Features
The A-Z of Acid
It's all about aciiiiiiiid
S The second Summer of Love
Was acid house the last great youth movement the UK has seen? Discuss.
T Tadao Kikumoto
We owe it all to this man, Roland's Senior Managing Director and head of its R&D centre, for it was he who designed the TB-303 bass synthesiser, easily one of the most important happenings in the whole of dance music culture.
U Underground Resistance
This staunchly independent Detroit outfit did their bit in spreading the acid sound into the techno form with EPs like 1990's 'Return of Acid Rain'.
V Voodoo Ray
If the US had 'Acid Tracks', the UK had 'Voodoo Ray', the deeply spiritual, shamanistic sounding acid cut that would have been 'Voodoo Rage' but for the fact that A Guy Called Gerald's sampler ran out of memory and cut off the final syllable of that seductive and sensuous vocal.
W Wealth
Money and overt commercialism have never been comfortable bed fellows with counter cultural dance music, but they were back in the late 80s. Most often, early acid house parties such as Sunrise were put on by entrepreneur toffs such as Tony Colsten-Hayter aka Mr Big and Paul Staines, who now runs the right wing political blog Guido Fawkes. To be fair to Colsten-Hayter, he was in it for the long run, handcuffing himself to TV's Jonathan Ross and later heading down to a 1989 Tory party conference in order to try and persuade those in attendance that he and his raves were a product of "enterprise culture". Without his big bucks, then, who knows what would have happened to the scene. And what happened to him? Well, Mr Big made headlines again recently.
X x0xb0x
This is a hardware clone that replicates the original 303 circuitry and uses as close a set of components as possible to achieve the famous 303 sound in case you can't afford £1000 for an actual Roland… You're welcome!
Y Yellow Smiley
The iconic and immediately recognisable face of acid that breeds fear in those who don't know, and stirs familiar feelings of unity, friendship and dancefloor memories in those that do. The symbol was first aligned with dance culture in the 70s after Ubi Dwyer co-opted it for his Windsor Free Festival, but was further cemented into legend during the Second Summer of Love in 1987, and again when Bomb Da Bass used it on their 'Beat Dis' single a year later.
Z Zombie-dom
Given its vital gatekeeper role in modern dance music, it's hard to imagine that Radio 1 was dead against acid house when it first emerged. This was so much the case, in fact, that DJ of the day Peter Powell opined, "It's the closest thing to mass organised zombie-dom. I really don't think it should go any further." Unlucky, Peter.
