Chugging Out Some More Choons From 1988 And 1989... Felly Had Blue Lipstick - But Wasn't Singing... And We Were Pumping Up The Jam, Being Pure, Singing About History, Thrashing Around To Accieed and Getting Back To Life...

 

Felly of Technotronic - her with the blue lipstick on the original album cover. She didn't wanna place to stay, but you could get your booty on the floor tonight and make her day. However, it wasn't really Felly singing. No, Ya Kid K was the one! This was all over the charts and the dancefloors in September/October 1989. I bought the Technotronic album, which contained this and their next few hits towards the end of the year, and was bowled over.

And I still love Felly's lipstick.

And Ya Kid K, of course.

ACCEEED! Love this. The Acid House  scene of 1988 really rattled the establishment and that's never a bad thing, and this vid and song always do my head in. Especially the bit where the bloke's head judders about.

RIGHT ON ONE, MATEY!

This 1988 hit by Breathe is one of my favourite love songs. And the video's so yuppie, but with a splash of delicious working class humour at the end. Gorgeous.

Back To Life... the mighty Soul II Soul in 1989. So beautiful and classic and wonderful and innovative and downright marvellous I actually passed my ciggies around.

1989 - and I was gobsmacked by the transformation of Siobhan Fahey - from Bananarama chorus girl to purring sophisti-cat. This is stunning - Shakespear's Sister, History.

Pure, the Lightening Seeds. One of my themes to the summer of 1989. Released on 8 July, it spent ten weeks on the chart. I was, of course, romantically involved - and this is terribly evocative. Ah, those golden days in Saffron Walden!

We'll carry on our trawl of (just) some 1980s pop brilliance soon. We've started with 1989 and 1988 and next we'll take a peek at 1987 and 1986. We're heading all the way back to 1980 in time. Keep it chooned.

More About Acid House - What The Establishment Thought, 1988, And A 1989 Rave...

This is Acid House 1988... still stirs the blood and gets me moving... how far we'd come from Adam and the Ants, Bad Manners and Madness...


Footage from a 1989 Rave...

House music was a brand new electronic music genre born in Chicago USA in the early 1980s (for those desiring a more specific timeline 1983 is often referred to as "Year Zero"). We got our first taste of House here in England in 1986 and, following hot on its heels, in 1988, came Acid House - with its attendant Raves and new drug culture ("What planet are you on?" "Planet Ecstasy"...).

The only drawback with ecstasy - or E as it was known - was the chance that it could do you serious harm or even kill you if you happened to pop a bad one! It was a small risk, but still off-putting to many people. Mind you, the music and atmosphere of an Acid House rave could still be enjoyed without popping anything!

The distinctive Acid House sound came from the Roland TB-303 Bass Line synthesiser, which was first released in 1982.

Acid House had the establishment seriously rattled - the bloody kids were acting up again - and saw bitter rival football fans peacefully dancing and chatting together under the effects of ecstasy.


What the tabloids and elders thought... BBC news footage from 1988. The stance taken by the BBC in this clip seems as impartial as the stance the organisation took (and still takes given half a chance) towards Reagan and Thatcher! Didn't they interview anybody in favour of Acid House?!

More '80s Actual Acid House here.

Acid House

One of the big "things" in 1988 and 1989 - the smiley face! Created in the 1960s and long associated by us plebs with kids' badges and jolly tea mugs, the face was suddenly the symbol of a rather frantic and frankly rather naughty progression from the House Music scene called Acid House. I was confused. House music had been created in Chicago - 1983 was 'Year Zero' for House - and the sound had not begun to go wide until midway through the decade.

And now we had ACID House. Say what?!

The smiley face was soon cropping up on T-shirts everywhere, accompanied by the slogan "Right On One Matey!" The elders got themselves into a right old stew about it all, whilst many youngsters, bored with being garishly posh, gothy, Indie or synthy, eagerly embraced the chance to get sweaty under strobe lights, and move about to weird electronic noises and samples.

And if you had to break into somebody else's warehouse or barn to do it, all the better!

Some newspapers seemed alarmed. A new drug culture, and the kids acting up again. Oh dear! Where had Acid House sprung from?

The Observer observed in 1988:

Drugs Fear as the 'acid house' cult revives a Sixties spectre

"Acid house" started in four London clubs... In the past month it has "taken off", spreading to other clubs around the country.

1988 and 1989 were wild. Absolutely evil according to some! The elders were definitely rattled!

From the Sun, August 28, 1989:

More than 25,000 youngsters - some aged only ELEVEN - went wild at a huge acid house party yesterday as the police watched helplessly.

Dozens of evil pushers raked in a fortune openly selling the mind-bending drug Ecstacy at £10 a time - with a bottle of mineral water to wash it down.

A police superintendent and WPC moved through throngs of spaced-out teenagers as dealers chanted "E, hash, weed" to the beat of the music.

School-age children rolled their own reefers.

But the officers were only there to make sure there was no trouble while notices about the noise were served on the organisers.

The 15-hour bash started on Saturday night when hordes of acid house fans converged on the village of Effingham, Surrey.

Cars, coaches and vans poured into Newmarsh Farm for the £30-a-head "Energy Summer Festival".

Youngsters from as far way as Leeds, Swindon and Ipswich screamed "Mental, mental" as lasers lit the sky.

Headlines from the Sun CONDEMMING the drug craze flashed on a huge video screen.

Party organisers made an estimated £500,000 from the bash - which cost about £50,000 to stage.
Police, who only heard of the party hours before, at first stopped youngsters entering the site.
But as thousands joined the crush, senior officers decided it was safer to let them in.

About 70 police were on duty, but there were only seven arrests - two for alleged drug offences.
Police will quiz the organisers and those responsible for the land.

A spokesman said:

* An acid house bash, tagged The Heat, was smashed at the weekend because it was a FIRE RISK.

* Around 10,000 revellers were expected to head for a disused factory at West Bromwich, West Midlands.

* But the local council won an injunction to ban the party after fire experts declared the building unsafe.

* Only 30 youngsters, mainly from London, arrived at the factory, but were promptly turned away by the police.

"There could be criminal charges."

Michael Grylls, MP for North West Surrey, said: "It is a massive indictment of parents that they allow their children to attend this sort of thing."

Fellow Tory Terry Dicks said: "These parents should be fined, if not sent to prison."
Monks at a silent order at West Kingsdown, Kent, were disturbed by 3,000 at a nearby acid house party.

Master of a little-known DJ skill called Transformer Scratching (making a record sound like a robot's voice), James Dorrell was hailed as a pioneer of "English hip-hop". Dorrell, who was also in M/A/R/R/S (Pump Up The Volume), was interviewed in 1988 and said of Acid House:

"It's really crazy, psychedelic music. There's no real tune, just lots of studio technology. You can also scratch other bits of records over the top of the beat and add to the effect. The other day I found an amazing old record by Brian Clough of all people! I used this bit where he says, "He's got a good left foot that lad!" over a serious Chicago House groove. It sounded brilliant!"
Mind you, imagination and originality were needed. Dorrell again:

"If I hear another James Brown yelp or This is a journey into sound again I'll scream!"

Despite the '60s psychedelic references (particularly the return of the lava lamp, which became HUGE in the 1990s, reaching its highest ever sales), the new drug culture (just what was this ecstacy?!) and so on, followers of Acid House were not hippies. From what I saw, they were harder, more streetwise, more working class - "On One Matey!" rather than "Peace Man!" The music too was very different. 20th Century Words by John Ayto, describes it thus:

Acid House n (1988) a type of house music with a very fast beat, a spare, mesmeric, synthesised sound, and usually a distinctive gurgling bass noise. Also applied to the youth cult associated with this kind of music, characterised by a vogue for warehouse parties, a revival of psychedelia, and the taking of hallucinogenic drugs. "Acid" may well be the slang word for LSD, although many cultists claim that it comes from the record "Acid Trax" by Phuture (in the slang of Chicago, where this music originated in 1986, "acid burning" means "stealing", and the music relies heavily on "sampling" a polite word for stealing musical extracts).

Did you join in or want to put an end to the "menace"? From the "Sun", November 18, 1988.

Haysi Fantayzee

From the Daily Mirror, August 14, 1982:

Don't underestimate the hand-me-down appearance of Kate Garner and Jeremiah Healy, singers with rock group Haysi Fantayzee.

For it's their junk shop look that attracted the record companies when the group made their own promotional video.

And it led to a record contract and their current top twenty hit, John Wayne Is Big Leggy.

Jeremiah fondly remembers the video which the group put together for £150.

"I had a bass guitar on the end of an elastic strap."

I spent the whole time bouncing it up and down, just to show that I couldn't really play."

Both Kate and Jeremiah buy their clothes at second-hand shops and wear their hair in West Indian dreadlocks - a million miles away from the clean-cut, all-American style of John Wayne, the subject of their record.

But the group are keen to point out that despite the title, the hit isn't a tribute to him.

"People think because we've written a song with the name John Wayne in the title that we actually like him, but we don't," says the band's keyboard player Paul Caplin.

Kate says that none of the band have any real-life heroes.

"I used to have a few heroes until I met one at a party and suddenly discovered he wasn't very nice."

The kind of characters that the band look up to are fictional ones like Huckleberry Finn and many of Walt Disney's cartoon figures.

Jeremiah said: "People say we look like cartoon characters and we don't mind putting that kind of image across. We like to say serious things but in a cartoon-like way.

"We didn't set out to play cartoon music - it just turned out that way."

'80s Actual On Haysi Fantayzee - The Facts...

Jeremy Healy (or is it really Jeremiah?!) was a former Blitz Kid, and ex-schoolmate of Boy George. In 1981, aged 19, he joined forces with model and fashion photographer Kate Garner and her musician boyfriend Paul Caplin to form the weird and rather wonderful Haysi Fantayzee.

Paul had studied maths at Imperial College from 1975-1978. He had some musical success with New Romantic synth band Animal Magnet in 1981 (Welcome To The Monkey House - remember "I, I, Me, Me, Grab, Grab, Grab!!"?), then left to help set up and become a founder member of Haysi Fantayzee.

The Face magazine helped Haysi on its way in 1981. Says Jeremy:

"I had begun sprouting dreadlocks, which strangely enough was an excellent career move. It got my mostly imaginary group an article in The Face, and from that we blagged some demo time at EMI. Then we had to write something to record. At this time I was living in West Hampstead with Kate Garner and Paul Caplin in a flat he owned. I was the messiest person in the world with two feet of clothes covering the entire floor. Luckily the look was this Dickensian Rasta hybrid, so it didn't really matter that I was so raggedly turned out.

"Anyway it was here in this chaos that I found a little diamond. I wrote the lyrics for a silly song called 'John Wayne is Big Leggy'. It was an allergy for treatment of which the white settlers used, but on the Native American Indians. However, I wrote it like John Wayne having anal sex with a squaw. I thought this was hilarious! I've often been accused of having a childish sense of humour; I woke up everyone in the flat and announced I'd written our first hit record. We made our demos and shopped them around, and somehow, with our deranged songs and our strange looks, we landed our first record deal on my twentieth birthday."

Kate and Jeremy were the singers and front people of the band; Paul was mostly out of vision, writing songs and playing some instruments.

Quirky from the start, Haysi had traded on their distinctive fashion sense (dreadlocks meets hillbilly, meets circus master meets...) and sent out copies of Shiny Shiny as a low budget video and loads of publicity photographs to record companies. This was probably one of the first bands to win a recording contract largely on the strength of its visual image.

John Wayne Is Big Leggy charted in the UK in August 1982, and reached No 11. Follow-up Shiny Shiny charted in February 1983 and peaked at No. 16. These are the two songs which still haunt me (in the nicest possible way) to this day. But were they simply nonsensical cartoon pop? No, apparently not - it is said that Shiny Shiny was about the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse and John Wayne has some distinctly saucy and edgy lyrics!

The album Battle Hymns For Children Singing was released to a mixed reception, and finally in late 1983, Haysi split to pursue individual projects.

Jeremy would soon resurface on the popular music scene: in 1987, he and Boy George got into the newly emerging Acid House sensation. The result of this was the E-Zee Possee song Everything Starts With An 'E', released in 1989 and a chart hit in early 1990.

A great unofficial tribute site to Haysi Fantayzee can be found here.