Acid House

Chicago's initial acid house releases during 1986-1987 (like earlier house music releases) received very little attention in America outside of Chicago's disco community. The songs crossed the Atlantic to England, where dance music's appeal had begun to diminish due to the over-commercialisation of the style. The new house material had a major impact on UK house music, and by 1988, the myriad of house music night clubs that had opened all over the United Kingdom resonated with the sound of the 303 Roland synthesiser, signifying the arrival of the United Kingdom's own acid house style.

The closure of Chicago's WBMX radio station meant the virtual end of house music's radio exposure in that city. This closure, combined with acid house's sudden surge in popularity in England (the dance craze phenomenon had become England's biggest youth cult movement since punk rock a decade earlier) caused a shift in emphasis away from Chicago to the UK.

England's commercially-controlled radio stations were oblivious to the huge demand for acid house. Except for a few 'token' shows the music received little exposure on the stations' main play lists. This provided the opportunity for a throng of pirate radio stations to emerge around London and other major cities to supply this unexpected demand for the music.

When LWR was what you call the boom, it was on half a million listeners. And we knew that because the surveys were actually being published in newspapers The Jacking Zone was getting 40-50 letters a week and I was broke because all my wages went on new tunes^[2].

The UK music press - ever eager to 'discover' new trends - helped establish England as the focal point of the dance music world. Acid and its adopted logo (the 'smiley') became accepted within not only dance club culture but also the general community. This widespread acceptance (signposted by the appearance of the 'smiley' on t- shirts in clothing shops throughout the United Kingdom,^[3]) was short-lived as the English tabloids began a campaign against the style, running stories which connected the new dance music craze with the insidious growth of drug abuse in the United Kingdom.

The 1988 release of 'We Call It Acieed' by the D-MOB only reinforced the media-hyped popular belief that acid house was ' a threat to the morality and health of British youth'^[4] (the song's title was interpreted as having drug overtones). Although the more traditional drugs of past generations (such as alcohol) were undoubtedly being abandoned for new 'designer drugs' such as ecstasy, the extent of the 'threat' to morality and health' was debatable. Ken Tappenden, the policeman who ran the task force responsible for stopping/controlling the dance related drug explosion, admitted in a television documentary ^[5]that the new mass recreational drug culture was probably not as subversive as once thought: 'I wonder whether the amount of time, resources, money that has been ploughed into this has all been worth it'^[6].

During the summer of 1988, known as 'The Second Summer of Love', England's domestic acid music had seemingly severed its stylistic connection with Chicago house. Many of the subsequent English DJ's and producers honed their skills during this period, and the dance music phenomenon moved out of the nightclubs and warehouses, where it had resided during the genre's infancy, to huge open air 'raves', mostly around London and the south east of England, where thousands of revellers danced all night.

The tabloid media campaign (with stories such as 'A New Threat to British Youth'^[7] and 'Ecstasy Airport'^[8]) increased public anxiety about these parties, which were now labeled as 'a facade for dealing drugs on a massive scale.'^[9] Home Secretary Douglas Hurd, supported by the opposition, ordered an inquiry into these unlicensed parties - leading to a huge police crackdown on these events. A series of arrests and prosecutions suggested that the police were gaining the upper hand, until a magistrate's court in Maidenhead found Tony Colston-Hayter (a prime mover in the underground party scene) not guilty of running an unlicensed party, since the ticket that was purchased by the attendees was deemed a membership card. This meant that the party did not need a licence, as it was a private function only attended by members of a club.

The police now seemed to be losing the 'war' against these events. A new strategy was developed by the Home Office, one which gained the support of the local authorities, who up until this point had shown little interest in the police force's attempt to stop these events for drug offences ( a criminal matter and not in the jurisdiction of local government)^[10] The police concentrated on health and safety concerns, noise infringements and obscure local by-laws.

The Pay Party Unit's lawyers scoured the statute books, digging out any piece of legislation that could, even vaguely, be applied to raves^[11].

Combined with this was a campaign of misinformation as the police tried to frustrate partygoers. They advertised bogus events, hoping to draw convoys of ravers away in to the English countryside where they would only find a policeman with a loudhailer informing then that there was no party and to go home.

In December a Private Members Bill was passed in Parliament that increased the maximum fines for unlicensed parties from 2,000 to 20,000 pounds and six months in jail. John Pattern (Home Office Minister) announced that he intended to implement an order that would enable him to confiscate any 'criminal proceeds' from illegal parties. These new measures, combined with the failed 'New Year's Eve Mega Party', seemed to announce the end of not only the illegal 'rave' phenomena but also the end of acid music's popularity.

A Pay Party police report on 14thApril 1990 detailed the task force's success. The unit had monitored 336 parties. Of these 167 didn't take place, police had stopped 106 and 68 had been allowed to run. The increased pressure by both the police force and the government seemed to have won out against the rave phenomenon - forcing it to move back into licensed venues where it could be monitored and controlled with greater ease. 'Raves became integrated into the infrastructure of the entertainment establishment; shepherded back into licensed premises, contained and commodified if not eradicated.'^[13]