Safe Space for Crusty UK Hippie-Bobbins a la Shpongle, Megadog, Planet Dog, and all the other dodgy stuff excavated on the Shamen thread

Club Dog was not cool in that it was literally set up to not be about cool. But it's funny that it's supposed to be embarrassing because that's where you could see LFO, Underworld, Orbital, The Black Dog, Mike Paradinas (can't find the mu symbol) (actually I saw them play when they were a duo at a Club Dog in the George Robey),l and the mighty PWOG of course, bands that are mostly well regarded around here anyway, for not much money, and dance (or whatever) all night in a very free environment, you neve felt anyone judging how you dressed or looked or how you were dancing, and hardly any heavy handed security presence at the London's ones. What's not to like.

Admittedly the merits of MC Teabag's schtick could divide opinion.

It's funny, I was just looking up tracks by Transglobal Underground, and the first comment was Who first heard this at the Whirl-y-Gig, Shoerditch?

It's weird for me to listen to things like Banco de Gaia now, without thinking about Empire, and the dreaded A-word (appropriation). At the time, it didn't feel like there was a clear delinneation between 'white british hippies who had been to Goa and viewed the ~entirety of 'World' music~ as their personal sample bank', and 'second generation British immigrants who were having fun with their parents Bhangra tunes' - that Banco de Gaia was maybe the former, and Asian Dub Foundation was probably the latter, but Transglobal Underground was a giddy and glorious mixture of both groups of people trying to achieve something very utopian.

There seems something very innocent about hippies use of 'ethnic' fabrics and textures, but at the same time that these sounds and textures were coming into Britain *because* of Empire - that rejection of or embracing of dub music, bhangra, samples of Nigerian guitars or Soweto singing groups was (or was not) an expression about one's feelings about *people* from Britain's Empire arriving in Britain? (Though it's perfectly possible for people to accept the music and sounds, and reject the people; one can enjoy white musicians making dub records, and still express displeasure towards having actual Afro-Caribbean neighbours. See also Kula Shaker)

(Is this where I talk about how Bill Drummond, although he's been claimed by the Scots, was actually born in the same tiny village in the Transkei that my parents are from? Bizarre place, at the time it was literally 600 Scottish people in the middle of the South African veldt. Empire is woven through the whole of contemporary British music.)

Anyway, sorry. This is a derail of the Last Train To Lhasa.

I may possibly have danced on stage with trans global underground in a railway arch in Sheffield, possibly wearing a boiler suit and white gloves from Cole brothers.

Having been to Anjuna it's very apparent that this vibe is still going strong in a lot of places, it's a very strange experience being in the sea in the late afternoon and hearing the psytrance go on at 6pm on the dot, from nothing to 160bpm without any warmup at all. There was one old guy who looked exactly how you expected him to look who was *one on* on the rocks at the end of the beach and just going for it while everyone else hadn't even packed up from their afternoon.

You can still get away with this in parts of the West Country as well, the kind of small festivals that are advertised inside the toilet doors at Glastonbury, there's one guy called 'DJ Cous Cous' who appears omnipresent at these things and whose music has been an object of horrified fascination to me ever since I first noticed his name. It goes without saying I've never heard it.

The idea of anything like this happening in a city centre is almost unimaginable now, I doubt you could even pull it off in Bristol or Brighton.

Never been to Goa. In 1993, the closest I could get was taking the bus to Jackson Heights to go shopping at Indian grocery stores, which were the only place in New York City that sold traditional Britisher foods like Birds Eye Custard and Bisto and Crunchie Bars at a reasonable price. Would always embarrass my housemate by asking what the music they were playing was, usually some amazing combination of Bollywood and Bosh, and the guy at the counter would be bemused, but direct me to buy "Now That's What I Call Desi Pop" for a fiver.

I wish I still had those tapes, because my feeling these days is that they were probably way better than anything Planet Dog actually put out. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, someone should tell me where to start with Shpongle!

I think it must be an obvious suggestion but if you've never heard Divine Moments Of Truth that's got to be fun the first time. Tempo and time changes, even complete style shifts (spoilers sorry) are still unusual in dance music. They even refine these tricks on the later albums I think but this was inspired.

https://youtu.be/8qt2WbfotkU

Might be better to find the remastered album on Bandcamp for a little more impact.

Well, it was new to me! And yes, very cool rhythm changes and shifts. The vocoder voice kind of annoyed me, and I did find myself wishing for Mr. C to come in and inject some levity, but I would happily listen to some more.

this whole area is a mystery ground to me as a USian, i'm _familiar_ with this music but my fundamental non-britishness means that there's a whole lot of stuff going on that i don't process in the same way

the post on the other thread about programming music was interesting to me because mostly i encountered this stuff through the demoscene. i don't really know how these things intersect and what is relevant to this thread. you've got Jesus on E's and then you've got Ozric Tentacles and then you've got Boards of Canada and none of it seems to be _precisely_ what this thread is about but they all seem adjacent to this stuff somehow in my mind? does Opus III fit in here? does Ultramarine? The Grid?

Ozric Tentacles spawned Eat Static so they are most definitely related.

Thematically or stylistically maybe key things are the 'tribal', 'ethnic', psychedelic / ethno-botanical. I understand it partly in terms of scene distinctions, where things come from but there are probably better ways to delineate this.

Ultramarine are great but aren't they mainly doing a very English folkiness? Bon Jovi samples notwithstanding. Boards of Canada might use the odd tabla and Native American reference but for the most part they aren't borrowing other ethnic flavours, I don't think. Their hippiness is more about weird apocalyptic cults. Which is nice.

Mainly those bands are more self consciously tasetful perhaps.

I don't know, maybe bucolic Britishness + electronics is part of this continuum. There is stuff like Another Fine Day which is very bucolic even though he's from Brixton I think.

Great thread!

would i be right in thinking that spiral tribe would be the big smelly cheeses in the whole 90s crusty rave scene? feel like the ambient dub end of things is definitely sneaking back into hipness (definitely hearing more stuff of that ilk vibe played on nts shows) but the more in yer face techno / gabber stuff is still banished to the far end of a layby somewhere outside of melksham, at least as far as the uk is concerned

x-posts now

That's kind of what I'm trying to work out, through starting the thread - because it's not a genre, per se, it's more like a vibe? (So it's not a category, it's pattern matching.)

So I'd say, like Ozric Tentacles definitely contributed to the shape and form of the vibe (as did Steve Hillage and System 7) even though they're not actually in the pattern itself.

I think of the bands Kate mentions, The Grid is closest - they have the cyber-utopian-techno element, the psychedelic element, the dub element, and definitely have the 'unafraid to be cheese' and 'anti-cool' vibe. (LOL, I just went to play Swamp Thing, and the advert in front boasted "real cheese production" and I was like, yup.) But I'm not sure they have the ~Kai's Power Tools Fractal Explorer~ visuals thing down.

I have just spent an unreasonable watching Shamen videos, and it's so weird how somewhere between the first iteration of Pro-Gen, where they are kinda nerdy, dressed in a super-similar B-boy style to Jesus Jones and EMF (and dressed that way, I could definitely hear that the bleep-bleep bloop-bloop riff was very sonically similar to EMF's Unbelievable, even though I'd never put them in the same category!) but by the second video for Pro-Gen, now definitely Move Any Mountain, they are... recognisably The Shamen in look as well as sound, they are wearing rubbery Cyberdog gear, they are on a ~desert island~ being all tribal, and Mr C is inexplicably dressed as... a tarot card?

That it's the style as much as the sound.

(Also, help me, I am developing a strange crush on Colin Angus, please make this stop.)

does this stuff have to be british?
documented below, new stuff in this vein from
as far afield as canada and australia

the melbourne → vancouver connection

i will readily admit american hippie rave breaks stuff has a somewhat different flavor, despite some affinities as evinced by baggy_green_alien_wearing_jnco_smoking_blunt.gif

Also, I just realised I had never knowingly listened to Spiral Tribe and so I'm remedying this on YouTube, and this is the most ~in the zone~ thing I've ever heard.

So it's not a category, it's pattern matching.
I realised trying to enumerate characteristics wasn't really helping. How can you define genre when there are no boundaries man. It requires a heuristic approach.

agree re grid.
i only have rollercoaster cd ep and 456, and have been on lookout for more via my weekly charity haunts forever.
would love more.
and despite the fact that they became their own thing, i would suggest that Orbital grew up through the hippie/crusty/ambi-techno scene.
also, as per mentioned re the west country festival thing earlier - isn't the very successful Boomtown festival directly linked to this era, but now with a more sassy modern commercial edge ?

(its the one festival i would love to go to, but i fear i would be the only grey haired person there ... )

Also, I think it is fairly inherently British, because as up above, it's about Britain's relationship to / devouring the ends of its Empire. That it contains both intense Britishness, and also ~eating The Other~ as represented by 'tribal' and 'ethno' and 'dub' elements, at the same time. It is about Britain's relationship to the colonised, and the sounds brought into Britain by colonised subjects from the Caribbean, from Bangladesh, from Nigeria and South Africa and the bits of the Middle East that we ate up. Canada and Australia might have closer relationships to that Empire and so be able to capture the vibe, but although Americans can ape the sound, the fundamental vibe is missing.

There are definitely artists that came out of this scene (Orbital, early Prodigy, Aphex Twin called one of his earliest singles Digeridoo, FFS) but do not match the pattern well enough to be part of it.

was the GBOA spin off crusty dance thing (PFX ?) worthy ?
i used to see the cd in bins in leeds and never got it.
of course, i regret it now.

the ambient dub end of things is definitely sneaking back into hipness (definitely hearing more stuff of that ilk vibe played on nts shows)

I haven't listened to NTS for a while but this producer / porducers is involved in a show and this sort of thing seems to be referencing doggy type techno. It's quite PWOG now I listen to it again. I think this particular track is also referencing Teste - The Wipe (5am Synaptic), but you could very well have heard that at a Megadog. It seems relevant here to me anyway.

https://youtu.be/uvz0Krm9v4s

I don't know, maybe bucolic Britishness + electronics is part of this continuum. There is stuff like Another Fine Day which is very bucolic even though he's from Brixton I think.

― to go hoff and things (Noel Emits)

i think the main thing for me as an american is that i read britishness as "ethnic"! putting robert wyatt on a record comes across to me in about the same way putting a didgeridoo on a record does. it's that whole bit where robyn hitchcock sings "i often dream of trains" and basingstoke seems hopelessly exotic to me. and then on the flip side slapp happy sing about hoboken (and pronounce it wrong) and hoboken is to me decidedly _un_exotic.

Branwell's point about Empire is excellent and very helpful but then this kind of thing is also very much crusty bobbins but only post-colonial stylistically as far as I can tell in the sense that, according to an anateur musicologist of my acquaintance, the 4/4 beat comes from Africa.

https://youtu.be/B2iGM01Mgx0

And Acid House is African American music, I know.

i know this is at the shamen/pop end of the scene, but i still think it fits.
boy band vs scene styled remixes were totally a thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXzZ07gGhQc

Interviewed Mr. Banco de etc a couple of years back.

https://www.factmag.com/2015/10/04/banco-de-gaia-interview/

I think this thread is covering a few different strands of dance music that evolved through different and distinct phases from the end of the 80s to the end of the 90s.

One side of it comes from the crossover between the 80s free festival circuit and the rave scene at the end of the 80s. That's where Club Dog came from, along with soundsystems like Spiral Tribe and other less remembered ones like Tribal Energy (it was accidentally finding myself at a Tribal Energy party that was my first road-to-Nazareth rave experience). That's the scene where crusty festival bands had dance spin offs like Ozric Tentacles -> Eat Static and Magic Mushroom Band -> Astralasia. Hippies on E.

Separately in Goa was a different hippies on E scene. Anyone with the vaguest interest should listen to Dave Mothersole's Roots of Trance mix which is still around on the internet somewhere and is completely awesome.

The UK ambient/techno/trance scene crystalized around '92 and exploded by '93. The music was wildly varied at the time from Ultramarine's folky side to PWOG's industrial background to Orbital's M25 party background. Megadogs and similar ('The Pongmaster's Ball') had awesome lineups. I saw PWOG, Aphex Twin, Orbital and Underworld all on the same lineup. DJs in between might play Frankfurt trance or acid or techno or progressive house (that'd be the early Guerilla Records style prog house). There was Megatripolis initially at the Marquee Club on Charing Cross Road and then at Heaven under Charing Cross Station. The main dancefloor was pounding trance while upstairs was a hippie playground, all Banco De Gaia soundtracked meditation sessions and cyber visuals.

It was 94 that the Goa trance sound hit the UK scene and started to take over from 95. While it was a rush at first, it became very formulaic and the variety of that early scene disappeared. Underworld and Orbital became massive and stopped playing PAs at clubs. It soon turned into the psytrance scene, which remains exactly the same to this day. Spongle formed in '96 and were totally part of the pstrance scene. By then I'd moved on from the scene and immersed myself in techno.

that roots of trance mix you mention is awesome!! I lost it somewhere ;_;

hd crash

Is it this one Brimstead?

http://www.bleep43.com/podcast/2010/4/14/podcast-165-the-roots-of-trance.html

That's it :)

Thank you, Spandex, that's a really informative post providing a great deal of very relevant context.

I think you've got to the nub of the problem that we are having, articulating what we're talking about - that this was music that was clustered around certain *scenes*, that it was intended for certain activities (festivals, raves, dancefloors, chill-out rooms) and the binding commonality was "music that was played in these spaces" where the space and the people in it and the activities that took place in the space (which drugs, what kind of dancing) that defined the commonality, rather than any musical stylings.

So the commonality is going to be more clear to "people who went to those clubs in London / Glasgow / wherever" than it is going to be to anyone who was either trying to follow along at home, or to someone coming to the music as an archaeological artefact. (Which is how I tend to come to music.)

I watched a 1 1/2 hr film about Whirl-y-gig from around 1995 last night that I had no idea existed. Lovely to see.

There's hardly any video documentation around of things I got up to or went to in the 90s and all of a sudden there's a whole film, although this was just a little after I'd stopped going so regularly.

lol I started watching cyderdelic yesterday on youtube

(it was quite shit tbh)

(i still love frogger though)

I watched a 1 1/2 hr film about Whirl-y-gig from around 1995 last night that I had no idea existed.

Was this on YouTube, or was this a personal video? Please share, if the former. Coz I'd love to see what people were on about, it sounds really quite special.

I'm not sure of how much interest it would be aside from reminiscin' but it really is a good document. Honestly the footage from the event at Shoreditch is some of the least embarrassing rave / club footage I've ever seen. Just fuckin' wholesome and fun.

https://youtu.be/IAyCYvNaKsI

Cheers! Thanks for that, I'll watch the full thing when I get some good internet. :D

There was a separate 3-minute snippet in the 'suggested videos' which had an interview with the 2 organisers, which gave a flavour of it. It did really strike me, how resolutely anti-cool they were. The set-up looked like they were not afraid to do stuff that came across as really really naff - but also super-fun. Like, in so many ways, 'cool' can become the enemy of fun. To really cut loose and have fun, one really has to not be afraid of losing one's cool or not looking cool.

This seems to fit here - pre-Shpongle Simon Posford & Raja Ram:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2MvJ0vp5SU

Haha, what is a psi-eti?

Not sure I have the patience for 57 minutes of this right now, but it looks like it might be fun.

another addition to the thread.

https://www.discogs.com/Pressure-Of-Speech-Art-Of-The-State/master/106814

randomly picked this up from a charity shop today as it mentions a bunch of the usual folks in the 'thanks' list.
turns out it's micky mann who worked a lot with the shamen.
a few tracks in, and it's very megadog rave but without the cheesy/sci-fi samples (that i love, to be fair), but has a lot of those lovely 90s techno sounds and deep basslines.

i saw them play a few times and have the first couple of 12" singles but i don't reckon i'd be able to pick them out in a sonic identity parade now.

this seems as good a place as any to rep for psychedelic budz (d. tiffany and ciel) - "faerie stomp" ep on planet euphorique

https://planeteuphorique.bandcamp.com/album/faerie-stomp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHOc4ukfczU

Just noticed this channel which has been putting up some interesting footage.

(NOTE: Lots of flashing lights.)

The Grid at Megadog January 1994. Some terrific crowd / lights shots and the sound off the camcorder is good. The Grid sound good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdiQR0N5Mtw

30 Minutes of a Synergy gig in 1990. Er, there is a mostly boring setup and soundcheck by The Shamen (with Will tho), queuing on a very noisy Holloway Road, hanging around corridors, standing at the bar. In other words a very true to life document. There's some good stuff from DJ Stika (?) and the last ten minutes has a bit of a live Mixmaster Morris / Irresistible Force set which sounds interesting. There's supposed to be a live Irresistible Force album from 1990 in the works (as well as some reissues.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvzqkfrRZ3Q

Thanks for posting these. I will watch when I have a chance. I was a couple of years too young to be there (and then a bit snobbish around techno) but these are appealing. I bought this CD box set a couple of weeks ago https://www.discogs.com/release/138559-Various-Megatripolis The first CD is kind of okay but the other two are really something.