All week on FACT, we’re celebrating #RaveWeek. Following a FACT mix and revealing interview from pioneering Detroit techno producer Kevin Saunderson, scene overviews, the long-awaited sequel to Joe Muggs’ Rubbish Raver memoir, interviews with Terry Farley and Jerome Hill, and rundowns of the greatest ever rave tapes, happy hardcore records, rave videos and more, we close the week with the big one – the A-Z of Rave.

We close #RaveWeek with the feature that prompted us to start it in the first place: the A-Z of Rave.

There were arguments – seriously, you should see the fights for G and M that went down in our shared Google Doc – but ultimately, we think we nailed it: the history of rave, condensed into 26 little letters. And no, there’s no prizes for guessing E.

Turn the page to open up the A-Z of Rave, and check out the rest of our #RaveWeek features below.

More Rave Week!
– FACT mix 458: Kevin Saunderson
– Inner City and the inside story of ‘Big Fun’
– Joe Muggs is a Rubbish Raver
– Terry Farley on the history of house
– Jerome Hill is keeping rave alive
– Mella Dee’s Top 10 Rave Tapes
– Makina: the scene keeping the hardcore flame burning
– The 20 best Happy Hardcore records of all time
– The 20 best rave videos on YouTube

A – ACID

Oh, the power of acid. What started as a stroke of accidental genius in the late ’80s from Chicago producer DJ Pierre developed into one of rave music’s most important and influential genres, acid house. More than just a genre, however, being up on yer acid feels like being part of a club – check the loveable aesthetic of the I Love Acid club night, for instance, which closed its doors earlier this year. Interesting, Pierre never had the drug acid in mind when he invented acid house: as he told Fader this year: “I was like, acid makes a gritty sound. You have battery acid, you’d always see the sign ‘acid’ and then they show somebody pouring something out a tube onto metal and be melting it. I didn’t even know there was a drug called acid.”

B – BIG FISH, LITTLE FISH, CARDBOARD BOX

Where rave dance moves came from are a mystery. Certain foundational moments have become part of the mythology – Danny Rampling waving his records around behind the decks at Shoom led to arms-spread “trance-dancing”; Bez’s deranged Running Man variants at the Haçienda schooled a whole generation in the northwest about how aerobic movement amplified the effects of E. But it seems more like a lot of the moves emerged from a kind of folk consciousness, or even from natural factors of the human body: they became popular purely because they feel good.

After all, who could ever said to have invented the fist-pump, the arms-spread “feel the rush” salutation, or twirling your finger in the air like you’re dialling a very tall telephone? And the “big fish little fish cardboard box” making of geometrical patterns with the hands like you’re doing a kind of robotic t’ai chi? Who knows? But if there’s one lesson we’ve learned from rave is, that if something feels good but looks ridiculous: DO IT, and do it OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

C – CASTLEMORTON 

Tens of thousands of people raving, illegally, in a field, for a WEEK: the Castlemorton Common festival of May 1992 was the high-water mark for rave as counterculture and as unified scene. Sparked by the new age traveller contingent being moved on by police from their yearly Avon Free Festival site, it became a spontaneous gathering for ravers of every stripe – the crusty likes of Bedlam, Spiral Tribe, Circus Warp, DiY setting up their soundsystems first, then bigger and bigger name DJs coming to join the party as the word spread via that notorious underground communication network, the national news.

The size and importance of Castlemorton is an indicator of just how important the hippie-squatter-traveller axis was to rave’s initial explosion. The experience of the convoys and free festivals of the 1980s was invaluable when it came to building rave’s infrastructure, and many of the hippie bands and soundsystems ended up with close connections to rave’s most important practitioners: witness Circus Warp’s Where’s The Party label releasing Roni Size’s first 12”, or trip-merchants Eat Static playing live at Rage with Fabio and Grooverider.

Of course, there was nowhere to go once something as big and mental as Castlemorton happened. From here on in genres began splintering at a rate of knots, and of course the Criminal Justice Bill was brought in as moral panic ensued (and, if you are moderately conspiracy-minded, the alcohol companies lobbied the government to get crowds out of the fields and back into licensed venues), leading to a lot of the bigger soundsystems taking off for foreign shores. But it did happen, and the memory of that awesome collective madness – or even the knowledge of it for people who weren’t there – has continued to inspire ever since.

D – DARKSIDE 

Not quite a genre, more a genre tendency on the cusp between big movements, but also a state of being, “darkside” was a word that came increasingly into circulation as rave got more and more intense through 1992 going into 1993. People were doing more and more pills and more and more speed as they chased the initial euphoria of the late-80s-into-90s explosion. Coke and crack were coming into circulation, and the (no pun intended) cracks were starting to show in the starry-eyed unity of the scene.

Class and racial divisions started to open up, the dangers of hanging around thousands of lunatics off their heads became apparent, and the music began to reflect this. Everything was getting harder, faster, meaner; gabba was coming into its own in Holland, the patterns of jungle were gradually evolving, mentasm synths were still everywhere, vocals were pitched into weirdness and hysteria and horror or gangsta film samples were the order of the day. Goldie’s first Metalheads and Rufige Kru releases caught the mood, then as quickly as it had become a thing, it gave birth to classics like Remarc’s ‘Ricky’ and Origin Unknown ‘Valley of the Shadows’ and jungle proper took over.

E – ECSTACY

a.k.a. pills, beans, pingers, little fellers, disco biscuits, eckies, ectos, tabs, Jeffs, Garys, E, Billy Hills, sweeties, Molly, Mandy, mudmer, Adam, X, tingle tokens, doves, brown burgers, New Yorkers, white diamonds, apples, rolexes, Dennis The Menaces, rhubarb & custards, CDs, red devils, 007s, mitzis, turbo mitzis and BUMBLES. Rave just wouldn’t be rave without them. Can I have a go on your water mate?

F – FLYERS 

As one article in rave rag Eternity put it, “what came first, the flyer or the night?”. For those too young, too remote or too chicken to actually make it to the clubs, flyers were gateway drugs – inductions into the new ways of being and seeing proposed by rave (and, by extension, ecstasy). By the turn of the 1990s, these bits of rave flotsam were bring traded on a large-scale – swapped like shinies in playgrounds (genuinely), splattered on bedroom walls, and stockpiled for posterity. Rave’s insidious cultural takeover couldn’t have happened without them.

You can reasonably split rave designs into two camps: cosmic whimsy and Atari futurism. But any rave collection shows just how multifaceted the scene was, a riot of sound and colour. Some went for posho Classicism – see Biology’s use of the Vitruvian Man, or Amnesia House’s wretched Gorgon design. Hysterio’s video-nasty psychedelia and eye-busting colour schemes are worlds apart from RIP’s post-punky aesthetic or Shoom’s heart-shaped flyers; HR Giger designs sit alongside Blakean pen drawings and psychedelic vectors, sometimes for the same club. Key designers: Pez’s distinctive mutant graffiti; Jim Tang’s designs for Dreamscape; Junior Tomlin’s endearingly naive airbrush work for Fantazia (as well as sleeves for Kickin’ Records’s early rave smashes); Dave Little’s images for Spectrum; and George Georgiou, whose smily face logo (cribbed from the 1960’s counterculture, incidentally) for Shoom became the accidental emblem of the entire scene.

H – HARD HOUSE

The awkward cousin of the rave family, hard house has never been cool, but neither did it ever particularly give a fuck – and in some senses, it has kept original rave spirit alive in ways a lot of other scenes forgot about. It was the big survivor of the mid-90s UK fragmentation that threw up handbag, hardbag, glam house, nu-NRG and a dozen other micro-variants, all emerging from gay / mixed / too-pilled-up-to-be-sure-of-your-orientation clubs, and became the gaudier, prolier counterpart to big time trance and prog house in the Mitsubishi-fuelled late ’90s.

Its go-hard-or-go-home ethos was rooted in Trade – which was the first London club to really cater for go-all-weekend ravers, and which brought a lot of pillheads face-to-face with sweat-dripping, poppers-reeking gay culture in the raw for the first time – and it has to some degree or another retained an outré polysexual feel through the Gatecrasher era and on. And even now, in provincial towns across the UK and particuarly at the Tidy Trax weekenders (which just raised £60k in crowdfunding for its spring 2015 event like it was nothing), if you want to see a bunch of gurning nutbars dressed like Leigh Bowery’s dayglo nightmare and having an terrifyingly good time to relentlessly euphoric riffage, a hard house event is definitely the place to be.

I – IBIZA

Basic origin myth stuff, this. Ibiza was the spiritual seat of rave – the place where the Summer of ’88’s spirit, uniform and talent was codified. And of course where British ne’er-do-wells discovered ecstasy (apparently originally brought to the island by “the orange people”: the followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s hippie love cult who relocated there in the ’70s).

In contrast to the rare groove scene of London’s mid-1980s clubland, the anything-goes eclecticism of the Balearic clubs (and specifically Alfredo Fiorillo’s hyper-eclectic Amnesia sets, pulling on ambient, EBM and psych) pointed the way for a psychedelic take on US house music. Every essential acid house night from the early days of the scene was set up by people who’d made the trip to the island: Streatham’s Project Club, set up by Paul Oakenfold; Shoom, presided over by the Ramplings; the Boy’s Own nights, led by Terry Farley and Andrew Weatherall among others; Nicky Holloway’s The Trip…the list rolls on. Hard to imagine given the summit/superstructure it’s become, but, in a fairly modest way, it all began here.

J – JUNGLE

A lot has been made of jungle’s split from the main body of dance music circa 1993-4, and certainly it did embody deep social and aesthetic schisms. But it was still rave music, and still had as much in common culturally with its musical siblings as it did that set it apart. Yes it had its own clubs – AWOL, Innersense, Club UN, Sunday Roast – but its natural habitat was just as much at the massive raves, alongside house, garage, techno and particularly happy hardcore, from which it never quite fully structurally separated.

It’s not for nothing that High Rankin’s painfully funny rave avert pisstake about the Raveageddon 352 Day Rave at Bagleys uses original junglist Kenny Ken (back to back with Kenny Ken) as its recurring motif: jungle, and the drum and bass that followed on, incorporating almost all its original personnel, continued existing at the heart of “rave” as such right up to the present day. And of course the musical power of the original jungle explosion continues to atavistically pop up again and again throughout every other section of the club world…

K – KETAMINE

Recreational use of ketamine long pre-dated rave: synthesised in 1962 as a replacement for PCP, it gained some traction in 1970s New Age communities, and had an underreported presence in the disco scene too. Even the UK had some limited street trade in the 1980s, but it took the acid house boom to properly loop it into club culture.

Special K did the rounds extensively as counterfeit ecstasy – a more potent, inward-turned experience than ecstasy’s shared love bomb. Dissociative and spaced-out, its effects started to creep into the music by ’92/’93: see the zoned out levitation of DiY’s early releases, and the creeping shadows of darkside hardcore. Conveniently forgotten by many (especially those critics who’ve anointed the dubstep set as Generation K), ket was an important symbol of the unhappy fag-end of rave, and a reminder that the drug scene was always more complex, and significantly weirder, than the whole eccies-for-brekkie narrative might make out.

 L – LARGING IT

By the late 90s “larging it” (and giving it the large, going large, having it large and all the rest) became something altogether terrible. As well as being synonymous with over-pad, under-talented Superstar DJs, it became the province of the most oafish parts of Britpop and lad culture, generally implying overprivileged middle class men on cocaine trying to be younger, hipper and prolier than they were – the predecessors of today’s Fucking Ledges. But in the rave days, it signified something rather more wonderful and powerful.

The idea that rave was a reaction to recession may or may not be true, but there was certainly something about its decadent excessiveness that felt like a “fuck you” to the know-your-place brigade. Whether you were a dressed-up, clued-up elitist or a spotty herbert in baggy hoody and scuffed-up trainers, part of the experience of raving was that the combination of the drugs and the sense of people power that the crowd could give you could make you feel like you were all kings and queens, lions and lionesses, for a precious few hours. You could feel like you really were that important. Having it large wasn’t just about a show-offy demonstration of how much you could consume or how much noise you could make (though it was these things too), it was – just sometimes – a real glowing moment of personal triumph.

M – M25 

It’s possible to get surprisingly mystical – or psychogeographical, if you prefer – about London’s glorified ring-road. The writer Iain Sinclair has written at great length about its significance, and KLF associate Alan “Gimpo” Goodrick has organised a yearly 25-hour “spin” around its perimieter. But when it comes to its relevance to rave, you don’t need to get high-falutin to appreciate its importance to rave. The M25 was a genuinely modern thing when rave hit in ’88 – it had only, in fact, been completed two years earlier – and the opportunity it provided for night people en masse to roam around London’s outskirts “on a mission” was structurally integral to what happened over the next few years. It’s no coincidence that a lot of hardcore and jungle’s foundational crews – Moving Shadow and, obviously, Suburban Base being the key example – came from towns around its edge. And of course the “orbital motorway” gave its name to one of rave’s most enduringly successful acts too…

N – NO TRAINERS 

As with any musical subculture, dress was a battleground in rave culture from the Summer of Love onwards, when Balearic baggy stood in opposition to Boy’s Own casual, and the hooligan mob comported themselves differently to the gay scene. Snootiness prevailed early too, where acid Teds and johnny-come-latelies were pilloried by the more urbane first-wavers.

The ‘no trainers’ rule, though, was a key early ‘90s turning point. By around ’92/’93, post-Castlemorton and the ascension of the Spirals, certain clubs – Mansfield’s Renaissance, Nottingham’s Venus, Sheffield’s Music Factory – purged the scruffier elements; nights remained messy, but revellers had to be neat, composed and in possession of a pair of boots. Of course, variations of the ‘no trainers’ rule predated rave, persisted through it, and continued long after it (cf ‘no hats no hoods’, Prada’s smart-trainers, etc.) But this sartorial shift showed that, by ’93, the bifurcation between the raves and the soon-to-be superclubs has become near-insurmountable – and so the delacing of the scene began.

O – OLD SKOOL

When you listen to a classic rave set, you can feel the sweaty excitement in the crowd, not just giddy at the occasion they’re enjoying at that moment, but at their position in musical history – the knowledge that they’re watching something evolve, mutate and develop in front of their very eyes. No wonder then, that it only took a couple of years of rave for people to start reminiscing about the “old skool”, and although on the surface the idea of promoters in 1990 throwing Back To ’88 raves is ridiculous, as a reflection of the speed at which rave moved it’s an incredible phenomenon. Just check the comments on these videos if you don’t believe us.

P – PIANOS

The piano was the only acoustic instrument from disco’s richly orchestrated structures to gain a free pass into house and techno’s mechanical cathedral; since Marshall Jefferson’s 1986 House Music Anthem 12”, pianos have run through house music like a black-and-white helix. As such, they inevitably found their own particular rhetorical effects in UK hardcore – impossible to avoid, and used in different and telling ways.

The cheeky, hi-viz vests and white gloves, strain of rave was well served by plinky-plonk pianos – a daft, naff signifier of ‘gather round the joanna’ innocence. In diva house and the slicker end of hardcore (from Black Box to Bizarre Inc), piano stabs were weaponised, turned into a propulsive stomp that pushed forwards into the future. As the Mentasm crept in, tinkling ivories were often juxtaposed with the hoover sound – a sort of before / after picture for tech-heads. And by ’93, it was being used as a bona fide percussion instrument, a compliment to skittering breakbeats (see Fat Controller’s shredding ‘In Complete Darkness’, one of the all-time greats).

Q – QUEUES

Sure, it’s part of any nightlife experience: the heartleap of anticipation, the fizz of conversation and gossip, the politics of who gets in and who doesn’t, the psychology of dealing with door-whores and bouncers. But the bigger the event, the bigger the queue, and the more intense the event, the more intense the queueing experience, so for a massive 10,000+ capacity rave at the peak of a cultural movement, where everyone is on the same mission and everyone is in some way on the wrong side of the law, the queue – which you could easily be standing in for an hour and half – became an integral part of the ritual.

Do you drop your pills before going in and avoid a search? Will you be coming up on them just as you reach the bouncers? Which of the people from right across the country that you met last weekend will you bump into this time round? Will you make it to the front before some gang of wideboys steams down the line robbing everyone? What time’s Ratty on? It was a veritable social crucible within the deranged laboratory that was rave.

R – REWIND

If it sounds nice, we play it twice. A crucial part of rave culture that the Americans either wilfully ignored or never quite got, the simple practise of simply playing a record again from the start if it gets a remarkable reaction has been going since the reggae days, but reached its peak in UK clubs. In some ways, the rewind/reload reflects both the good and the bad of club culture – we’ve all experienced those moments where the level of hysteria on a dancefloor reaches such a boiling point that there is no way on Earth that record will stay on the deck for more than 16 bars, and equally, we’ve all been bored senseless by coked-up MCs and DJs wheeling every second tune and losing all sense of momentum on the floor. Still, at its best, the reload is a beautiful demonstration of the audience and performer as one, and from drum’n’bass to dubstep, raving just wouldn’t be the same without it.

S – SUPERCLUBS

Look, it was inevitable, right? Human excessiveness being what it is, capitalism being what it is, the spirit of dance culture was always going to turn into something fancier and shiner – a good number of the ravers were always going to come in from the fields and warehouses and into the nominally safer enivrons of a club where they could go without all the mess and unpredictability. The whole story of how early 90s naivete and enthusiasm turned into gold-plated cynicism is told in all its depressing detail in Dom Phillips’s book ‘Superstar DJs Here We Go’ (a title you should buy for any friend who looks like they might be on the verge of making a bit of money from music, if you care about them at all). But let’s not fight cynicism with cynicism: these clubs were and are part of our cultural fabric, and if you never had a “podium moment” to ludicrous handbag house tunes surrounded by satin shirts and girls with their hair in Björk bobbles, then you have missed out on a preposterous but huge fun part of the picture.

T – TAPE PACKS

Flyers served as propaganda for rave-as-lifestyle, and zines provided a samizdat network for the scene. But tape packs – recordings of live DJ & MC sets, sold by the rave promoters themselves – were the most important documents of the period. Conventional models of pop consumption (musician-as-artist; album-as-king) were thrown out by rave (live collective experience trumps artist worship; 12”-as-currency) – and so the tape pack, alongside pirate radio, proved the primary gateway portals into what was new, exciting, and urgent.

As ever, tape packs were the child of huckster tactics – a way of promoters to make back enough money to make the show viable. Single and double cassettes, hawked at nights or sold through in-the-loop shops or mail-order, were the main unit of currency, and rave’s second wind c. ’91 saw 8-12 x cassette bundles come into play. They’re the most enduring artefacts of the rave era – shorn of all the naff visual signifiers, they allow today’s younger right-place-wrong-time ravers to peek into this thrilling, antic culture.

U – UNIVERSE 

Of all the rave promoters who rose up to try and make the culture legit – the Fantazias, the World Dances, the Dreamscapes – Universe were the ones who tried the hardest to bring together all the elements of dance culture into their mega events, or certainly to bring European techno into the fold. Originally an unlikely trio of a former new wave drummer and music industry promo guy (the late Paul Shurey), a new age traveller convoy veteran (Rob Vega) and an ex-Bath rugby captain (Roger Spurrell), their Tribal Gathering and Big Love events were among the biggest around until they went bust in 1993.

They then shifted to clubland for a while to create the much-beloved Final Frontier at Club UK, a lunatic techno sweatpit where the likes of Jeff Mills, Sven Vath, Andrew Weatherall and Laurent Garnier were regulars, before Shurey relaunched the Tribal Gathering as a bigger and slicker event covering all bases including notably bringing Kraftwerk’s live show to a rave crowd. This too was short-lived, before disputes with partners Mean Fiddler brought an end to the name, and Mean Fiddler launched Creamfields as a replacement. It’s an indication of how much influence and lasting respect Universe had, though, that when Shurey died in an accident last year, there was not just an outpouring of appreciation from the dance music world but obituaries in national newspapers.

V – VICKS

OH MY GOSH I’M HAVING A RUSH. Of all the ludicrous features of rave culture, sticking a decongestant inhaler stick up each nostril, and letting a stranger rub volatile VapoRub into your bare shoulders, in order to enhance the pleasurable effects of your narcotics, must rank pretty highly. It’d be interesting to know whether Vicks experienced a sales spike in the early 90s – but it looks like the EDM kids are still at it.

W – WHISTLE POSSE

MAKE SOME FUCKING NOISE.

X – XL 

Amidst the constellation of small labels briefly shining bright and burning out, there were the more substantial names: Moving Shadow, Suburban Base, Production House, Shut Up And Dance, Strictly Underground and the rest of it. But no label stamped its name on the UK rave scene like XL.

In the mid 1980s, Beggar’s Banquet – which began life during the white explosion of punk – teamed up with the Groove record shop to form the hip-hop leaning Citybeat, whose roster included Rob Bass & DJ E-Z Rock, Freeez and Ultramagnetic MCs. XL sprouted out of that label in 1989, steered by Kicks Like A Mule’s Richard Russell and focused on proper, full-blooded hardcore.

The label would prove responsible for some of rave’s biggest touchstones – SL2’s ‘DJs Take Control’, Liquid’s gorgeous ‘Sweet Harmony’ – and, of course, it shepherded The Prodigy from being scene heroes to arena-fillers. The label’s 1990-1995 Chapters series, spread across five different releases, remain the key commercial compilations of the period. And, as history suggests, XL’s trajectory mirrors that of the scene as a whole: underground intensity, followed by a canny shift into the charts (and, latterly, the stadium), and, eventually, a total disavowal of the sound. ’89 to 21 – funny old journey.

Y – YORKSHIRE BASS

Ital Rockers, Unique 3, Nightmares On Wax, Forgemasters, XON – and of course LFO. There was clearly something in the water rolling off the Yorkshire hillsides and into the cities at the end of the 1980s, because a diverse bunch of people were inspired to set the county rumbling with ridiculously huge subsonic bass tones, which changed the course of UK dance music to a staggering degree.

It was a perfect storm of influences: Sheffield and Leeds had long had a warehouse dance scene built around serious electro (big enough that N.O.W.’s George Evelyn had essentially managed to be a professional breakdancer on the scene from the age of 14); both cities had huge reggae soundsystem cultures too; Sheffield’s Jive Turkey club was a significant early adopter of house and techno alongside its funk, rare groove and hip hop – and of course there was a long history of electronic experimentation in Sheffield too. And when the rest of the country went mental for four-to-the-floor music in 1988-9, these influences fused uniquely into a multicultural collision with gut-busting bass: bass which you can hear reverberating on through hardcore, jungle and all that followed.

Z – ZINES 

If the ravers were busy building a new, better future, then zine writers were keen amateur disciples, dedicated to building a (often charmingly hokey) network to spread the Word (and the Word was “acieeed!”). By early 1990s, the scene was stratified. Mixmag was the daddy, using the acid house boom to fully upgrade itself from DJ newsletter to bona fide dance publication. Then there were the middle-ranking efforts, with limited means but some semblance of ambition. Eternity was sizeable, thorough (and, crucially, actually printed). Blaze (“The Ultimate Rave Magazine”) was a well-read counterpoint, more grounded in a by-ravers-for-ravers mentality, and Ravescene was another outlet for heads, with its blocky mosaics of B&W artwork. Boy’s Own documented the early days of the scene with more care and flair than most, while Herb Garden and the first incarnation of Jockey Slut later provided northern counterparts to Boy’s Own’s acerbic hooligan wit.

The real treats from the period, though, were the cheap’n’cheerful newsletters, steeped in the have-a-go spirit and vernacular of the day. Interdance or Atmosphere are prime examples – shonky photocopy jobs, cluttered with editorials promoting “the land of musical ecstasy” and “alien life force”, or lists of “nu toons” and garbled reviews. Vibrant local scenes had their own rags – see Underworld, “by Peterborough, for Peterborough, about Peterborough”. If flyers offered a psychedelic window into the scene, zines were community bulletins: may featured advice from local drug community groups, reports on how to take drugs safely, and roundtable panels with drug experts. Elsewhere, pernickity issues of the scene came to the fore: marvel at Eternity’s sub-Panorama “chewing gum report” on clubs’ tyrannical ‘no gum’ policy, or the letters pages debating “plastic” ravers and “bagging and slagging” promoters. Huge archives exist online, and are a cracking way to while away an hour.

More Rave Week!
– FACT mix 458: Kevin Saunderson
– Inner City and the inside story of ‘Big Fun’
– Joe Muggs is a Rubbish Raver
– Terry Farley on the history of house
– Jerome Hill is keeping rave alive
– Mella Dee’s Top 10 Rave Tapes
– Makina: the scene keeping the hardcore flame burning
– The 20 best Happy Hardcore records of all time
– The 20 best rave videos on YouTube