Matthew Collin Is a Former Editor of the Big Issue, I-D Magazine and the Time out Website. He Has Worked As a Foreign Correspond
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Matthew Collin is a former editor of The Big Issue, i-D magazine and the Time Out website. He has worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC and now reports for Al Jazeera from Tbilisi, Georgia. He has also written for many newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian, Observer, Independent, Daily Telegraph and Mojo. His other books, This is Serbia Calling and The Time of the Rebels, were also published by Serpent’s Tail. John Godfrey, who worked on the original research and interviews for this book, is a former editor of i-D, deputy editor of The Face and executive producer at Rapido TV. He now lives in Sydney, Australia, where he is the executive producer of factual and documentary programmes at SBS. Praise for Altered State ‘At last somebody has written the real history of the last ten years, and written it with such wit, verve, empathy and profound intelligence. If you’ve been part of the scene in any way, this brilliant book will serve as positive affirmation. If you haven’t, yet still feel moved to pontificate about it, you will no longer have the excuse of doing so from a position of ignorance. I can’t recommend this marvellous piece of work enough and in a sane world it would sell more copies than any other book written over the last decade’ Irvine Welsh ‘The first full history of the dance boom which, fuelled by Ecstasy, has transformed British culture over the past decade: here you will also find the drive to transcendence, or oblivion, that is at the heart of British pop’ Jon Savage ‘Altered State is not just timely; it was crying out to be written’ Independent altered state the story of ecstasy culture and acid house matthew collin with contributions by john godfrey A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request The right of Matthew Collin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Copyright © 2009 Matthew Collin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published as Altered State in 1997 by Serpent’s Tail First published in this revised edition in 2009 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd 3A Exmouth House Pine Street London EC1R 0JH website: www.serpentstail.com ISBN 978 1 84668 713 6 Designed and typeset by olio at Neuadd Bwll, Llanwrtyd Wells f Printed in Great Britain by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon, cr0 4td 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 contents foreword (a long time afterwards) / vii prologue: a night in the eighties / 1 1 the technologies of pleasure / 5 2 summer of love / 45 3 magical mystery tour / 87 4 journey to the east / 129 5 freaky dancing / 148 6 techno travellers / 198 7 urban blues / 261 8 the chemical generation / 293 acknowledgements / 341 notes / 343 index / 348 foreword (a long time afterwards) When Altered State was written in the mid-nineties, the culture which it documents had yet to reach its peak. Although it had already been transformed from an underground scene with roots in renegade urban cults and the secretive psychedelic avant-garde into a mass-market phenomenon which brought recreational drug use into the social mainstream, at that time it was still evolving. What was first called ‘acid house’ and then the ‘rave scene’ in the late eighties had turned into a multi- million-pound leisure industry known as ‘dance culture’; a far less mutinous and outlandish phenomenon, although its narcotic allure remained strong. It had become the most vibrant, diverse and long-lasting youth movement that Britain had ever seen, one which continued to send out cultural and political shock waves more than a decade after it began. The fundamental reason why it became so pervasive and influential was simple: it was the most extraordinary entertainment format yet invented. The combination of Ecstasy and electronic dance music had genuine transformative power: it could deliver altered states of consciousness; experiences which changed the way we felt, the way we thought, the way we lived. The scene had an inclusive, open-access ethos rather than a defined ideology, and this was the vital force which drove it forwards. It was a culture with options in place of rules; a series of possibilities which people could use to define their own identities, possibilities which could be adapted to each vii altered state individual’s social background and belief system. The recurring story was of people being inspired by the revelatory flash of the primal Ecstasy experience, then getting involved and altering the direction of the scene by bringing in their own ideas and influences. Musicians, entrepreneurs, artists, criminals, political activists, hippies and football fans all affected its development by adapting it to suit their own desires – hence the scene’s relentless dynamism, its constant self-reinvention and its unprecedented longevity. At its heart was a concerted attempt to suspend normal transmission, if only for one night; to conjure from sound and chemistry, however briefly, a kind of utopia – what anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey has described as a temporary autonomous zone. Such zones, Bey says, are ‘successful raids on consensus reality, breakthroughs into more intense and more abundant life’, fleeting moments where fantasies are made real and freedom of expression rules before external reality intervenes. Sometimes these autonomous zones could feel very real and very potent indeed. Ecstasy culture was no freak storm which burst miraculously from the ether. It was shaped by time, place, and very specific economic and social conditions: the late eighties in urban Britain, the end of the Thatcher years, when the psychic map of the country was redrawn. So long afterwards, it’s hard to imagine how powerfully the Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher once dominated our ideological life and how much her politics divided us, but at the time it was inescapable. The Thatcher fantasy was about breaking free from the past, entering a paradise of unrestrained entrepreneurial and consumer opportunities where materialism was elevated to a creed, individualism was celebrated and collective action was discouraged or outlawed; an ideology which would define the decades that followed. Acid house and the rave scene expressed viii (a long time afterwards) deeply-felt desires for communal experiences which Thatcher rejected – ‘There is no such thing as society’, in the words of her most notorious assertion – but they also seemed to echo her libertarian capitalist doctrine of market freedom and consumer choice. They provided an outlet for Thatcherite entrepreneurial impulses, even amplified them, enabling people to get involved, to participate rather than simply observe or consume, to do something, whether it was recording a techno track in a bedroom studio, organising a warehouse party or selling a bag of pills (although criminal entrepreneurialism probably wasn’t exactly what Conservative ideology envisaged). Simultaneously, the exponential increase in recreational drug use in Britain from the late eighties onwards, which was catalysed by Ecstasy – the ‘miracle pill’, as some of us saw it back then – ensured that the mainstream of youth culture became intimately connected with illegal activity. As drug use became normalised, criminality was democratised. What the author Irvine Welsh called the ‘chemical generation’ was also a generation of outlaws. Three separate pieces of legislation were introduced by the British government during the nineties in an attempt to contain the spread of Ecstasy culture; one of them even tried to outlaw electronic dance music, if it was played in certain circumstances. All of them were unsuccessful. The scene’s highest point in Britain, at least in terms of the sheer numbers of people involved, probably came some time after the start of the new millennium, a few years after the first edition of Altered State was published and more than a decade and a half after the origins of acid house in an obscure nightclub in an unfashionable district of south London. From then onwards, its populist appeal began to decline, although electronic dance music continued to evolve and Ecstasy continued to be an extremely popular drug in Britain, while elsewhere in the world its usage still seemed to be growing. ix altered state (The United Nations has estimated that in 2008 more than nine million people took the drug.) Re-reading Altered State now, it inevitably reflects the period in which it was written: the reckless enthusiasms, the exaggerated impulses and the sheer intensity of living through those high times. But although it might be, in many ways, a partisan insider’s account, the book also documents the seamier side of a culture based on illegal drug use, the problems created by criminality and excess, and the difficult questions about Ecstasy’s long-term effects which have yet to be properly answered. Millions of pills have been swallowed since it was first published, but scientists still can’t agree whether or not it causes any serious damage to the human body and brain, while attempts to restrict recreational drug use have almost always failed. Two decades on, the fallout from Ecstasy culture – social, political, legal and medical – continues to cause controversy. This new edition tracks the scene to its populist summit as well as following up some of the disparate post-rave subcults which were still developing when Altered State was first published. But despite the fact that Ecstasy culture is now a global phenomenon, the book still focuses, unashamedly, on Britain, where the scene (if not its drug and its music) first developed, and the formative years of acid house and rave culture in the late eighties and early nineties, when many of the most remarkable incidents took place – some of them so extraordinary it’s hard to believe now that they really happened.