7. Various ArtistsWe Call It Hallucinates
About a year later, in 1988, my brother’s friend Richard Stowe got a cassette from Camden Market with all the acid tracks on it and I was listening to it a lot. It was just sold with a smiley face on lurid yellow card but it was We Call It Hallucinates on one side of the tape, I think. I’d listen to that on my cassette player all the time because it was so bloody weird. I basically stole it off him. My drum machine was a Dr Rhythm one, and I could get all the 808 sounds on it and I started to recognise them in this music. This was the first time I heard house music really. I’d heard about the "summer of love" from newspapers and the TV and stuff and wondered if this acid music was where it was at. I still hadn’t seen any of the records, I didn’t know about import record stores in London or anything like that, but quite quickly found out about all that and I started to go up to London and go to clubs with my friends. We were doing GCSEs at this time so we were about 16. They used to go to the Acid Jazz clubs. They were playing a lot of James Brown and that sort of thing, that’s what my friends were into.
I was smoking a bit of marijuana by then. I did smoke with the band at band practice really, but I didn’t associate that with listening to music. They all hated house music and the rest of it. Well, Caspar, the drummer, he liked house, and he had an older brother as well, he went to clubs. He was mainly into hip-hop. But it wasn’t long after that that I started to really get back into music again. There was a bit of a gap between about ’85 and ’89 really where I wasn’t listening to anything new. But after I heard this I was looking for more stuff. I also got into The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, which was more relevant to what we were playing in the band. It wasn’t until the rave scene hit in 1990, ’91, when I started going to clubs playing electronic music, house and hardcore and all that.
