It’s 30 years ago this summer that acid house exploded in the UK, triggering what’s now called the second summer of love and the biggest youth revolution since the 1960s. All inhibitions and barriers seemed to have dissolved in a heady mix of youth, summertime, the magical new music and, no doubt, a new empathy-inducing drug, called ecstasy, that many people had begun taking. A girl in a swimsuit tipped buckets of water over her sweat-drenched body. Girls crowded around the mirrors in the bathroom telling each other they were beautiful. From the moment you stepped on to the dance floor everybody loved you, and everyone was smiling and swigging out of each other’s water bottles. After the self-consciously cool West End club scene I’d dipped into in the mid-80s, the club night Spectrum was a revelation. The minute I was through the door I was swept into a cavernous room of flashing lasers, dry ice and sweating bodies.
I must have had the heads up on the attire as I was wearing baggy yellow surf shorts I’d just bought in San Diego, a far cry from the carefully curated layers of black that usually passed as a clubbing outfit, but other than that I had no idea what to expect. I’d arrived at Heaven nightclub, underneath the Charing Cross railway arches, on a hot Sunday afternoon to find my friends had already gone in – you didn’t risk hanging back and missing your chance – so I joined the queue of kids dressed in the acid house uniform of Day-Glo dungarees and smiley T-shirts.
I t was the year I got my first job, the year I broke up with my boyfriend, the year I flew to Barbados and met Imran Khan on a beach, but of all the crazy life-changing moments, none had more impact than the night I first experienced acid house, age 22, in the summer of 1988.
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