Smileys for miles: 10 rave culture classics that you should listen to immediately

Look at you, sat on your sofa watching repeats of the Nine O'Clock News from 1984 while munching seven-day old Jaffa cakes you found in the back of your cupboard. Jeez, what a loser. What you need, my lazy friend, are some rave-inspired records to ramp up your energy.

Here are ten tracks that, in their own individual way, bring alive the energy of rave music. Some are more directly connected to rave, and will transport you back to the days of poppers and smiley faces. Others owe some kind of historic debt to rave culture: even if you didn't experience rave back in the day, these tunes should still evoke the pill-popping hypercoloured club culture of yore. 

The highlighted links should open to a YouTube video of that track.

808 State: Cubik
Following the success of their blissful and balaeric Pacific State, 808 State put out a series of singles with a harder energy. Cubik was an unlikely top ten hit because of its cranky square-wave chords, alarmist emergency sirens and wild guitar shreds. There's footage online of young ravers partying to Cubik at Stone Roses' infamous Spike Island gig. Perfect for throwing (cuboid) shapes to.

Altern-8: Infiltrate 202
This was the masked mavericks' first hit single, and it peaked at number 28 in July 1991, just behind a new entry from Frankie Knuckles' The Whistle Song and just ahead of a new entry from Bomb The Bass's Winter In July. Crumbs, what a chart. And what an anthem. Simplistic, geometric breakbeat shapes which felt quite comical at the time, but laid some pretty serious groundwork in commercial chart rave.

Bicep: Glue
The video for Bicep's nostalgia-bazooka Glue interspersed images of abandoned rave sites with quote captions from ex-ravers. "Never had a comedown like that one," reminisces one caption. "Best days of my life," says another. "Off my box with four cans of Stella," interrupts one wag, ruining the mood. Joe Wilson's video was a perfect foil to the Bicep boys' heart-wrenching breakbeats. What a comedown. 

Chase & Status: Blind Faith
Like the Chemical Brothers, Chase & Status's partnership can be traced back to their time at Manchester university. And like the Chemical Brothers, the pair tread a neat line in roof-shattering beats. Blind Faith was a huge hit from their breakthrough album No More Idols. It was a tribute to grubby warehouse rave, bolstered by Loleatta Holloway-style live vocals from Yola. Chase & Status gonna work it out.

Fatboy Slim: Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat
Norman Cook has enjoyed number one success in various guises, and I had plenty of choice for this list. His creativity knows no bounds, whether it's a caveman turning into a chubby lad or Christopher Walken walkin' weird. Three decades after he learnt bass so he could join the Housemartins, Mr Slim released this modern classic in tribute to the fours states of raving. It's like Eat, Pray, Love but with poppers.

Klaxons: Atlantis To Interzone
They may have just been a bunch of London indie kids, but they brought "new rave" to the masses and singlehandedly re-popularised glowsticks with the gigging public. The awkwardly-named Atlantis To Interzone enjoyed radio support but, incredibly, failed to make a dent in the UK charts. A travesty. They followed-up this tribute to rave with an ace cover of Grace's Perfecto Records classic Not Over Yet.

Nia Archives: Off Wiv Ya Headz
I could have included A-Trak's iconic remix of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Heads Will Roll, but this junglist remix is irresistible. Nia Archives knocked up the track when trying to entertain crowds at Manchester's Warehouse Project, no mean feat considering the number of gurning bucket-hatters I've encountered there. If her name is new to you, dive into the Nia Archives archives immediately. Your rave heart will thank you.

Pet Shop Boys: Vocal
This might be a controversial one if you're a purist. And yes, I know Vocal has all the energy of your grandad pining for the days when the high street was all butchers and shoe shops. But this track has proper rave origins: the Boys say it was inspired by a clubbing venture in Brazil in the mid-1990s. They reflected this in the video by using footage from actual raves. A great tune from the domino dancers. 

Together: Hardcore Uproar
This John Carpenter-sampling classic was released on Pete Tong's brilliant FFRR label, It was the epitome of crossover rave bangers. That "ha-ha-hardcore uproar" voice? It's not a sample: it's just Suddi Raval's doing it directly into a mic. And the crowd cheers are from a Together live recording - in the background, you can hear Suddi shouting "yeeeeeah" to hype the crowd up. Rave to its very (hard)core.

The Streets: Weak Become Heroes
This list is almost in alphabetical order by artist, so we end up with The Streets. This is the best music act named after a road since, er, 'Don't Call Me Baby' hitmakers Madison Avenue. The downbeat Weak Become Heroes is Skinner's paeon to losing himself in the club and having a KFC afterwards. It's not a very ravey way to finish this list, but you can't have the smiley highs without the post-ecstasy crash.

Main blog picture: Altern-8

Further Fats: If it goes bleep, it may or may not be EDM (2013)

Further Fats: Just how DO you act at your first rave? (2019)

The First Dance: scientific clubbing versus plague raving

The sight of thousands of revellers crammed into a Liverpool club the other night was initially quite disconcerting.

Where were their masks? Why weren't they distancing? Where were all the awkward elbow bumps?

Circus's The First Dance was actually one of two nightclub experiments at the weekend to see if large-scale music events could work with the right safety measures in place. The clubbers went through a scientific testing and monitoring, turning them into guinea pigs with glow sticks. Which obviously is the cutest thing in the world.

These are the first official club events in the UK since the virus hit, and it was a delight to see. Big up to Liverpool for pioneering our way out of lockdown: until now, the city was only famous for Richard and Judy, The Zutons, and Ken Dodd.

The line-up included the Blessed Madonna, Fatboy Slim and Sven Väth. The last name impressed me: he's one of my all-time bestest faves: here's me raving about him in 2010. Sven Väth helping end the apocalypse. Brilliant! I knew I could count on Sven...

Except...

I mentioned Väth on Twitter, and I was immediately put right by Posthuman, who in non-virus times runs a night called I Love Acid and is an all-round good egg. Turns out Sven is a plague rave DJ. Posthuman was hugely positive about the event, but likened Väth's booking to a "having an arsonist on the fire safety board".

What's a plague rave? These are big club events held in places in the grip of Covid-19, with headline acts flown in while the virus spikes with deadly effect. In fact, the events are probably possible precisely because the host country has lax virus regulations. Clubbers arrive in their thousands and the virus claims its victims, putting pressure on already inadequate levels of testing and health care.

Sven Väth has been touring India, a nation suffering a brutal Covid surge. Väth has always had an attachment to the iconic clubbing destination of Goa, so it was no surprise that particular Western Indian state was on his gig schedule. His appearance behind the decks at a particular Goa event in early March was described by one giddy electronic music website as going "viral among fans of electronic music." No irony whatsoever. I won't link to it here.

Let's draw out a timeline. In the month after that March Goa gig, Covid cases across India rose by a multiple of six. Now let's extend that timeline. On the day of writing this piece, around two months after that Goa gig, the number of cases across India was 26 times larger. And in Goa specifically, cases were 64 times higher than they were in early March, albeit rising from a comparatively lower base. 

Excuse the number crunching, but this helps us understand that any big-name DJ show taking place in India in early March could easily have had the consequence of being a super-spreader event.

This isn't just about Sven Väth, of course. Business Teshno has been raising awareness of such Covid-calamitous behaviour for months, calling out the likes of DJs Dixon, Luciano, Solomun and Nina Kraviz.

There are plenty of acts criticising plague ravers too. Carl Cox said in Mixmag: 

"It’s irresponsible to be out there at the moment... Having a party in a pandemic, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. People are still suffering from this and we aren't out of yet. This isn't a Steven Spielberg movie called Panic, you know: we are in it."

And Bicep called such Covid-careless DJs "disgusting", saying:

"They don’t need to do this. Take a year off, write an album. So many people lower down in dance music are struggling and this paints the whole industry in a bad light."

I feel weird linking to Mixmag considering they've been raving about Väth's Liverpool appearance on social media, but anyhoo...

This brings us back to the Liverpool experiment. This project was a shining example of science-led creativity, and everyone involved deserves a jolly good pat on the back. The line-up had its problems, but the larger picture could mean a route out of the apocalypse, and the revival of a zillion careers across the entertainment industry. 

It's a shame about Sven. I'd been slow to pick up specifics on the whole plague rave thing, hence me initially praising Väth's involvement. I'd seen Business Teshno's social media activity, but it all seemed rather confusing. Mainstream outlets like Resident Advisor and Mixmag don't seem particularly vexed with the plague rave thing, and there appears to be a widespread suspicion that once the clubbing industry gets back on its knees, the offending DJs will continue to coin it in, with no consequences of their pandemic actions.

As for me? I'd love to go clubbing again – I Love Acid have committed to not booking plague rave DJs, and it will be one of the first nights I go to. That said, as someone who's higher risk, it'll be some time before I have the confidence to get all sweaty and giddy with strangers. We'll see.

More importantly, what about the awkward elbow bumps? Honestly, a little wave is a lot less cringy. Let's stop the elbow bumps. Please. For the sake of future clubbing coolness, let's stop the elbow bumps.

Further Fats: A ticket to ride: bumbling into MC Tunes and putting the green suit away (2007)

Further Fats: The quarantine raves – Top one, nice one, get Covid? (2020)

Ten slices of shallow-fried Twitter whimsy

Twitter is a platform in which everyone can communicate with everyone else all of the time without any downsides whatsoever.

What follows are ten slices of shallow-fried whimsy lovingly copied-and-pasted from my Twitter account. Some if it reads as a useful self-help guide along the lines of The Power Of Now, How To Win Friends And Influence People or the Roland SH-101 Owner's Manual. Some of it reads like poetry along the lines of, er, poems and stuff.

I have given each tweet a header so you can perhaps make an index from it, like they do with proper books.

1. The food puns
Butter Living Through Chemistry. Meusli Has The Right To Children. Thymeless. Dubnobasswithmyheadman (where bass is a fish). Adventures Beyond The Ultrawurst. Endtrojuicing. Not sure where I'm going with this.

2. A question about 1996
Did the boy ever see his mom that weekend to tell her Satan Satan Satan Satan Satan Satan Satan Satan?

3. Thoughts post-Brexit
Don't worry, everyone, we don't need Europe. Just stay in your towns, don't go anywhere, don't meet new people and don't buy anything. We didn't have the EU around the time of the Great Plague and everything was just fine.

4. Morning reflection 1
A grey morning in Manchester. Cold raindrops fall on puddled streets like polar bears in spandex, if polar bears were tiny and made of water, also forget the spandex, that's just a distraction tbh

5. A motivation
How to have a positive day:
- smile more
- do one kind thing
- pay a compliment
- open up the portal of d'ath krondor
- eat healthy
- live in the moment
- the tentacles, the tentacles, they burn
- be a good listener
- the void shall become all, ye wastrels of earth

6. A concern
I'm slightly worried that Antifa is short for Anti Fat Roland.

7. A dream for the future
It's splitting hairs, but I'd like to hear New Order's Mr Disco covered by Electronic.

8. Morning reflection 2
It is morning. The sun comes alive in the eastern sky and says its happy greetings. Hello trees. Hello fields. Hello squirrels. Hello sun! they call and wave. In the western sky, the moon dies a horrible death. Everyone laughs.

9. A simple wish
I wish Squarepusher was called Squidpusher and all of his promo shots were of him in back alleys selling squid.

10. The bird incident
Twitter, I forgot to tell you. A low-flying goose honked at me pretty aggressively the other day, so that's pretty much 2020 written off. How's YOUR week been?

Further Fats: Squarepusher's psychedelic number - could it send him (robert) miles off course? (2009)

Further Fats: Top ten ways to write a top ten music list (2012)

Big beat's gonna work it out, maybe, perhaps not

From grunge to g-funk, from trip hop to Brit pop, there’s one thing you can be sure of about the 1990s: the one forgotten genre might be big beat.

Everyone knows the artists. The Chemical (Dust) Brothers blasted the roof off the place with Brother’s Gonna Work It Out, Fatboy Slim had a party in his head with Gangster Trippin and even if people don’t know the band name, they may well recognise Bentley Rhythm Ace (pictured).

But as a name, I reckon there’ll be a lot of younger people who don’t know “big beat”. The label kinda got swallowed up by the cool Britannia thing. Or perhaps it shed its identity when it went massively mainstream: see the Prodigy’s Firestarter or The Propellorheads’ History Repeating.

Maybe it just became known as video game music. Maybe, as Acid Ted suggests, it just got a bit embarrassing.

Not that labels matter that much, but big beat acted as a useful curatorial guide when picking tracks in my early DJing days. For example, there was a great block rockin’ underground in the shape of Brassic Beats and Heavenly Social, with the likes of Req, Cut La Roc, Monkey Mafia and the Skint Records founder Midfield General.

There’s a longer piece in this, and I may well pen something for Electronic Sound. In the meantime, to test my theory, I’m going to be shaking teenagers by the shoulders until they name all the 1990s music styles.

Who knew “let go of me, Fats, you idiot” was a genre?

Back once again

This 'renegade master' cartoon seems to be everywhere at the moment. It's the work of Moose Allain, whose cartoons have had millions of loops on Vine, which is like telly but for small people.

It made me chortle. It's obviously a reference to the 1995 top 20 single by Wildchild, who alas didn't live long enough to see Fatboy Slim catapult his remix of track into the top ten three years later. Sorry. Buzz kill.

There's something nice about jokes that are so far past topical, they're almost into the territory of dad jokes. Like this Pixar tweet.

What's the Pixar lamp got against the letter i anyway? Dick. pic.twitter.com/gvXas3F8dF

— Fat Roland (@FatRoland) December 28, 2015

Perhaps "nice" is the wrong word. "Comforting." Flips. I try so hard not to be nostalgic, but I think it comes with age. It doesn't help that loads of chart dance music by the likes of Disclosure sounds twenty years old.

Anyhoo, back to modern things. I promised to do a Spotify playlist of highlights from my 2015 albums-of-the-year series. It's two-and-a-half hours long and counting. I'm almost there.

(I probably should have tweeted that in the 1990s.)

— Fat Roland (@FatRoland) December 28, 2015

Massive Attack got soul but Ceephax got swing(ing lampshades)

Hey, look, there is some albums what just come out!

Ceephax Acid Crew

I'm swinging from the bloody lightshade.

United Acid Emirates, the new album from Ceephax Acid Crew, has got me prancing around my mansion like a brain damaged pixie. It's so lurid and colourful, like being stuck in an 8 bit Meg And Mog cartoon.

The drooling, looping trippiness of the acid, splattered all over this album, is a constant, giddy joy. The opener Cedric's Sonnet is a sharp, spikey melodic number reminiscent of his brother Squarepusher in Welcome To Europe mode. Castilian is dragged kicking and screaming by a full-on, bullying bass drum, while the dated click rhythm of Life Funk reminds me of Felix-era house music.

This is, however, not a stupid album. It's a serious step forward for Ceephax, where he demonstrates his various skills at chugging 80s techno anthems (Topaz) or off-kilter chord arrangements (Commuter). And all this with plenty of squelching acid moistness. Highly recommended.

Massive Attack

Are you bothered about a new Massive Attack album?  Of course you are: I can't believe you asked me that, you idiot.

Heligoland has finally, um, landed. It's a full seven years after the band's previous studio album ("If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing slowly," says their MySpace page) and nearly 20 years after their highly influential debut Blue Lines. And actually, it's that memory of Blue Lines that I can hear on Heligoland.

Yes, there are guest vocalists (which The Guardian had down as almost unique in the dance world, despite the Gorillaz, Fatboy Slim and Unkle doing that kind of thing for years). Yes, there is gloominess a-plenty. But what this has, which I think 100th Window missed, is... capital letters... SOUL.

It's an album that is destined for coffee tables, new year's parties and easy headlines about the vocal collaborators (hello, Guy Garvey), and therefore many serious music fans will brush it off their shrugged shoulders. Which is a shame.

What will really get me all excited are those Burial remixes the internet's been promising.

Pantha Du Prince

Also out this month is Pantha Du Prince's Black Noise. Oh, and look, he has vocal collaborations from the likes of Animal Collective, !!! and LCD Soundsystem people. Read this and weep, The Guardian.

Black Noise is awash with clouds. You know how some albums sound urban-y and some sound outdoors-y? This is Heidi the goat-herder's friend flatlining on heroin on the highest mountain in the world while buzzards perform a jagged dance of death around her.

With sharp techno, dizzying loops, spiralling bells and smoky, smoky atmospherics, this will appeal to Susumu Yokota fans looking to grab something a bit more substantial by the goat horns.

We need a new Mercury Music Prize for people that give a crap about electronic music

There's a sumptuous scene in Danny Boyle's best movie Sunshine where a fullstop-like planet Mercury slinks past a firey, all-powerful sun.

For electronica fans, it represents a brilliant metaphor for the Mercury Music Prize: an insignificant dot backed up by a glowing past that is more distant than you think.

When the Mercury showered Primal Scream with £20,000 for such a far-out album as Screamadelica, beating U2, Simply Red and Young Disciples, it was a kick in the Brit Awards' union jack pants. That was in 1992, remember, when 20 grand was worth about a billion quid..

The kudos reverbarated through the years with Portishead and Roni Size reaching equally dizzy heights. And that's despite the Mercury trying to derail everything by choosing M People in 1994.

I'm not saying this year's list sucks. I've filed Bat For Lashes, Glasvegas or (yawn) Friendly Fires into a big box labelled "shrug", but I'm sure they deserve their success. You may well argue this in the comments section.

But where's the electronica? We've been thrown a brace of bones with Underworld (although never with the ultimate techno album band Orbital), but there's something fundamentally wrong.

In a great piece for Bleep43, Toby Frith searches for any Mercury nods for Warp Records ("the UK’s most important label") and fails. You could make a similar argument for Leaf.

Firth argues it's because electronica immerses itself in singles and live appearances, rather than albums. He's right (think of Windowlicker), but the exclusion from this year's nominations of Squarepusher's Just A Souvenir is criminal.

It's more because of the man rather than the album. The Square one (photo, above, from Bangface) became the darling of the serious press last autumn; if any electronica artist was going to be the Mercury's first true IDM nomination, it was going to be him.

Except it wasn't. Inside that little dot of a prize, there so many are guitars, guitars, guitars, there's little room for a 303. And, as non-nominated Fatboy Slim will tell you, everybody needs a 303.

Maybe we live on a different planet, in a different solar system with Aphex Twin's grinning face where the sun should be. And maybe, therefore, we need our own Music Prize that respects a wickedly neglected genre.

BPA's album is a trouser-fiddling mess of buffalo proportions

Bless my Aunt Fanny's hairy knees: what has Fatboy Slim done?

I Think We're Gonna Need A Bigger Boat is the first album by BPA, otherwise known as Brighton Port Authority, otherwise known as Norman 'Pizzaman' Cook (pictured) and his trusty engineer Simon. And it is a total disaster of buffalo-sized proportions.

The album is a vom bucket of ska-dance-funk trouser-fiddling dressed up in a tweedy construct about a rediscovered 1970s rock band. Which is funny, because I wish I'd never discovered this godforsaken record at all.

David Byrne seems out on a (be-suited) limb set against the chirpy horns and childhood rapping of Dizzee Rascal on Toe Jam. Think of Musical Youth copyists back in the 80s. Think of the Mavericks meet Boney M. Think of Dizzee's disastrous turn on that Band Aid single.

Seattle is a track that wouldn't be out of place on Woodstock's smoke-hazed fields. But this isn't Woodstock. Nor is it Seattle. It's meant to be bloody Brighton.

He's Frank (Slight Return) is more than a slight return. It is a wholesale Tardis ride to 90s Fatboy, although tragically more Brimful Of Asha B-side than Rockafeller Skank A-list. Island with Justin Robertson offers some cozy Vienna-style spaciousness, and it's a blessed relief to my punished ears - except Norm and Si insist on hammering on a clumsy chorus. With bent nails.

Cook can't remember recording all of the tracks according to this Rolling Stone interview [link broken]. Sounds like denial to me. Like a werewolf who tears and gouges his way through a village, then pretends not to remember it over melba toast the following brunch.

BPA give a bad name to DJs beginning with 'Fat'. Oh dear me. I'm off to douse my ears in battery acid.