We are the musicmakers and we are the dreamers of dreams

24/10/2015 at 13:30

The sound around them all
Acid on the floor

When you’re strange the 1980s was a decade of equally strange ideas for what constituted a disco. As an erstwhile nerdy and bookish student who enjoyed spinning the decks, calling your club night ‘alternative’ opened up an infinite world of musical, and more importantly rhythmical, possibilities that didn’t have to conform to the Friday night norm. I wasn’t one of the music makers but I was a dreamer of dreams and the dance-floor was where dreams were made flesh.

The sonic brilliance of a personal playlist was only limited by two things: your imagination and its (un)conscious coupling with each carefully chosen track’s inherent facility to motivate at least a handful of bright young things onto the dance-floor. The seemingly open-ended possibilities of an ‘alternative’ night were unavailable in the ideologically purist and political world of the ‘indie’ disco where being seen to be cool was considered more important than being seen to be having fun. When your only concern is to cut a rug and to ‘have a good time all the time’ then you don’t really care if PWL or PWEI are supplying the motivation to get down and funky.

There were, of course, other factors influencing the process. An ‘alternative’ (as opposed to an ‘indie’) disco gave you licence to drop in tracks from yesteryear which allowed you to act for a few hours like the benevolent independent record shop owner you secretly dreamed of becoming, trying to steer your charges away from investing in the wrong kind of records by playing the right kind of music on the shop stereo. You could also drop in songs from the current Top 40 to highlight the fact that not all good music is made in a Peel Session bound for bed-sit land and that good ideas weren’t limited to the tragically hip and those afflicted by a shyness that was criminally vulgar (as I could often be in those days).

At a community spirit level an alternative disco was guaranteed to bring out the freaks and bring in the minority groups from around campus and the wider city in general who, by and large, were far more tolerant of music in all its guises and of people who didn’t look or act like them. This was the rare opportunity once a week for music to be played from various sub-genres for devotees who rarely saw the light of day let alone the light of a strobe. With extremely limited funds for buying new releases week in week out, having the freedom to put together the playlist from old and new sources also meant you could legitimately raid other people’s record collections and use your wits and powers of persuasion to illegitimately beg, borrow and steal vinyl (the various libraries around town, the university campus and halls of residence were ripe for plucking) in order to hit that perfect beat boy every Friday night.

Nothing was off-limits. If it was guaranteed to bring punters through the door or, if feeling mischievous, ensure floor hoggers were running for cover – after all, drinks from the bar didn’t order and pay for themselves – it was in. Any song that kept the vibe going or turned it on its head without stamping on the brakes was up for grabs. You could Kick Out The Jams with a hefty punt from a JAMC boot, bounce Bowie with a Balearic beat, pierce a ballooning P-funk groove with the sharp needle point of breathless punk funk and make a Goth Paranoid by crash landing Black Sabbath on his Black Planet. My love of psychedelic sounds was the golden thread to any playlist. That said, what constituted ‘psychedelic’ music in the 80s and in the head of this particular amateur hour DJ?

The answer all really depends on what boxes you think psychedelic music has to tick to qualify for that moniker. There are those who hermetically seal the sound in a time-machine and insist any tracks from today and tomorrow must replicate the tropes of its late 60s heyday; rock music with ragas and drones breaking the limits of the pop single and the classic songbook structures to stretch out for eternity on gatefold sleeves.

For me, that is far too limited and does the idea of psychedelic music a great disservice. Psychedelic music is like a virus, when it strikes it affects every pore of any musical genre. Its intent is to infect, to create new mutations in sound, to mess with the DNA of a genre to create a new listening experience, to deny access to the protective vaccine afforded by lining up artists, albums and tracks into conveniently packaged brands for consensual pill-popping. Confining psychedelic music to one era or one particular set of sounds also denies the very thing I love about it: its living legacy. The enduring appeal of psychedelic music made by the boys and girls of the 60s isn’t just the music itself, it’s also the processes they pioneered that allowed the sonic experimentation to take effect; the prevailing forward thinking attitude, the open-mindedness for accepting the studio accident as the basis of a new groove, the desire to make a single something more than a pop song, an album considerably more than a collection of 10 self-contained ditties, the hunger to create a cultural cipher to reveal its true meaning tomorrow rather than today.

Psychedelic is everywhere in music if you’re prepared to accept that those inspirational processes endure. From rock music it begat garage, prog, folk rock, space rock, metal, from soul and R‘n’B it begat funk, P-funk and disco. Psychedelic music made the pop song an art form. It made the pop song no longer the preserve of the classic song-book but a statement of artistic intent, a cosmic musical calling card that didn’t have to follow the old 2 verse 1 chorus rule, didn’t have to be a message of love or be bound by the aggregated experiences of the masses. The pop song could be about uniquely personal and kaleidoscopic memories of Cyprus Avenue and Strawberry Fields, of imagined people like Arnold Layne and Sebastian F. Sorrow. For the DJ in me it was about having your mind freed by chasing the White Rabbit down the hole simply to ensure that your ass will follow.

Punk itself was psychedelic. We were told we were pretty vacant by pantomime villains dressed in clobber from Kensington High Street who knew how to shock the public with their risqué music hall turn. At the start of the 80s punk had crashed into funk and in doing so provided an unstoppable rhythmic propulsion that drove like a juggernaut through the decade. New nuggets of garage music arrived, enervated by punk’s scorched earth policy, but now mixing in elements of country, jazz and folk, paving the way for what would eventually become the US college scene and later the Americana of the 90s. Rap and hip hop continued psychedelic music’s facility to raise our collective consciousness (and conscience), to rub our eyes and look at the world anew with a definitive gaze that was counter to the perceptions we’d allowed ourselves to accept as reality’s norm. As fundamentally the tools of rap and hip hop – the turntable, the scratch, the broken twisted pulses of voice and technology – made the very beat of music a lightning rod for psychedelic experimentation. A psychedelic record could simply be a radically engineered set of rhythms with melody consigned to remain in the mixing desk. The synthesiser, the sequencer, the explosions of technological advances that would appear almost weekly on new releases from labels like ZTT and Mute, blurred the lines between what was made by a Human and what was made by a Numan, the confusion further exploited by the androgyny and gender baiting of performers who were psychedelic and kaleidoscopic noises made flesh.

No matter the original genre, great psychedelic music both expands and contracts time as we listen to it. The Beatles expanded time on A Day In The Life but also contracted time into songs like I Am The Walrus, a single that makes the listener think they’re catching a brief snippet of a continuous loop that plays for eternity in some other dimension. In the 80s the remix, particularly the extended versions of new releases available on 12”, allowed the more experimentally charged artists and producers to put their songs into a sonic blender afforded by new studio technology and throw out collages of sound and colour that stretched and contorted the 7” single into its very own mini concept album. The 12” gave pop songs transfusions from any blood type available – dub, rap, hip hop, avant-garde, ambient, classical, jazz, rawk – and mutated them into new forms of musical life.

So here’s another Spotify playlist, a very personal set-list evoking the 80s ‘alternative’ disco. It’s for all the freaks who still like to come out to dance at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. It’s psychedelic even if it’s not as you know it.

Comments

Ahh_Bisto says

24/10/2015 at 13:30

The sound around them all
Acid on the floor

When you’re strange the 1980s was a decade of equally strange ideas for what constituted a disco. As an erstwhile nerdy and bookish student who enjoyed spinning the decks, calling your club night ‘alternative’ opened up an infinite world of musical, and more importantly rhythmical, possibilities that didn’t have to conform to the Friday night norm. I wasn’t one of the music makers but I was a dreamer of dreams and the dance-floor was where dreams were made flesh.

The sonic brilliance of a personal playlist was only limited by two things: your imagination and its (un)conscious coupling with each carefully chosen track’s inherent facility to motivate at least a handful of bright young things onto the dance-floor. The seemingly open-ended possibilities of an ‘alternative’ night were unavailable in the ideologically purist and political world of the ‘indie’ disco where being seen to be cool was considered more important than being seen to be having fun. When your only concern is to cut a rug and to ‘have a good time all the time’ then you don’t really care if PWL or PWEI are supplying the motivation to get down and funky.

There were, of course, other factors influencing the process. An ‘alternative’ (as opposed to an ‘indie’) disco gave you licence to drop in tracks from yesteryear which allowed you to act for a few hours like the benevolent independent record shop owner you secretly dreamed of becoming, trying to steer your charges away from investing in the wrong kind of records by playing the right kind of music on the shop stereo. You could also drop in songs from the current Top 40 to highlight the fact that not all good music is made in a Peel Session bound for bed-sit land and that good ideas weren’t limited to the tragically hip and those afflicted by a shyness that was criminally vulgar (as I could often be in those days).

At a community spirit level an alternative disco was guaranteed to bring out the freaks and bring in the minority groups from around campus and the wider city in general who, by and large, were far more tolerant of music in all its guises and of people who didn’t look or act like them. This was the rare opportunity once a week for music to be played from various sub-genres for devotees who rarely saw the light of day let alone the light of a strobe. With extremely limited funds for buying new releases week in week out, having the freedom to put together the playlist from old and new sources also meant you could legitimately raid other people’s record collections and use your wits and powers of persuasion to illegitimately beg, borrow and steal vinyl (the various libraries around town, the university campus and halls of residence were ripe for plucking) in order to hit that perfect beat boy every Friday night.

Nothing was off-limits. If it was guaranteed to bring punters through the door or, if feeling mischievous, ensure floor hoggers were running for cover – after all, drinks from the bar didn’t order and pay for themselves – it was in. Any song that kept the vibe going or turned it on its head without stamping on the brakes was up for grabs. You could Kick Out The Jams with a hefty punt from a JAMC boot, bounce Bowie with a Balearic beat, pierce a ballooning P-funk groove with the sharp needle point of breathless punk funk and make a Goth Paranoid by crash landing Black Sabbath on his Black Planet. My love of psychedelic sounds was the golden thread to any playlist. That said, what constituted ‘psychedelic’ music in the 80s and in the head of this particular amateur hour DJ?

The answer all really depends on what boxes you think psychedelic music has to tick to qualify for that moniker. There are those who hermetically seal the sound in a time-machine and insist any tracks from today and tomorrow must replicate the tropes of its late 60s heyday; rock music with ragas and drones breaking the limits of the pop single and the classic songbook structures to stretch out for eternity on gatefold sleeves.

For me, that is far too limited and does the idea of psychedelic music a great disservice. Psychedelic music is like a virus, when it strikes it affects every pore of any musical genre. Its intent is to infect, to create new mutations in sound, to mess with the DNA of a genre to create a new listening experience, to deny access to the protective vaccine afforded by lining up artists, albums and tracks into conveniently packaged brands for consensual pill-popping. Confining psychedelic music to one era or one particular set of sounds also denies the very thing I love about it: its living legacy. The enduring appeal of psychedelic music made by the boys and girls of the 60s isn’t just the music itself, it’s also the processes they pioneered that allowed the sonic experimentation to take effect; the prevailing forward thinking attitude, the open-mindedness for accepting the studio accident as the basis of a new groove, the desire to make a single something more than a pop song, an album considerably more than a collection of 10 self-contained ditties, the hunger to create a cultural cipher to reveal its true meaning tomorrow rather than today.

Psychedelic is everywhere in music if you’re prepared to accept that those inspirational processes endure. From rock music it begat garage, prog, folk rock, space rock, metal, from soul and R‘n’B it begat funk, P-funk and disco. Psychedelic music made the pop song an art form. It made the pop song no longer the preserve of the classic song-book but a statement of artistic intent, a cosmic musical calling card that didn’t have to follow the old 2 verse 1 chorus rule, didn’t have to be a message of love or be bound by the aggregated experiences of the masses. The pop song could be about uniquely personal and kaleidoscopic memories of Cyprus Avenue and Strawberry Fields, of imagined people like Arnold Layne and Sebastian F. Sorrow. For the DJ in me it was about having your mind freed by chasing the White Rabbit down the hole simply to ensure that your ass will follow.

Punk itself was psychedelic. We were told we were pretty vacant by pantomime villains dressed in clobber from Kensington High Street who knew how to shock the public with their risqué music hall turn. At the start of the 80s punk had crashed into funk and in doing so provided an unstoppable rhythmic propulsion that drove like a juggernaut through the decade. New nuggets of garage music arrived, enervated by punk’s scorched earth policy, but now mixing in elements of country, jazz and folk, paving the way for what would eventually become the US college scene and later the Americana of the 90s. Rap and hip hop continued psychedelic music’s facility to raise our collective consciousness (and conscience), to rub our eyes and look at the world anew with a definitive gaze that was counter to the perceptions we’d allowed ourselves to accept as reality’s norm. As fundamentally the tools of rap and hip hop – the turntable, the scratch, the broken twisted pulses of voice and technology – made the very beat of music a lightning rod for psychedelic experimentation. A psychedelic record could simply be a radically engineered set of rhythms with melody consigned to remain in the mixing desk. The synthesiser, the sequencer, the explosions of technological advances that would appear almost weekly on new releases from labels like ZTT and Mute, blurred the lines between what was made by a Human and what was made by a Numan, the confusion further exploited by the androgyny and gender baiting of performers who were psychedelic and kaleidoscopic noises made flesh.

No matter the original genre, great psychedelic music both expands and contracts time as we listen to it. The Beatles expanded time on A Day In The Life but also contracted time into songs like I Am The Walrus, a single that makes the listener think they’re catching a brief snippet of a continuous loop that plays for eternity in some other dimension. In the 80s the remix, particularly the extended versions of new releases available on 12”, allowed the more experimentally charged artists and producers to put their songs into a sonic blender afforded by new studio technology and throw out collages of sound and colour that stretched and contorted the 7” single into its very own mini concept album. The 12” gave pop songs transfusions from any blood type available – dub, rap, hip hop, avant-garde, ambient, classical, jazz, rawk – and mutated them into new forms of musical life.

So here’s another Spotify playlist, a very personal set-list evoking the 80s ‘alternative’ disco. It’s for all the freaks who still like to come out to dance at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. It’s psychedelic even if it’s not as you know it.

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Ahh_Bisto says

24/10/2015 at 13:31

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Ahh_Bisto says

26/10/2015 at 10:26

Here’s a fantastic video clip from 1980 to visually highlight how the psychedelic pot was well and truly stirred in the decade that followed.

Yellow Magic Orchestra performing Firecracker on Soul Train

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Ahh_Bisto says

27/10/2015 at 20:10

I forgot to add Herbie Hanckock’s Rockit to the playlist. Like YMO performing on Soul Train the Rockit video from Godley and Creme still stands up as a great visually psychedelic moment of the 80s. There’s something for everyone in there, from the parochial setting of a dreary English suburban 2-up 2-down (with a couple of silver tops on the doorstep) to the Wilf Lunn meets Kraftwerk robotics, SR toothpaste and Quaker Oats

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Raymond says

22/11/2015 at 21:11

Nice article, @ahh_bisto. I enjoyed the liberal sprinkling of song references.

I’m not sure that I share your positivity about the phenomenon of the 12″ remix. I get (and sort of agree with) your ‘blood transfusions’ point, but -more often than not- the remix felt like more of a marketing tool than an art form. There was some genuine creativity of course, but an awful lot of mindless ‘drop the vocals and turn the snare volume up to eleven’ also went on.

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Neil Jung says

19/12/2015 at 12:49

I played and enjoyed the first of your psych playlists yesterday. Not so sure I like the look of this one as much though…..

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