I got into a club for the first time when I was 15 - in 1993. This was Raquels, in Basildon - made infamous due to the death of Leah Betts in 1995 (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Leah_Betts).
We were under age, so obviously it was very exciting but it opened up a new world which has basically formed the basis of my entire life ever since. I would go every week - taking my £16.80 budget - £6 entry, £1.80 bottle of water and £10 for, let's call it "recreation." The music was basically house and a little bit of breakbeat / hardcore stuff that had a really strong scene in and around SE Essex at the time - I still have some of the rare early hardcore records and they go for an absolute fortune on Discogs (though I would never sell them.)
Here's a couple of absolute favourites. The first samples Duran Duran and the second one is a perfect combination of rave piano's, breakbeats, stabs, vocal samples and with a stupendous bassline.
House wise, they would be playing all of the pop style house (Bucketheads, Livin' Joy etc) with more underground (proto) progressive house.
Carried on doing this for a while, and then when I was at college, this came out:
hhttps://www.discogs.com/Sasha-John-Digweed-Renaissance-The-Mix-Collection/release/100874
I was still pretty green, and thought that Sasha and John Digweed were a married couple.
If you read the comments on the Discogs page you can get a good idea of how important this release actually was. I still
love this album. Sasha and Digweed showcased the absolute best - and actually fairly diverse - house music available at the time and provided a lesson in set programming that still beats most commercially available mix CD's released ever since. It still gives me goosebumps. The piano riffs of Moonchild's "VOAT" and subsequent transition into Sunscreem's "Perfect Motion" is 15 minutes of music that could be argued to sum up what it felt like to be in the middle of an ecstatic dancefloor, sweating, overcome by sound, surrounded by friends and feeling nothing but joy - a level of escapism that could not be replicated any other way.
This album inspired me to become a DJ, and so our exploits stepped up a notch. We started going to London.
First London club I went to was the Leisure Lounge on Chancery Lane. It was a big step up from Raquels. The place was bigger, the sound was bigger and better, and it was even more hedonistic. I was in my element. We started to attend events like Megadog at Brixton Academy - more like a mini festival than a club - some of the artists that would play are detailed here:
https://pinkfishmedia.net/forum/threads/banco-de-gaia.230432/
I found myself getting more and more drawn into the drum loops and sections between the piano riffs, the vocals; getting more hooked into the groove than with the more obvious parts of a song. One jaunt up to London (a gang of us from Basildon would hire a minibus there and back) saw us arrive in Wandsworth, to visit Club UK. A mate knew someone who was DJ'ing and so we got in for nothing. More money for other things.
This is where I learned that the drum loops and more percussive stuff was actually called "Techno". It was another life changing moment. We basically didn't go anywhere else. Friday nights were Club UK and Final Frontier. I cannot really describe what it felt like to be in the middle of the dancefloor, hearing the most amazing, futuristic and far out music. It invoked a state of mind and a feeling that you never wanted to end.
Club UK:
https://www.originalhouse.org/index.php/livesets2/uk/itemlist/category/97-club-uk-wandsworth
It was ecstatic and couldn't have been any better....
...or so I thought. The first time that I heard Jeff Mills play, some time in 1994 at Club UK took things to a whole new level. He was faster. he was
louder. He did things that nobody else could do, and around that time he made most of the other DJ's seem average. He was our go-to DJ - he blew our minds and further escalated the DJ'ing hobby which was becoming a way of life, and not just some hobby borne out of a desire to emulate someone else.
In 1995, he released this:
https://www.discogs.com/Jeff-Mills-Live-At-The-Liquid-Room-Tokyo/release/9459
It was, and still is, the best commercial mix CD ever released, bar none (not even Renaissance). It captured Mills, warts and all, doing his thing in a Japanese nigh club complete with bonkers crowd noises. (I was sold my copy of this CD in a record shop in Bristol, by none other than
darrell_giant from this parish). It instantly become the blueprint, the go to record for techno. There was nothing like it; raw, loud, funky as hell and a snapshot of a moment in time that I hoped would live on perpetuity. There's a great recent review of it here:
https://patternburst.wordpress.com/2019/07/24/the-long-player-jeff-mills-live-at-the-liquid-room/
Jeff Mills is, in my opinion, the greatest DJ to have ever lived. Nobody comes close to his vision, his delivery, nor his ability. Anyone who argues or disagrees probably didn't manage to catch him play during the mid 1990's when was simply untouchable, destroying dancefloors and injecting new levels of excitement into music, DJ'ing and clubbing that took clubs worldwide beyond anywhere they'd been up until he appeared.
At The End, on 12th February 1997, I watched him play from mere feet away. The DJ booth at The End was at dancefloor level, right in the middle of the room. Every clubbing experience I had had up until this point was subsumed by the three hour long epiphany that I had that night. It's one thing to hear the music coming out of the speakers, it's an entirely different thing to see exactly what is being done to make it sound like that, and watching Jeff Mills that night was simply an electrifying, life changing experience. Utterly mindblowing. The notion of playing one record after the other was completely demolished.
Our love for Mills inevitably led to us attending the best Techno party that's ever existed - Lost. It was the ultimate party for the techno enthusiast. Held in obscure locations - my first was in an enormous warehouse at Royal Victoria Docks - with superb sound systems, no decor, subtle lights and mindblowing music. After I started going to Lost, I didn't bother with anything else. There was basically no point. Nothing came close. The atmosphere was electric, and that's down to the fact that the crowd was extremely passionate, and knowledgeable. It was basically me x 1000. The significance of the party is nicely put in this article from several years ago:
https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/1298
Mills relationship with Lost is elegantly summed up in this paragraph:
He's still going, well into his 50's, the rest still trailing in his wake.
https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/3436
My clubbing experiences have petered out in recent years, mostly due to having kids and moving away from London, but because those seminal years between 1993 and around 2008 will never be surpassed. I was involved with promoting a few parties (Flux being one - we had an Underground Resistance event in early 00's) plus I organised some pretty big events in Czech Republic of all places.
There's very little happening in the techno scene now that hasn't been done before, door policies at places like Berghain are the complete anti ethos of what dance music is all about - which should be inclusion, escapaism, and unity.
I still DJ now - having played a fair bit in the UK and across Europe "back in the day", and try very hard to dig out new music, but there is a lot of soul less, doom laden rubbish that appears to be in vogue but doesn't capture any of the excitement or sensibilities that underpin the origins of Techno. I do my best here:
https://soundcloud.com/farfromthesun
I realise I have gone on quite a bit and have written one of the longest forum posts of all time. But perhaps that goes some way to answering your original query? All of these words go a little way towards summing up what it all
means, and the memories that will live long, for someone who considers themselves fortunate enough to have experienced some of the things depicted in the BBC series.
