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)

LFO'S LFO

I was thinking today about how much of an incendiary bomb LFO by LFO was.

The single was Warp Records' first big hit, peaking at number 12 in the UK charts in August 1990, wedged between Timmy Mallett and Craig McLachlan from Neighbours.

"We'd just been messing around with drum machines since we were, like, thirteen, tapping away at them like they were arcade games," said LFO's Mark Bell.

And that's what it sounds like. Computer-y. Geometric. Made of pixels. It was kind of house music, which had been around for a while, but lacked any sass. No diva was going to start wailing over this kind of club sound. 

This was a track from a Leeds band, released on a Sheffield label. Is this relevant? I think it is. I'm tired of lazy generalisations about "the north" but there's no way this would have sounded as good if it was made in London. It needed a Yorkshire dourness: a sense of the industrial. After the burst of yellow smiley colour that was the rave explosion, LFO seemed to be built from actual scaffolding. Structural and metallic; absolutely clanging. 

Also they said "LFO" in the track. They were called LFO, they named their single LFO, the lyrics were "LFO". What a statement of intent. Tricky Disco's Tricky Disco, which was a hit at the same time, pulled the same stunt, a chirpy and childish "tricky disco!" spicing up the bleeps. That's like Orbital chanting "Orbital!" right in the middle of Chime, which they'd need to rename Orbital.

LFO spent one week at the giddy heights of number 12 in the charts: it would go on to sell 130,000 records, solidifying Warp's future and beginning a whole new chapter in electronic music history. Mark Bell would go on to produce Björk, helping move her from a spiky popster into a baroque techno experimentalist on Homogenic.

What replaced LFO at number 12 the following week? Together's Hardcore Uproar, the legacy of which should probably be saved for another blog post.

As the Pharisees attacked Jesus, and so it was that pop music fought back against LFO. In the second half of the 1990s, a band called the Lyte Funky Ones appeared. They shortened their name to LFO, thereby confusing everyone forever. I hated them. These New England popsters were NKOTB wannabes who were about as techno as a Barbie doll head on a spike. 

Actually that's quite techno. I may need to think that analogy. 

Within a month of (the proper) LFO's commercial success, Timmy Mallett would top the charts, followed by the Steve Miller Band's The Joker which I think is one of the worst songs ever written. Vanilla Ice would try the eponymous lyric thing by saying "Ice, Ice baby" but it would sound all wrong.

Good old LFO. Have a listen here.

Further Fats: My Warp top ten: it's not all Warp and there aren't ten of them (2009)

Further Fats: Fat Roland's wonderful Warp Records word search (2020)

The Stone Roses and the seriously stained alley of nostalgia

Edit: I was clearly way off the mark in this piece. Here are my 2016 reflections on the new Stone Roses single.

The Stone Roses are reforming. The Stone Roses are not reforming. The Stone Roses are reforming. The Stone Roses are not reforming. The Stone Roses might be reforming.

Manchester was awash with speculation yesterday. It's the only thing people were talking about in the porn shops. Drug dealers whispered the news from beneath street grids. All the flyers in Affleck's Palace were replaced with pictures of Ian Brown next to a big question mark.

In fact, Manchester does nostalgia almost as well as Liverpool, what with reformations by the likes of James, M People and, um, Northside. When in fact what we really want back are our dearly deceased, such as Joy Division, Frank Sidebottom and Together.

Although the cod-blues drudgery on the second Stone Roses album was a crock of anal splatter, the band's contribution to rock music stands as proudly as the Beetham Tower and we Mancunians should shout about it. Well. Drawl about it.

What we didn't need, though, was another trip down a syringe-ridden nostalgia alley. We'd just end up vomiting into our navals and using our hoody to wipe up the sick, thereby creating an ironically-pleasing hypercolour design on our clothing. How on earth can they recapture the Bez days of our lives? Stand in Harvey Nicks and pretend it's the Hacienda? No, thanks.

The rumours were quashed pretty quickly. Many commentators took a (private) post-funeral piss-up between ex-band members as genuine news. But Mani himself gave a journalist a right old ear-pummelling about the rumours, ending his rant with "It isn't true and isn't happening."

The Stone Roses are not reforming. The Stone Roses are not reforming. The Stone Roses are not reforming. Let the whispers become murmers then shouts: the Stone Roses will not come again.

See also: How do you solve a problem like Madchester?

A good week for old LPs - and if you say 'what's an LP', I'll set fire to your mp3 player

808 State (pictured), Manchester's third greatest band after Together and Swing Out Sister, have reissued a glut of old LPs.

Firstly, Quadrastate, the one with Pacific State on, is out on CD for the first time.

And secondly, a quartet of old 808 albums have put on a bit of slap and come out to play again: 90, ex:el, the astonishing Gorgeous and the cock-themed Don Solaris.

As if my joy wasn't unbridled enough, record label ZTT are also planning on rereleasing MC Tunes' The North At It's Heights.

MC Tunes, if you recall, was the lizard-tongued rapper that had an "only rhyme that bitessss" back in the dying months of Thatcher's Britain.

Speaking of Prime Ministerial gay icons... Back in Ted Heath's day, there was a collosal jam session to end all collosal jam sessions.

King Crimson lynchpin Robert Fripp was meant to be laying down some phat guitar licks for the god-voiced Robert Wyatt, when he bunked off to lark around with Brian Eno.

You remember Brian. I did a Bri Chart of him once.

Anyhoo, the resulting session between Fripp and Eno was the historic 21-minute opus Heavenly Music Corporation. This rich, mesmerising wash is a highlight of their No Pussyfooting album, which has also, like the 808 State albums, been released back into the wild.

Which means it's a good week for old LPs. Go find a record shop, virtual or otherwise, and reminisce your guts up.