[THS] Jon Savage selects the definitive acid house tracks

[Peter Webster]

http://music.guardian.co.uk/electronic/story/0,,2273951,00.html

Twenty years ago acid house and a new drug arrived in Britain's clubs
to incite the biggest revolution in youth culture since the Sixties'
summer of love. The key members of the scenes in London and
Manchester talk DayGlo grins and dancing in fountains with Luke
Bainbridge

Jon Savage selects the definitive acid house tracks

Sunday April 20, 2008
The Observer

At the start of 1988, the London club scene was ripe for change. Rare
groove and hip hop had dominated for a few years, but a select few
DJs and clubs were popularising a new music called acid house. The
two formative clubs were Shoom and Future, run by Danny Rampling
and Paul Oakenfold, inspired by an infamous trip to Ibiza the previous
summer.

Danny Rampling (DJ and founder of Shoom): You will always get
people saying 'My mate played "acid house" back in 1984,' and some of
the records had been around for a couple of years, but it wasn't until
1988 that it exploded and took the whole country by storm. Myself,
Nicky Holloway, Johnny Walker and Paul Oakenfold had a complete
revelation in Amnesia the summer before and were totally inspired. I
had a crystal-clear vision of what I wanted to create back in England,
and I'm sure the others both felt the same.

Carl Cox (DJ): I supplied the sound system for the first two Shoom club
nights. Danny Rampling asked me to come down because he knew I
was already into the music. It was in a fitness centre on Southwark
Street in south London, but what happened in there was like nothing
that had gone before. This whole rare groove movement had lasted for
years in London but it couldn't really go any further, whereas house
music pointed the way forward.

Terry Farley (DJ and founder of Boys Own fanzine): At first you just had
little pockets of people who knew about acid house. The very first
people to get into it were those from London, Manchester and Sheffield
who had been out working in Ibiza in the summers of 1986 and '87 and
been exposed to it there.

Pete Tong (DJ): At that stage what we were playing was part acid
house, part balearic and part rare groove.

Mark Moore (S'Express): It was a tiny little scene at first and felt really
special. It had so much energy. At the time London was really into rare
groove and hip hop and some people were saying house music is just
not right for London. I remember saying if the drug of choice changes,
people will get into the music, because the drug of choice then was
weed. And people just laughed at me.

Wayne Anthony (promoter of Genesis raves): I had taken ecstasy in
Tenerife the summer before, but it hadn't really done anything for me.
Then someone took me to Future one night. I didn't really know what to
expect. I turned up in a three grand suit! Everyone looked like they had
just come back from Ibiza. I had half an E and was totally euphoric.
There was a huge positive energy being given out by everyone and I
just knew it was something special. I knew it could change my life.

Originating in Chicago in the early Eighties, house music took its name
from a club called the Warehouse. What became known as acid house
was characterised by the alien sounds of the 303 synth on tracks such
as Phuture's 'Acid Trax', and wasn't a reference to LSD, as some
assumed. But the arrival from Amsterdam of a new drug had a huge
impact.

Mark Moore: It definitely took ecstasy to change things. People would
take their first ecstasy and it was almost as if they were born again.
They suddenly got it: 'Oh my God, this is amazing!' You could watch
these people walk into the club as one person and walk out as a
different person at the end of the night.

We did think: 'Wow, this is going to change the entire universe. We are
going to stop wars; we are going to stop people being repressed in
other countries. We are going to elevate to a whole new level of
consciousness.' There was this very spiritual side to it originally.

Nicky Holloway (DJ): The ecstasy and the music came together. It was
all part of the package. People who hadn't done ecstasy didn't really get
it, and as soon as they did an E they got it. That may sound a little sad,
but there's no way acid house would have taken off the way it did
without ecstasy.

Terry Farley: People were evangelical about Shoom. They saw Danny as
some sort of acid house Billy Graham figure. I remember one girl telling
me she could see his aura as he DJ'd, this glow around his head
[laughs].

Phil Hartnoll (Orbital): It definitely came together, the drugs and the
music as part of the same package. If you look back through history,
new music is quite often associated with a new drug, isn't it?

Danny Rampling: The people who had been in Ibiza had brought back
a bit more of a hippy-ish look - and the clubs were so hot because a lot
of them were in smoky basements full of strobe lights. So, naturally,
people changed their dress sense and started weating baggier clothes.

Nicky Holloway: There was no game plan, everything just seemed to
come together in a way that it never has since really, from the music
right down to the dress sense. Nothing like this 'new rave' scene now,
which no one can pretend is really anything apart from what journalists
write. There's no scene there.

Pete Tong: It was all one love, everyone together. Anyone can dance all
of a sudden, freedom of expression. Dress down, not up. Converse
trainers, smiley T-shirts - a sort of tribalism took over. Everyone was
happy to be the same.

In the north of England, DJs were also spreading the acid house word,
not least in Manchester.

Mike Pickering (T-Coy, M-People): There was quite a north-south divide
at the start. People were dancing to house music for a year in
Manchester before they were in London, because London was so
steeped in the rare groove scene. The initial northern house movement
was basically Graeme Park at the Garage in Nottingham and me at the
Haçienda. I remember I did an exchange with a DJ called Simon Goth,
who had a club called Fever at the Astoria. I came down in January
1988 and I distinctly remember playing [Derrick May, aka Rhythim is
Rhythim's] 'Strings of Life' and getting booed. People were standing
with their arms folded and someone passed me this note saying 'Why
are you playing this Chicago homo music?'

Jon Da Silva (Haçienda DJ): It was still quite rare to hear the music
then. If you heard someone playing acid house in a car, you would
cross the street to hear it, and if you heard it coming out of someone's
house, you'd want to know who lived there.

Dave Haslam (Haçienda DJ and author): In January 1988, I bumped
into Tony Wilson in Manchester. I'd been in Piccadilly Records and he
asked what I'd bought and I said, 'Acid house', and he picked up on
the drug reference and asked, 'Is it music people take drugs to listen
to?' and I said, 'No, not necessarily.' But if he had asked me the same
question in March I would have said, 'Yes, usually.'

Manchester has always had a big drug-taking music community and
ecstasy use had spread through 1987, but it was in the first few months
of 1988 that it just swamped the Haçienda.

Graham Massey (808 State): For the first few months of 1988, it still felt
like there were just a few of you doing this new thing. Me and [A Guy
Called] Gerald [original member of 808 State] would get the National
Express to go to Aberdeen Art College or somewhere to play live and
they would project porn on to you. We didn't quite fit in just yet. Then
we started to get booked at soul all-dayers and we'd always be on the
bill with Adamski and Guru Josh.

Mike Pickering: Nude was the first big night for acid house at the
Haçienda. It had started in 1986 and I gradually introduced some acid
house. By 1988 we had about 1,600 people in there and when ecstasy
hit it was like a Mexican wave that swept through the club over a three-
week period. Suddenly everyone was on ecstasy. I could just stop a
record and put my hands in the air, and the place would erupt. The
whole club would explode.

John McCready (DJ and journalist with The Face): It wasn't like
anything you'd ever experienced in a club before. The clubs we'd been
to previously were full of apprentices in pressed white shirts on the pull.
Girls were huddled in groups like disorientated wildebeest. At the
Haçienda it was almost as if a generation breathed a sigh of relief,
having been relieved of the pressure of the chase. The baggy clothes
desexualised the whole environment. The rising heat from 2,000 people
dancing, even at the bar, in the queue for the toilets, damped down
everyone. We all looked crap. If you held onto on the handrail on the
balcony above the dancefloor, your palms would be dripping in
accumulated human sweat. Many of the records talked about dancing
as working, like 'Work it to the Bone', and suddenly the original
intentions of the music started to make sense. You could feel the down
when the music stopped. The room quickly went cold as all the exit
doors were thrown open and we were herded out. Back to forbidding
reality. Until next Friday. The whole experience was always far more
addictive than the drugs. You started wanting it all to go on for ever.

Dave Haslam: Ecstasy intensified the experience and also meant the
crowd were pretty responsive to dancing to music they had not heard
before, which was very liberating. Although sometimes I think you could
have played a recording of a Hoover and 2,000 people would have
screamed with joy. Mostly when you DJ you're faced with a crowd
waiting to be entertained and it's your challenge to whip them up into a
frenzy. In that era it was different; you were faced with 2,000 baying
people on the verge of their heads exploding. It was more like you had
to hold them back, like someone trying to guide wild horses.

Danny Rampling: A lot of the old London crowd hadn't got it at first.
When I played gigs in regular clubs, people were like, 'He's lost his
mind! What's going on here? This is the work of the devil, I don't want
anything to do with it!'

So many people dissed it in the early stages, at the tail end of 1987,
and then, all of a sudden, people's enthusiasm for the whole experience
just exploded in a matter of weeks. I can still see the faces of people in
some of the clubs, the look of bewilderment was just astonishing. It was
like, 'God, you don't know what we're experiencing here, you don't
know what you're missing out on.' Subsequently, a lot of those people
joined the party, around the late summer of 1988, particularly a lot of
the old rare groove and funky crowd. They weren't going to miss out on
the greatest thing that had come along in years.

Having run Future in the back room of Heaven, in early April, Paul
Oakenfold opened a new club called Spectrum in the main room of the
club, one of the largest club venues in central London at the time.
Some viewed it as over-ambitious, but it was an almost instant success,
the clearest demonstration of how quickly the acid house scene was
exploding.

Mark Moore: When Paul Oakenfold opened Spectrum on a Monday
night, everyone laughed and thought it would never get off the ground.
But the first night 200 people came and had a brilliant time and within
weeks there were queues around the block.

Paul Oakenfold: I think the moment we moved to Spectrum in the main
club was when we realised just how big this thing was going to be.

Fabio (Radio One DJ): My first proper exposure to acid house was at the
first night of Spectrum. Steve Jackson, the DJ, had told us about it, but
when we got down there it was pretty cold and there was a massive
queue and we couldn't get in for hours. In the end Steve Jackson said
to the bouncer 'Don't you know who I am?', and the bouncer said,
'Someone call a doctor, this guy doesn't know how he is.' But they let us
in, and I was just completely blown away. I was a soulboy really, and
I'd been through the rare groove thing, but this was something
completely different. I couldn't believe the power of it. [Paul] Oakenfold
was up there like a God, DJing surrounded by lasers and things, and
everyone was off their heads. It was like stepping into another world.
After one night I was completely and utterly hooked.

30 April: S'Express scored 1988's first acid house hit single, reaching No.
1 with 'Theme From S'Express'.

Mark Moore: I wrote the song about six months previously. I just
thought they'd play it at Shoom and Future and it would be a cult
record. We sent out promos but couldn't get it on the radio; Radio 1
refused to play it. Then the first week it came out it went to number 27
or 28, then the next week it went to three and Radio 1 went 'Uh-oh,
we're going to look really stupid if this goes to No. 1,' so they started
playing it. And it went to No. 1.

Graham Massey: It did feel like a clean page in music, like the board
had been wiped clean. We managed to get some very odd-sounding
records in the charts as well. The music sounded very automatic, as if
the music was making the music, rather than people. You can see that
in some of the early 808 State stuff like Newbuild

4 June: Nicky Holloway opened the Trip at the Astoria, in London's West
End, the first big legal Saturday night acid house club.

Nicky Holloway: I was offered the chance to do something at the
Astoria, because they had a seven-week gap in their diary when
someone cancelled. So I thought if we could close off the upstairs we
could maybe fill the downstairs part of the club, which was 600 people.
But on the opening night we had 1,200 people.

We called it the Trip and the first night was 4 June 1988. It was just
really lucky timing really. The only two style magazines at that time were
i-D and the Face, and they both had huge features in their June issue
on acid house, which came out the week before we launched the Trip. I
had no idea they were coming out, but it couldn't have been better
timing for me. It meant we were full from day one.

Mike Pickering: Nicky Holloway booked me to DJ and T-Coy to play at
the Trip. This was only six months after I got booed at the same venue,
but when I came back down the crowd were all in bandanas and smiley
T-shirts, trance dancing... and I played what was probably 70-80 per
cent of the same records, and they went mental.

Nicky Holloway: At the Trip, people would refuse to go home at the end
of the night. The roads would all be blocked, and people would be
dancing in the fountains at the bottom of Centrepoint . The police
would just be laughing because they had absolutely no idea what was
going on. They didn't know what ecstasy was at this point, so they just
couldn't understand. They just thought it was funny, because they
could see that no one was hurting anyone else.

Fabio: It wasn't just the drugs. I think the timing and the social aspect
was just as important as the drugs. It's difficult to remember now what
Thatcher's Britain felt like. A lot of people were unemployed and bored,
and felt very distant from everything else that was going on in society. A
lot of people were searching for something, for a way out. It's difficult
to recall how drab things were at the time.

Nicky Holloway: I remember standing in the club at its peak and
thinking it is never going to get better than this, and it never did really,
not for me. For the first time in my life I was not only DJing at the
biggest and best club night, I was running it. I had to pinch myself. It
was just mad. Everyone just went nuts. We all knew it was our
Woodstock, our Sixties thing. We knew we were part of something that
people would be talking about 20 years later, and here we are. It's
amazing that most of the people who were part of the scene then are
still making a living out of it now.

Fabio: Even when it really began to take off in the summer it still felt like
there was only a few thousand people who were in on it. Most young
people didn't have a clue. You would come out of all-night parties and
bump into people in the petrol station who were on their way to work,
and they would look at us like we were zombies!

13 July: The Ibiza-themed Hot night launched on Wednesdays at the
Haçienda, with a swimming pool on the dancefloor and free ice pops.

Paul Cons (promoter at the Haçienda): Tony Wilson used to pay me to
go to New York for a month each year for 'research' purposes, and the
previous year I'd basically spent it all in the Paradise Garage on ecstasy,
so I knew what was coming, and just had this idea to launch the new
night with a summer beach party theme.

Paul Mason (Haçienda manager): Myself and Fred, the maintenance
manager, erected this huge pool and connected all the hosepipes up
we could find to the sinks behind the bars, then went to the pub for a
few pints of Stella. We came back three hours later and there was just
this puddle in the bottom of the pool. We ended up having to get
someone to connect us up to the main water supply. Of course the next
morning we then had this swimming pool full of tonnes of water in the
middle of the dancefloor and we had a bloody gig that night so had to
empty it quickly somehow. Peter Hook [from New Order] turned up in
the afternoon and said, 'I know what to do, my kids have got a
paddling pool which is the same design, just smaller. You just take one
of the panels out - it's much quicker that way.' But we lost control of it
and tonnes of water burst out of the cargo doors of the club. This little
old dear was walking past the club pulling her shopping trolley and it
washed her about 300 yards down the road.

Jon Da Silva: The first couple of weeks of Hot were reasonably 'normal',
but from the third week it was mayhem. It was almost scary. I came out
of the DJ booth and there was this guy with dreadlocks who was almost
hysterical, crying and laughing at the same time, just blown away by
the atmosphere. You almost felt like you were missing out by DJing, you
wanted to be on the floor.

Hana Borrowman (Haçienda regular): I'd just turned 16 and left school
when I first went to the Haçienda. It just turned everything upside
down. Within weeks I'd left home and ducked out of college for a year
to take it all up full-time. At £25, though, ecstasy was pretty prohibitive
for us, so we all dabbled in halves and even quarters.

Dave Haslam: I was DJing at the Haçienda one evening and a girl came
into the DJ box, lay down and took all her clothes off. She was naked,
and started pulling at my trousers. I was wise enough to know it was E
taking effect, rather than anything to do with me, but it was just one of
those things; there was a lot of craziness in the air.

Hana Borrowman: The clubs soon became just the warm-up for the
evening's events. Most of the real 'rave' experiences came after - at the
after-hours parties in the makeshift venues and shebeens, like the
Kitchen in Hulme. At 16, on small does of strong ecstasy, climbing piss-
stained staircases towards the barely muffled basslines of massive
speakers and entering the neon gloom of a barely lit council flat was like
entering a futuristic fantasy. We used to dress in Converse booties,
baggy sweats, Kickers, baseball caps and rucksacks stuffed with
whistles, sweets and toys to entertain our fellow hallucinating party-
goers. You would end up sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor of a
car park, falling in love, staring pupil-to-dilated pupil into the eyes of
boys with bowl haircuts.

Mike Pickering: That whole period just felt so special because no one
had a clue what we were doing. The authorities didn't have a clue. We
used to come out of the Haçienda when it finished and go back to the
Kitchen in Hulme, which was just two old council flats knocked together.
Funnily enough, I bumped into Noel Gallagher recently and we were
reminiscing about the Kitchen and saying hardly anyone mentions it.

One of the first big raves in Manchester was put on behind Piccadilly
Station by Chris and Antony Donnelly. Bizarrely, it was directly opposite
what is now, 20 years on, the Warehouse Project. The coppers didn't
turn up until about 9am when we were sweeping up, and it was just
piles of water bottles. The police were like, 'What's been going on here?'
and we said, 'We've just had a private party, officer, but as you can see
there was no alcohol, and Tony Wilson from Granada Reports came
down as well,' and they were like, 'OK, fine.' They didn't have a clue.

Jon Da Silva: 'Voodoo Ray' was the sound of the summer of 1988 for
Manchester. One of the other DJs, Dean Johnson, had told me about
this music [A Guy Called] Gerald was making which sounded incredible,
and I'd actually driven round Moss Side looking for him and his studio to
hear it. Then one night at Hot he appeared behind the DJ booth with a
12-inch of 'Voodoo Ray'. I stuck it straight on, which you would never
do, and it was just amazing.

In August, Tony Colston-Hayter hosted one of the first big warehouse
raves at Wembley Studios in London, under the name Apocalypse Now,
and let ITN News film the event, the first time news cameras had been
let into a rave. On 17 August, the Sun published a story about drug-
taking at Heaven, owned by Richard Branson, claiming that 'junkies
flaunt their craving by wearing T-shirts bearing messages like "Can You
Feel It?" & "Drop Acid Not Bombs"'. Branson gave an interview to ITN
denying any link between the music and drug taking, although he
referred to it as 'acid rock'.

Danny Rampling: It was a bit of a worrying time really. All of a sudden,
it was horror stories all round - 'This is going to be the death of our
children. Who are the people responsible?' - and, of course, I was
responsible for it, with a handful of other individuals. My wife at the
time, Jenni, said, 'No matter what you do, do not become a
spokesperson for this movement, because you will just get nailed,' and
she was so right. Tony Colston-Hayter became a spokesperson and
ended up with MI6 on his tail and his phone was bugged. It was a
pretty frightening time.

Paul Oakenfold: As usual, the tabloids blew everything up and
sensationalised it. They even tried to use the drugs issue, which was
fabricated, to put pressure on Richard Branson to close down
Spectrum, but, to his credit, he wasn't having any of it.

Despite, or perhaps because of the tabloids' interest, acid house parties
got bigger and bigger. On 10 November, Wayne Anthony held the first
Genesis warehouse party in Aldgate, east London.

Wayne Anthony: I had already worked in the music business with Mel &
Kim, and, once I'd been to a few acid house parties and saw it was just
a sound system and a few lights, could see there was an opportunity for
someone to do it properly. A lot of the parties were in derelict buildings
and quite unsafe, so I thought there was a gap to do this a bit safer.
The police didn't have a clue, so once you knew how to placate them it
was quite easy. We would look for a warehouse that was up for let and
in decent condition, and then we would break in. The only other
promoter who was trying to do it on the same scale as us was Tony
Colston-Hayter and his Sunrise outfit. Our first party was a couple of
hundred people and then the second, a week later, was over a
thousand people - and it was amazing.

Danny Rampling: When it exploded it was taken out of the hands of the
original people, which caused a funny Animal Farm-type situation.
Previously it had all been 'We're all equal, love and peace' and all of a
sudden, there was a bit of snobbery and people taking the mick out of
these newcomers who didn't quite get it, and calling them Acid Teds
and Acid Sheep. People were pissed off that they didn't have control
over it any more, but you can't control these things once they explode.

Mark Moore: When the big raves started the elite would be like, 'Oh, my
God, you didn't go there, did you?' They really looked down on it; they
thought they were just full of the hoi polloi. But if you look back at
footage of those first raves everyone is completely off their heads but
looks so innocent and natural. It was beautiful and I thought, 'This is a
great atmosphere, there's nothing wrong with this.'

Wayne Anthony: Within a matter of weeks we had become the biggest
promoters. We found this amazing warehouse venue in Hackney, and
on Christmas Eve we had nearly 1,000 people in there. I was up all
night and went round to my Mum's for Christmas dinner, but didn't end
up eating much. Then we had another one on Boxing Day and 2,000
people turned up. We had quite a few celebrities that night, including
Matt Dillon, Milli Vanilli and Boy George. Some of the West End's biggest
club owners came down to, in their own words, 'see what all the fuss is
about'. They'd come to see where all their punters had disappeared to
and were gutted to find they'd lost them to a party in a warehouse on a
back street in east London.

We then joined forces with Tony and Sunrise for New Year's Eve in the
same venue, which was the biggest and best acid party yet.

As the party continued into 1989, the focus switched more towards
large-scale parties, sometimes involving 10,000 revellers, held in either
warehouses or fields. Many took place around the M25, and thus
became known as Orbital raves (from which Paul Hartnoll and his older
brother, Phil, took the name of their band). In the north, similarly, the
emphasis moved towards large raves, most famously in Blackburn. But
for many of the founding fathers of the scene, nothing would ever quite
recapture those heady early days.

Phil Hartnoll: The thing I remember about the time was just jumping
around with excitement about the whole scene really. Just loving it. I
had never really wanted to be in a band. I was just plodding along with
my brother and really interested in synthesisers as a hobby. Then we
thought, 'Shall we try and put a track out on record?' And we've never
looked back really. I still can't believe my luck.

Liam Howlett (the Prodigy): I remember bumping into an old school
friend on the train and he was like, 'You've got to come to one of these
acid house parties,' so I went down to one late in the summer of 1988,
but it didn't really grab me. I'd come from a hip hop background and
the music was a bit too trancey for me; I was more into beats. Also,
someone had told me that if you had allergies then you should stear
clear of ecstasy. I don't know where the hell they got that from, but I
had hayfever so that put me off taking ecstasy for a bit, which probably
didn't help. To be honest, I was more into the rave scene that exploded
the year after - that made much more sense to me.

Mark Moore: I don't think kids nowadays quite get how revolutionary
and countercultural it felt. It changed, and stopped being about a holy
sacrosanct where you knew you were going to go out and expand your
consciousness and also have a fucking brilliant time. It became about
just getting off your head, which was sad really.

Dave Haslam: Breaking down social and musical barriers was an
important part of what was achieved. In the late Eighties, courtesy of
Thatcher, communities had been fragmented, ghettoised, marginalised;
but on the Haçienda dancefloor those divisions, that horrible selfishness,
seemed to melt away. The best music revolutions have always been
about synthesis. That's been the case ever since the birth of rock'n'roll;
Elvis bringing together white country music and black rhythm and
blues. We had that synthesis; influences, people, coming together.

Danny Rampling: It changed a lot of people's lives for ever. The
strength of the whole experience was more than just going to a club
and listening to music. It changed a million mindsets. It had a profound
effect on anyone who experienced a night in a warehouse, a field, a
basement or a club. And people have enduring memories to this day,
quite rightly so. It was an absolutely amazing experience for a whole
generation. It completely deconstructed the way we were thinking back
then. If you look at youth culture now, it's just gang culture and
violence and knives and just wasting that youthful energy. If only we
could have it all again, because youth culture is screaming out for
positive change. It really is.


Acid house essentials

Smiley faces

Danny Rampling: I picked up on the smiley face logo from a fashion
designer called Barnsley. I ran into him one night when he was covered
in these smiley face badges and I thought, 'Wow! That's it! The smiley
face completely signifies what this movement is all about - big smiles
and positivity.' I think we first used them on the flyer for the third
Shoom, and everyone picked up on it.

Lucozade and water

Danny Rampling: Everyone would just drink water and Lucozade.
Unbeknown to Lucozade, the rave scene had taken their drink and used
it as the drink of choice.

Dave Haslam: I remember DJing one New Year's Eve at one club and it
was full, and everyone was in there for five, six hours. Afterwards the
bar manager told me he'd sold just one pint of lager despite the
amount of people present in the club.

Ice pops

Hana Borrowman: At the Haçienda, Hot were really good about little
details. Just when the hallucinogens were kicking in and the dancefloor
was so full with smoke you couldn't see or breathe, they'd hand out ice
pops to everyone.

Mark Moore: Jenni and Danny Rampling used to hand out ice pops at
Shoom with gay abandon to the parched and needy.

Dungarees and baggy clothes

Danny Rampling: A new dress sense was created simply in reaction to
the fact that the heat was so sweltering inside the clubs, so people
started wearing baggy clothes like big T-shirts and dungarees to cope
with the heat. It was more about practicality and comfort than a styled
look - dungarees, larger T-shirts and more ethnic clothes. It was quite
anti-style because London was quite high fashion at that time.

Whistles

Hana Borrowman: Instead of jewellery, our accessories were toys and
other playthings. Whistles on a string, lollipops and a Vicks Sinex. One
girl always used to wear a dummy around her neck.

--------

Back to the old house

http://music.guardian.co.uk/electronic/story/0,,2273953,00.html

Jon Savage selects the definitive acid house tracks

Sunday April 20, 2008
The Observer

1 Fingers Inc. Mystery of Love (club version), 1986

One of the very first house records, this is one of the very greatest. Over
six and a half minutes of syncopated bass, spectral handclaps,
percolating bongos and the simplest of synthesiser melodies, Robert
Owens whispers the new gospel: 'Love love love, love love love.' It
sounded like nothing else in spring 1986, and it still seduces, 22 years
on.

Fingers Inc - Owens, Larry Heard and Ron Wilson - released a string of
brilliant records under a variety of names during the late Eighties: the
vocal 'Can You Feel It', which became an acid staple, 'Donnie' as the It,
and 'Washing Machine' as Mr Fingers. Some of these were collected on
two essential albums, Another Side and Ammnesia, while Robert Owens
had a solo hit with 'I'll Be Your Friend'.

2 Sleezy D I've Lost Control, 1986

With the incessant burbling of the Roland TB 303 bass synthesiser
underpinning a heavily treated vocal, this Marshall Jefferson production
helped to define the intense acid sound. An uncannily accurate
depiction of a bad trip, it ushered in a new age of dark side
psychedelia.

3 The Children Freedom, 1987

Beginning with a yell, this classic track features a stonking bassline
before settling into an impassioned gay rap: 'We need to come
together, I'm sure it can be done. Divided as individuals, united as one.'
The deep anger is all the more impressive because it's so restrained.

4 Phuture Your Only Friend, 1987

On the flip of the track that gave acid its name - the 12-minute-long
'Acid Tracks' - is this bad drug nightmare. 'Cocaine speaking,'
announces the treated voice, 'I can make you do anything for me.' Like
many early acid tracks, this is severely minimal.

5 Maurice Joshua I Got a Big Dick, 1988

If you've got it, flaunt it, and the only words to be heard over the
chattering percussion and rising bassline are the four words of the title:
cut up, phrased and stretched to the limit. Well, what else do you need
to know?

6 Jamie Principle Baby Wants to Ride, 1988

This club hit was greatly enhanced by a monstrous nine-minute 'sex
mix', which laid down this secular 'revelation' in true testifying terms.
Oscillating between breathy raps and Prince-like squeals, Jamie gets
down and dirty at around five minutes and doesn't stop: 'I wanna fuck
you all night long.'

7 A Guy Called Gerald Voodoo Ray, 1988

Gerald's enduring work of genius by itself justifies the whole Madchester
hype and remains one of the greatest records to ever come out of that
city. Featuring trance-like female vocals and clonking synthesisers,
'Voodoo Ray' was melodic enough to enter the Top 20. Smash Hits even
printed the lyrics.

8 Black Riot A Day in the Life, 1988

Black Riot was only one of Todd Terry's aliases, and his funky, sampled
breaks with a strong Latin flavour defined the New York sound of the
time. 'A Day in the Life' has the most brutal synth riff possible, and
snatches of Manu Dibango's 'Soul Makossa' that hark back to the
earliest days of disco.

9 Pet Shop Boys The Sound of the Atom Splitting, 1988

The flip of Top 5 hit 'Left to My Own Devices', this was the Pets at their
weirdest. A jam on the 'Devices' line - 'Che Guevara and Debussy to a
disco beat' - it boasted a memorably creepy vocal sample, its hissed
lyrics catching the mood of the time.

10 Baby Ford A Place of Dreams and Magic, 1990

Ford made his name in 1988 with two of the earliest UK acid records,
'Oochy Koochy (F.U.Baby Yeh Yeh)' and 'Chikki Chikki Ah! Ah!'. This is
the lead track from his first album, The World of Baby Ford, and a
proper song it is too, with Ford's voice pitched between wonder and
ecstasy.