable Tory administration. For all the reproachful efforts of the Manic Street Preachers and Tricky’s talk of pre-millennial tension, there was never a less gloomy, less fretful time in pop history. Dance music was suddenly dominated by nerdy, white, often middle-class boys playing at being DJ/auteurs and getting away with it, and with nobody minding because we were past all that factionalist 1980s political stuff for the time being, pre-intersectional. From the Chemical Brothers to the brilliant Basement Jaxx to Fatboy Slim, glad time it was to be young, male, Caucasian, with a box full of vinyl, mixing, matching and stealing to the march of big beat, the thudding pulse of a pop time approaching the end of the century ass-backwards, retro but free from fear, doubt and alienation, happy to crowd together in perma-party mode.
Few, if anybody, worried about white boys ripping off black culture. After all, this wasn’t like Led Zeppelin and the blues, or Vanilla Ice. Derrick May had every right to feel disgruntled, but techno itself was unabashed about borrowing from white European music – Kraftwerk, D.A.F and Tangerine Dream in particular – while Jeff Mills even cited the B-52s as an inspiration. The technology and its innovations had their origin in the experiments of white men: John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer. As for minimal techno, and its principal genius, Ricardo Villalobos, he had started out as a huge Depeche Mode fan. His music – looping and isolated rhythms in mixes that were prevented only by their repetitive beats from floating out into realms of sheer idiosyncratic abstraction – was not traceable back to the blues but rather to the dusty backroads and humid swamplands of Basildon.
Complaints about inauthenticity were also becoming drowned out. An understanding had built that in pop’s postmodern stage, originality was impossible to attain – there was no more virgin soil to till – and that ideas about real music played on real instruments were the province of music criticism’s equivalent of real-ale bores. There was an understanding that the pop world in which we now lived was actually a huge, compound mess of stuff from the classical dead past that was being perpetually remixed and reanimated. This machinery had been around for a long time now, we knew the score. No more earnest qualms; this was the time to party, hard and clever, all of us together, above ground. Everybody was happy.
The greatest beneficiary of this was Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim. No one would have picked him out of the line-up of the Housemartins, for whom he played bass in the 1980s, and marked him down as the man who would make millions cramming Brighton beach with ravers who were more than happy to make a superstar of him, a High Priest of Party fully deserving of his success.
He had actually been DJing since 1980, playing private parties in Sussex on hired decks as a teenager. After his brief diversion into hamster indie with Hull’s ’Martins, he quit the group in 1988 and, by his own account, lay down his bass, never to touch it again. He’d already released a version of the SOS Band’s 1980s dancefloor monster ‘Just Be Good to Me’ with Beats International, in which he took all of the weight and layering of the original, instead resetting it over a bantamweight cod-reggae beat and cleverly juxtaposing it with a desolate harmonica motif culled from a Sergio Leone spaghetti western soundtrack, lending his version a wittily mordant distance from the unmatchable Jam & Lewis version. Juxtapositions and resettings of old material would be key to Cook’s (patch)work.
He was part of the same cultural flow as the Chemical Brothers; they’d met and bonded during a 1994 visit to London’s Heavenly Social Club, to which he’d been introduced by Beats International singer Lindy Layton. It was here that he really began to meld with the times, mutate into Fatboy Slim and all that that entailed. He would eventually draw comparisons with Moby. (Like Moby, he had suffered a severe mid-career setback, lapsing into depression and near bankruptcy in the early 1990s and considering an alternative career – in his case, as a fireman.) These were prompted by his single ‘Praise You’, which sampled Camille Yarbrough’s ‘Take Yo’ Praise’. There were mild concerns, as expressed by Barney Hoskyns when he interviewed Cook for his website Rock’s Backpages. ‘Do you ever stop and think the original music-makers are being overlooked in all this?’ he asked Cook.
‘Well, to be honest, James Brown was old until Eric B came out with “I Know You Got Soul”,’ Cook replied (alluding to Stetsasonic’s ‘All that Jazz’). ‘As long as you credit people and pay them, at the very worst they’ve got some money. Imagine if, like Camille with “Praise You”, you made a record in 1973, never had a hit, became a schoolteacher, and 20 years later someone goes, Here’s a check. It’s like winning the lottery. And then quite often the record gets re-released and people re-investigate it. I mean, Camille was great, she went on chat shows talking about it.’ Everybody was happy.
After all, this wasn’t the sort of ‘blackface’ you had with white soul imitators in futile search of authenticity in the 1980s. The sheer artifice of the DJing approach precluded that, for a start. As with Moby, this was a presentation of the ‘spiritual’ in a way that was at once sacred and deconsecrating; sampling as a means of mechanically extracting gospel soulfulness for the benefit of a more secular, less obligated age, when the most appealing idea of religion was that we could all live really happily for ever. As Cook went on to say to Hoskyns, ‘It’s funny, I really like the spiritual, uplifting thing about gospel music or preaching or religion or whatever – everything apart from the God bit! It’s a shame that religion had to get hi-jacked by God.’
‘Praise You’ was deeply reverent towards Yarbrough, who was presented as a creature of sheer soul the like of which a white late-twentieth-century boy like Cook could never hope to become by mimickry or osmosis, but only through the process of sampling; at the same time, and coupled with Spike Jonze’s video of an enthusiastic but thoroughly amateurish dance troupe, it was part of a musical package that represented a propulsive upwards motion away from old-fashioned ideas of subterranean cool and tastefulness. ‘Praise You’ spoke to the sense, both frivolous and zen, that prevailed in the late 1990s: nothing ‘mattered’. There was no need to agonise the way we used to. We were free. We could just be. Rock music was just about dead and nobody believed it had the capacity to transform the world. The counter-culture had long disappeared; the motorways were here to stay. The Great Battles had either been won or lost but, whatever, they had been fought. The time for fighting, the time for protest was over. What was left was a vast, democratised mass of people in the same large cultural (and physical) peacetime space who wanted nothing more than to live really happily for as long as possible, preferably for ever. It was a space once exclusively occupied by rock superstars and the spectacle of heroic agonising they presented.
Oasis had held that space during the Britpop years but, unlike the Beatles, Noel Gallagher was unable to evolve, to enter a Sgt Pepper phase. In 2015, Garry Cobain of the Future Sound of London, aka Amorphous Androgynous, would express his frustration when he and Brian Dougans tried to entice the Oasis songwriter onto more colourful, neo-psychedelic, experimental and electronic terrain when working with him on a putative solo album. ‘We tried to force him to write new material,’ Cobain told the Guardian’s Paul Lester. ‘But he dragged his heels and failed to stretch himself.’ Their efforts to encourage ‘a liberated, exploratory Noel Gallagher, cutting loose from Oasis, enjoying his freedom; the Noel who name-drops our Monstrous Bubble albums and krautrock, and who had hits with the Chemical Brothers’ ran aground. Gallagher simply didn’t have the courage, resources or curiosity of a Lennon or McCartney, or even a George Harrison. ‘He obviously loves that kind of music, but has no idea how to make it,’ concluded Cobain. Oasis were always destined to fall away from the centre. That space was now clear for electronic dance music.
In 2007, Dave Clarke, aka the ‘Baron of Techno’ (John Peel), performed a DJ set at the annual Lowlands Festival in Amsterdam, a city with which he eventually fell in love and settled in. I acquired it many years ago via a now-defunct Internet service. It may not be the best hardcore techno set of that era; it may be well down the list of the greatest sets by Dave Clarke. I’ve only ever heard a section of it. However, it is a section I know extremely well, one I’ve played many times on headphones at the gym to mask the invariable soundtrack of turbo-charged, Auto-Tuned Europap, with its ultra-predictable drops and tedious starbursts of synth. It also seems to tell a story. Clarke claims never to prepare his sets, but this one follows a quite definite arc.
Clarke left his Brighton home at sixteen, was temporarily homeless, worked part-time and, fired by his early love of punk and hip hop, began to scratch a living in the music industry, eventually establishing himself as a DJ of the highest rank. His high-metabolic determination is reflected not just in his love of speeding down autobahns, where there are no speed limits, but also in the thudding kinetic metal heartbeat of his sets.
The Lowlands set, bathed throughout in colour, flash and fog, begins with a fury of scratching. It’s not vinyl scratching; by 2007, that human act is no longer adequate to match the speed, density and relentlessness Clarke requires and he’s using technology such as CDJs and Serato Scratch Live. The opening minutes are a jumbled frenzy of electro-funk, Man Parrish and Afrika Bambaataa-style riffs and percussive apparatus; a faster, harder, laser-cut reminder of the likes of Captain Rock, the Extra T’s, the Jonzun Crew, punctuated by pneumatic-drill-like diagonal interventions and a scratch of Queen’s ‘Flash’, diced and stuttering almost beyond recognition. A burst of Space Invader warfare, a verbal instruction – ‘Time to land’ – then a mutation of the opening of Bambaataa’s ‘Looking for the Perfect Beat’, then ‘Fasten your seatbelts – ’cos I’m about to flow,’ and we’re through a wormhole to the year 1988 and Eric B and Rakim’s ‘Follow the Leader’, delivered here with a new rhythmical chassis of Clarke’s own choosing. Listen to the left and right speakers and relics from what might be old Mantronix cuts fly about in the mix. It’s a trip back, but coming fast forward. Next, past and future meld with Miss Kittin’s ‘1982’, a homage to Steve Strange and the New Romantics – ‘I see your face fade to grey / imagine you’re dancing / you’re a robot, man-machine.’ Now fast back to the future posited by Kraftwerk on 1981’s Computer World.
Then, around thirteen minutes, a bass boost, a switch to seventh gear, and we’re catapulted out of the referential zone into the deep, black space of the now, propelled at the warp speed of pure techno. Reverb, backwards taping, stereopanning, violent, European, a blur of light like the final scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Arpeggiator sirens, a meteor storm of obsolete rhythms, then onward; except, despite the progress implied by the bpm, we’re at a sort of terminus. A single-note stabbing riff makes it feel as if time itself has been left behind; we’re going going nowhere at the speed of whooshes of Hubble gas – ‘Somebody give the Lord a handclap’ – and then the gruelling bass crescendo of the piece. Clarke sounds like he’s cutting into a disc with a lathe, trying to saw through to the turntable rubber – a ruthless, vicious scratching action, a scrawl, blackening reams of club space the way the Futurists blackened reams of paper in their founding manifesto; blackening ‘White Noise, White Noise …’ – a plug for the show he presents. By now, among the crowd, white flesh melts, puddles form; the rat-a-tat-tat woodpecker of the looped riff evolves and spirals upwards into an acid-bass whiplash assault, one which fades into the cosmic distance and then, with a sudden flick of the volume, is back gnashing in your face, a threshing black hole of a riff … which then tapers off as the set hits cruise control.
The set tells the story of how dance music got past the stage of merely referring to its past, as it blasted beyond orbit into the sheer amnesiac, hi-tech, concentrated HERE and NOW.
*
Two years earlier, in 2005, Daft Punk at last agreed to play the annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which had been held in Indio, California, since 1999. Its founders and organisers had long been aware of the burgeoning interest in dance music, despite the discophobia that still coursed deep from left to right across the spectrum of rock fans. But Disco Sucks was a long time ago, and among American college-radio kids the understanding that music with a 4/4 beat could be more than a banal commodity, could be 4-real, was growing by the year.
By this stage, as far as long-term European followers of the group were concerned, Daft Punk were a little faded. I had attended the playback for their 2005 album Human After All at Fabric in London and been less than underwhelmed. This was what they’d spent four years doing? Actually, they hadn’t; they’d spent six weeks making the record, valuing the improvisational corner they’d forced themselves into. They’d thrown a few guitars into the mix as well, so at pains were they to stress the very human and very real aspects of their work. It felt like another case of techno musicians themselves falling victim to a sort of technophobia in relationship to their own work – something Kraftwerk had always resisted, thereby accounting for their immaculate preservation. Drearily, it appeared Daft Punk were, indeed, human after all.
So it seemed from London. The album received only lukewarm reviews, but America was moving on a different track. Punk had only happened properly there with Nirvana, and even then it made only a limited tear in the nation’s cultural fabric. Rave, as a national explosion, had yet to happen at all. Daft Punk’s Coachella appearance, however, would prove transformative.
Their set was kept well under wraps. Curious fans came flooding over from the main stage, where Depeche Mode had just finished playing. What greeted the stream of heady punters was a reminder of Daft Punk’s black funk/white soft rock duality: a giant pyramid atop a spaceship that reminded one of George Clinton’s P-Funk stage pomp. Inside this were Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, preserving their spectacular anonymity in their robot guises. The music was fine – their trademarked, more-than-human vocoderising, their deceptively simple but perfectly pared 4/4 concussion pumping sweet, exquisite, scaffolded softness into the night air. The context was all. Not only diehard fans but a wider industry of more distant cultural onlookers had been drawn to this set by Daft Punk’s coyness. What they understood was that all their preconceptions of rave as dank, muddy, subterranean, a mere sleazy stream of beats in which swam society’s drug-addled jetsam, were junk. Daft Punk’s 2004 Coachella set established before the very eyes of the industry’s movers and shakers that dance music could work as a clean, huge, crowd-pleasing spectacle, in the tradition of, and supplanting, rock music. Son et lumière. It was legitimate. Furthermore, qualms about pop versus rock, us versus them, underground versus overground, real versus fake, guitars versus synths, were dead. The Internet, iTunes had razed such assumptions to the ground. These were the binaries of old men. What was left was a flat landscape. And, appropriate to the technology-driven times, the primary beat was electronic.
I remember seeing the full Daft Punk pyramid show in 2007. I went alone, drove up in my Honda Fit, bought a ticket off a scalper for $150, got on the floor, and had the best time of my life. I didn’t have a drink, no drugs. But I was high out of my mind. It changed my life. This is gonna sound really lame, but try to take it the right way: There have been a couple times where I’ve been so proud of what I’ve done live, like I feel like I’ve given someone the same kind of feeling I got at that Daft Punk show. And that feels so good.
Skrillex, Pitchfork magazine
Skrillex is onomatopoeic. A case in point: his remix of Avicii’s ‘Levels’. Every knob on the board is twisted as far right as it will go. Every last pixel is shrieking with maximum sound, light and energy. This mix shreds, the way metal used to. It serrates and claws. It eats alive the space it occupies. It Skrillexes: shrill, skirling, post-Aphex (Skrillex’s hero). In a music industry that is elsewhere utterly occupied with its own past, it exists entirely in the present, like an iPhone upgrade that will itself be obsolete in a matter of months. Nuance, shade, reflection, retrospection are trampled in this mix, with its white broadsides of digital treble and twisted, enema basslines. This is music for a generation that is post-postmodern, no longer steeped in the recent past, out of its shadow. They’re in an audio/techno/visual culture where everything happened in the last few months. For a while, everything in the chart rundown on Radio 1 sounded like this – the garish, unpretty blare of the obliviously new.
Skrillex himself, aka Californian Sonny Moore, is 4-real, however, a fugitive from the basements of punk/grunge/emo who spent his formative years soaking up Warp Records’ output – not just Aphex but Squarepusher. He comes across in interviews as engagingly nerdy, as much a fan as a musician, and looks like the sort of specky kid whose autograph book is always in the back of his trousers. No airs, pretensions, smooth graces or ambitions beyond playing and making records. ‘Every decision I make, I want to feel honest about. I’m not chasing opportunity. I don’t wanna do something for money if I’m not interested in it. Not to say a phone company or whatever is bad, but I’m not excited about it. That’s not what I do,’ he told Pitchfork. And from him, you believe it. He’s driven. The discovery at the age of sixteen that he was adopted – and not only that, but that all of his friends knew – seemed to trigger something in him that set him on the road, a road he has travelled hard ever since. Such a specimen has been improbably vaulted to the apex of the EDM pyramid, not revered like a guitar hero, but more of a cypher; a high priest, not to be revered in his own right but as one who channels a higher power. For many, he is at the gauche, clichéd, vulgar end of dubstep – what Kiss are to rock – yet the power he commands doesn’t come from sculpting esoterica for a handful of after-hours taste police but from drawing the crowd by whatever means necessary, harder, faster, stronger, if not necessarily better, than the rest.
Deadmau5 is an altogether smoother, more progressive, chromium proposition than Skrillex. Cases in point: ‘Faxing Berlin’ (2007) and ‘The Veldt’ (2012). On ‘Faxing Berlin’ there is space aplenty, delineated patiently by a looped house rhythm and rattlesnake wisps. In fades the arpeggiator, bouncing like an orb of spotless metal, windowless and featureless, as a giant, gaping maw gradually opens behind it – the Daft Punk device of simulating the opening of a nightclub door applied slowly and solemnly. Who faxes a city? Who still uses a fax in 2007? It doesn’t matter. This is a content-less, vocal-less exercise, the orb bouncing back and forth and creating a vast, irresistible awning, before receding, its work done. ‘Faxing Berlin’ is about nothing but its own existence, as wondrously meaningless as the motions of the cosmos – pure spectacle. Clean as a whistle.
‘The Veldt’ is not content-free. It is based on a 1950 Ray Bradbury short story, ‘The World the Children Made’, a disquieting, ultimately grisly tale of children escaping into a virtual reality zone within their own nursery and creating an African veldt, to the mystification of their parents, George and Lydia. When the parents enter the virtual veldt themselves to see just what their children are getting up to, they are killed by lions, their kids looking on with apparent indifference.
Again, the arpeggiator, a gentle, undulating fabric on which a beat hammers softly and warmly. This is pure seduction, like the scent of a just-bought car to the power of ten. Rhythms shower and burst in cascading shards, as vocalist Chris James gives a husky-sweet lyrical précis of the key moments and phrases appertaining to Bradbury’s story, while falling short of the carnage of its conclusion. The long version fades out, then fades back in again, so in love with the way it is.
So deceptively benign was ‘The Veldt’ that Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Liberal campaigning for prime minister on a platform of handsomeness, actually used it as part of his soundtrack while out on the stump, his team doubtless finding in its ‘world the children made’ a Whitney Houston-style message of hope for the future. Trudeau and his people may have read too little into it; perhaps it’s reading too much into it to connect the untroubled, sun-kissed air of the track’s progressions with the serenity of the children as their parents are killed and eaten by wild animals, victims of their own overbearing surveillance. The happiness of EDM, the soundworld the children made, is similarly indifferent to the indignant qualms of an older generation.
Seeing Deadmau5 at the Brixton Academy in 2010, I remember thinking two things. Firstly, how the mouse’s head had a Shamanic quality. The identity of Joel Zimmerman, born in Toronto in 1981, was known but unimportant; what mattered was his accepted role as high priest, in the course of whose duties it was necessary to take on another masked identity. This was not how rock superstardom had worked; it was a great means of taking advantage of the anonymity of the DJ/auteur, supposedly their drawback. Secondly, I was struck by how skinny, how very white his arms were, and that such a frail, faceless Caucasian was able to defy the old Übermensch pretensions of rock yore and fill such a huge hall with people and noise. These were new rules, new rulers.
Skrillex and Deadmau5 were just two among many artists performing under the banner of EDM – there was also Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia, David Guetta and a host of wannabes excoriated by older hands like Carl Cox for reducing the art of DJing to the press-button expedient of an on-cue bass drop. But both were North American, proof that the taboos long harboured by that continent regarding dance music – the Disco Sucks movement in particular – had been utterly scotched.
Or maybe not quite. Deadmau5 was a very different sort of character from Skrillex, pricklier in interviews. Ironically, musically he was a product of smoother influences – Steely Dan and Tears for Fears, alongside Canadian anti-vivisectionist avant-industrialists Skinny Puppy. His father’s record collection included U2 and Metallica, and he was drawn to these groups rather than the piano lessons forced on him. He played Microsoft Golf and Minesweeper as a kid. But he never seems to have had any interest in rave or its names, and shamelessly declared he had never heard of Pete Tong. ‘I don’t care for the who’s whos and what’s whats,’ he said in an interview with Resident Advisor. ‘I’m interested in two things: music and technology. I’m not interested in clubs, I’m not interested in being in the middle of a 80,000 person crowd and “having the time of my life.” That’s my idea of hell. Being in the middle of a dancefloor like that.’
‘But you’re often playing to that dancefloor,’ protested the interviewer.
‘Right. But I’ve got my little area, in my own little world. I’m having a fun time – and helping other people to have a good time. That’s great. That’s a cool situation. But I could never go to a club and be that guy in the middle. Every gig, it’s packed like sardines and you look at the dude in the middle and he’s got the biggest shit-eating grin on his face and it’s like, “What’s wrong with you?”’
Deadmau5 was disdainful of the wave of EDM artists who came after him, and received criticism for apparently slagging off his own constituency. You sense a kernel of grudging grunginess about Deadmau5, a little bit of shame at the role into which he has been cast, one that has made him millions. Is EDM just depthless noise, surface blare, a mere push to the max for the sake of the max? A sell-out, a white-out, a massive stadium-swelling cliché? Is it a genre that has stalled because it has left itself nowhere to go?
There was a worry that EDM marked the point where rave and club music had become over-legitimised through sheer commerciality, far too acceptable to the sort of white-jock constituency whose forefathers would once have burned twelve-inch vinyl in baseball arenas. We’d come a long way from Castlemorton, that was for sure. It’s tempting, indeed, to regard Castlemorton as the last time that popular culture and the authorities were at loggerheads, when actual legislation was used in an attempt to strike down a musical movement.
For black British artists working on the UK live scene, however, it’s long been a different story. In 2009, Kode9 and the late Spaceape cut a version of the Specials’ 1981 hit ‘Ghost Town’. ‘All the clubs have been closed down,’ intones Spaceape with slow, solemn emphasis over a post-apocalyptic, razed dubscape of ghostly peals of brass, sirens and a subdued bass pulse. That same year, reported Dan Hancox in the Guardian, the live-music community was protesting against the police’s use of the infamous risk assessment form 696, which demanded information from licensees as to the performers and audience members at any club night or gig they were planning to stage, on pain of a hefty fine if they failed to comply. One of the questions asked on the original form was: ‘Is there a particular ethnic group attending? If “yes”, please state group.’ This somewhat blatant racial profiling was removed from the form in December 2008, but mentions elsewhere on the form of musical styles to be played (‘bashment, R&B, garage’) gave strong hints as to the kind of events the police were looking to circumscribe. Grime DJs protested that despite the combative nature of their music’s lyrics, the amount of trouble at events was no worse than you might get at the average pub; that grime was being penalised for its blackness and its newness.
Several years on, things hadn’t changed. In 2016, the owner of the Dice Bar in Croydon, south London, was told that the music he featured was attracting ‘the wrong sort of clientele’, while a licensing officer from the local borough made reference to ‘unacceptable forms of music’ – those considered synonymous with blackness, with violence.
The Grenfell Tower tragedy of 2017 made this sort of exclusionary tactic, an attempt to suppress cultural expression based solely on prejudice, even more repugnant. Many insisted that the word ‘tragedy’ was not adequate for what was a criminal act of state and local authority negligence, whose victims were people of colour left behind in a London ruthlessly bent on gentrification and social cleansing. Grime artists such as Skepta, Stormzy and Ladbroke Grove’s AJ Tracey were already becoming engaged at this point, finding in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party a reason to engage with mainstream politics. Interviewed by the Guardian, Tracey excoriated the continued suppression of London, the ‘most multicultural place in the world’, and the attempt to shut down its celebratory music ‘because the rich people don’t like the noise or seeing brown people outside their window’. The Grenfell tragedy did not surprise him, nor the pitiful lack of response from central government. ‘If this had been a Tory constituency in Hampshire, they’d have sent the army in,’ opined Tracey’s brother. The whole country was moved by the efforts of the emergency services and communities themselves – if not the abysmally inert local council – to rally and lend assistance in the face of the disaster. Still, when an attempt was made to organise a fundraiser for Grenfell at the Trapeze Bar in Shoreditch, London, the general manager wrote back and said the music they intended to play – bashment – was ‘crap’ and would attract a ‘poor quality demographic’ to the venue.
In fairness, the manager in question was subsequently relieved of his position. What’s more, at this time live-music venues of all kinds were under threat of closure as new people moved into hip city areas and attempted to close down the ‘vibrancy’ that was supposedly their selling point, complaining with far too frequent success about noise and enabling property developers to swoop and create yet more new apartments. Even the urbane Fabric looked to have closed its doors for the last time following a drugs scare, before its licence was reinstated.
However, while the gradual acceptance of rave as a mass music that had come to supplant rock made it an overground, mostly white and Euro-American phenomenon, the excluded, illegitimate beats of the black underground would provide the rhythmical accompaniment to a protest against a post-neo-liberal, post-prosperous and fatally polarised society: Grime4Corbyn.
On the face of it, grime’s endorsement of Corbyn is a little puzzling, as there’s little in the lyrical content itself, with its brags and beefs, its ruthless top-dog materialism, that seems to share any kinship with Corbyn’s personal and political ethos: a ‘kinder, gentler’ approach, but one unequivocally pitted against the ravages of the capitalist free market on the welfare state. Jeremy Corbyn is perhaps the least grime-y person on the planet. The best way of making sense of this undoubted phenomenon is to regard the motions of grime as having as much to do with ritual as reality. It is inadmissible in the genre to talk about social deprivation, personal vulnerability, theft of pride, poverty, much as it has been in African American music since 1990. But that does not mean that feelings of racism, of disadvantage and exile from mainstream concerns and discourse are not felt. And when a Corbyn comes along professing that he will at least turn around a system that is stacked against black and ethnic minorities, there will be no pretence that they are anything other than 4 him and 4 that.