the republic of rave (30 years on)

an article for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on 30 years of rave

"Once Upon a Time in the Rave"
Robinson magazine, part of La Repubblica
02 Ottobre 2018

by Simon Reynolds

Thirty years ago, the U.K. was convulsed by the birth of arguably the last real youth movement. Rave was a proper subculture, with rituals and its own clothing style as well as music. Between the winter of 1987 and the summer of 1989, a new template for youth leisure emerged that would ultimately spread across the world: massive parties in which hordes of young people, clad in brightly colored clothes, danced all-night-long to electronic rhythms, united not just in the trance caused by the hypnotic beats but through a blissful communion generated by the drug MDMA. As rave proliferated, DJs were idolized, but the true star remained the dancing crowd itself. Raves were fiestas of anonymous collectivity, where individual self-consciousness dissolved in a tribal vibe.

The story of rave actually begins outside the U.K., when a coterie of London deejays traveled to Ibiza in 1987 and there experienced the synergy between MDMA (also known as Ecstasy, or E) and house music (a post-disco style spawned in Chicago’s gay clubs). Attempting to bring back the summery “Balearic” vibe to wintry London, the deejays Danny Rampling and Paul Oakenfold launched the clubs Shoom and Spectrum. Their atmosphere of relaxed intimacy broke with the preexisting clubland ethos of cool and posing.

Meanwhile, in the Northern city of Manchester, a similar energy coalesced at the Hacienda, a cavernous and somewhat desolate club started earlier in the Eighties by Factory Records. House’s music brisk rhythms plugged into a regional taste for uptempo black music, reactivating the fevered spirit of Northern Soul (a Seventies subculture based around cult-worshipped deejays, imported black American dance singles, and amphetamines). The “Madchester” scene spawned some of the first UK artists to take the imported sounds of Chicago house and Detroit techno and apply a unique British spin to them, such as A Guy Called Gerald and 808 State. There were also Manchester indie-rock groups who assimilated the new feeling, like Happy Mondays, who built a local following not just through their music but by selling pills of E direct to the audience. Their onstage frontline included a character known as Bez whose sole function was to swallow as much E as he could and do a bizarre twitchy dance. A holy fool of Ecstatic excess, Bez modelled a new dance culture archetype: the raver, whose uncool delirium superseded the club scene’s premium on elegance and composure.

“Rave” was actually an old word, dating back to the Sixties, when psychedelic bands like Pink Floyd threw All Night Raves.  The term was reactivated in 1988 as the logic of the new culture demanded ever larger events: the more people in attendance, the more that the MDMA-induced feeling of unity was amplified. In the autumn of  1988, promoters began to throw events in warehouses and abandoned factories in run-down inner-city zones like London’s East End, or the industrial areas of Northern cities like Bolton or Sheffield.  That logic of escalation then led in the summer of 1989 to even huger raves in the English countryside. Promoters took over farms (sometimes with the owner’s permission, but never notifying the authorities or following appropriate safety regulations) or they illegally occupied abandoned airfields. Long before mobile phones were widely available, rave organisers developed sophisticated methods of directing ravers to the secret locations, using phone messaging systems and “meet points” where cars of revelers drew up to receive further instructions.  The strategy was to assemble a large number of people at a location before the police found out, at which point they would be forced to accept the de facto rave for fear of causing a riot if they attempted to shut it down.

The huge convoys of cars that arrived on the M25 motorway that encircled London every weekend, the massive assemblies of bizarrely dressed youngsters shattering the quiet of the English countryside with futuristic electronic noise  - these disruptions could hardly fail to draw attention. And rave quickly became the most demonized British subculture since punk. Even without the drugs involved, you can see why both the political establishment and the general public might fear raves. Unruly gatherings of working class youths recalled the mass pickets during the Miner’s Strike of 1984-85. But rave stirred more inchoate fears. From the outside, raves did look like a pagan cult – kids flailing their limbs like voodoo worshippers. The word “rave” has connotations of madness, hysteria, or extreme forms of enthusiasm or fanaticism.  In the Sixties, “raver” had been a slang term for a sexually wild girl. Many of the newspaper scare stories about rave in 1988-89 concerned classic scenarios designed to alarm parents: tales of teenage girls having their tender minds blown on LSD, of orgies and creepy strangers preying on helpless young females.

Actually, if anything, MDMA instilled a sexless vibe.  Because MDMA’s effect encouraged tactile affection but suppressed sexual lust, the drug created an atmosphere in which women came into their own, free from the predations of the male gaze.  Rave clothing was baggy, its looseness ideal for dancing in hot sweaty environments, but also child-like, hiding the curves of sexual differentiation. When the word “love” appeared in house tracks, it wasn’t a reference to erotic coupling but a feeling of open-hearted trust towards the strangers with which you shared the dancefloor– a marvelous sensation of “collective intimacy”. That’s why, in a playful postmodern nod to the hippie Sixties, ravers talked about 1988 as the Second Summer of Love.   Later, in the early Nineties came a spate of rave tunes that sampled the melodies of children’s TV programmes. Rave as a culture involved a mass regression into innocence, a flight from adult responsibilities but also adult desires (remember, this was also the era of peak fear about AIDS).

Rarely directly political in its themes, rave’s collectivity offered an implicit rebuke to Margaret Thatcher’s worldview of competitive individualism, crystallized in her infamous statement that “there is no such thing as society” . Rave’s more fervent converts believed that the love drug Ecstasy could change the world. “They could settle wars with this…  imagine the world’s leaders on pills” is how The Streets’s Mike Skinner recalled the feeling at the time in his 2002 rave-flashback song “Weak Become Heroes”. Indie-rock converts to rave The Farm, from Liverpool, scored a 1990 hit with “All Together Now”, a song inspired by the 1914 Christmas truce between British and German troops.  And certainly in the early days of rave, the divisions between races, classes, and sexualities seemed to be dissolving in the woozy unity of the rave. Even the warring supporters of football teams fraternized in clubs and on the stadium terraces.

After the failure of police forces to thwart the big outdoor raves of 1989, Thatcher’s Conservative government passed the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act of 1990, legislation that threatened rave promoters with huge fines. For a while, the culture retreated back into the clubs. But then in 1991, the large-scale events resurged. Some were fully licensed and increasingly commercial, with spectacular lights and lazers and amusement-park side-shows. But there was also a new surge of illegal raves thrown by renegade outfits like Spiral Tribe, rough-and-ready parties without the amenities (like toilets or food) provided by the legal raves, but infused with a thrilling sense of adventure as you danced under the stars in remote areas of England.

As the music got harder and faster, matching the escalating drug consumption of the ravers, everything seemed to be hurtling towards some kind of catastrophic climax. It came with the May 1992 mega-rave at Castlemorton Common in the rural west of England. Urban ravers joined with hippie travelers, who for decades had traditionally migrated between summer festivals in their gaily painted buses and caravans and buses.  Forty thousand revelers attended Castlemorton during the rave’s six days of existence, during which it made the front covers of every newspaper in the country and led to questions in Parliament. Ultimately the Conservative government responded with the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which increased police powers to crush raves and harass travelers until their lifestyle became barely viable.

1992 may have been the peak of rave as a countercultural force, but the electronic dance culture only grew bigger as the Nineties unfolded. Musically it fragmented and mutated into a huge range of genres and micro-scenes. But its mainstream of house and trance-techno also became a well-organised and profitable leisure industry, with the rise of superclubs like Cream, Ministry of Sound and Gatecrasher: mini-corporations who raked in the money with merchandising, sponsorship deals, even club tours that took their legendary "vibe" around the county. Paralleling this professionalization was the emergence of a Premier League of super-deejays who travelled up and down the UK (and internationally too), earning thousands of pounds for each two-hour set and often playing several gigs per night at the weekend.

By the turn of the millennium, club culture had become a predictable and even controlling institution. It arguably still largely operates as a kind of social safety-valve, encouraging youth to live for the temporary utopia of the weekend rather than invest their idealism in a long-term collective project of political change.  Yet there are other legacies that still retain elements of the dissident potential of the original rave movement. The gay roots of electronic dance music have been reaffirmed by a new breed of queer and trans electronic artists like Arca, Elysia Crampton and Lotic. Then there’s the black British genre of grime, which emerged in the early 2000s from London’s illegal pirate radio culture (which earlier fostered the fiercest and strangest mutants of rave music, like jungle).

Demoting the status of the deejay, grime elevated the MC – hitherto a secondary figure in UK rave – and pushed his lyrics and vocal charisma to the fore. Initially apolitical and socially irresponsible in the gangsta rap style, grime’s political consciousness has matured and at the last UK election in June 2017 the genre threw its weight behind Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. The support of leading grime MCs like Stormzy and Novelist appears to have actually encouraged inner-city youth not just to register to vote but actually to turn up at the polling stations, resulting in Labour electoral gains and an unexpectedly close result that denied Prime Minister Theresa May an outright victory. In that sense, rave could be said to still be resisting Conservatism. At the Labour Party conference this week, Corbyn took to the stage to the tune of The Farm’s “All Together Now” and in his speech laid out a vision of reborn socialism that would effectively cancel the Thatcherite consensus of the last 35 years.

KLF

The KLF

The Observer, April 7th 1991

by Simon Reynolds 

"We lurch a lot," says Bill Drummond of The KLF. "I've never followed a set path. There has only been this feeling of getting closer to something. A beckoning peak!"

Over the past four years, Drummond and his partner Jimmy Cauty have veered chaotically from mammoth success to dismal catastrophe, leaving a trail of half-completed projects and unrealised pipe dreams. Operating under a variety of cryptic names, they've been guided only by a loose philosophy that Drummond calls "zenarchy", based on improvisation, getting bored quickly, and moving on.

Drummond's active involvement in pop began in the late Seventies as guitarist in the Liverpudlian art-punk group Big In Japan, and a subsequent role as manager of Echo and The Bunnymen. Several years later, working as an A&R consultant for WEA Records, Drummond met a like mind in Cauty, and in 1987 the pair formed The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, taking the name from a mythical anarchist secret society.

Their first single 'All You Need Is Love' quickly became notorious for its barefaced samples of the Beatles and Sam Fox, and a subsequent LP was withdrawn following an injunction instigated by Abba, in reprisal for samples from their 'Dancing Queen'.

In the summer of 1988, the duo reached Number One as The Timelords with their novelty hit 'Doctor In The Tardis', an annoying hybrid of Gary Glitter and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and documented the escapade in the book The Manual; How To Have A Number One The Easy Way.

Such stunts earned Drummond and Cauty the reputation of pranksters. For some they were heroic mischief-makers in the mould of Malcolm McLaren, for others merely an irritant in the gimmicky, self-publicising tradition of Jonathan King.

Drummond, now 37, sees it differently. "McLaren has a hunger for a public profile, whereas I think Jimmy and I shy away from that. We don't have a master plan, just impulses that we act upon. We've never set out to irritate but I know that we annoy people because we seem to be very knowing — simply because of all our experience in the business, we do know a lot more than a bunch of 19-year-olds who are completely instinctive and naive."

None the less, the duo rapidly grew sick of their reputation. "There was a point when we really only existed on the pages of the music papers. And we wanted out of it. We liked the idea of achieving something that had no irony and no reference points."

They drew inspiration from acid house and rave culture, which they found refreshing precisely because it was unmediated and unselfconscious. "The rave scene was a complete rejection of Eighties 'Style culture' mentality, which I always loathed because it was elitist and joyless. Acid house was all-embracing and inclusive, but like anything new, it quickly built up its own class structure and code. But then in 1989, when the big raves started along the orbital motorways, the scene opened up again."

Early in 1990, as The KLF, the duo released Chill Out, an album of beat-free "ambient house", designed as a soothing soundtrack to the crack-of-dawn come-down after all-night raves. Despite a record cover that spoofed Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother and samples that ranged from Fleetwood Mac's 'Albatross' to Acker Bilk, for many people Chill Out was the first time the duo had made music without having their tongue wedged in their collective cheek.

Towards the end of last year, The KLF had a huge hit with the manic techno-mantra 'What Time Is Love'. But any doubts that Drummond and Cauty were finally succeeding on their own musical merits were scotched in February when their '3AM Eternal' got to Number One, and their new album, The White Room, entered the Top Ten.

Despite their two Number One hits, The KLF are "perpetually broke", partly because they run their own record label and partly because of 'the never-ending saga' of their full-length movie The White Room. "We've spent £200,000 on it already, but we need £1.5 million to finish it," says Drummond ruefully. So they've released the soundtrack album first, and are waiting to "knock on doors to ask for money". In the meantime The KLF are determined to avoid a planned career. Says Drummond, "We prefer just to roam."

The KLF + Massive Attack

The New York Times, August 18th 1991

by Simon Reynolds

So volatile is the club scene that few artists have been able to make a career out of dance music, which is released mostly as singles. When dance groups do make an album, it usually consists of a few singles and a heap of filler.

But in the aftermath of Britain's "acid house" revolution — the psychedelic trance-dance music played on samplers, synthesizers and drum machines — a new breed of dance group has emerged, one that looks to the album format as an opportunity to explore its ideas. The last year has seen probing albums like 808 State's Ex:el, Bassomatic's Set the Controls for the Heart of the Bass and the Shamen's En-Tact.

Now Massive Attack's Blue Lines and the KLF's White Room suggest a breakthrough for dance music intended to be heard at home. They may even herald the return of the concept album, not seen in disco since the days of Earth, Wind and Fire. And after building a reputation in England — the KLF has had three hit singles, Massive Attack glowing reviews — the two groups are poised to conquer the United States.

Massive Attack's origins lie in an early 80's rap collective called the Wild Bunch, from Bristol, in England's West Country. The band's 1986 cover version of 'The Look of Love' is credited with influencing Soul II Soul's hybrid of funk, reggae and hip-hop. But because Massive Attack was slow to record its debut album, the group is regarded as a follower in Soul II Soul's shift toward a laid-back, contemplative dance sound. Blue Lines (Circa/Virgin America 2-91685; CD and cassette) takes this to the next phase.

Although Massive Attack uses house and hip-hop techniques like sampling, rapping and turntable-scratching, most of its songs are much slower than the club norm of 120 beats per minute; they range from about 90 beats per minute to a torpid 67. Dance records usually simulate the uproar of communal celebration, but Massive Attack's vibe is meditational rather than gregarious. The group has talked of its admiration for Pink Floyd, its desire to be considered primarily an album band and its reluctance to have its records categorized as dance music.

On the liner notes, Massive Attack pays tribute to the inspiration of such unlikely ancestors as the post-punk experimental group Public Image Limited, the jazz-rock cosmonauts the Mahavishnu Orchestra and fusioneers like Herbie Hancock. More predictably, Massive Attack cites Isaac Hayes, the pioneer of symphonic soul, and the legendary reggae production team Studio One.

Mr. Hayes's influence comes through on the epic 'Safe From Harm' and the mournfully sweeping, string-laden 'Unfinished Sympathy', both of which were hit singles in Britain. But Massive Attack's real originality lies in more tranquil tracks like 'One Love', with its mesmerizing clockwork rhythm and jazzy, electric-piano pulsations. The title track, 'Blue Lines', combines purring keyboards, a sleepwalking beat and a soft-spoken rap soliloquy that's far from the self-assertive bluster associated with hip-hop. As the rapper 3D declares, "No tension in my life/'Cause the way I deal is hazy."

On 'Daydreaming', 3D lets his mind drift on a stream of consciousness in which he refers to Robert De Niro and quotes from 'Fiddler on the Roof' and the Beatles, in between expounding an almost Zen Buddhist philosophy of sublime inertia. He talks of "living in my headphones," of floating like helium above the hyperactive "trouble and strife" of everyday life.

On the similarly mystical 'Hymn of the Big Wheel', Horace Andy's vocal is swathed in eddies of ethereal sound more appropriate to Brian Eno's production style than a dance record. Like the music of the cosmic rock groups that Massive Attack admires, its sound evokes interstellar imagery. But Blue Lines is really about being lost in inner space. This record is the dance-music equivalent of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, a shift toward a more interior kind of music.

^^^^^^^^^^

The KLF flirts with the cosmic and the conceptual, but in a less lofty, more tongue-in-cheek fashion than Massive Attack. In the video for the single '3 A.M. Eternal' (which recently appeared in the Billboard Top 10), the KLF. is garbed in ceremonial robes and moves in formation as though enacting a religious rite. On the album The White Room (Arista AR8657; CD and cassette), the group mythologizes itself as a nomadic cult of outsiders on a vague quest. The obsession with secret societies dates back to the band's earlier incarnations.

The KLF's core members, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, met in 1987 and formed a rap group called the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (the Jamms), taking the name from a fictional anarchist organization said to have been fighting authority since the dawn of history. Later, they called themselves the Timelords, after another mysterious sect of warriors against evil, this time taken from the BBC's cult science fiction series Doctor Who.

As the Jamms and the Timelords, Mr. Drummond and Mr. Cauty were known principally as pranksters. Mr. Drummond described their philosophy as "zenarchy." Promoting their first single, 'All You Need Is Love', they daubed their logo on billboards throughout Central London. The Jamms' 1987 album had to be withdrawn after Abba, one of many groups sampled on the record, threatened legal action. As the Timelords, the duo scored a No. 1 hit in England with a novelty single called 'Doctorin' the Tardis'.

But Mr. Drummond and Mr. Cauty grew tired of their reputation as mischievous pop strategists. They decided that, in Mr. Drummond's words, "irony and reference points are the dark destroyers of great music." The duo longed to shed the British post-punk trait of having a master plan to, say, shock every grandmother in England. Inspired by the acid-house scene's lack of self-consciousness, they dedicated themselves to making serious trance-dance music. Renaming themselves the KLF. (it stands for the Kopyright Liberation Front, an allusion to their sampling problems), they recorded the febrile electro anthem 'What Time Is Love?'

Still, the group has never completely shed its playful side. Last year, it released Chill Out (Wax Trax 7155; all three formats), an album of "ambient house" — house music with the beat removed to leave a tranquilizing sound-bath for tired dancers. Aware of the album's affinity for the cosmic rock of the early 70's, they put a photograph of sheep grazing on the album cover — a reference to Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother. The joke is continued by another ambient group, the Orb, on its soon-to-be-released album Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld (Big Life/ Mercury 511034; CD and cassette), the cover of which spoofs Pink Floyd's Animals.

This year the KLF released The White Room, the soundtrack to its unfinished movie of the same title. On songs like 'Church of the KLF', the duo brings the mystical side of Britain's youth culture to consciousness. The song '3 A.M. Eternal' celebrates the feeling of having transcended time through spending a night in nonstop trance-dancing. Earlier this summer, the KLF. held a summer solstice party on the remote Scottish island of Jura, where the group and its guests dressed in yellow robes and burned a giant wicker man in imitation of a Celtic pagan ritual.

The KLF is simultaneously celebrating and mocking acid house's revival of the transcendental imagery of the hippie era. When the acid craze swept Britain in 1988, participants called it the "second summer of love." Album-oriented groups like Massive Attack and the KLF. suggest that the psychedelic dance revolution has now entered its progressive rock phase. So long as bands can avoid resurrecting the sterile monumentality and self-indulgence of groups like Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, this is a promising development.

The Prodigy (RIP Keith Flint)

[in chronological order of release, not of me writing them)

The Prodigy
Charly EP
XL Recordings
(for eMusic, Rave Dozen, 2007)

by Simon Reynolds

The Prodigy’s career could be Exhibit A in the case claiming that rave, far from being anti-rock (like its precursor sounds techno and house) was in fact a futurised reinvention of rock. From ‘ardkore classics like “Everybody in the Place” and “Out of Space” to the digi-punk and Oi!-tronica of “Firestarter” and “Breathe”, the core essence of Prodigy is a teen rampage spirit of bring-the-noise mayhem. Producer Liam Howlett is a riff-master on a par with AC/DC’s Angus Young, while his grasp of tension-and-release, build-and-breakdown dynamics is as consummate as genius pulp hitmakers Chinn & Chapman (the team who wrote and produced most of the classic glam smashes for The Sweet). Yet his pre-rave past as a Public Enemy-loving British B-boy ensured a level of bass-knowledge and breakbeat-science that made the Prodigy sound utterly contemporary.

Only the group’s second single (the first, “What Evil Lurks” b/w Android”, has never been reissued for some reason) “Charly” was a Top 3 hit in the UK in August 1991. It singlehandedly spawned the hardcore subgenre of toytown rave, tunes that sampled children’s TV shows (especially where some kind of Ecstasy-pun or druggy double-entendre could be made out of the show’s name or a fragment of dialogue). In ‘Charly’”, the sample is a little boy from a Public Information Film advising children how to avoid getting lost or abducted. “Charley says, always tell your mummy before you go off somewhere,” the kid says, translating the words of a cartoon cat, Charly, whose miauow is transformed by Howlett into the tune’s killer riff. The joke here is the idea of UK teenagers sneaking off to raves where they get up to things that would make their mums blanch. The original version of “Charly” sounds slightly restrained, so the one to go for is the “Alley Cat” mix, its swirly Belgian-style techno-riff expertly simulating the timbre of the cat’s miaouw but turning it into a spine-tingling MDMA-activating noise. In between the two ‘Charlys” you’ll find two other terrific tunes, “Pandemonium”and “Your Love”

You are also recommended--nay, urged--nay, instructed--to check out The Prodigy’s debut album Experience, especially in the Expanded reissue version with its bonus disc of back-in-the-day remixes, B-sides and rarities. 

THE PRODIGY

Experience: Expanded

(for Spin I think; 2001)

by Simon Reynolds

1997's "Firestarter" might have been their US breakthrough, but in Britain The Prodigy were massive almost from the git-go. Their second single "Charley" was a #5 pop hit in the summer of 1991, and the follow-up "Everybody In the Place" was only kept off the top spot by the re-released "Bohemian Rhapsody."  Back then the Prodigy were pop ambassadors for hardcore, staple sound of England's early Nineties rave scene and the hip hop/techno mutant that eventually evolved into drum'n'bass. All convulsively strobing keyboard vamps, frenzied breakbeats, and bruising bass, hardcore always was the "the new rock'n'roll". It's just that Liam Howlett had to add guitars, punk-snarl vocals, and videogenic hair-rebel shapethrowing before the non-rave world was convinced that Prodigy rocked.

Experience: Expanded is a reissue of Prodigy's 1992 debut album with an extra disc of remixes and B-sides. Sounds slightly dubious, I know, but actually it's a radical enhancement of an already bona fide classic. The B-sides offer ruff proto-jungle bizness, and the remixes are the absolute killer versions that slayed 'em on the ravefloor in 1991-92 (then reappeared in slightly-inferior remixed form on the original Experience). So this retrospectively "corrected" Experience now includes the definitive "Alley Cat Remix" incarnation of "Charly", with its cartoon feline's miaouw smearing into the miasmic churn of the distorto-synth riff, and the superior "Fairground Remix" of "Everybody In the Place," a dementedly whirling dervish-machine that was actually popular on rollercoaster sound systems.

Experience is all about speed--not just the synergy-rush of E's and whizz (UK slang for amphetamine) with exponentially-soaring b.p.m rates, but an entire emergent culture of hyperkinetic thrills, from videogames to snowboarding. And in 1992 that gave The Prodigy and their hardcore rave brethren real resonance for Brit-kids languishing under Tory tyranny: when your culture is all about blockage and stagnation, reaching escape-velocity becomes  paramount. Things haven't improved a whole heap since, which might be one reason Experience still packs such a mighty buzz.   

The Prodigy interview, circa Music for the Jilted Generation

Melody Maker, July 16th 1994

by Simon Reynolds

"So I've decided to take my work back underground... to stop it falling into the wrong hands."

So begins Music For The Jilted Generation, The Prodigy's fab second LP. See, seven consecutive hits and a gold debut album aren't enough for 23-year-old whizz kid Liam Howlett. He's sick and tired of his public image: peerless purveyor of hyper-hyper bubblegum nuttercore for E'd up popkids. Liam wants to be taken seriously; more to the point, he wants to be taken seriously by you, the alternative rock fan. So that's why he's used rock guitar in a couple of tracks on the album, and that's why Jilted is a sort of semi-concept album, with a ‘heavy’ political statement.

"The Jilted Generation, it's all the kids who've grown up on this supposedly corrupt dance music," says Liam, in between hacking his lungs out (he's run down by endless remixing and a recent tour of Australia). "The government are trying to make out the whole scene is bad, and they want to stop everyone going out and having a good time."

On the album's inner sleeve, a painting depicts an allegory of this confrontation, as a police force and a ragged army of ravers glare at each other across a ravine, with the rave-tribe's chieftain about to slash the ropes of the bridge. The chorus of ‘Their Law’ – a surprisingly effective metal-riff propelled collaboration with Pop Will Shite itself – articulates this defiance: "Fuck 'em and their law". What's riled Liam isn't just the Criminal Justice Bill, but the unofficial clampdown on legal raves.

"The police can control the sound levels at raves. Basically, there aren't going to be big outdoors raves anymore. They're not giving them licenses in the first place now cos of the alleged disturbance and noise pollution, and all the drugs. And cos of that, the punters have lost faith a bit. A year ago, you'd get 20,000 at a big event, no worries. Now you'd be lucky to get 10,000. Events happen up until the last minute and then they get cancelled, and so people stop bothering. The Obsession rave, a big three-dayer on the beach, was cancelled, and that was going to be the only major event this year. The Prodigy haven't suffered from it at all, we're still packing out shows and selling records. But it does annoy me, the government telling young kids what they can do."

Because of the clampdown, rave culture's gone into the clubs and it's fragmented into factions: scenes like techno, jungle, progressive house, garage, et al. Liam admits to being nostalgic for the golden days of rave's bygone unity.

"I think a lot of people are. That's why the housey progressive scene is so popular, cos even though it's not as mental and sweaty, it's still got the love vibe. On the hardcore scene, the DJs won't mix up different styles of music, they just wanna play the brand new 'dubpates' that no one can get hold of, cos they only printed ten copies."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The Prodigy emerged from  the early hardcore scene (what's now evolved into jungle). Along with Altern-8, they were the principal ambassadors for 'ardkore in the Top Ten. The Prodigy's Top Three hits ‘Charly’ and ‘Everybody In The Place’ were classic breakbeat tracks, and the debut LP Experience was ruff jungle bizness, albeit with a commerical sheen and Liam's poptastic choonfulness well to the fore. But ever since a dance mag accused The Prodigy's ‘Charly’ of instigating "the death of rave" (because it inspired a rash of lame bubblecore tracks with kids' TV samples, like ‘Sesame's Treet’), an embarrassed Liam has struggled to distance himself from hardcore.

"It's the 180 bpm breakbeats I've moved away from. The new album is as hardcore as anything I've written, but hard in a different way, a German techno way. But I still use breakbeats, cos I've always been into hip-hop and that side of me will always be there."

It's all a bit ironic, given jungle's creative renaissance in '93 and its long overdue return to hipness in '94. (The dance mag in question just leapt on the bandwagon along with every other rag in town).

Admits Liam, "There's loads of quality jungle tracks around. The problem was that a lot of people thought it was so easy to make hardcore that they just knocked out white labels and flooded the market with crap. But this year there's been a lot of intelligent jungle. Moving Shadow are the leading label."

But Liam still doesn't like the attitude and moody atmosphere that so often surrounds jungle '94, and which is so different from the nutty, luv'd up vibe of 'ardkore '92.

"The reason I got into rave was that hip-hop had gotten too much into attitude. To me, the jungle scene now is really confused. One minute they'll play something really uplifting and the next it's dark and gloomy. Also, that music's lost a bit of energy. Because it's so fast, people don't dance to the 160 bpm drums, they lock into the reggae baseline, which is half speed. So you dance really slow. With techno, you dance to the full-on beat. The stuff I really rate is European, like CJ Bolland and a lot of the German artists."

When I suggest that The Prodigy are the last representatives in the charts for the old rave spirit, Liam frowns. What he really wants is to get back his underground credibility – something as difficult and arguably futile as attempting to recover your virginity.

"We actually do everything we can to stay off the telly and out of Smash Hits and the pop media," he stresses. "We only do interviews that I feel are credible. It is a battle, a constant battle to get the correct press."

Hence his flirtation with alternative music and deployment of rock guitar on Jilted. He's been listening to Led Zep and Pearl Jam, and he might be producing Skinny Puppy's debut for Rick Rubin's American label. He tells me how much he like Senser's "energy" (they were actually first choice before Pop Will Eat itself, but were too busy). As well as ‘Their Low’, grunge guitar features on the killer next single, ‘Voodoo People’.

But Howlett doesn't need to latch misguidedly onto that dodo ‘alternative rock’ for cred; his own roots – in electro and early hip-hop – are solid enough. I always thought his thang was like a hyperkinetic version of Mantronix's breakbeats-and-samples collage aesthetic, and sho'nuff, it turns out he was a big fan. His old-school hip-hop background comes through in the funky, fusiony ‘3Kilos’, which is part of the LP's ‘Narcotic Suite’ – songs meant to evoke different drug atmospheres.

Back to the present, to Generation J, the kids who live for dance and drugs… Are they going to fight back against repression, or are they just going to languish at home, get despondent, get wasted?

"At the end of the day I don't think there's anything anyone can do. But as long as people can still go to clubs, it'll survive. They'll never kill the whole thing off completely. Why are the government so threatened? I don't know. We live in Essex and there's a massive Farmers festival every year at the Showground. They block up the whole f***ing road and it's totally disruptive. But they won't have a rave there. It's the same with football matches – there's loads of drugs at football now, people taking E’s. So it's one rule for us, one rule for them."

                                                          

The Prodigy: The Fat of the Land

Village Voice, July 8th 1997

by Simon Reynolds

Some say the Prodigy have betrayed the bright promise of the "electronica revolution", resulting in a techno-rock hybrid that's not so much kick-ass as half-assed. But the Prodigy have always been a rave 'n' roll band rather than ‘proper’ techno. The crucial distinction to grasp here is that techno and rave are not synonymous, and that in some respects rave has more in common with rock than with club culture.

In the USA, rave is regarded as the epitome of fashion-plate Europhile trendiness, but in Britain dance music is the mainstream of pop culture, and rave specifically has a decidedly lumpen, un-cool aura. "Raves were mass, teenage, one didn't go to them," is how a veteran of London's 1988 acid house club Shoom explained it to me recently. Purists, who believe the music is properly experienced in clubs, where DJs play long, varied, ‘educational’ sets to an allegedly discriminating audience, see raves as alarming close to arena rock concerts. Ravers' rowdy rituals of abandon and joyous uniformity of attire suggest the very ‘herd mentality’ that clubbers define themselves against.

By 1990, huge-scale one-off raves were transforming house and techno into bombastic spectacles full of lights and lasers, fun-fair attractions, and stellar DJ lineups. Where a club might have one or two DJs, raves featured ten DJs playing a bare hour each, sometimes less. To avoid being blown away by the other jocks, the DJs played crowd-pleasing anthems with their turntables cranked up to plus-8. Then DJ-producers started making music to fit this full-on tempest. Detroit techno was ‘debased’, or so the official history goes, into the hyperkinetic drug-noise called 'ardkore (which was when my ears pricked up).

And by 1991, the UK had a massive circuit of commercial, fully licensed raves, with promoters booking rave bands as well as DJs. Alongside N-Joi, Bizarre Inc, and Shades of Rhythm, the Prodigy were the most popular hardcore rave act. Musically, the Prodigy fit techno's standard syndrome – the boffin (Liam Howlett) knob twiddling alone in his studio lab. But live and on video, the Prodigy were always a band, with three other members – MC Maxim Reality, and dancers Keith Flint and Leeroy – taking up the visual slack.

At the height of this golden age of rave, the Prodigy encapsulated the contradictions of 'ardkore: this music was simultaneously an underground phenomenon and solidly pop. Apart from their first, every Prodigy single released to date has made the top 15; their second, ‘Charley’, got to Number Three in the summer of '91, while the follow-up, ‘Everybody in the Place’, was kept off the Number One spot only by Queen's ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. All the more remarkable since these brilliant early singles offer an only slightly more polished version of breakbeat hardcore, the music that evolved into jungle. Techno purists sniffed, but I always saw it as the new garage punk: riffs, noise, amphetamine-frenzy freakbeats, a sort of aggressive euphoria – the spirit of 1966 and 1977 channeled through the body of hip hop. When the Prodigy stepped onstage at Irving Plaza a month ago, they were introduced as something "for all you punk rockers, hip hoppers, and pill poppers." No mention of techno headz or house bods; indeed, Liam Howlett has been proclaiming in interviews that he never liked Kraftwerk, the sacred source for Detroit techno.

Starting with 1994's sophomore album Music for the Jilted Generation, the Prodigy repositioned themselves as rock, partly by using electric guitar on a couple of tracks, and partly by the vague conceptual/protest angle to the album. The jilted generation, explained Howlett, was kids who'd grown up under Thatcher, had little to live for but drugs and dance music, and now found even their weekend utopia threatened as authorities targeted raves. The UK equivalent, in other words, of the American grunge audience: Generation E.

All that remained was to bring the noise to America. Step One: turning dancer Keith Flint into the video-genic vocalist on ‘Firestarter’. OK, the promo is corny: Flint's Mohican and psycho-youth grimaces. But sonically, ‘Firestarter’ is a sampler-wielding cyber-Stooges, a Dionysian hymn to destruction. Appearing at the MTV Europe Awards to pick up a trophy for Best Dance Video, the Prodigy greeted EC youth with "Hold it down!" a vintage '92 rave rallying cry – as if to confirm 'ardkore's historical victory and vindication. No matter that out of the early rave bands only the Prodigy had survived the collapse of the 1990-92 circuit; the music had become what it had always secretly been – the new rock.

‘Firestarter’ looked like a dead cert as electronica's ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, but inexplicably stumbled at the threshold of the Billboard top 30. Maybe ‘Breathe’ – a jungle-punk duet between Flint and Maxim – will bust down the door, what with its abjection-chic video à la Tool and Marilyn Manson. Enjoyably reminiscent of Oi! bands like Angelic Upstarts, the song was a highlight of the Prodigy's otherwise patchy performance at Irving Plaza. There's rock, and then there's rawk; too often the Prodge crossed the line. When they dragged onstage a ‘real’ guitarist, nor only did he look like a ye olde punke relic from the King's Road, but the overall effect was a tad Rage Against the Machine. Sans politics, of course: the Prodigy's brand of vacant menace and quasi-insurrectionary mayhem slots into the illustrious plastic punk lineage that runs Alice Cooper/Sweet/Billy Idol/Adam and the Ants. (The Prodge even feature an insect in their logo.)

Keith Flint has described the Prodigy as "buzz music." The song titles are mostly self-reflexive, referring only to the music's own sensations: ‘Hyperspeed’, ‘Pandemonium’, ‘G-Force’, ‘Full Throttle’, ‘The Heat (The Energy)’. 'Ardkore always did belong to a burgeoning ‘rush culture’ that includes video games, roller-blading, extreme sports like snow-boarding (a hobby of the band's), and bungee jumping (a popular sideshow at raves), as well as the obvious illegal stimulants. The Fat of the Land is no departure: it's all teenage rampage, cheap thrills, and adrenalin OD.

Fat kicks off well with the boom-bastic ‘Smack My Bitch Up’. Shame about the obnoxious title/chorus – teenage boys hardly need any more excuses to strike pimp poses. In mitigation, it must be said that the Prodigy are not a group that repays close lyrical analysis; their forte isn't deep and meaningful, but the profoundly superficial (not a dis by any means). Howlett is a supreme organizer of dynamics, bridges, and breakdowns, tension and release. ‘Diesel Power’, a pumping midtempo collaboration with rapper Kool Keith, nods to Howlett's pre-rave past as a British B-boy. ‘Funky Shit’ – old-school 'ardkore, more or less – is one of the few non-vocal tracks. Fat's use of ‘real’ singers is an indication of the band's eagerness to meet post-grunge America halfway. But it means the Prodigy have to get around the fact that they have nothing much to say – "this is dangerous/open up your head/feel the shellshock" is typical – which didn't matter when the music was just breakbeats, riffs, and samples.

Ironically, given their desire to be taken as a futuristic rock band, the Prodigy's taste in yer actual contemporary guitar bands is poor. ‘Serial Thrilla’ samples Skunk Anansie; ‘Narayan’, a nine-minute collaboration with Crispian Mills of the god-awful Kula Shaker, is a poor man's ‘Setting Sun’ (the Chemical Brothers' Britpop/breakbeat merger). The L7 cover ‘Fuel My Fire’ would normally count as more bad taste by my lights, but I must admit it's an exciting finale, with a heavily distorted Flint tirade and Republica's Saffron providing baleful backing sneers. The song fits perfectly into the Prodigy's shtick: depoliticized punk offering youths a sort of aerobic workout for their frustration and aggression.

Fat packs enough big beats, bass-quake, and flechette-insidious hooks to do the required job (conquering America), but as an album-length experience it sags somewhat in the middle. In true punk tradition, the Prodigy are really a singles band, which is why the 1992 debut Experience (in effect a collection of greatest hits up to that point) remains their most consistently exciting album. But as opposed to ‘proper’ techno, where there's no brand loyalty and artists are only as good as their latest 12-inch. I'll keep faith with the Prodigy. They're a rave 'n' roll band, and I'm a fan.

The Prodigy - interview, 1994

THE PRODIGY
Melody Maker, 1994

by Simon Reynolds

“So I’ve decided to take my work back underground … to stop it falling into the wrong hands.”

So begins Music for the Jilted Generation, the Prodigy’s fab second LP. See, seven consecutive hits and a gold debut album aren’t enough for 23-year-old whiz-kid Liam Howlett. He’s sick and tired of his public image: peerless purveyor of hyper-hyper bubblegum nuttercore for E’d up popkids. Liam wants to be taken seriously; more to the point, he wants to be taken seriously by you, the alternative rock fan. So that’s why he’s used rock guitar in a couple of tracks on the album, and that’s why Jilted is a sort of semi-concept album, with a “heavy” political statement.

“The Jilted Generation, it’s all the kids who’ve grown up on this supposedly corrupt dance music,” says Liam, in between hacking his lungs out (he’s run down by endless remixing and a recent tour of Australia). “The government are trying to make out the whole scene is bad, and they want to stop everyone going out and having a good time.”

On the album’s inner sleeve, a painting depicts an allegory of this confrontation, as a police force and a ragged army of ravers glare at each other across a ravine, with the rave-tribe’s chieftain about to slash the ropes of the bridge. The chorus of  "Their Law" – a surprisingly effective metal-riff propelled collaboration with Pop Will Shite Itself – articulates this defiance: “Fuck ’em and their law.” What’s riled Liam isn’t just the Criminal Justice bill, but the unofficial clampdown on legal raves.

“The police can control the sound levels at raves. Basically, there aren’t going to be big outdoors raves any more. They’re not giving them licences in the first place now ’cos of the alleged disturbance and noise pollution, and all the drugs. And ’cos of that, the punters have lost faith a bit. A year ago, you’d get 20,000 at a big event, no worries. Now you’d be lucky to get 10,000. Events happen up until the last minute and then they get cancelled, and so people stop bothering. The Obsession rave, a big three-dayer on the beach, was cancelled, and that was going to be the only major event this year. The Prodigy haven’t suffered from it at all, we’re still packing out shows and selling records. But it does annoy me, the government telling young kids what they can do.”

Because of the clampdown, rave culture’s gone into the clubs and it’s fragmented into factions: scenes like techno, jungle, progressive house, garage, et al. Liam admits to being nostalgic for the golden days of rave’s bygone unity.

“I think a lot of people are. That’s why the housey progressive scene is so popular, ’cos even though it’s not as mental and sweaty, it’s still got the love vibe. On the hardcore scene, the DJs won’t mix up different styles of music, they just wanna play the brand new dubplates that no one can get hold of, cos they only printed 10 copies.”

The Prodigy emerged from the early hardcore scene (what’s now evolved into jungle). Along with Altern-8, they were the principal ambassadors for ’ardkore in the top 10. The Prodigy’s top three hits :Charly" and "Everybody in the Place" were classic breakbeat tracks, and the debut LP Experience was ruff jungle bizness, albeit with a commerical sheen and Liam’s poptastic choonfulness well to the fore. But ever since a dance mag accused the Prodigy’s  "Charly" of instigating “the death of rave” (because it inspired a rash of lame bubblecore tracks with kids’ TV samples, like Sesame’s Treet), an embarrassed Liam has struggled to distance himself from hardcore.

“It’s the 180bpm breakbeats I’ve moved away from. The new album is as hardcore as anything I’ve written, but hard in a different way, a German techno way. But I still use breakbeats, ’cos I’ve always been into hip-hop and that side of me will always be there.”

It’s all a bit ironic, given jungle’s creative renaissance in 93 and its long overdue return to hipness in 94. (The dance mag in question just leapt on the bandwagon along with every other rag in town.)

Admits Liam, “There’s loads of quality jungle tracks around. The problem was that a lot of people thought it was so easy to make hardcore that they just knocked out white labels and flooded the market with crap. But this year there’s been a lot of intelligent jungle. Moving Shadow are the leading label.”

But Liam still doesn’t like the attitude and moody atmosphere that so often surrounds jungle ’94, and which is so different from the nutty, luv’d up vibe of ’ardkore ’92.

“The reason I got into rave was that hip-hop had gotten too much into attitude. To me, the jungle scene now is really confused. One minute they’ll play something really uplifting and the next it’s dark and gloomy. Also, that music’s lost a bit of energy. Because it’s so fast, people don’t dance to the 160bpm drums, they lock into the reggae baseline, which is half speed. So you dance really slow. With techno, you dance to the full-on beat. The stuff I really rate is European, like CJ Bolland and a lot of the German artists.”

When I suggest that the Prodigy are the last representatives in the charts for the old rave spirit, Liam frowns. What he really wants is to get back his underground credibility – something as difficult and arguably futile as attempting to recover your virginity.

“We actually do everything we can to stay off the telly and out of Smash Hits and the pop media,” he stresses. “We only do interviews that I feel are credible. It is a battle, a constant battle to get the correct press.”

Hence his flirtation with alternative music and deployment of rock guitar on Jilted. He’s been listening to Led Zep and Pearl Jam, and he might be producing Skinny Puppy’s debut for Rick Rubin’s American label. He tells me how much he likes Senser’s “energy” (they were actually first choice before Pop Will Eat Itself, but were too busy). As well as on"Their Law", grunge guitar features on the killer next single, "Voodoo People".

But Howlett doesn’t need to latch misguidedly onto that dodo “alternative rock” for cred; his own roots – in electro and early hip-hop – are solid enough. I always thought his thang was like a hyperkinetic version of Mantronix’s breakbeats-and-samples collage aesthetic, and sho’nuff, it turns out he was a big fan. His old-school hip-hop background comes through in the funky, fusiony "3 Kilos", which is part of the LP’s "Narcotic Suite" – songs meant to evoke different drug atmospheres.

Back to the present, to Generation J, the kids who live for dance and drugs … Are they going to fight back against repression, or are they just going to languish at home, get despondent, get wasted?

“At the end of the day, I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do. But as long as people can still go to clubs, it’ll survive. They’ll never kill the whole thing off completely. Why are the government so threatened? I don’t know. We live in Essex and there’s a massive farmers’ festival every year at the showground. They block up the whole fucking road and it’s totally disruptive. But they won’t have a rave there. It’s the same with football matches – there’s loads of drugs at football now, people taking Es. So it’s one rule for us, one rule for them.”

Politics and Pop - a personal journey

A personal journey through politics and pop

director's cut version of Pitchfork Review essay, fall 2016

by Simon Reynolds

SEX PISTOLS, “Anarchy in the U.K.”; “God Save the Queen” (1977)

I first heard the Sex Pistols in mid-1978, a full year after “God Save the Queen” convulsed the United Kingdom in the summer of ’77. Living in a small English town far from the action, my 14-year-old head was elsewhere all through ‘77, sideways glimpsing punk’s existence only in photo spreads of outrageous haircuts in Sunday newspaper magazines. When I finally heard Never Mind the Bollocks, the Pistols story affected me as a rock-myth fait accompli, rather than unfolding as a real-time historical sequence with an uncertain outcome.

It was my brother Tim—a few years younger, far better endowed in street cred because he went to a state school—who brought home a cassette of songs by the Pistols and Ian Dury & The Blockheads and who later bought Bollocks. Because I wasn’t going to gigs yet, or reading the music press, and only rarely seeing groups like these on TV, punk’s power manifested itself to me almost entirely as sheer sonic force: I’d never heard anything so domineering, never even imagined that “pop” could be this unbridled, such an attack.

The record covers were thrilling too, thanks to punk’s aggressively innovative graphic language (Bollocks’s ransom-note newsprint lettering, for instance). When the Pistols’ The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle came out in 1979, me and Tim and our younger brother Jez pored over the double album’s gatefold sleeve with its stills from the forthcoming movie (then still a long way from completion and release). But most of all, it was the voices in punk, a kind never heard before in pop: tones of jubilant bitterness; a sense of malevolent power conjured up from with the singer’s body through sheer will and blasted out at the listener. The voice, above all of Johnny Rotten. That, and the things he sang about. Like anarchy, an intoxicating and unfamiliar concept.

It’s moot whether “Anarchy in the U.K.” should be taken as a Political Statement; it’s more like prophecy or poetry. If the song corresponds to any ideology, the closest thing is the 19th century stripe of anarchism associated with German philosopher Max Stirner, who imagined the state being dissolved in favor of a “union of egoists.” Anarchy, in this worldview, means absolute sovereignty for each individual, who would no longer be subject to higher authority or constraints to the free exercise of desire. Anarchism, in other words, that has nothing to do with the placid, orderly decision-making of communes or workers’ councils; rather, it’s an apocalyptic unleashing, a chaos of wills, with each individual ruling his or her life like a tyrant.  That’s how I hear the chorus “I wanna be/Anarchy,” which Rotten drags out like a triumphant jeer.

As a vision for how society should organize itself, “Anarchy in the U.K.” is literally puerile, the sort of thoughts entertained by adolescents with no inkling of how challenging life is. But I was 15 when I heard the song, just the right age. The Pistols spoke most intoxicatingly to boys between 13 and 17: a period in life when you have an innate flair for recklessness, an awesome ability to disregard consequences. Boredom—and something darker too, an appetite for destruction—drove the brothers Reynolds and our peers towards vandalism, risk-taking (“dares”), and pranks. It’s the nastiness of punk—the “I wanna destroy” side, the (Sid) Vicious-ness—that gets written out of the validating histories, which invariably accentuate punk’s idealism, the empowering and constructive do-it-yourself ideas. But in our suburban bedroom, we thrilled to the tales of the Pistols puking at airports, Sid slashing his chest onstage, and the seductively cynical notion that it had always been a swindle, a Malcolm McLaren cash-from-chaos masterplan.

Age 20 when he recorded “Anarchy,” Rotten was already a bit old for this kind of thing—and in truth, he wasn’t a “Smash It Up” punk at heart, but a book-reading, record-collecting hipster who shrank from real-life violence.  McLaren, at 30, should have been well past this way of thinking. But the Pistols manager idealized, venerated—and also envied—teenagers as the only really revolutionary class. Existing in a liminal limbo between childhood and duty-bound adulthood, emboldened by the dawning sense of their own physical and mental independence, the Kids were the only ones who could ever change things, because they had no stakes in the status quo.

Where “Anarchy” is timeless Gnostic-Romantic poetry, “God Save the Queen” diminishes itself slightly by being topical, as well as having the shape of a Classic Rock Anthem. The historical peg was the Royal Jubilee celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s 25 years on the throne, “a mad parade” of imperial nostalgia that covered every town in Britain with bunting and Union Jacks. The Pistols’ single was such an affront – the lyric described the monarchy as a “fascist regime” -  the song led not just to a BBC ban, but to enraged patriots violently assaulting members of the band. Despite the embargo, the single reached #2 on the UK chart; some believe that devious conniving by the authorities kept “Anarchy” off the top spot to save further embarrassment to the Establishment.

The scandal of “God Save the Queen” set up impossible expectations for what politics in pop could achieve. It restored a belief in rock’s power to incite and to threaten that had waned steadily since the heyday of the Stones and the Who. But it was “Anarchy in the U.K.”—and other Bollocks songs like “Bodies”—a foaming fulmination, explosive with expletives, against the horror of human biological existence—that set the true challenge for rock going forward: How to equal the expressive force of a voice, and a sound, that felt so corrosive it would surely shake the world? The Sex Pistols songs were rock’s equivalent to the theses nailed by Luther on the Wittenberg church door: They made a decisive break with the Old Wave, while also—like the Reformation before it—opening the way for further schisms, the proliferation of sects pursuing different ideas of what punk now meant and how that dramatically revivified power should be deployed most righteously.

TOM ROBINSON BAND -  Power In the Darkness, TRB 2   (1978-9)

The only fan of Tom Robinson Band I ever knew was a boy in my lower-sixth class (equivalent to the eleventh grade) called Sandbrook, who had daubed TRB’s clenched-fist stencil-style logo onto his satchel. Although my own tastes already leaned towards post punk groups like Public Image Ltd and the Slits, Sandbrook’s passion for TRB and protest-oriented Ulster punks Stiff Little Fingers was close enough for us to feel like we were on the same side, at a school where most boys were still drawing perfectly executed Genesis, Yes, and Pink Floyd logos on the desks. His satchel also bore the insignias for Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, other indicators of simpatico values that stood out at a school where: 1) the Conservatives always won the mock elections; and 2) where the parents of one of my friends could declare that the world should quit meddling in South Africa’s affairs, because the system there worked well for everybody—and they weren’t hounded out of polite society.  

Talking of sides, one of TRB’s anthems was titled “Better Decide Which Side You’re On.” Tom Robinson conceived of his band’s constituency as a rainbow coalition of the disadvantaged and marginalized: the unemployed, racial minorities, gays, squatters, feminists, drug users. In reality, TRB’s following was largely composed of progressive-minded white middle-class youth, very much in the mold of Robinson himself—a clean-cut, well-spoken, smiley chap who came over as earnest, unthreatening, and “straight” (although actually openly and vocally gay). Those who’d been energized by punk but wanted something constructive and more clearly aligned in its Left allegiances rallied to TRB’s banner.

Robinson’s approach to music was means-to-an-end: he wanted to bring his message to as wide an audience as possible.   Accordingly TRB’s rousing sound was rooted in the Old Wave more than the New Wave, finding a stomping, if stiff-hipped, groove midway between Free and Mott the Hoople. Well-played and cleanly produced, the road song “2-4-6-8 Motorway” was commercial enough to crack the Top 5.  But the group’s single and album covers were plastered with contacts for every imaginable pressure group and activist organisation.


                                         

TRB were huge in 1978: Critics hailed them a positive realization of punk’s promise, there was an hour-long TV documentary devoted to the band, the tours took in ever larger concert halls. But almost instantly the music press turned on them for “preaching to the converted” and for being too straight in their angle of address (lyrically and musically). Reaching the unconverted became a crucial concern going forward. But equally important for those looking to both live up to and extend punk was the idea of challenging and unsettling the converted. Musicians and critics began to explore the idea that politics was not about the transmission and reception of messages but the initiation of a thought-process. In the next stage, “Question everything” and “personal politics” became key buzz concepts.

CRASS -  Stations of the Crass, “Bloody Revolutions”, “Our Wedding” (1979-81)

Crass, a collective of former hippies and new punks who lived in a communal farm cottage called Dial House, took the “anarchy” in “Anarchy In the U.K.” literally. Punk, for them, was about self-rule. Crass opposed all forms of hierarchy: State, Army, Church. They brandished slogans like “Fight War Not Wars. Destroy Power Not People” and “You can’t vote anarchist, you can only be one.” Politics was “politricks” and a power game (another black-flag slogan was “Whoever you vote for, the government wins”). For Crass, the Left was just as bad as the Right: Stations’ “White Punks On Hope” equated socialist violence and fascist violence as “just the same old game.”

My brothers were Crass fans and one single they played a great deal, “Bloody Revolutions,” picked up this theme, criticizing macho hard-left militancy in much the same way that John Lennon, in The Beatles’ “Revolution,” jeered at dogma-indoctrinated radicals with their Chairman Mao placards. At university in the early Eighties I encountered this divide within the anarchist community itself: gentle hippie-ish types largely concerned with getting their minds right (feminist consciousness raising groups for both women and men) versus the hot-head street guerrilla types happy to leave the chicks and the wimps to their navel-gazing and get down to serious business like brick-hurling confrontations with the Pigs.

Although later their music got more sophisticated and experimental, early on Crass treated sound as a mere delivery system for the messages. That was one reason the British music press initially scorned the group and the anarcho-punk movement they spawned; Crass were also accused of puritanism and sloganeering.

Yet Crass had a mischievous side, a McLaren-like delight in the publicity stunt as a form of subversive media theatre. Most famous of their pranks was the Thatchergate hoax: a 1982  record purporting to be a telephone conversation between the British Prime Minister and Ronald Reagan, during which were revealed dirty secrets about the Falklands War and the President’s plan for a showdown with the Soviets using Europe as the  arena of conflict.  The intelligence services got in a right flap about it, with the U.S. State Department initially identifying the record as a KGB ruse. 

But the one that really tickled me was in 1981, when—in the guise of Creative Recording and Sound Services, which acronyms as C.R.A.S.S.—they persuaded Loving, a mushy romantic magazine aimed at young women, to run a special offer for the free flexi-single “Our Wedding.” Sung by Joy De Vivre, the band’s second female singer, to the accompaniment of strings, church organ and wedding bells, this supposed celebration of marriage was really a sardonic poker-faced expose of matrimony as mutual bondage: “Listen to those wedding bells/Say goodbye to other girls”; “Never look at anyone/Must be all you see.” Hundreds wrote in for the flexi before the prank was revealed in a newspaper article. Talking to NME in June 1981, the band’s Penny Rimbaud railed at Loving-type magazines as “obscene and despicable rags” peddling “teenage pornography” that “trivialized love and relationships.”  “Our Wedding” later appeared on their 1981 No. 1 indie-chart album Penis Envy.

Virtually all of Crass singles and LPs topped the UK’s independent releases chart: their following was huge, especially out in the provinces where punk achieved its greatest and most lingering impact a few years after the big cities like London and Manchester had moved on musically and sartorially. You saw the Crass stencil all over the UK: on walls, on paving stones, and on the leather jackets of the punx mooching in clutches around bus shelters and the fountains outside town halls. For most of the fans—including my brothers—Crass’s appeal was as much to do with the visuals as the rather rudimentary sonics. The records came in elaborate packaging that folded out to form posters featuring Gee Vaucher’s beautifully drawn photo-realist counter-propaganda, dream-like tableaus in which Maggie Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth were leather-clad punkettes, the Statue of Liberty had a Mohawk, and Pope John Paul II wore a “Destroy” T-shirt.

GANG OF FOUR -  Entertainment!, “Why Theory?”  (1979-81)

Aged 17, I believed two things about Gang of Four—that their music was funky as hell and that if these songs got on the radio and onto Top of the Pops, they would be subversively consciousness-raising in a simple cause-and-effect way, at the point of contact with the listener’s brain.  Go4’s funk, though, is quite some distance from Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall or Chic: not a release but a girding of the loins for the struggle ahead, a stark and staunch sound clenched with commitment. As for the lyrics, they are certainly a big step forward from the soapbox screeds of Crass and Tom Robinson, designed to unpick the threads of ideology that stitch together our sense of the world as “a natural fact” (a line from “Why Theory?” on Go4’s 1981 album Solid Gold).

Still, each song is making a statement, which the listener has to work to uncover. Go4 are not preaching to the converted; they’re critiquing on behalf of the predisposed. For example, on the 1979 debut Entertainment!, “Natural’s Not In It” can easily be deciphered as an analysis of the way capitalism ensnares desire via advertising’s “coercion of the senses”; “Contract” is clearly a structural diagram of marriage that reveals its fault-lines and contradictions. “At Home He’s A Tourist,” Go4’s near-hit single, is more opaque, ranging from commodified sexuality to bourgeois culture-binging as a way of filling the void. 

Gang of Four signed to EMI, the same label as TRB, for similar reasons: To get their ideas across to a mass audience. They agonized over whether to appear on Top of the Pops to perform “Tourist” to the show’s 10-million-plus viewers, because the price of admittance was censoring the word “rubbers,” a slang term for condoms, in a lyric. Torn between integrity and crossover, Gang of Four decided to opt for the former and torpedoed the evangelising raison d’etre that had led them to EMI in the first place.  This principled refusal alienated the record company and as the moment of potential breakthrough passed, the group’s career never really recovered.

SCRITTI POLITTI - Peel Sessions EP, 4 A-Sides EP (1979)

Born out of the same Leeds art school scene, Scritti Politti took the next step forward from Go4. Catalysed by the Anarchy Tour of 1977, Scritti began as a straightforward punk group, The Against. But almost immediately, things got a lot less straightforward:  punk’s negative drive (its against-ness) turned on itself, with the launch of a potentially interminable project of undermining one’s own ideological assumptions.  From the start that made the Scritti sound far less staunch and stable than Go4’s: wracked with uncertainty (“Doubt Beat” is one song's title) to the point where the music feels  on the brink of nervous collapse. In singer/lyricist Green Gartside we encounter a mind so sharp it lacerates itself, thought that ties itself up in immobilizing knots.  “OPEC-Immac,” for instance, makes oblique connections between the cartel of oil producing nations and a beauty product, before dissolving into a lacuna of impotent confusion: “how much do you ever stand to know?” The word “stand” suggests both a limit to how much you are ever likely to understand the workings of the world, but also how much knowledge – how much disabused lucidity – can an individual bear before succumbing to despair.  Inverting the Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s maxim, pessimism of the intellect defeats optimism of the will.

Aged seventeen I found Scritti Politti – whose name, taken from a collection of texts by Gramsci, translates roughly as “political writings” – genuinely enlightening. They introduced my young brain to a large, confounding idea:  the notion that, rather than being a transparently useful tool for radical thought, language itself might be a mechanism of oppression. In “PAs”, it’s “the language” that “shuts down” in 1920s Italy and again in 1930s Germany – and that might yet collapse in a fascist U.K. of the coming Eighties. “Bibbly-O-Tek” argues that language, wrapped around clothing, creates fashion, which then creates money.  In the song, phrases like “secondary pickets” and “Eastern Bloc” are recited in a pointed, withering tone, leaving the listener to work out the ideological freight with which they’re loaded.  “Secondary” implies that workers in one unionized industry have no business striking in solidarity with workers from another (as with dockers cutting off the supply of imported coal to help miners during an industrial dispute);  “Eastern Bloc,” as a menacing term for a  Soviet Empire, obscures the fact that NATO nations are satellites too, a Western Bloc of vassal states twitching to the tune of a different superpower.

This disorienting - yet also darkly exhilarating -  idea of language as the prison-house of consciousness was pursued not just in the songs but in the photocopied text wrapped around the Peel Sessions EP, pages from an imaginary book titled Scritto’s Republic. “The rules of a society are embodied in the rules of its language,” wrote its unidentified author (Green obviously, although Scritti liked to present as a collective to the world). “It is through common sense speech that we are reproached and directed.... Language pre-exists our entry into it and defines what is normal and represses that which will not or cannot be covered or developed by its framework.” 

Green carried his “linguistic turn” through to Scritti’s next phase of pop crossover, with deconstructed love-songs like “The ‘Sweetest Girl’” (which vows to look behind “the strongest words in each belief”) and the huge UK hit single “The Word Girl.” But as with deconstruction in the academy, this abstruse close-work seems to have little to say about the world outside the text. Scritti’s domain became the politics of and inside pop, rather than bringing real-world politics into pop.  

DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS - Searching For the Young Rebels (1980)

Post punk hatched an ascetic streak latent in punk. Entertainment for its own sake was escapist, a narcotic: music needed to carry a higher purpose of consciousness-raising or critique. Sometimes accused of being didactic and dour, groups like Gang of Four, The Au Pairs, The Pop Group, and Scritti Politti were my kind of postpunk puritan, perfect for a young mind that was beginning to approach the world critically. But there was another kind of puritan around on the early Eighties British music scene: mod-influenced figures like The Jam’s Paul Weller and Dexy’s Midnight Runners’s Kevin Rowland. Both made great singles but for some reason I was never swayed into become a follower of either of these men. I think partly that’s precisely because they both so clearly wanted converts; each band became a cause in itself for their following.  

Dexys retained and intensified punk’s will-to-power—they are named after a brand of amphetamine, after all. Rowland’s first response to punk had been The Killjoys, the name itself indicating a puritanical zeal seemingly at odds with his Irish Catholic background. Depressed in the aftermath of punk, Rowland rallied his spirits with the horn-pumping, muscular soul of ‘60s performers like Geno Washington. This became the template for Dexys’ sound: brassy, uplifting, pugnacious, and, in its own retro way, as staunch as Gang of Four. Searching For the Young Rebels, the debut LP, starts with the sounds of a radio: Bursts of Sex Pistols and The Specials (another politics-in-pop byproduct of punk) are heard amid the hiss and crackle, before Rowland’s exasperated voice cries, “For God’s sake, burn it down.” Dexys set themselves up here as both next in a series of insurgent renewals for British music and as the upstarts who will surpass their failed precursors. The LP title is an open call for recruits, an attempt to conjure a new youth movement out of nowhere.

The nature of “young soul rebellion” remained unclear, though. Political specifics figured here and there. “Dance Stance,” the debut single, took issue with derogatory stereotypes about the Irish, defiantly reeling off the nation’s list of illustrious literati. The LP cover featured a Catholic boy from Ulster being driven from his Belfast home during the sectarian clearances of 1971; one song concerned Rowland’s unsuccessful attempt to set up a union at his workplace. But the overriding emphasis was on the internal politics of the British music scene, on Dexys’ candidacy as a messianic force, and on Rowland’s belief in, well, belief.

“There There My Dear,” the follow-up hit to the #1 “Geno,” was a paranoid rejoinder to a journalist or musician who refused to “welcome the new soul vision.” Almost thrown away in the accusatory bluster was one of political-pop’s most provocative thought-bombs: “The only way to change things is to shoot men who arrange things.” The implication is that music can only ever be incidental to the struggle. But given that Rowland and his Dexys would carry on being pop stars, recording another two more ‘80s albums before dispersing for a couple of decades, you might well draw a further inference: They are not really that interested in changing things. That raises the perturbing possibility: Is pop an arena in which those with the temperament of revolutionaries can experience all the self-aggrandizing excitement of leadership, without any of the unglamorous costs or consequences of actual struggle?

KATE BUSH, “Breathing”; YOUNG MARBLE GIANTS, “Final Day”; UB40, “The Earth Dies Screaming”; FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD, “Two Tribes” (1980-1984).

It is almost impossible to convey to young people today what it was like to grow up during the ‘60s, ‘70s and (first half of) the ‘80s, with the awareness that nuclear annihilation was a real prospect constantly hanging over you. One of my high-school projects was a paper on the effects of a ten megaton bomb dropped on London. Our hometown was about 35 miles from the capital’s center – the bull’s eye in the target for Soviet bombs - and so it would escape the fireball and direct blast, but receive some very fierce winds, following by radioactive fallout. Around this time, I joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which was then resurging after the government’s consent to base U.S.-controlled cruise missiles on British soil, a decision that would turn the UK into a launch-pad and thus a prime target for Soviet retaliation—or a preemptive strike.

Pop picked up on these currents of anxiety with a string of songs about nuclear war. Kate Bush’s disturbing, if overwrought, 1980 single “Breathing” described “chips of plutonium” penetrating the bloodstream shared by a pregnant mother and her unborn child. Young Marble Giants’ “Final Day” was a hauntingly still and soft vignette—somehow more terrifying for its brevity—about our compliance and complicity in the madness of mutual deterrence. Despite the melodramatic title, UB40’s hit “The Earth Dies Screaming” was even more chillingly subdued: its dread bass and funereal pace turned the atmosphere ashen in the Top of the Pops studio.

                                     

A few years later came what was intended as the ultimate protest record: Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s single “Two Tribes,” a follow-up to “Relax,” released by the arty-provocateur label ZTT. Lyrically inane and emotionally ambiguous (at times it seemed almost to exult in Armageddon, the excitement of living in a world “where sex and horror are the new gods”),  “Two Tribes” nonetheless brought the issue to the biggest possible audience, colonizing the No. 1 spot on the UK singles chart for nine weeks during the summer of 1984. 

                                        

The sleeves of its numerous 12-inch mixes resembled my school project, caked in data and diagrams about what a superpower showdown would entail for short-term lethality and long-term species-extinction. (A stylish chart totted up the death toll in categories ranging from nuclear winter and famine to disease and psychological trauma.) Yet as ZTT’s conceptualist Paul Morley noted wryly, “Two Tribes” was replaced, after two months atop the charts, by George Michael’s “Careless Whisper.” Nothing changed, not even in pop, let alone in the outside world.

                                                

THE STYLE COUNCIL -  “Shout To The Top”;  THE REDSKINS -  “Keep On Keepin On!” b/w ”Reds Strike the Blues!”; THE SMITHS - “Still Ill”; WORLD DOMINATION ENTERPRISES—“Asbestos Lead Asbestos”; THE MEKONS - “Darkness and Doubt” (1984-85)

                                                    

During the 1983 general election, while still a student, I did some canvassing for the Labour Party: a door-to-door, unswayable voter to unswayable voter trudge so discouraging it permanently soured me on the front-line grunt-work that’s the dreary, but indispensable, essence of political involvement. In the years between Labour’s resounding defeat and the next election in 1987, a cluster of prominent left-wing musicians—Billy Bragg, Paul Weller of The Style Council, Jimmy Somerville of the Communards—formed an organization to mobilise the youth vote: Red Wedge. That name made aesthetes like me recoil. (Although the phrase’s provenance turned out to be supercool—the title of a 1919 propaganda poster by Soviet modernist El Lissitzky—it probably sounded a lot better in Russian). 

                                          

                                                   
Me and my kind were also turned off by the overall aura of well-meaning worthiness that clung to the Red Wedge project, the demeaning use of music as a mere vehicle. But by this point – I’d started writing for the UK weekly paper Melody Maker -  I had become persuaded that politics in pop was a busted flush anyway. To me, the only artistically potent expressions of the political in late ‘80s music were expressions of impotence: the flailing rage of World Domination Enterprises; the dissident defiance of The Smiths; the despondency of The Mekons. (Well, there’s also Public Enemy, but that’s a whole other knotty story).

                                           

Despite Red Wedge’s efforts, the 1987 election was another resounding defeat for Labour. This served to propel me even further into blissed-out anti-politics: the most adventurous music then being made, it seemed to me, hid from the world in gorgeous clouds of noise. Today, grown-up and worried, I feel retrospective sympathy for Red Wedge and the soul-influenced, militantly optimistic groups of that time, like The Redskins (aligned with the Socialist Workers Party rather than Labour). Why was I so down on the idea of preaching to the converted? When History is against them, the converted need to have their morale maintained, their spirits kept stalwart.

 

SPIRAL TRIBE, “Breach the Peace”; “Forward The Revolution” (1992)

It’s May 1992 and almost by chance I’ve ended up at the largest public irruption of subcultural dissent the UK has seen since the concerts and rallies of the punk/Rock Against Racism era: Castlemorton, a  mega-rave that takes over an area of unspoiled and secluded countryside in West England for a full seven days and draws crowds estimated at around 40,000. Castlemorton is “Anarchy in the U.K.” for real, what ‘90s theoreticians call a “temporary autonomous zone”: an instant city formed through the tribal alliance of urban ravers and the post-hippie travelers who for decades now have driven back and forth across the UK in their caravans and trucks visiting a summer circuit of free festivals.

I’m only there for the first night—by the time I get back to London, still blissed and babbling to anyone who’ll listen, Castlemorton is a front page story in all the papers and the lead item on the TV news. Questions are asked in Parliament about what should be done to end the menace of nomadic ravers who could descend in hordes on any genteel village in the country, inflicting their noise and outlandish dress sense upon the powerless locals. Rumors abound of hairy, smelly travelers taking a dump in the front gardens of Castlemorton residents, or trying to sell drugs to local children.



Spiral Tribe, canny media operators and aspiring martyrs, take all the credit and all the blame. All 13 members of the techno party crew are prosecuted for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, in a long drawn-out case that will cost the public 4 million pounds but end in acquittal.  For the truth is that there were no ring-leaders behind Castlemorton: its mass confluence was a viral happening, a swarming that anticipated the flash mobs of digital days to come and that spiraled way larger than the instigators had anticipated. 

                                              

In the immediate aftermath of Castlemorton, while other sound systems -- DiY, Bedlam, and Circus Warp - shrewdly keep a low profile, Spiral Tribe do loads of interviews, talking about their aim to create a “public new sense,” about how days and nights of nonstop drugged trance-dance can take you outside the limits of reality. The collective are given a record contract from a label convinced they are techno’s Sex Pistols. Actually, they’re closer to Genesis P-Orridge’s Psychic TV: literally a cult group, believers in conspiracy theories and magical-mystical forces, prophets for a new primitivism that has paradoxically been enabled by the do-it-yourself autonomy provided by digital technology. 

                                            

In addition to the ultimately unsuccessful Spiral Tribe prosecution, the British government extends the clampdown on illegal raves with the Criminal Justice and Order Act 1994, which vastly expands police powers to thwart rave organisers and to make life difficult for squatters and travelers. While the laws are still working their way through Parliament, their intended victims organize a protest movement, the Advance Party. This alliance of  sound systems and civil liberties campaigners stages a couple of demonstrations in the summer and fall of 1994. The first, in July, is one of the few marches I’ve been on in my life. It winds up in Trafalgar Square, as is traditional for demos in the UK, but everything else about the protest—the garish, tatterdemalion clothes, the creatively designed placards—is a wildly different from the drab norms of Left activism.

I’m aware, though, with every step I take in the midst of this joyous cavalcade, that resistance is futile. Squatters, ravers, and travelers have few friends in the mainstream of British life: Ordinary folk are repelled by their appearance and talk, see them as parasitic layabouts, while figures of influence in politics and the media know that standing with “the crusties”—as they are popularly demonized—will do them no favours. The Criminal Justice Bill passes easily; Spiral Tribe splinter, with one faction moving to Europe to spread the “teknival” concept across the Continent.

                                                   

Like the Sex Pistols, Castlemorton proved once again the extraordinary power of music to upset and disturb; how noise and words can shake reality, momentarily upturning common-sense ideas of what’s normal and proper and possible. But it also showed once again the limitations of that power in the face of the forces that control the world.  The idea of changing things through music is arguably a useful illusion, creating an urgent sense of mission and high stakes that again and again results in inspirational sounds and statements. But it could also be seen, more severely, as a diversion from the dirty, dreary work of struggle.