Cyberkids: crash and burn

The Mitsubishi Corporation had never had so much free advertising. A new and seemingly endless batch of potent pills flooded clubs in the summer of '98. Thanks to Tony de Vit, people had got a taste for the hard and fast things in life. That included popping pills with vigour. Club dress also got crazier. The Mitsubishi logo was sewn onto clothes, then painted on faces. Subtle glitter around the eyes turned into swirling collages of colour. Clothes went day-glo. Rave accessories like glowsticks, dummies and even white gloves reappeared. These clubbers were turning into a tribe: the cyberfreaks.

But they were a tribe without a DJ shaman to unite them. The circuit DJs had been hammering Euro trance tunes like 'For An Angel', 'Binary Finary 1998', 'El Nino' and 'Ayla', but it wasn't until trancemaster Paul van Dyk started playing regularly in Britain that the cyberkids found their messiah.

By April 1999, Gatecrasher had its own subdivision of the cyberfreaks: the 'Crasher Kids. On April 24, self-styled leaders UV Lee and Andy Bonner famously made a six-foot banner for van Dyk that read, "Would you please consider being our resident". That was the first night Matt went to the club. He was blown away by van Dyk's music and the 'Crasher Kids' style. "It changed my life," said the former curtain-haired beer boy. He is now known as Shiny Matt.

Summer rumbled into view and brought with it a record number of dance festivals. Homelands, Lotherton Hall and Creamfields were not simply places to lose it to great music under the stars. They were, as festivals tend to be, a meeting of the tribes.

Non-cyberfreaks witnessed such sights as human tune cards, silver-suited space cadets and thousands of people dressed up like extras from Sesame Street. The word spread. Trance stalked the charts, the anthem ATB's '9pm (Till I Come)' was the second-biggest selling single of the year. Trance was shifting more copies than Boyzone and S Club 7. The 'Crasher Kids' rallying cry was "Anyone can join in!". And they did.

Newspapers and magazines ran features on the phenomenon, visiting Andy Bonner's Gatecrasher shrine in his bedroom and spending the evening gawping at the colourful creatures hanging out on the stage in the club. The cyberkids were invincible.