It's all gone Pete Tong

I spent most of the 90s raving in one way or another. But sadly those days are gone – the music dated as quickly as the milk in the fridge and well... hitting thirty - going out and clubbing until dawn, watching the colour distorted paranoia flicker across the 8 am faces of the Sunday morning tube commuters, enduring the shivers and the sweat drenched shirt that clings to you like a saggy second skin becomes less appealing as you get older.

But good days - happy happy happy ecstatic days.

So I thought an ode to RAVIN was in order. That crazy pastime of the 90’s that briefly leaked into the 21st century. The only musical scene where the people who played the music were more famous than the people who made it. The first real new music since punk.

It wasn’t complicated - it didn’t mean anything. But when the walls of thumping bass washed over you, sweeping you off your feet plunging you into the sweaty heaving human pool of the dance floor where you became one with the crowd, sharing that one ecstatic moment over and over again, one moment after another; letting the luscious music fill you - become you – then you realised that something that feels this good doesn’t *need* to mean anything.

But still some songs still get the hairs on my arm going.

So where to start?

Those heady embryo days of Acid House where the heat beats of Detroit and Chicago House were thrown into a big vat of LSD and British flare and came out the Summer of Love in 1988. When Camden Market was filled with smiley faces and bootleg ACIIIIID. When hundreds of very fucked and freaked out people went to abandoned warehouses and listened to very freaked and fucked up music?

No.

The teenage years of the early nineties when it went rural and ecstasy took over from acid. Spending Saturday nights out on the motorways of the north west of England – finding a convoy of a thousand cars all hooting the horns, grinding the M60 down to a 30mph pace, picking up packs of cars from Liverpool and Manchester, following some crazy bastards from Moss Side who had stolen a fucking lorry and were blasting out beat from its back, jamming the Police FM frequencies with pirate radio almost goading the man to come and find us and try to stop the crazy party in some shit filled field in Lancashire we were hoping to have.

The days when football violence stopped dead – when Man City and Lead Untied fans, who a few years earlier were obligated to beat the living crap out of each other on sight, were now hugging each other in the Hacienda. The days when the right wing press went hysterical – “What the fuck are the kids doing!!!????! – They will die! They will die!!” the headlines screamed. But we didn’t die. The conservative government at the time tried to stamp out this insane new youth movement by passing draconian laws. Suddenly generation E, unlike its predecessor generation X, had a political purpose- “fight for the right to party and have a good time.” If you don’t have that - freedom means nothing.

The consequential political protests inevitably led to a good old fashioned British riot – I would have gone but – you know… I was having a lie in.

No not that.

Maybe the wilderness years of the mid 90s when everyone suddenly got into brit pop and Oasis and Pulp and Blur were toast of the day but the lone genius Nick Warren kept the flame burning.

No, not any of that…

I am going to go for the Golden Age – The glory days.

Part 2 coming soon…