Adventures In Wonderland: Acid house, rave and the UK club explosion by Garratt Sheryl

Author:Garratt, Sheryl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TCL Publishing
Published: 2020-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

No one had ever seen a party like Energy. Five rooms, each with its own lavish theme: a set from the cult science fiction film Blade Runner, a Greek temple, Stonehenge, a pyramid room and a sushi bar. They sold out two weeks in advance, 5,000 tickets at £15. On the night, there were hundreds, maybe thousands more people outside, trying to get in. The studios had a small central office tower which overlooking all of the rooms, and the Karma team spent much of the night in there, watching the mayhem they had created.

‘People were just climbing up the walls to get in,’ remembers Lynn Cosgrave, who had just started working at their office in Taylor’s Chelsea flat, setting up ticket sales across the country. ‘It got out of hand, and we were all really scared. We had no control whatsoever. We just sat there going, “Oh God, what’s going to happen now?”’

Jazzy M played the temple room, his decks wobbling on a platform high above the dancefloor. ‘I was playing two copies of “Strings Of Life” and hyping everybody up as you would in a jam, getting on the mic and just sending them completely crazy. Everyone’s on top of this temple, dancing on top of the columns, and the lasers are firing straight into the middle of it, hitting a prism and just shooting everywhere. Every single person in that room had their hands in the air. It was the best gig I’ve ever played.’

After Jazzy’s set, at around three in the morning, Adamski came on and played a set that was to make him a fixture at all the big raves that summer. Seeing the music created in front of them there and then, the crowd went wild.

‘I’d never seen a crowd rock like that!’ says Chambers. ‘He had an ability to just destroy people on the dancefloor. They would be just physically exhausted after one of his sets. It was crazy. I still think that was the best acid house party ever thrown.’

A week later, Westworld held a party called The Secret Of The Golden Flower in a large, empty mansion on the exclusive Coombe Park Estate near Kingston. Compared to Energy it was an intimate gathering for 700 people with a beautifully-lit garden and a heated swimming pool in the grounds, but it still caught the eye of the tabloids. The Sun report afterwards made the first reference I’d seen in print to M25 ‘orbital parties’.

Boy’s Own were to continue to hold similar small, deliberately low-key events throughout the summer, keeping the spirit of ‘88 alive. At their party on a farm in East Grinstead, clubbers greeted the dawn lying on the giant hay bales scattered round the field. The party provided the inspiration for The Beloved’s first hit ‘The Sun Rising’, a song which for many summed up the awe and joy of the second summer of love. But it was the Energy party which set the standard for 1989, became the benchmark the other big promoters felt compelled to beat.

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