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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781906191177 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Music Press Books |
| Publication date: | 07/24/2010 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.48(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Prodigy
The Official Story Electronic Punks
By Martin Roach
John Blake Publishing Ltd
Copyright © 2010 Martin RoachAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78418-966-2
CHAPTER 1
"Hip-hop was about standing in the corner being bad and looking cool, but this new scene was just about being part of something."
Liam
"I think it's best that you leave." The man was standing alarmingly close, his breath warm and fetid on Liam's face, as he angrily spat out his feelings. "You're from Essex, this isn't your area, so get out now." As he spoke, he opened a back door to the club and gestured for Liam and his three friends to leave. It was a bad end to a brief and uneasy night. They had come to north-west London after an invite from one of the hip-hop club's DJs, but as soon as they entered the small venue, it was clear that they would not be welcome. Within twenty awkward minutes, they were hustled out into a back room and told to empty their pockets, and when they scornfully declined there was a brief and angry confrontation as furtive hands tried to rifle through their jackets. They pushed the grabbing hands away but their defiance did them little good – they were still forced to leave. Angry, but with no real choice, the foursome headed back through the dimly lit side streets of north London to the gold Cortina in which they had come. As they did, one of Liam's friends pulled out a handgun which he had recently bought on the black market, and talked about going back to the club to return the threats they had just been subjected to, but it was pointless, there would only be more trouble. By the time the car doors had clanged shut and the cold engine had stuttered into life, the atmosphere was thick with disappointment, and for the entire journey home there was a disenchanted silence. When the car took the signposts for Braintree, Liam wondered if he would ever be respected and at home in the hip-hop scene.
Six days later, a seventeen-year-old Liam Howlett was in his own car, a battered Ford Escort, heading for The Barn in Rayne, on the way to his first rave. The venue itself was exactly that – an old barn, complete with wooden beams and high ceilings which made for an exceptional atmosphere. Essex had always been a stronghold for innovative dance music clubs, with the 1970s seeing Canvey Island's Goldmine and Rayleigh's Pink Toothbrush leading the jazz-funk and Brit soul booms. Similarly in the late 1980s, The Barn very quickly established itself as one of the premier clubs in Britain, and during its time saw PAs by all the biggest acts of the scene, including the likes of N Joi, Shades Of Rhythm, Guru Josh, and Lil' Louis; in addition, the resident DJ was Mr.C, who went on to enjoy considerable mainstream success with The Shamen. Even so, despite the club's celebrated reputation, as Liam walked up to the main door he still sensed the same trepidation that had accompanied him on most of his outings to hip-hop clubs recently – this was, after all, a new thing for him, how would the regulars react?
He needn't have worried. Within half an hour of being in The Barn, Liam had found his musical home, and the memories of that first night are still vivid in his mind.
"It was incredible. Me and a friend went because we had heard all about this rave thing – my old school friends were already into it, but I just thought it was a drugs phase they were going through. Until then I had only ever smoked a few puffs of weed which I thought was quite heavy, so all this acid seemed a bit serious to me.
"I watched the people taking acid and they looked okay on it, so I took half a tab. All I can remember after that is that the club just sparkled." The entire evening flew past in what felt like five minutes – the music made him buzz and he thought the feeling of his first acid trip accentuated the whole experience. When the last record finally cut out, Liam was left with a huge grin spread across his face. He stumbled out of the club still in a daze, and walked around the town centre for a few hours; unlike the violent night a week earlier, the only paranoia he felt was the fear that he might not come down off the trip before he finally went back home. The next day, he knew he was converted. "I thought it was the bollocks, such a different experience from what I had become used to. Hip-hop was such an exclusivist, pretentious scene, and to a certain extent, that always excluded white bands. Then to experience something like that first night at The Barn was such a stark contrast, I really loved the music and the whole vibe. I had never been into dancing that much, but it didn't matter here because you could just smile and jump around and really enjoy it, you didn't have to dance properly. The next week though I didn't take acid at all, because I wanted to check it out more clearly, and I found that the buzz was exactly the same for me. I really got into it then."
* * *
During the middle of 1988, a new musical form began sweeping through the UK's clubland with its hypnotic beats and new age drug culture – Acid House. The origin of the term is unclear, although many people claim it was inspired by the group Phuture's 'Acid Trax' single of 1987. The musical origins of the form were also somewhat difficult to identify. Many saw it as evolving from the musical mecca of Chicago. Others said it hailed from Detroit, and laid the credit at the feet of people such as Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, and other innovative DJs and musicians. Whatever its actual origins, the new minimalist Acid House had many musical cousins, but its mind-altering frequencies, relentless rhythms, unconventional structures and offbeat soundscapes imbued it with a weirdness and unorthodoxy all of its own. Whilst house music tempered its rhythmic obsession by incorporating more melodies and harmonies, Acid House pursued rhythm to new extremes, using the technology that had broken the mould of traditional live instrument music, and in the process producing beats that could never be simulated by flesh and blood musicians. The music soon crossed the Atlantic, and was introduced to Britain through the massive illegal warehouse parties that formed the foundation for what became known as rave. With the so-called smart bars selling high energy, strictly non-alcoholic, caffeine-full drinks to fuel the marathon dancing, the culture rapidly adopted a recycled hippy mantra, and its 'love vibe' and benign communality created what came to be called The Summer Of Love. The media did not like it one bit (Top of the Pops even banned some 'acid' tracks) nor did the authorities and the older generation, but this attempted criminalisation only served to increase the rebellious flavour, and hence the popularity, of the massive all-night parties. Ironically, many of the people who now condemned rave as barbaric, mindless, repetitive, and nihilistic were the same people who had grown up in the 1960s with the same criticisms being levelled at their very own amphetamine stutter of 'My Generation'. The mainstream snub for the 'smiley culture' later took on a more determined edge in October of 1989 when special anti-drug squads were set up to combat the phenomenon, but for now the baggy jeans and long haired 'ravers' ran free across the country. Pirate radio stations filtered new material out from under the noses of the media, and the sheer scale of some all-nighters (frequently running to tens of thousands) meant that the authorities had seemingly little power to stop them. In the south-east, the M25 motorway became celebrated on thousands of flyers for illegal parties, as it cut off a neat section of south-western Essex which became a haven for the phenomenon. The early parties were secretive affairs with people being given phone numbers to call, or meetings to attend at service stations along the M25, whereupon they could find out the secret location of that night's party. The almost complete lack of reliable or accurate media documentation further heightened the pervading sense that this was an utterly underground experience.
* * *
Liam's final conversion to rave had taken some time. When the summer of 1988 had arrived and the nation had been swept up in the communal euphoria of Acid House, Liam had actually barely noticed. He was too busy with his hip-hop band, Cut To Kill, and the early simplistic acid music he heard on pirate radio held no appeal. For some time now he had been a hip-hop fanatic, but his musical background was a litany of various styles. His first ever record was Ska's Greatest Hits which his dad had obligingly bought for him. Bands like The Selector and The Specials appealed to the youngster's interest in street level music. That autumn, when Liam graduated to the local comprehensive school, he was exposed to many new styles of music and spent hours around his friends' houses swapping records and plundering their vinyl collections. One such session unearthed a record by Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five, the New York-based act who mixed their encyclopaedic knowledge of black American music with impressive turntable skills to great effect with tracks such as 1984's 'The Message'. Liam was dumbstruck by this material and over the coming months dived into this new genre, buying what records he could afford as his appetite for musical knowledge became voracious. His interest was further fuelled when the hip-hop film Beat Street arrived in the UK, and by now Liam was an ardent fan of the whole scene, the scratching, the mixing, the breakdancing, the graffiti, everything. Yet, despite his interest in all the elements of the new scene, including the fashion and clubs, he always gravitated most strongly towards the music itself.
Having enjoyed lengthy classical piano lessons as a kid, Liam inevitably began to nurture his own musical ideas, and with the use of a friend's old four-track recorder he tried a few primitive mixes in his bedroom. Despite the crude nature of the mixes, Liam revelled in the challenge, and vowed to save enough money to buy his own turntable. "Once I had messed with my friend's four-track I had to get one of my own, so I took this job on a building site in the summer holidays, hoping to save enough money to get my own turntable. It was such hard work, and I was just this skinny little kid running up and down these ladders all day. I was returning home every night absolutely shattered, and only getting fifty quid a week. At the end of the first week I remember getting to the top of this ladder with a big bucket full of concrete in my hand and suddenly my arm started to shake uncontrollably, I just couldn't hold it, I was in agony. It was early in the day and I had weeks to go before I would have enough money for my turntable, and I thought, 'Fuck this, I don't want to do this'. Then this picture of two decks in the corner of my bedroom appeared in my head, so somehow I carried on, wobbling my way to the top of this ladder."
On the last day of the holidays, Liam walked off the building site and straight into the local music shop, where he immediately spent all his hard-earned savings on two modest turntables. Every night he would come back from school, run upstairs and spend hours practising on the decks. It was now that Liam felt confident enough to approach the aforementioned Cut To Kill, the local hip-hop outfit whom he had seen and liked and he was duly accepted on board as their second DJ, alongside an MC, a beatbox guy and the original DJ. Liam's career in Cut To Kill was to last two years, during which time he became a DJ of some local repute. In the early days, despite all the band still being at school, they played quite regularly at small local venues such as the YMCA at Chelmsford, attracting reasonable crowds of 150 people or more with the photocopied flyers they designed for each show. They were not exactly prolific, but when the band did gig Liam loved it. Once the group left school, things started to become a little more serious. With his A-level in Graphic Design, Liam secured a job at one of the many London free magazines, a publication called Metropolitan, where he befriended the art director and entertained him with stories of Cut To Kill's activities. One day, Liam was taken aback when the director offered to manage the band and invest £4000 in an album recording session and production schedule. The four friends were duly consigned to a local studio, where they recorded and cut twelve tracks; unfortunately, the entire budget for the project was spent in the studio, leaving little for promotion or release. Undeterred, the band and manager sent out fifty copies of the debut album to prospective record companies, agents and other industry figures. They did not receive any serious interest.
The demoralising dearth of interest in the band's album coincided with the period of repeated snubs by the hip-hop underground scene, culminating in the recent violent night at the London club. Therefore, Liam's first rave a week later came at a vulnerable time when his enthusiasm for hip-hop was quickly wilting – it was soon completely extinguished for the time being, when the other members of Cut To Kill went to Tam Tam Records and signed a record deal but excluded Liam from the arrangement completely. Surprisingly, Liam was relatively unconcerned by this move. Besides, it gave him the opportunity he had been increasingly craving for to get on with writing his own material. When he found out about this, he finally turned his back on the hip-hop scene and headed straight for The Barn.
* * *
At the age of 16, James Brown was convicted of petty theft and sent to the Alto Reform School, where his days were spent slopping out and avoiding the institutionalised violence. His future looked as grim as the outside world, which was embroiled in the Second World War. When Leeroy Thornhill reached the same age, he spent all day watching videos and listening to records of the same James Brown, who had by now been making legendary music for over thirty years and was firmly established as 'The Godfather Of Soul'. Brown's dancing footwork and speed fascinated Leeroy – whilst Liam was on the other side of town immersing himself in the musicality of hip-hop, Leeroy veered towards the dancing. He loved the music, of course, but dance was how he got his buzz. Having been through a brief dalliance with Mods, parkers and Two Tone, Leeroy picked up on the nascent electro scene and spent many long nights in town with his sheet of lino and bottle of Mr. Sheen, breakdancing with his friends, before riding home on his BMX. When electro was usurped by hip-hop, Leeroy was again immediately taken, but never lost sight of his original influences such as rare groove and soul, and he began frequenting local clubs where he would dance to tracks by artists like Maceo, George Clinton, Stevie Wonder and, of course, James Brown. Unfortunately, his local social life was dealt a severe blow two years after leaving school when his job took him two hundred miles west to the spa town of Bath. It was whilst he was working here as an electrician that Leeroy missed the start of a new scene for the first time in his young life – acid house had arrived. Not wanting to miss out, Leeroy drove home one weekend and joined a group of friends for an evening of acid house at The Barn. The club itself seemed okay, but for once Leeroy did not appear to be comfortable with the style of dancing – to him everyone appeared to be just running on the spot and when he tried it his body could not latch on to the beats of the sparse music. He wasn't getting a buzz, not from the music, not from the people and not from the dancing. Leeroy was not impressed: "It wasn't very interesting. I had never done any drugs so that was all a bit strange. On top of that, and odd as it sounds, I just thought, 'This is white man's music.' All I could see were these people at The Barn, all white, all dressed the same, all dancing the same. There was nothing there for me to lock on to and dance to."
He continued working in Bath for a further nine months and every two weeks he would return home, but still remained unimpressed by his friends' tales of the infant rave scene. However, by the summer of 1989, the supremely minimalist musical nature of acid had developed into something a little more varied, with a greater variety of beats and layers of rhythms starting to be mixed in with the original, more sparse material. Suddenly Leeroy could see something fresher and more exciting than previously, and he decided to try a rave once more. His new hopes seemed to be doomed when he again tried and failed at the odd running style of dance, so he sat down next to a speaker, miserable and dejected. Almost as an afterthought, he swallowed the tab of ecstasy that he had been given by a friend, and suddenly his whole body seemed to spark into life: "That was it, I was off!! The combination of this massive house sound system and the drug just took me over. I jumped up and started dancing and didn't stop for three years. I got on the E buzz and that was it for a good while, because you knew what you were taking and you only needed one tab." Leeroy had found a scene where he could dance all night, then go on to another party and dance through until the morning – within a matter of weeks he was hooked on the scene: "At that point it was fantastic – the whole E buzz of meeting so many people and being friendly with them was so amazing, so communal, there was none of this standing with your arms folded in the corner with your own crowd. It didn't matter what you looked like, what you danced like, how old you were or anything, you just enjoyed yourself non-stop and met so many people. Nobody was paranoid. On top of that, I only ever saw five fights in four years of constant clubbing and there is a lot to say for that."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Prodigy by Martin Roach. Copyright © 2010 Martin Roach. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
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