The A-Z of Acid

What is acid? Is it a drug? A sound? A fashion? Or simply a state of mind?

The answer is that it's a happy and coincidental coming together of all those things. In the blink of an eye in the late 80s they coalesced into a musical movement and cultural revolution of the kind not seen in the UK since the Summer of Love in 1967.

While many of the records that first defined the acid sound were made by Chicago musicians using a Japanese bass synthesiser, acid house was very much a British scene. It was people on these shores who embraced the sound and turned it into a culture with its own fashions, drugs and even its own logo. It was here that we had the second Summer of Love, here that the scene grew so strong that a very public backlash ensued and here that the government was moved into passing new laws that stamped down on raving.

But the establishment didn't win and decades later acid is still everywhere you look. Far more than just an alien squelch, acid was, and is, a lifestyle choice. As such, we present to you an A to Z history that touches on all the things that made it so….

Thankfully, there is no easier or more obvious place to start an alphabetical run down of acid house than with 'Acid Tracks', the cut that kick-started one of music's longest running revolutions. While it's true that many lay claim to having been the first, the de facto starting point is this 12-minute opus from Phuture, a.k.a Spanky, DJ Pierre and Herb J. The story goes that the batteries on the trio's Roland TB-303 were running out and, as they did, an otherworldly sound emanated from its computerised innards. Squelchy and resonant, that same sound has since creeped into everything from trance to breakbeat, pop music to techno and still sounds as weird and wonderful today as it did back then.

With post punk attitudes, DIY style and anti-establishment moods looming large in the air of the late 80s, it's no wonder a bunch of young yahoos took it upon themselves to document the emerging acid house scene. Joining the dots between the clubs, the football terraces, the fashions, banter, slang, sounds and drugs of the day, Terry Farley, Andrew Weatherall, Cymon Eckl and Steve Mayes only managed 12 issues in six years between 1986 and 1992, but that was enough to cement their place in acid house history.

Did this LP, produced in Mumbai by an ageing Bollywood session musician in 1982, pre-date acid house as we know it? Debate still rages today, and it's clear to see why once you've heard even the smallest snippets of the futuristic way in which Singh was manipulating his 303.

Danny Rampling and UK acid house go together like Boiler Room and anarchic chat rooms. After a much mythologised trip to Ibiza in '87, Rampling returned home like an intrepid - though rather more free-spirited - 16th century explorer, keen to share his spoils with the world. Those spoils were a Balearic musical spirt where anything goes, a penchant for ecstasy, baggy fashions and smiley logos, and together they added up to Shoom, the legendary parties that very much marked the launching point for what would become acid house in the UK.

Before acid and the drugs that went with it, clubs in the UK were notoriously bleak places where people went to "fuck or fight." The clothes were dour, the music was worse and a nondescript greyness characterised most of the people who were out past 9pm. When acid house took hold, people began to smile, come out of themselves and treat the person next to them on the dancefloor as an undiscovered friend rather than a threat to their territory. With acid's carefree attitude came a much more open approach to fashion. Clothes got baggy, colours grew ever more garish and the worlds of music and art collided ever more frequently, with hugely unpredictable but enduringly popular results.

It's fair to say the UK establishment (read: national press and the government) fears what it cannot control. And so Fleet Street ran headlines like "ACID PARTY ARMY OF BASEBALL BAT BRUTES," "£12 TRIP TO AN EVIL NIGHT OF ECSTASY" and "SHOOT THESE EVIL ACID BARONS" in the late 80s. Despite being intended to terrify people into action, to encourage parents to lock up their kids and generally make the populace kick back against the acid movement, it actually seems like some of the reporters were having as much fun as the ravers themselves. Amusingly enough, of course, The Sun now has its very own Clubz section, so it's clear who won that little battle.

These two were the driving force behind counter cultural icons 808 State in the early days. Championing acid sounds right from the off, they were always one step ahead.

It might be best known for its crossover indie dance sounds and bands like New Order and Happy Mondays, but had this incompetently-run, money-draining club not have been instrumental in spreading acid house around the north of England, it's likely those bands would never have been.

While people in clubs all around London and the north of England in the late 80s were happily getting on it and minding their own business, in parliament there was trouble brewing. Despite acid being a depoliticised scene that brought together people of all colours and creeds, those in power saw so many young people acting together in organised fashion as a threat to their very being. As such, it became a topic of discussion in the commons and became a priority for (often brutal) police interventions and so, in the public eye, became something that needed to be "controlled."

Eventually the government decided that something serious had to be done and in 1994 it secretly and speedily passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which prevented people gathering and dancing to "music that includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats." This was something of a death knell for the acid house rave scene and the many outdoor parties that took place across the UK, forcing music back inside clubs. It also triggered a protest in London in October of '94, with ravers marching from Embankment to Hyde Park (see photos).

Images via Digital Journalist

Had the instruction manual for the Roland TB-303 been translated into English, maybe those earliest adopters would have known how to use it properly, and we might never have heard of this thing called acid at all. What a scary thought.

Love or loathe superstar DJ culture, it has very much been a part of the fabric of dance music for nigh on 30 years now. And it all started with acid and, arguably, with Danny Rampling at Shoom. His clothes, his dancing, his music and the drugs available at his club night all made people fall in love and immediately subscribe to his cult. To use a tired but true cliché, dancers worshipped at his altar, and there is a famous tale where one youngster even claimed to have been able to see Rampling's aura as he played. It was more likely a cloud of body odour given how long those sessions went on, but you get the point.

Acid house was eventually forced out of London by the rozzers, but that wasn't an end to it. All that happened was people pulled together, investors came in and the party moved just outside the M25 Orbital. It was here that the scene really thrived, bringing together travelling communities, hippies, crusties, suburban trippers and inner city acid heads in perfect open-air harmony, if only for a short while before gangs, criminality and the Criminal Justice Bill brought it all to an abrupt end.

Legend has it that Chicago club Muzic Box, where a certain Ron Hardy was resident, was the first club to air an acid track. In fact, Hardy played Phuture's 'Acid Tracks' no less than three times the first night he was presented with the record. Essentially, then, this is acid's ground zero.

Nude was the short lived but hugely influential night run by Hacienda resident Mike Pickering in the late 80s. It was all about acid house, and so was Manchester as soon as word got round.

Jane Bussman's 1988 book Once In A Lifetime: The Crazy Days Of Acid House And Afterwards is an excellent and highly entertaining insight into the heady days of rave. The party animal turned comedy writer has credits for killer TV shows such as Brass Eye, South Park and The Fast Show, so when you're done with this list, go grab her tome and become fully immersed in the fine details of the acid house explosion.

Whether or not DJ Pierre, Spanky and Herb J were the first to introduce the acid sound into their work will never truly be known, but what we can be sure of is that they remained dedicated to the form for years. The group released a great number of acid tracks that remain stone-cold classics to this day.

You've probably heard the fantastic 'Mind Games' by Quest, but did you know they also excelled at a deep and subtle acid sound, as evidenced by their 1988 offering 'Look Into My Eyes'? Well, now you do.

This is it: the box that defined a generation. Only around 10,000 were manufactured between 1982 and 1984, and it was originally designed and marketed as a bass guitar accompaniment for guitar players. As history tells us, though, it completely failed on that front and instead found favour with dance heads around the globe. TB stands for Transistor Bass, and the 303 has a singular oscillator that can be configured to produce either a sawtooth or square wave. Cloned and copied many times, nothing beats the sound of the original, which – fun fact – was first heard in the UK charts on boogie trio Imagination's 1982 hit, 'In The Heat of the Night'. It is worth noting, however, that many acid tracks exist that were made using tools other than the 303, such as Josh Wink's 'Higher State Of Consciousness'.

Was acid house the last great youth movement the UK has seen? Discuss.

We owe it all to this man, Roland's Senior Managing Director and head of its R&D centre, for it was he who designed the TB-303 bass synthesiser, easily one of the most important happenings in the whole of dance music culture.

This staunchly independent Detroit outfit did their bit in spreading the acid sound into the techno form with EPs like 1990's 'Return of Acid Rain'.

If the US had 'Acid Tracks', the UK had 'Voodoo Ray', the deeply spiritual, shamanistic sounding acid cut that would have been 'Voodoo Rage' but for the fact that A Guy Called Gerald's sampler ran out of memory and cut off the final syllable of that seductive and sensuous vocal.

Money and overt commercialism have never been comfortable bed fellows with counter cultural dance music, but they were back in the late 80s. Most often, early acid house parties such as Sunrise were put on by entrepreneur toffs such as Tony Colsten-Hayter aka Mr Big and Paul Staines, who now runs the right wing political blog Guido Fawkes. To be fair to Colsten-Hayter, he was in it for the long run, handcuffing himself to TV's Jonathan Ross and later heading down to a 1989 Tory party conference in order to try and persuade those in attendance that he and his raves were a product of "enterprise culture". Without his big bucks, then, who knows what would have happened to the scene. And what happened to him? Well, Mr Big made headlines again recently.

This is a hardware clone that replicates the original 303 circuitry and uses as close a set of components as possible to achieve the famous 303 sound in case you can't afford £1000 for an actual Roland… You're welcome!

The iconic and immediately recognisable face of acid that breeds fear in those who don't know, and stirs familiar feelings of unity, friendship and dancefloor memories in those that do. The symbol was first aligned with dance culture in the 70s after Ubi Dwyer co-opted it for his Windsor Free Festival, but was further cemented into legend during the Second Summer of Love in 1987, and again when Bomb Da Bass used it on their 'Beat Dis' single a year later.

Given its vital gatekeeper role in modern dance music, it's hard to imagine that Radio 1 was dead against acid house when it first emerged. This was so much the case, in fact, that DJ of the day Peter Powell opined, "It's the closest thing to mass organised zombie-dom. I really don't think it should go any further." Unlucky, Peter.