The Asylum/Oldskool thread

We all went raving mad

A new youth culture turned 1989 into a summer of love. By Matt Munday

We sat up into the small hours, dialling the premium-rate phone line quoted on our tickets to get directions to the party, but no answer. Had we been ripped off? One last try and, at last, a message instructing us to take the A12 to Witham. We hit the road and, barely 20 minutes later, traffic on the A12 was three lanes deep. At 3am, anarchy hit the sleepy Essex town — its centre gridlocked with honking cars, its 24-hour garage pillaged for sweets and fizzy drinks, until someone, somewhere obtained further directions and off we all went (hardly anyone had mobile phones back then — you just followed the car in front).

We arrived, more than 20,000 of us, just before dawn at a huge aircraft hangar at Raydon airfield in Suffolk, and we danced through an idyllically sunny Sunday. Huge illegal raves, with cod-hippie names such as Energy, Biology and Sunrise, held around the M25 — and, in the northwest, around Blackburn and “Madchester” — became a tabloid bête noire in the summer of 1989. The Daily Mail called them “a new threat to British youth”. Ecstasy culture, a marriage of the illegal “love drug” MDMA with a poncho-wearing bohemian sensibility imported from Ibiza and an eclectic jumble of electronic music, seduced Britain’s teenagers — me included. What had started in 1987 at a handful of in-the-know club nights with names such as Nude and Shoom — the latter frequented by Patsy Kensit and Boy George — became a mass movement that turned 1989 into a Summer of Love for what the writer Irvine Welsh dubbed “the Chemical Generation”.

But what, other than the queasy appeal of drug-fuelled hedonism, did this new youth culture stand for? The answer would vary wildly depending on who you spoke to. “Ecstasy culture’s prevailing ethos is inclusive,” wrote the journalist Matthew Collin in his book about the rave years, Altered State. Beyond that, its lack of dogma meant that “its definition is subject to individual interpretation”.

To Rana Reeves, now running his own PR consultancy, John Doe, it was about race relations. “What I remember most was shopping at Kensington Market,” he says. “They sold all these hooded tops with prints influenced by rave culture — the Om symbol and Ganesh, the elephant god. For a Sikh who had grown up in Southend, it was profound — suddenly it was cool to be Indian in Britain. It wasn’t so much that racism went down, rather people’s tolerance went up.”

As the year wore on, police raids and the threat of confiscation of “criminal proceeds” from illegal parties under the 1988 Criminal Justice Act began to discourage the promoters of the M25 “orbital” parties. Nevertheless the music was here to stay. On October 1, three of the summer’s rave anthems — Black Box’s Ride on Time, Technotronic’s Pump up the Jam and Sydney Youngblood’s If Only I Could — stood at Nos 1, 2 and 3 in the UK pop charts. By the end of 1989, however , the orbital raves had all but died out as a result of the police crackdowns.

Luke G wrote: »

Seen the ads for that Johnny & couldn't wait to buy it, mad disappointing as their was like 1000 pages on that aul Thatcher c*nt, and only a little article on Acid House, Nothing about Airport or Sunrise 89:(

bohsboy wrote: »

playing some asylum stuff tonight on the kitchen sync until 11.30...

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/kitchen-sync

aceberg wrote: »

like a bit of this style meself jonny.was it only recently produced or is it oldskool if ya know what i mean.:D