Deep inside

It is June 1988. In the cobbled streets of Bankside, between Southwark Cathedral and the nearby bridge, steam pours from every vent and gap in the walls of an old warehouse down Clink Street. It’s like a crazed pressure cooker. Outside, a queue snakes all the way down towards the cathedral, while the KLF’s US police car is parked surreptitiously by the kerb.

Inside: a cacophony. An assault on the senses, the smells, the din, the whistle posse in full flow, dry ice hanging in the air, sweat dripping from the ceiling – from everything, in fact. Tough Chicago house and Detroit wails bounce off the Victorian brick walls as bodies perform a robotic ritual, somewhere between communion, dance and mayhem.

Today this part of London has changed irreversibly. Bankside is now a tourist trap with Clink Street Museum, the chi-chi gourmet Borough market round the corner and the re-imagined Shakespeare’s Globe a stone’s throw away. In 1988 it was an empty, desolate dystopia, where Canary Wharf was a dream in a speculator’s mind, the Shard and Gherkin many years from even that and it still felt as though we owned the dirty streets of London.

There are many tales of acid house. The firsts, the wheres, the whos and the best. On the Balearic tip, came Future, The Trip, Spectrum and Shoom, inspired by Afredo in Ibiza. But on the street side, allied to the London reggae sound systems, there were The Dungeons on Lea Bridge Road, Mendoza’s in Brixton, Labyrinth in Dalston and, of course, Clink Street.

The iconoclastic Mr C was a resident there: “It was different. It wasn’t like anything we’d really seen before. Obviously there had been a couple of rave parties that had gone on; Hedonism being one of them. But there wasn’t anything that had been acid house in a warehouse situation like that before. The crowd was different. It was like London had come together in a demonstration against discotheques. Discos before [house] were full of football hooligans and fighting and casuals and it was all a little bit… daft. Clink Street was a real cross-section of different sorts of people, colours and classes. One of the things that made it so interesting and exciting and vibrant was that mix.”

The Clink Street parties were more formally known as RIP (Revolution In Progress) by its promoters, north London couple Paul Stone and Lu Vukovic. The pair had been originally turned on to house not by the sun setting in Ibiza, but the more prosaic (but highly influential) Jazzy M’s radio show on LWR: The Jackin’ Zone. Investigating further, Stone was introduced to Kid Batchelor, then an associate of the Soul II Soul soundsystem and an early house evangelist. After staging a few parties in Eversholt Street, near Euston, Stone and Vukovic found an old rehearsal space in Bankside, down the road from where Shoom was happening in Southwark.

“By June, I was raring to go but the first night all the security ran away when the police turned up,” says Stone. They never opened. “I thought I’d give it one more go, ’cos I had a bit of cash left. At ten o’clock there were a few people dribbling in. But as the pubs started to shut, there were droves of people started to come. By 3am it was rammed. Absolutely rammed. People out on the streets. Smoke. Strobes. It was all going off everywhere. People were turning up suited and booted. I don’t know what happened to their suits, but they weren’t coming out with them.”

When RIP at Clink Street opened in June 1988, possibilities seemed endless and everywhere. Suddenly, opportunities that had not previously been there presented themselves. Hairdressers became promoters, gas fitters became DJs, student designers were suddenly in demand for flyers. Derelict foundries and factories were repurposed as party spaces. Change was in the air. Qualifications were suddenly irrelevant. It was now about having a go. “I had an epiphany,” says Ashley Beedle. “I was working for Zambia Airways but I was sick of my job. I was going out a lot then and I was involved with Shock soundsystem, where we were doing Clink Street. One Wednesday I went for lunch and never came back.”

Alongside Shock, RIP had gathered together the cream of London’s advance guard of house DJs. In one room they teamed Batchelor with ‘Evil’ Eddie Richards and Colin Faver, already both known as innovative underground DJs, and in the other room Shock played with a mouthy ex-milkman called Mr C.

Unlike the media-friendly Shoom, there were few pop stars hanging out at RIP. It was twitchy, scruffy, with an edge. “RIP was all about dark and black,” says Eddie Richards. “A lot of reporters didn’t want to go because they were too scared. Shoom was white pop music and I was playing black underground music. Two different things going on, both really good.”

Rob Acteson, whose Dungeons party down the road in Leyton was often spoken of in the same terms as Clink Street (they even shared some DJs), was impressed with what Stone and Vukovic had created. “When I went to Clink Street I felt like I was missing out,” he says. “It felt like they knew something we didn’t, like they had a head start on us. It was more of a musically dominated club. Musically they were a bit more aware than our crowd were, because we had 2,000 people in the club each week and maybe 500 of them might know a bit about house music, but the rest of them it was, ‘What’s all this about then?’ Clink Street was more Chicago-oriented and because it was a smaller venue they could get away with being more experimental.”

“Amazing things happened,” Lu Vukovic told Matthew Collin. “like one morning the sun was rising and everyone was completely tripping on the energy and the emotion and the feeling of it all, someone shouted out, ‘Bring down the walls!’ and they all started jumping up, trying to take the room apart, to actually bring down the walls! No amount of words could describe that euphoria, that sense of belonging, that possibility.”

Mr C was also present when it happened. “Ashley Beedle from Shock got on the mic and said, ‘We need to break through the room, be joined as one with the other room,’ and with that half the room started attacking the wall with bare hands. They broke through it and the ceiling came down. Everyone was covered in dust. It was quite hilarious – and very dangerous.”

In July RIP introduced a party on the Friday called Acid Transmission and soon after Zoo was added on Sundays (“because anyone left still going after the weekend had to be animals,” according to Mr C). The summer passed quickly, but Vukovic and Stone’s parties lasted only until autumn when they ended amid pressures to make the night more commercial by forces that were rounding on the promoters – what Stone refers to cryptically as “the dark side”.

With nascent rave promoters like Anton Le Pirate and Tony Colston-Hayter regular visitors, the commercial possibilities were clear. But as the RIP acronym suggests, the pair were purist about the scene they had created and had little interest in the massive raves that were obviously on the horizon. “That Summer of Love went really well,” says Stone. “It was constantly full. But then you had people out there who could see a buck or two. I’ve never really been about the buck. I had people approaching me saying do you fancy doing this or that... it was working its way toward big outdoor events. Everybody started getting greedy. But the idea of doing this in a field, where I couldn’t control the sound, where I couldn’t make it what it actually was – it just lost it for me. I was totally against all that. I wanted to keep a little niche of something that was special.”

Tony Colston-Hayter and Anton Le Pirate were alive to the commercial possibilities presented by the activities in these clubs. Giant raves like World Dance, Biology and Sunrise grew out of what was then a micro-scene. After Clink Street folded, Mr C became the rapper for the Shamen, enjoying a number of cross-over hits, including the hilariously subversive ‘Ebeneezer Goode’, and with the money he accrued from his pop ventures he built a studio and started the techno label Plink Plonk with RIP accomplice Paul Stone.

“Clink Street was the birth of rave culture,” claims Mr C. “It has now proliferated across the world into the global phenomenon of underground electronic dance music that we see in major clubs today. I think it was the beginning of that. The music in Chicago, Detroit and New York was more of a black gay disco scene. What we did was pull together the music from those three scenes, with the drugs and this synchronicity, and created something new and fresh. It was the beginning of rave culture as we know it. ”

Watch a film on Clink Street here