1. Phuture
I was a little bit too young for raving. I was in secondary school, I think I was 15 and prior to listening to any of the music on this list, it was just pop music, what was on the radio, what my friends at school were listening to. Somehow I happened across a Sunday night radio show on Piccadilly Radio in Manchester presented by Stu Allan. He had an hour of hip hop, two to three hours of soul, and then an hour of house from 12 to 1am. As a 15-year-old this music just blew my mind. I’d put a C45 in the cassette deck, hit record, listen to the first two or three tracks of the show and then I’d be asleep. The next morning I’d press rewind and listen to these amazing pieces of music coming out of America. It was so different to anything I’d ever heard. The early Chicago house and acid stuff was stripped back, raw and synthetic. The sound of that Roland 303 particularly was just like something from another planet. It had this monotony and repetition, but it was also textural. Morphing, changing, shifting sonorities. ‘Acid Tracks’ was one of the first pieces of acid house itself. Back in those days there was no internet, and getting information about how this music was made was difficult to say the least, and so it became mythologized. It seemed so exotic. Stu Allan did a monthly event at Wigan Pier, one of the nightclubs down in the town. Me and a few school friends, aged about 16, started going there for the first time and hearing this music actually in a club. You have these images of clubs in London, where they’re rammed to the rafters, everyone’s really sweating and there’s just this incredibly visceral experience; well, in Wigan it was just six or seven people…
