Happy Mondays by Simon Spence

Happy Mondays by Simon Spence

Author:Simon Spence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI


15

Oakenfold / Osborne

Things were getting so crazy on the Acid scene that its most recognisable face, Paul Oakenfold, had decided to back out from behind the decks. He and his long-time but unsung partner, Ian St Paul, had been the driving forces who got the movement off the ground in London in late 1987. They’d run club nights together since the early 1980s and Oakenfold had been heavily involved in the early hip-hop scene in London, promoting records by Run DMC and the Beastie Boys. He and St Paul were part of the crew who’d discovered in 1987 that the mix of Ecstasy and Ibiza club tunes created some new piece of heaven.

The pair had tried unsuccessfully to introduce an Ibiza-influenced night in London as far back as 1985, mixing fast-paced indie with Europop, early American House music and many obscure rock oddities. Back in London after the summer of 1987, they tried again and with the addition of Ecstasy found their nights were a success, a radical departure from the then predominant soul or jazz-funk nights, where hipsters sipped expensive drinks in flash suits. The dancing, the sweating, the baggy clothes and the unpretentious mix of music became an underground sensation in the capital, similar to what was happening at The Hacienda at the same time. When, in early 1988, Oakenfold and St Paul started Spectrum at Heaven, the scene exploded. It was where Bez first recognised Oakenfold, who soon found himself on the front page of music magazines, explaining all about the ‘Balearic Beat’, as the music he conducted from behind the decks was then known.

As the scene developed into Acid House, Spectrum was the first club night to be forced to close by lurid tabloid headlines about drugs. Although Oakenfold and St Paul reopened the night under a new name, their success – like that of The Hacienda – attracted gangsters and heavies trying to control the drug traffic in the club. St Paul was said to have been almost blinded during a deal involving 12,000 Es and relocated to Los Angeles, where in due course he’d start up Acid nights, and where the Mondays would catch up with him again.

Oakenfold had DJed at some of the country’s biggest Acid House parties and his name on a flyer was always a key attraction, even if he was not booked to play. But, like the Mondays, he too felt the scene was becoming a monster out of control. His reworking of Ibiza club staple ‘Jibaro’, a 1974 track by Colombians Elkin and Nelson Marin, had been an underground hit in 1988 when released by FFRR Records and he’d been fishing around for more studio work ever since. But remix culture was in its infancy and being known as the country’s leading Acid House DJ was not the calling card it ought to have been to the paymasters at major labels: one of the hit Acid tracks of the summer, E-Zee Possee’s ‘Everything Starts with an E’, had been banned by Radio 1 and all TV outlets.



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