The quarantine raves: Top one, nice one, get Covid?

A bunch of people in Greater Manchester went raving last night. 

This would not normally be news because, as we all know, 100% of people in Manchester are raving 100% of the time.

However, these raves happened in the middle of the pandemic, and it's kinda not okay. A tonne of party-goers descended on two sites in Trafford and Oldham for 'quarantine raves'. Several videos on Snapchat caught lots of revellers half-heartedly swaying to fairly commercial dance music. 

In the aftermath, Warehouse Project founder Sacha Lord slammed them as "morons" and "selfish idiots", while local volunteers collected over 200 bin bags of rubbish from the mess they had left behind. He's right. Top one, nice one, get Covid? If you went to one of the raves last night, you're a wrong 'un.

I understand the need to be at events like this. Hold on. Let me clarify. I wouldn't be caught dead at crappy park raves where WKD-glugging drones cheer as the DJ drops Get Lucky. But I do get the need to go to places with speaker stacks banging out tunes; to feel the heat of the bodies, the music and the lukewarm sweat dripping off the ceiling. I miss clubbing.

But surely us ravers can keep our glow-sticks in our pants for a bit longer? The more these Superdry-wearing sub-Parklife plonkers go to illegal raves like this, inevitably spreading the virus because that's how viruses work, the longer the rest of us wait until we don our party pants. And the longer the club industry will take to recover.

It has also occurred to me that if Covid hangs around for a long time, we may never go raving again. We'll have to go to clubs in human-size hamster balls, zorbing our orbs against each other like a kinky lottery machine. It sounds weirdly appealing, but raising our hands in the air like we just don't care is going to be a logistical nightmare.

I can cope with people protesting in large numbers for #BlackLivesMatter, because that is about a threat that is every bit as immediate as this pesky virus. If you disagree with that sentence and you're white, you've just proved the need for #BlackLivesMatter. But a bunch of rave babies dancing to low-rent wedding reception dance music because they feel stronger than the virus? No thanks. 

It's like they listened to the chorus of Rozalla's Everybody's Free without paying attention to the verse: "We are a family that should stand together as one / Helping each other instead of just wasting time." Together is a metaphor: that means staying home, you clubbing Covidiots. Also, I bet that was the only track the DJs had: just Rozalla over and over again.

If you want to support Greater Manchester clubbing instead of frightening a bunch of hedgehogs in a field in the middle of the night, then support United We Stream.

Edit: Since posting this, the news story has advanced. In addition to the idiocy of a quarantine rave, there have been some pretty serious crimes at these events. It's pretty depressing reading.

Further Fats: "Short of performing a skiffle set on the grass, we were going to have to pull the show." (2011)

Further Fats: Review – Daft Punk's Random Access Memories (2013)

Essential Hardcore got me started, ahem, on rave music

When I was a young droog, much of my musical education came from chart rave, and from compilation CDs.

One compilation I had forgotten about, until I tripped over the above image online, is 1991's Essential Hardcore. 

It's image was not original. It had a cherub on the cover, reminding us of New Order's Technique, and the acts listed on the front, a style later copied by terribly-named series The Best... Album in the World...Ever!

What was notable was its track curation. The album never leaves strays too far from the environs of commercial dance music, but there's definitely a change in flavour as it progresses.

At the start are charty bangers like Rozalla's saxophone-fuelled Faith (In The Power Of Love) and 2 Unlimited's ubiquitous Get Ready For This. Not great. The kind of music that clueless people mention when you say you're into techno.

Then we get into classic rave. The likes of Bizarre Inc's Playing With Knives, Altern 8's Activ 8 and Slipmatt & Lime (SL2)'s DJs Take Control, with the London breakbeat's duo's biggest hit On A Ragga Tip still a few months off.

By the end of the album, we're into the slightly harder stuff. Lords of Acid's moody and stomping Take Control. Joey Beltram's The Omen (Psycho Mix). And Dutch duo L.A. Style with their jackhammering James Brown Is Dead. It's a great introduction to rave. 

And the The Shamen's wibbly Possible Worlds was a great way to end the album. Most people only knew them for Move Any Mountain, and this was a gateway drug to their more trippy side.

Please let's not talk about the inclusion of Simply Red's Something Got Me Started, though. Crumbs.

This was actually the fourth in the Hardcore series, previous iterations being Hardcore Uproar, Hardcore Dancefloor and Hardcore Ecstasy. All of them showed the dark and light side of charty dance music. The first one included Betty Boo, and Together's ravetastic top 20 single Hardcore Uproar, from which the series no doubt got its name.

I'm glad I rediscovered this again. Back in the olden days, it was useful to have compilations like this – Essential Hardcore and its sister albums played a key part in young me navigating my music taste. Hear a patchy stream of the album tracks over on YouTube.

Further Fats: Eight oh eight oh eight oh eight oh eight oh eight oh eight oh eight oh eight (2008)