3
Orbital raves, entrepreneurs and the tabloid backlash
Richard Strauss
After the confined intensity of inner city warehouses, the spectacle was breath-taking, like being freed into a fantasy playground sparkling with the fairy dust of MDMA. At the peak of the night, the lights went off, the building filled with dry ice and in total darkness, Steve Proctor dropped the needle on the majestic opening chords of Richard Strauss’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’, the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey.Open in YouTube ↗
Stanley Kubrick
After the confined intensity of inner city warehouses, the spectacle was breath-taking, like being freed into a fantasy playground sparkling with the fairy dust of MDMA. At the peak of the night, the lights went off, the building filled with dry ice and in total darkness, Steve Proctor dropped the needle on the majestic opening chords of Richard Strauss’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’, the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey.Open in IMDb ↗
The Beatles
As dawn broke, people gathered flowers to weave through each other’s hair and frolicked with the horses in the nearby fields, while Proctor attempted to capture the feeling in music, closing the party with the Beatles’ ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ and Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’.Open in YouTube ↗
Stanley Kubrick
But Colston-Hayter was emboldened by success and chose an even larger venue for his next party, a derelict gasworks set in waste ground by the Thames, at the mouth of the Blackwall Tunnel, where Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam movie Full Metal Jacket had been filmed.Open in IMDb ↗
Ridley Scott
The promotional flyer for Energy read like a stockbroker’s salary scale: 15K of water-cooled lasers, 25K of projections, illuminations and imagery, 30K of turbo sound, plus 12 DJs, five rooms, bouncy castle, helter skelter, dodgems … Fortunately, the decor lived up to the hype: one room resembled a Greek temple with Ionic columns, another looked like a scene from Blade Runner.Open in IMDb ↗
Rhythim Is Rhythim
The biggest rave hits of the summer were the revival of Rhythim is Rhythim’s emotive classic from 1987, ‘Strings of Life’ – still one of the best techno records ever – and Lil Louis’ ‘French Kiss’, an astounding metronomic mantra which ground down to a series of orgasmic moans before accelerating back into electrospace.Open in YouTube ↗
Lil Louis
The biggest rave hits of the summer were the revival of Rhythim is Rhythim’s emotive classic from 1987, ‘Strings of Life’ – still one of the best techno records ever – and Lil Louis’ ‘French Kiss’, an astounding metronomic mantra which ground down to a series of orgasmic moans before accelerating back into electrospace.Open in YouTube ↗
E-Zee Possee
From the stage, the E-Zee Possee declaimed the refrain of their summer hit, ‘Everything Starts with an E’: ‘Drop a tab of E and rub up with a stranger!’ No one wasted any time doing just that: the girls in baby rompers, the teens in track pants, the cowboys and the superheroes and the dreads and the bad boys, the girl in the silver sci-fi make-up and the man flailing and hopping on crutches, the groups of three or four stepping in unison as if telepathically linked together.Open in YouTube ↗
Black Box
On 1 October, three of the summer’s rave anthems, Black Box’s ‘Ride on Time’, Technotronic’s ‘Pump Up the Jam’ and Sydney Youngbloood’s ‘If Only I Could’, were ensconced at numbers one, two and three in the pop charts.Open in YouTube ↗
Technotronic
On 1 October, three of the summer’s rave anthems, Black Box’s ‘Ride on Time’, Technotronic’s ‘Pump Up the Jam’ and Sydney Youngbloood’s ‘If Only I Could’, were ensconced at numbers one, two and three in the pop charts.Open in YouTube ↗
Sydney Youngblood
On 1 October, three of the summer’s rave anthems, Black Box’s ‘Ride on Time’, Technotronic’s ‘Pump Up the Jam’ and Sydney Youngbloood’s ‘If Only I Could’, were ensconced at numbers one, two and three in the pop charts.Open in YouTube ↗
Ce Ce Rogers
There was Ce Ce Rogers, whose utopian lament ‘Someday’ was virtually the state anthem of the house nation.Open in YouTube ↗
Julien Temple
We were nice middle-class boys having a whale of a time, stretch limos and all that, living The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle number two.Open in IMDb ↗