3:AM Magazine

By Max Dunbar.

Dom Phillips, Superstar DJs Here We Go!, Ebury Press, 2009

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time - and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

- Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Nowadays, in 2009, very little is heard of acid house. There are middle-aged novelists and second-rate comedians and ageing activists going on about punk, a stage-managed metropolitan phenomenon that achieved nothing… but we were seventeen and my nose went septic from the safety pin and, like, I finally got off with Claire Henfield from Form Four!

Not much tribute, though, to the social revolution that actually worked.

Rave happened from the bottom up. A generation realised that the available options for leisure and pleasure were simply too narrow. (New Year’s Eve 1989 fell on a Sunday. The end of the year the Wall came down, the year that changed the world, you could only drink until half ten.) Rave was a national movement. We had Cream in Liverpool, Crasher in Sheffield, Haçienda in Manchester, Basics in Leeds. People loaded up on pills and drove to these places from all over the UK. Some came from America and Europe. Every industrial city and godforsaken cowtown had its own culture and clubs. It is no exaggeration to say that acid house got the North out of the recession and made it London’s cultural equal for the first time.

The influence remains. City centre bars with sofas and nonthreatening colour schemes and house DJs would not exist without rave. A panicking alcohol industry was desperate to claw back the 18-24 demographic that had defected to MDMA. Dance is the only form of music to be legislated against. The cretinous Tory government, incensed by the spectacle of free parties in abandoned quarries and warehouses, added a clause in its 1994 Criminal Justice Act that proscribed ‘open-air gatherings with more than 100 people at which music that includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’ would be played.’ The Blair administration was more pragmatic - it got rid of the last-orders bell, a repressive remnant from the Great War.

Rave affected sexuality. Cream’s PR exec Jayne Casey: ‘It was quite a good time for the woman… A girl could have loads of fun and dance quite sexy with somebody, or dance madly on the podium, show off and feel her own sexuality, without feeling threatened that she had to give out.’ It’s no wonder that so many thought that Ecstasy could actually change the world. ‘If everyone has one of these, there’ll be no more wars,’ DJ Nicky Holloway said. ‘That’s what we really felt. We weren’t fucking about.’

In Superstar DJs, from which these quotes are taken, Mixmag editor Dom Phillips charts what Irvine Welsh has called ‘the real history of the last ten years’. His central position brings great insights and observations, plus the usual unbelievable caner tales. Despite this, and for some reason, the book drags. It’s the breathless, italicised narratives about doing coke in some cubicle somewhere; the wide-eyed, slack-jawed reverence with which he treats his subjects. On Pete Tong: ‘There were occasional lunches with him and his staff, which he always paid for and I used to look forward to the moment when he took out of this wallet as it always used [to] seem so fat, the credit cards pinging out in a roll. Literally, the ‘money shot’.’ Literally?           

That’s the problem with countercultural writing, particularly countercultural memoir: for understandable reasons you lose yourself in the good memories and objective scholarship goes out the window. The result is a kind of Great Man theory of alternative history. Phillips gives too much space to the men behind the decks, not enough to the beautiful freaks on the dancefloor, the trash, the outsiders who made everything happen.

He ascribes the decline of the club industry to cocaine - coke was the Evil Drug just as pills were the Good Drug - but really it was about club management, which was corporate, male-dominated, egocentric, cut off from the people that paid for its convertibles and second homes. (Ministry boss James Palumbo: ‘I don’t find [dance music] interesting… Now Beethoven, there was an innovator.’ An ex-girlfriend described his South Ken flat as having ‘a clinical chill which screams emotional deprivation. It is completely devoid of any comfort or clutter; his fastidious tidiness somehow removes him from the reality of life.’)

No, the club world failed because it took itself too seriously and demanded too much money to sustain its delusions. Smart ravers always knew that you’d have more fun at a small, independent city venue than at the £100-plus national jamborees. Today the Hacienda is an apartment block full of recruitment consultants. People walk past it without a second look.

Despite its flaws, Dom Phillips’s book is a badly needed history of the rise and fall of what the Haçienda symbolised. It seems appropriate to end with another few words from the Doctor:

There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning… And that, I think, was the handle-that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave… So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals including Open Wide, Straight from the Fridge and Lamport Court. He also writes articles on politics and religion for Butterflies and Wheels. He is Manchester’s regional editor of Succour magazine, a journal of new fiction and poetry. He is a co-editor of 3:AM and blogs here.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, April 15th, 2009.