crofton

Well-known member
In Oxford in 91-2 the kids a year or two older than me at school started wearing very baggy trousers and going to motorway raves. I remember around 92 people talking about Prism, there was particular excitement about the fact that they had "flavoured smoke", DJ Kieran was the resident, I didn't go but I did go to Spectrum a couple of years later I think. In 94 one of the principal things around Oxford was of course the legendary Minchery Farm Tavern jungle nights, somewhat incongruously given the general vibe of Minchery Farm but a lot of big name people passed through as I recall. Again I didn't go, sadly, although I did go to the 93 Eruption FM party at the Astoria which was the first and best time I saw jungle. But otherwise I was mostly going to AbaShanti in the Vauxhall Arches which was quite easy and cheap from Oxford, basically get the bus to Victoria which at the time was 3 quid, into the dance at 10pm, out a 5am, walk back to Victoria and get the bus back to Oxford, it was a cheap night out!
 
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john eden

male pale and stale
92 was post college for me, so either on the dole or doing van driving jobs.

Can’t remember too much about it. There were clubs which were shit and clubs which were great and some squat raves which were generally excellent.

But also still going to punk type gigs.

Things like Megadog and the deptford urban free festival were a big coming together of the tribes. Dreadzone, Radical Dance Faction and all that. But also Orbital and a zillion faceless DJs.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Neither I nor anyone I knew had the foggiest idea what any of the records that got played were, is one thing. Apart from Papua New Guinea and a few things like that.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
Neither I nor anyone I knew had the foggiest idea what any of the records that got played were, is one thing. Apart from Papua New Guinea and a few things like that.

so true. total confusion.

but i suppose some djs MUST have had an idea - and that is actually pretty impressive.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
92 was post college for me, so either on the dole or doing van driving jobs.

Can’t remember too much about it. There were clubs which were shit and clubs which were great and some squat raves which were generally excellent.

But also still going to punk type gigs.

Things like Megadog and the deptford urban free festival were a big coming together of the tribes. Dreadzone, Radical Dance Faction and all that. But also Orbital and a zillion faceless DJs.

This is about the time I met you, I was struck by the contrast between raving and my excursions into "counter-culture" in terms of energy, excitment and diversity but probably was a bit young to differentiate properly. There's sometthing there about being a participant rather than an observer. I remember ging on about it a fair bit anyway.

"What, all those interviews with Gen, he was just talking bollocks?!"
 

crofton

Well-known member
got me through the nineties

They were pretty special nights tbh.

Other stuff that I remember from that time in London: Lost at The Lighthouse. The bingo hall on Caledonian Rd. Trenz in Amhurst Rd. The Dungeons on Lee Bridge Rd.
 

Pearsall

Prodigal Son
I wasn't there for 92 and so on (too young!) but I did attend Metalheadz at the Blue Note a number of times from late 1996 through to the summer of 1997 - I was only 16 at the time so was not a regular by any means (hard to go clubbing on a Sunday night when you have school the next day!), but I did go maybe 10 times over that time period. Given how baby-faced I was at the time, it's a minor miracle I was let in at all (our strategy was to go early before it filled up). It's a night that has become quite famous over time, and the subject of many gauzy reminiscences (see here, for example). By the time I went it was already into the mythology period, that this was the place to go to hear the freshest dubplates and the most forward-thinking music.

A few of my memories:

Hoxton on a Sunday night in the mid-90's was dead. You'd get off the tube at Old Street and there was no one around - this was years before the area became hipster central, let alone before it became its current incarnation of the natural roosting ground for hooting meatheads.

The experience was intensely physical in so many respects. The dancefloor was super tiny, so as soon as it was busy you were more or less compressed into a dancing meatloaf with everyone else. The speakers were massive and, given the size of the room, they were right there. You didn't just hear the music, you experienced it. Your sternum shook and your nostrils flapped as if in a bass hurricane. Yet the sound was also clear and crisp. As a 16 year old, it was an incredible thing to experience music where you could hear every element clearly, even at brain-altering volume. Previously I had been dragged by friends to the odd indie or metal gig where the sound would be loud but usually also very muddy. By this point I was also very big into dnb, buying tape packs regularly and listening to pirate radio, and I heard stuff at Metalheadz that I didn't hear elsewhere for months to come, if ever. Every time I went my mind would be blown by the selections, which got harder and more intense as the night went on. I am pretty sure it was usually Grooverider playing last when I went (I think Doc Scott was last at least once when I was there), and his sets were always a journey into sheer robotic madness.

I know that 96 techstep is not as iconic these days as 92-94, but I still feel really privileged that I got to experience Metalheadz at the Blue Note.
 

RWY

Well-known member
Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992

Acid house is often portrayed as a movement that came out of the blue, inspired by little more than a handful of London-based DJs discovering ecstasy on a 1987 holiday to Ibiza. In truth, the explosion of acid house and rave in the UK was a reaction to a much wider and deeper set of fault lines in British culture, stretching from the heart of the city to the furthest reaches of the countryside, cutting across previously impregnable boundaries of class, identity and geography.

With Everybody in the Place, the Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller upturns popular notions of rave and acid house, situating them at the very centre of the seismic social changes that reshaped 1980s Britain. Rare and unseen archive materials map the journey from protest movements to abandoned warehouse raves, the white heat of industry bleeding into the chaotic release of the dancefloor.

We join an A-level politics class as they discover these stories for the first time, viewing the story of acid house from the perspective of a generation for whom it is already ancient history. We see how rave culture owes as much to the Battle of Orgreave and the underground gay clubs of Chicago as it does to shifts in musical style: not merely a cultural gesture, but the fulcrum for a generational shift in British identity, linking industrial histories and radical action to the wider expanses of a post-industrial future.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
For me, raves were kinda getting more formulated by 1992, I think at that point I was going to less squat parties and more goth stuff, more gay clubs - the LA (in Shoreditch, near the Blue Note) and FF club, which would later turn into Trade at Turnmills. The squat scene was starting to go weird, the Torture Garden and Slimelight were going at full strength by that point, so the fetish scene was turning a corner from being this old fashioned, Venus in Furs type thing to young people spraying blood over each other and listening to Coil, yay. I thought the whole professional raver thing was dumb, and I was looking too weird by that point to feel comfortable around casuals and stuff, and they felt similarly about me. I'd stopped DJing at raves by that point.
 
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