MAD FOR IT;
ECSTASY CULTURE APPROACHES ITS 10TH SUMMER AS VIBRANT AS EVER ITS SOUNDS,
SIGNS AND SYMBOLS EMBRACED BY BUSINESSES CASHING IN ON A BIT OF SUBCULTURAL
CREDIBILITY. MATTHEW COLLIN ON THE REVOLUTION THAT BECAME AN INDUSTRY
by Matthew Collin
Copyright (c) 1997, Guardian Newspapers Limited
The Guardian March 28, 1997 THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. T2

TOO far gone. No way back. At least, that's how it seemed
at the end of 1995, during that strange week when Leah
Betts lay in a coma and, day after day, the image of what
was to be her deathbed was there on newsprint and screen.
Each day the mood became more hysterical, each day another
nuance of a secret society was exposed this is what our
children have been up to, and we never even suspected
until there was nothing left to tell.

The billboard poster, the beginning of the Betts
family's subsequent antidrug campaign, was a deeply
unsettling sight: their 18yearold daughter's photograph,
framed in a black border like an obituary for a culture,
with a stark slogan, 'Sorted'. It was meant as a warning,
but felt more like an accusation look what you've done
and it revealed the private fantasies of a generation. A
final confirmation that Ecstasy culture was mainstream had
come to every high street in Britain.

Just over a year later, a company that made its name at
the tailend of the illegal rave scene of the late eighties
released a CD sponsored by a perfume for men. Fantazia had
long ceased to promote huge parties, and had moved into the
more lucrative and less demanding business of the
massmarket dance compilation album. Its alliance with Lynx
demonstrated once again how much had changed within dance
culture since its outlaw origins in Thatcher's black
economy. 'Football teams have sponsors. It doesn't affect
the game,' responded Fantazia's Andrew Gallagher although
observers of the commodification of soccer during the
nineties might disagree.

This is Ecstasy culture as it approaches its tenth
summer, reaching out as far as possible. More than 15
years after the first Britons were introduced to Ecstasy on
excursions into New York nightlife, and over a decade after
house music emerged from the black gay clubs of Chicago,
the synthesis of the two has produced the largest and most
enduring youth culture Britain has ever seen. The Ecstasy
boom's sounds, signs, symbols and slang have become
allpervasive, part of the everyday landscape. Switch on
television: the millenarian rumble of drum and bass
advertises deodorants and Tory newspapers; psychedelic
graphics sell soft drinks and junk food. The Post Office
declares itself 'sorted'.

The dance scene is now a highly lucrative business for
operators on both sides of the law. In 1993, it was
assessed by market analysts at the Henley Centre to be
worth pounds 1.8 billion a year; a wild estimate, perhaps,
but indicative of the stakes for which club promoters,
record companies, radio stations, DJs and drug dealers are
vying.

A few examples: on New Year's Eve 1996, it was rumoured
that the DJ Jeremy Healy picked up pounds 15,000 for
playing records for a few hours. 'Superclubs' like
Liverpool's Cream and London's Ministry of Sound have taken
niche marketing to new heights of sophistication, starting
their own record labels to release DJmix CDs, launching
merchandise and clothing, opening bars and shops, promoting
nationwide club tours and package holidays to destinations
like Ibiza. The Ministry, financed by James Palumbo, former
City dealer and son of Lord Palumbo, the multimillionaire
property developer and retired chairman of the Arts
Council, is the world's biggest club merchandising company,
with an estimated turnover in excess of pounds 10 million,
and is striving to become a force in the record business.

The Ministry has linked up with brands like Pepsi and
Sony for sponsorship deals. The club Renaissance is backed
by Silk Cut cigarettes, the Hacienda by Boddington's beer.
Sponsors are buying into subcultural credibility. In the
early nineties, club flyers mimicked corporate logos,
twisting them into cheeky drug references; now many
promoters have established their own, instantly
recognisable logos for accessories and CDs. The first wave
of acid house raves was checked by government legislation;
now huge leisure corporations like Granada are cashing in
with clubs based on that formula. Mainstream house
clubbing, with its closedcircuit security cameras,
registered door supervisors and councilimposed procedural
guidelines, is the regulated opposite of its outlaw past.

Last year, the British Tourist Authority launched its
first campaign since the sixties to target the 1830 age
group. It printed a magazine, UK Guide, that aped the youth
press and focused on what were considered to be two of
Britain's main tourist attractions Leeds club culture and
the rock band Oasis, with a guide to Oasisspeak straight
from club dancefloors including druginspired slang like
'sorted', 'bangin' ' and 'mad for it'. House, it
intimated, had finally been made safe for tourists and
casual consumers.

The dance scene has been transformed into a dance
industry. Its codes have been cracked and nothing can
remain underground for any length of time. In the 1995 book
Highflyers, journalist Stephen Kingston lamented that house
has been commodified and neutered the way psychedelic rock
had been at the end of the sixties. Clubbers have become a
huge marketplace for corporate concerns, following the
classic trajectory: revolt into style, rebellion into
money. The outlaws have become the new establishment. The
dream is finally over, Kingston insisted, its fragile
spirit extinguished: 'The house movement has been herded
into a capitalist corral. Club culture used to talk a lot
about freedom. It's turning out to be the freedom to be
farmed.' Many things have changed and nowhere more so than
in the realm of music itself: pop's social relations have
been comprehensively rewritten.

At the heart of Ecstasy culture is a concerted attempt
to suspend normal transmission if only for one night. A
mission to reappropriate consciousness: to invent, however
briefly, a kind of utopia. Its prevailing ethos is
inclusive; open to individual definition. It is about
participation rather than observation, about being involved
whether making a record or selling a bag of pills. As the
digital bassline throbbed through flesh and bone and the
first rush of Ecstasy coursed through the veins, people
were transformed, freed into a playground sprinkled with
the fairy dust of MDMA; liberated to act out characters
that their everyday lives would not allow; intensely,
vibrantly alive. The world seemed to turn upside down,
inside out. The dance floor became the focus of attention,
not the stage; the hegemony of the star system was
overturned as cheap computer technology offered
unprecedented opportunities for doityourself creativity.

A thousand flowers bloomed in a wonderland where, for a
moment, anything seemed possible. Perhaps it was, perhaps
it still is. Earlier this year, a young unknown from Derby
released a song that he had recorded in his bedroom for a
few pounds. Your Woman by White Town, the alias of Jyoti
Mishra, entered the charts at number one. Although it
wasn't strictly a dance record, its sampled electronic
textures placed it in the doityourself dance culture.
Mishra refused to publicise his hit with the usual
interviews and photosessions. He bore no resemblance to
the stylised image that even alternative pop stars project.
The bemused look on his face when captured on his doorstep
by a paparazzo demonstrated disinterest in the holy grail
of celebrity. He honestly preferred to stay in his bedroom
and programme his machines. He is not alone. Since the late
eighties, a selfsupporting, ad hoc production network has
developed around dance music, based on inexpensive home
studios, smallrun whitelabel records, and a distribution
system hooked together by a web of mobile phones. It is an
independent alternative based on the same ethic of DIY
autonomy that punk rock once propagated, but with a reach
far wider than punk ideologues ever dared to envisage. It
has catalysed an enormous output of recordings.

The dance boom forced the record industry to find new
ways of packaging and selling music in a rapidly
fragmenting marketplace. In its early stages, house music
was unconcerned with the rock mythologies of authenticity,
career development, the musician as artist, or with the
staples of rock commodification: the live gig and the
album. However, the rise of recognisable and marketable
(often white) techno and ambient bands who played live gigs
and worked in the record industry's format of choice, the
compact disc, rather than anonymous (often black) recording
studio deities whose main mode of production was the
relatively unprofitable 12inch vinyl single, made house
and techno comprehensible to business and rock press.

The major labels sought to exploit the urgency and cash
of the swelling independent sector, just as they had
assimilated profitable elements of the hippie and punk
movements. They launched subsidiary dance operations headed
by scene heroes, bought out or affiliated themselves with
independent labels, issued mix compilations, marketed DJs
as celebrities, and used remix to bolster product sales and
longevity. And while some of the premier electronic auteurs
received just rewards, there was a backlash against the
cheesy and the commercial as the synthetic pulsebeat of
house was reduced to cliche in records cynically
manufactured to throw Eheads into raptures.

The dance scene thrived on participation and community
heresies in Thatcher's individualistic 1980s but as the
leisure industry moved in to privatise its profitable
elements, a participant culture was slowly transformed into
a consumer culture. Community broke down as dance music
shattered into confusing yet fascinating genres and
subgenres, each chasing the New and the Now. But liberated
zones survive and prosper. At home with their Akais and
Ataris, Jyoti Mishra and thousands of others sift through
the possibilities, running programs which are controlled by
them alone.

Yes, things have changed: drug culture, too, has
colonised the mainstream. In the 1990s, recreational drug
use went through a democratisation that mirrored the
evolution of the dance scene. Music sold pills, pills sold
music, and the whole thing built, the frenzy rising to a
peak perhaps, with hindsight, that strange week in 1995
when the private fantasies were finally made public and the
whole thing rushed over the top. Leah Betts's death wasn't
enough to stem the tide. How could anyone believe that the
clock could be turned back? A voxpop of clubbers in
leading dance magazine Mixmag the following month confirmed
this. Yes, it was tragic, people responded, but some kind
of freak accident that wouldn't put most of them off
swallowing another pill that weekend. 'There's been plenty
of deaths,' said one. 'You just go out and do it the next
weekend.' 'Alcohol rots your brain and your guts and no one
stops drinking when someone dies from that,' insisted
another. 'I know the risks, and I'm willing to keep on
taking them.' One of the central dynamics of Ecstasy
culture is the attempt to recreate the initial euphoria,
to relive the exhilarating high, to chase the thrill of the
rush. This has produced a recreational drug culture on a
scale bigger than any in Britain this century. It is
difficult to overstate the impact that Ecstasy had on
perceptions of drugtaking. It was, many believed, not only
an alternative to alcohol and tobacco, but a less harmful
alternative. This was extended to justify drug consumption
across the board.

To those who had never taken illicit substances,
Ecstasy's innocuous appearance was the opposite of what
they had been told about drugs. There were no hypodermic
needles, no ritualistic preparation. It came packaged, not
as a seedy drug, but as the ultimate entertainment concept,
with its own music, clubs, fashion and media and to many
it was the euphoric peak of a lifetime. In the 1980s,
government drug campaigns hectored the young with images of
addicts as poxridden anorexics, but these were far removed
from the experiences of Ecstasy. Thousands of sunny smiles,
the chatter of positivity, embracing total strangers
little wonder that Ecstasy's impact was to give people an
overwhelmingly positive experience of illegal drug use.
The chemical generation passed through the doors of
perception into a world where drugs were not only
acceptable, but glorious. Thousands upon thousands just
said 'Yes!', again and again.

Euphoria has given way to excess and comedown, as it
does within any drug scene. The realisation finally hit
after years of disbelief fuelled by media misinformation
and government propaganda that people were actually dying
after taking Ecstasy, and dying horribly, with blood
pouring from every orifice. There in the temple of
unlimited pleasure, some of that peculiar innocence
evaporated. Even though most of the deaths were
attributable to avoidable conditions like heatstroke,
selfdoubt crept in. The miracle drug lost some of its
shine.

But surveys in the midnineties indicating that around
50 per cent of British youth had tried illegal substances
offered a clear message: prohibition had failed. Where did
this leave government rhetoric the war on drugs? If
Ecstasy had been incorporated into the mainstream leisure/
pleasure equation; if, as an often cited estimate
suggested, half a million people were taking it each week,
what did that make Britain's youth a generation of
criminals? Government responses to Ecstasy have been
belated and irrational, inspired more by the frantic mood
of moral panic than by any genuine understanding of how
drug use has changed. The war was lost years ago.

As the 10year anniversary of Ecstasy culture
approaches, none of the questions it posed have been
resolved. Even more people are willing to chase the dream
bliss wherever it may take them. Although it is no longer
secret or subterranean, the social experiment continues.
The voice of Adonis, its baritone looming from the crackle
of cheap vinyl pressed during house music's infancy, sounds
ever more like a prediction fulfilled: 'I lost control, I
sold my soul. Too far gone ain't no way back. . .'

Adapted from Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy
Culture and Acid House, by Matthew Collin with
contributions by John Godfrey, published by Serpent's Tail
on April 11.