Welcome to How Clubbing Changed The World. Over the next two hours,
I'm going to show you how clubbing
completely transformed the world we live in. Yeah.
Clubbing is the most significant British cultural export
over the last 30 years...
it's a multi-million pound a year global industry,
it's the sound of your favourite popstar,
the look of your favourite shops,
it's changed the way we socialise, work, and how we holiday.
Clubbing has changed our attitudes to race, class, sexuality,
and even football. You don't believe me?
Turn it up. We're about to go deeeeep.
Subtitles by MemoryOnSmells http://UKsubtitles.ru. Support Us and Donate.
Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Disco.Detroit techno.
Electro house.
Drum and base.
I'm Idris Elba, DJ, actor, lifelong raver, clean-shaven.
Over the next two hours, I'm going to be counting down
40 of the most defining moments,
that have shown how clubbing's changed the world.
Now, we've consulted with the international clubbing community,
and this is what they came up with. That's right, people,
we've spoken to some proper club land heavyweights.
♪ You know you're only in it cos it's hot right now
♪ Hot right now Turn it up right now
♪ Put your hands in the air if you want it right now... ♪
The roots of the modern mass market phenomenon of clubbing
lie in the clubs of New York in the '70s, and Chicago in the '80s,
where disco and house music emerged.
The beats may have been born in America
but modern club culture as we know it is definitely British.
In the late '80s, UK youth chanced upon a drug and a music
that offered up an antidote to Thatcher's recession-hit Britain.
I'm going to show you how the cultural and political shockwaves
of this chemical and sonic collision can still be felt all around us.
You see, the influence of club culture has reached a new height
in the 21st century
as a fresh generation of British and European producers
and DJs are creating sounds that have revolutionised
success and the times when it all went a bit Pete Tong.
This, my fellow beat junkies, is how clubbing changed the world.
To understand how club culture
has become so ingrained in our modern lives,
we need to go back to a scene that started on New York's underground.
It was the '70s and the city was suffering.
In the '70s, New York was going through a real decline, financially.
A lot of businesses moving out,
you could just start a club almost for nothing.
These cheap, empty spaces gave underground clubbers
the freedom to do exactly what they wanted.
Clubs like Paradise Garage and The Loft
broke the mould and created a blueprint for the clubs today.
The Loft was my taste, my friends,
and continuous music.
You really could get lost in there.
Disco came out from a melting pot of black, Latino, straight, gay, white,
male, female as well.
This disco thing, that wasn't called disco, by the way, at the time,
we were just clubbing. And they were just playing hot records.
But, of course, once it becomes big, you need to put a label on it.
Disco exploded out of the underground
and into the public consciousness in 1977,
when a film called Saturday Night Fever hit the silver screen.
Because we want everyone to see John Travolta's performance,
Saturday Night Fever is now rated PG.
When people think about disco, they think about that film.
It was a hugely important film.
Saturday Night Fever the movie was about racism.
Dancing transformed this, you know, tough guy race,
you know it's like, "Hey, let's get in the car and go beat up the guys,
"you know, from the other neighbourhood." But when he's on
the dance floor, everybody's equal.
'Saturday Night Fever, rated PG.'
The film was a box-office phenomenon that penetrated British suburbia.
Even your gran in Skegness was learning how to do the dance.
Ten years later, however,
things in suburban club land didn't seem to have moved on all that much.
In 1987, record producer Pete Waterman developed a TV show
that aimed to capture the '80s British club scene.
That show was The Hit Man And Her.
Hello, welcome to The Hit Man And Her. This is the Hit Man.
And this is Her.
We're at Chorley at Camelot.
It was a representation of kind of cheesy nightlife
that did play kind of good dance tunes, but was only on,
and people only watched it because all the clubs shut,
and there was just nothing to do.
Let's go dancing, come on.
'This was the first night time television show.
'The whole point of The Hit Man And Her was, to reflect youth culture, '
the way it changes overnight sometimes.
But halfway through production,
there was a musical and cultural revolution.
Repetitive electronic beats in four four time.
House music was taking Britain by storm.
And these are the DJs, these are the guys.
They're mixing it as they're going along from one to the other.
This is what real club music's all about.
There was a kind of vacuum of voids before 1988,
and, you know, it was waiting for something to come in,
and that thing was acid house.
Acid house culture was like a revival of kind of the '60s
peace and love movement. And it was about unity and togetherness.
It was so incredible, the turnaround.
Discos were always a place to sort of be sort of slightly wary of.
But people were talking to each other,
people were hugging each other.
The Hit Man And Her accidentally captured the moment
this new underground British culture was thrust into the mainstream.
And the result was something uniquely chaotic.
Pete, what's the track?
I think it's... I'm not sure, actually.
Not Elvis Presley, that I do know.
This is warts and all, that's what it was like. There's a guy
taking a slash in the background at one point,
because he can't make it to the loo.
We'd like to say thank you for having us, and we'll see you soon.
Rave culture and the establishment
hasn't always been the easiest of bed fellows,
but, with the world's eyes on Britain for this summer's Olympics,
it was techno superstars, Underworld,
that were chosen to provide the soundtrack.
A lot of pressure on you.
Yes, and you can see I'm laughing hysterically.
Across the globe, what are we known for?
Rain, Beef eaters, rave.
Rave is the heart of our culture,
and now it's at the heart of the Olympic Opening Ceremony.
And that is right and appropriate.
Underworld being part of the Olympics
was a great opportunity to show the world,
"Yeah, when we party here, we know how to party."
If we went back, say, 30 years,
that wouldn't have happened for one minute.
But underworld wouldn't be taking electronic music
into the heart of the mainstream if it wasn't for this next lot.
None of us would have gotten involved in electronic music
if we hadn't heard Kraftwerk.
Kraftwerk didn't make music in a studio,
they constructed it in a laboratory.
And when they appeared on the BBC science show, Tomorrow's World,
in 1975, a whole generation was inspired to create electronic music.
♪ Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn
♪ Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn... ♪
Those sounds were out of this world.
Where did that come from?
I have no clue, how these sounds are being created.
♪ Weisse Streifen Gruener Rand... ♪
They had a, first of all, unique sound. They sounded like the future.
When you listen to it, you wonder, like, "How did they make this music?"
We all had that similar experience,
whether it was listening to Trans-Europe Express or Man Machine,
we were like, "Wow, so this is what people can do with electronic music."
I remember being drawn into Autobahn as a very young child.
It's one side and it's about a motorway that's really long,
and you can listen it and it's like a journey.
It's just this thing that goes on and on, what are they doing?
It's not even an instrument. I don't know what it is, there's just this bubbling sound.
These tracks are incredible and there's nothing still today that sounds like them.
From the Autobahn, to the A577.
In 1978, a casino in Wigan was voted above New York's Studio 54
in the Billboard Magazine Chart, as best disco in the world.
The worst sound system in the world was at Wigan Casino.
It was the pits.
But it really was the most amazing atmosphere.
♪ Misery is rushing down on me
♪ Like a landslide. ♪
I did go to Wigan Casino, it was truly amazing.
I mean, the music was really loud and it was just a sea of people.
You know, with talcum powder flying all over the place, it was wonderful.
♪ Baby, save me Don't you let me get caught
♪ Up in this landslide. ♪
Red Star Records from the industrial heart of America
had been the catalyst for a unique '70s club culture
in the heart of Northern England. Northern Soul.
Northern Soul was rare soul. '60s, mostly.
It's four by four music that sounds good when you're on drugs.
♪ Sometimes I feel I've got to
♪ Run away
♪ I've got to get away... ♪
For the first time ever,
the DJs had become absolutely quintessential entertainment.
When the DJ played that anthem, the whole place would dance.
I mean, everybody.
♪ Whoa, tainted love
♪ Whoa-oh-oh-oh Tainted love. ♪
Four to the floor beats, DJs, drugs, and all night dancing,
sounds familiar doesn't it?
But if you needed proof of the modern dominance of dance music,
you need to look no further than this man.
I cannot even imagine music that doesn't want to make you dance.
I wanted to share my passion for this music with the world.
In 2009, a certain Miss Kelly Rowland heard an instrumental track
of David Guetta's and convinced him to let her sing vocals.
♪ When love takes over
♪ Yea-ea-eah
♪ You know you can't deny. ♪
When Love Takes Over was born and, by the end of the year,
it had gone platinum in seven countries.
I'm like a Jedi, you know?
I'm focussed on what I do, and I don't do anything else.
Since then, everyone from Usher to Akon has come in search of some instant Guetta-fication.
He has become a modern pop phenomenon like no other.
I wake up, I eat and I make music all afternoon.
Then I take the plane, I go to a new city, I perform.
It is a little bit of a strange lifestyle, waking up,
you know, without knowing in what country you are.
The worst part of it is that I don't even ask myself any more.
That's my life.
To have this kind of life, you have to be totally obsessed by music.
It's like insane.
Do join me after the break as we follow clubbing boldly out onto the catwalk,
deep into the world of consumerism
and we go back to the very birth place of house music.
Dig out the white gloves, ravers, we're only just getting started.
Welcome back to our countdown of How Clubbing Changed the World.
Now, this is where clubbing and consumerism collide head-on.
Now, at its very heart, clubbing, raving, staying out all night,
whatever you wanna call it,
has always been about getting together
and letting yourself go, and throwing some serious shapes,
not something easy considering the clothes we were wearing in the '80s.
I think the designer era of the late '80s was all about restriction.
Very close to the body, big shoulders, you know, posing.
And it was about elitism.
♪ I want money That's what I want
♪ That's what I want... ♪
But when house music exploded out of the underground club scene,
things started to change.
Suddenly everyone was dressing down, cos people were just dancing.
And you couldn't be dressed up to the nines,
because you were on the dance floor,
the stroboscope was flashing, you'd be sweating like crazy.
There was this kind of hippy, bonkers sort of look
that kinda crept in.
Acid house was actually looked down on,
very much by these fashion people.
It was only when it got too big to ignore,
that suddenly people started to take it seriously.
As the '80s gave way to the '90s,
even the rarefied world of high fashion
began to take notice of clubbing's free and easy approach.
London designer, Rifat Ozbek, caught the mood of the times
with his White Collection in 1990.
Rifat was a good mate of mine.
Really loves dance music, and he was one of the first people
to kind of pick up on the significance of clubbing.
A lot of the big fashion houses suddenly realised, you know,
we can't go on selling to these, you know,
super rich people who are sort of now heading for their 50s.
And a huge youth quake happened.
Suddenly people like McQueen were asked to design
for fashion houses in Paris.
It was that moment that you saw how something from a small club
can then translate onto a bigger scene.
As the popularity of club culture grew in the '90s,
people began to wise up to the marketing potential.
Nothing demonstrates electronic music's relationship
with consumerism better than Moby's album Play.
Released in 1999, initially nobody was buying it.
We put out this record.
At first no-one was interested in it, and then
we got a few licensing requests, so I simply just sort of,
for better or worse, probably for worse,
just kind of said yes to a lot of things.
Advertising execs loved what they heard and,
ten months after it was released,
every single track on the album had been licensed
for use in TV, adverts and films.
Suddenly the album was a pop phenomenon.
Every aspect of it was completely accidental.
There was no strategy.
The success of the album signals electronic music's ability
to sell everything from family cars to chocolate.
'Thornton's, chocolate heaven.'
The thing that's most important about electronic music is
that it just carries you away.
I think that that's the thing that brands really want to do now.
Last year's DJ Fresh-inspired Lucozade campaign was a classic example.
♪ Louder
♪ Stronger... ♪
It does fit really well,
and I think it's really good to just be hearing it everywhere.
I used to work on the Lucozade business,
rave culture and clubbing transformed that business.
It was a bit more of a freedom drink than Coca-cola and Pepsi,
which were the establishment.
There's been an on-going co-opting of not just club culture,
but sort of like club aesthetics.
On a more mainstream retail level, it is a little bit disconcerting.
For brands, clubbing represents an attractive, energetic lifestyle.
But there is another aspect of club culture that has filtered into
our every day lives.
And it all started in a cafe on the island of Ibiza.
It's a place to watch the sunset in San Antonio.
He was playing the right music and they start to make CDs
and they got a massive success.
After raving it up all night, most people need to relax.
In 1994, Cafe Del Mar released their first compilation album
to cater to this need.
A whole new genre was born. Chill out.
These compilations really were the brand that started this sound,
and they went on to sell millions.
Ironically, chill out has become the sound track to our daily grind.
It is the sound of your bank putting you on hold,
or getting your legs waxed.
The aesthetics of the chill out area have also influenced the look
of the modern corporate environment.
Our whole world has been reconstructed by night clubs.
You look at this chair, this chair would have been in a chill out area
in Space in 1989, but it's now in an office, in 2012.
Offices look like chill out areas.
They're cool, they're designed, they're basically a nightclub.
Foxtons is a really good example.
They've turned the estate agency concept on its head.
They ripped it all out, and turned it into a chill out room.
A bar environment.
I think they do it now without even realising.
But dance music isn't always as cool and sophisticated
as it likes to think it is.
I was doing The Hitman and Her at Sale, the guy said
"Ladies and gentlemen, Pete Waterman."
Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah, I just went, "What the shit is this?"
I literally took the record off him, and phoned the guy in Belgium
and bought the record before I started filming the recording.
♪ Y'all ready for this?
In 1991, Pete Waterman released 2 Unlimited's Get Ready For This.
It stormed the charts globally, and euro house has become the
soundtrack to our summer holidays ever since.
♪ Yeah! Yeah!... ♪
Every year there's one record that completely dominates the charts,
in kind of August and September time,
that has been the big holiday island smash.
♪ Oh, we're going to Ibiza Woah!
♪ Back to the island... ♪
These are cheesy, horrible, horrible records,
but the very core of them, it just means holiday.
But enough of these cheesy holiday tracks,
it's time to go back, way back.
To the birthplace of house.
The year is 1984, and the city is Chicago.
It started here in Chicago, it's just a real underground thing.
You made the music out of your home.
We didn't have money to buy this stuff, you know, so
everyone had to borrow everybody's equipment, so you might have
one drum machine or keyboard going all through the city of Chicago.
House is really a raw, simplified version of disco.
DJs like Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy began playing these
homemade disco tracks at clubs, such as the Music Box and The Warehouse.
House music was born.
From this moment on, the sound of clubbing would be electronic.
Whatever Frankie would play at The Warehouse, that is house music,
everybody just went nuts over it.
The music that they heard, they heard nowhere else in the city.
All of a sudden these little parties start popping up.
Some of them would have signs in their window that say,
"We play house music."
It was contagious, you know, the whole city got into it.
In 1987, a Chicago house track called Jack Your Body
by Steve Silk Hurley
went straight to number one in the UK charts,
with virtually no radio support.
♪ Jack, jack, jack your body
♪ Jack your, jack your body
♪ Jack, jack, jack your body
♪ Jack your, jack your body... ♪
Jack Your Body went to number one, somehow.
Still don't know to this day how it did, but it went to number one.
But that was the power of house music.
Jack your body was a black and white video of people
kind of jazz dancing, and I thought, "That is so cool."
It was just so different to what you were hearing on the radio.
So different to what pop culture sounded like.
Jack Your Body brought house music to Europe.
With the success of that, they were flying us out there in droves.
A music with no popular appeal in America whatsoever
had found its way across the Atlantic, and been embraced
by a new generation of British youth, hungry for change.
♪ Gotta have house
♪ Music, all night long
♪ With that house
♪ Music, you can't go wrong...
It was after four or five years of this bleak economic landscape
of the UK then, bang, house music. It was like "Yes!"
♪ Set me free... ♪
To me, it was a minority kind of music here in America.
And, first time I went to the UK,
and I'm thinking, "It's all white people here."
I hate to say this but, at that time, nobody could dance.
Not like the States, man.
These people were dancing all goofy, they didn't care how
they were looking, they were horrible dancers, right?
But I love that, because they didn't care, man,
cos it was just about having a good time.
♪ Gonna set you free... ♪
Where would house be without the UK?
The birth was Chicago, to take it global was the UK.
No sooner had Chicago house conquered the UK
then another sound was beginning to emerge from neighbouring Detroit.
That sound was techno.
Chicago House had more kind of, it was wonderfully electronic,
but it had like a great sort of foot hold in disco, whereas I think
Detroit techno had a kind of science fiction element to it.
It was looking forward.
The music from Detroit was slightly more harder edged
and slightly more industrial.
Because Detroit was a pretty hardcore town.
Detroit is the grimmest place I've ever been to in my life.
And it was making this amazing, euphoric, electronic music.
In 1987, a track called Strings Of Life by Derek May's,
Rhythim Is Rhythim exploded onto the underground.
Detroit techno had truly arrived.
If you listen to Strings Of Life, this was just phenomenal that record.
And when the piano dropped it made you cry, it made you laugh,
all these emotions came out when you heard that,
you just thought "Wow, I'm here."
We'd not heard strings in movement of this speed.
And, you know, on top of something so industrial and spare
and stripped down.
And so it was kinda like strings, and industry just met head on, man,
and it just made this most beautiful noise.
Despite its huge influence, techno remained an underground phenomenon.
But, in 1988,
Kevin Saunderson's Inner City released a track called Big Fun,
and the sound of Detroit techno hit the UK top ten.
♪ We don't really need a crowd to have a party... ♪
I wasn't planning on having hits,
didn't think about having a hit actually,
I just wanted to make a great track with a vocal on it.
And it just took off and kind of changed my life.
♪ Having big fun
Those chord stamps and then that beautiful vocal, over the top.
I've gone goose pimply thinking about it.
♪ We're having big fun
The first time I heard Big Fun play in the UK, I mean,
the whole club just, everybody, just was on the dance floor,
and it just blew me away.
Completely smashed the place to smithereens. Brilliant.
♪ We're having big fun... ♪
Still today when I play that record now, people are like, "Yep, tune."
♪ We're having big fun... ♪
The record Big Fun, that's when I realised
the underground had kind of gone into the overground.
♪ Let me take you to a place I know you wanna go
♪ It's a good life
♪ Hey, hey, hey... ♪
Inner City's next release Good Life was an instant classic,
and its influence of modern artists is still felt today.
Good life, for me, just represents everything I love about a club tune.
To write a song about joy and to write a song about being happy,
is actually really hard.
♪ Love is shining, life is thriving in the good life
♪ Good life
You can't make a record that good. You put on Good Life,
you'll be like, "I don't know how to make a record that good."
That's completely original.
The whole techno movement, the whole Detroit thing,
it made electronic music soulful.
It was the first time I felt emotion, like deep emotions that
I used to feel with funk and soul, you know, from electronic music.
♪ Good life... ♪
Yes, I'll be right back.
Now, join me after the break,
as club culture terrifies the drink industry,
gets its melon twisted in Madchester,
and a few blokes from Croydon
completely change the face of popular music. Peace.
Welcome back.
We're counting down
the most significant moments
in the history of club culture.
Now, ever since Buddy Holly strapped on a guitar back in the '50s,
rock and roll has been the world's dominant youth culture,
but, with the rise of house music in the late '80s,
it seemed that Britain had suddenly left rock and roll for dead.
In Manchester, a handful of bands were beginning to be influenced by this new sound.
In November 1989,
The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays
appeared on Top Of The Pops.
A new scene dubbed Madchester came gurning into our living room.
Madchester was the moment clubbing changed rock and roll,
and The Happy Mondays were on a mission to twist everybody's melon, man.
♪ You're twisting my melon, man
♪ You know, you talk so hip, man You're twisting my melon, man. ♪
They were working-class lads that weren't necessarily
the best musicians, but had a special togetherness.
♪ He's going to step on you again He's going to step on you... ♪
You have a band that were kind of indie, NME based,
but with great rolling, driving beats.
That's what British youth culture has always done better
than anyone else in the world.
They've always used all their influences and put them together, and come up with something amazing.
The relentless rise of club culture meant Britain's youth wanted
to party later than ever before.
And, in 1989, a club called Turnmills in London
was granted the first all-night music and dance license.
♪ 24 hour party people... ♪
When I first started going out clubbing,
you could not go to a nightclub after two o'clock.
Clubs used to shut at two. Now it seems really early.
You know, everybody used to look forward
to a four o'clock, six o'clock finish, you know,
the all-nighter was the real holy grail of going out.
The way Britain wanted to party had changed.
Suddenly the idea of going to a pub was out of date.
The drinks industry had to react.
What happened, initially, with house music is people stopped boozing,
but they still carried on getting out of it.
It's not like they were all raving sober.
They were out of it in a different way.
The alcohol industry looked round and thought, "Right,
"we need to wise up fast."
If you went to a pub in the '70s or early '80s
there'd be a bunch of men that got away from their wives,
nursing a warm pint of beer.
What the drinks industry did was it lobbied government,
and they opened up a whole new world,
and that was basically the world of All Bar One.
All Bar One is the kind of totem of that '90s drinks culture.
All Bar One essentially was meant to be a kind of pre-club,
maybe even slightly clubby environment,
so hard surfaces so that the music sounds good.
You stand up at the bar, and there's big windows
so that men walk past can see there's loads and loads of fit women in there.
But it wasn't just pub environments that were reacting.
The drinks themselves were being aimed at a younger, clubbier crowd.
I think that alcopops were designed with clubbers in mind.
Because, essentially, if you're dancing, you don't want to be holding a pint.
20 years down the line, we have binge-drink Britain.
Your Saturday night out has changed for ever.
From Cardiff city centre to Los Angeles in our countdown,
the 2012 Grammys were dominated by one unlikely artist.
A kid from LA called Skrillex.
He might look like a Goth,
but his beats are the nastiest and bassiest to ever hit the US.
Skrillex got three Grammys for making really, really hard dubstep
that would scare even me, never mind my parents.
Skrillex winning three Grammys, going up on the podium and shouting out,
"The Croydon Dub Crew," was a massive, massive moment.
Yeah, that's right.
A three-time Grammy winner was inspired by a homebrew sound
from South London.
Its roots are in Croydon and South London.
Croydonia.
At a record shop, really, where I used to work,
the blueprint was created by, like, nine or ten producers in the shop.
Dubstep was a totally new direction for electronic music.
People didn't know how to dance to it.
It was half-time drums, it seemed really slow to everyone
and it didn't make sense.
Then it did.
From Croydon to stadiums across America,
dubstep has become one of the most sought-after sounds in modern pop.
Even Britney Spears wants a piece of it.
There was the Britney record where it was like everyone was talking about,
"It's got a dubstep bit in it."
I still can't get my head round it though, it's insane.
These days we take British innovation for granted.
But, in 1983, before house music was even invented,
a track exploded onto the UK dance floors
that sounded a bit like it had been sent from the future
to give us a slap.
That weird record, that starts with this,
"De, de," then, "de-de-de-de-de-de-de."
What's that? You can't do that.
Out of the ashes of post-punk band Joy Division came New Order.
And with their 1983 track Blue Monday
they turned the generation on to the power of electronic music,
and really short shorts.
Blue Monday legitimised electronic dance music for a lot of people
because it involved New Order, who had so much credibility
because they had been Joy Division.
Suddenly, it was OK for punk rockers
and people who were into new wave to like dance music.
♪ How does it feel to treat me like you do?
♪ When you laid your hands upon me
♪ And told me who you are. ♪
Kraftwerk became a big inspiration, and it was finding a way of emulating that.
It was done in binary code
in those days, which was absolutely unbelievable.
They were the pioneers. They were the first.
There's no other British band that made electronic music like that.
It was incredible that, you know, you can play it now
and it still sounds as fantastic as it did in 1982.
Blue Monday went on to become
the biggest-selling 12-inch record of all time.
Four years later, in 1987,
although we had fallen in love with house music from the States,
we weren't making it ourselves.
But all of that was about to change.
There was a kind of race to see who was going to be the first
new breed of British DJ to put out a DJ record.
Cold Cut got there first,
and, of course, MARRS' Pump Up The Volume came out.
And I thought, "How can I take the house sound and make it something that's mine?"
So, I came up with Theme From S-Express.
I thought "Oh, my God, what have I done?
"I've made a disco/house hybrid record,
"people are going to crucify me, they're going to kill me."
The Theme From S-Express was released in April of 1988,
and went to number one.
But, while that track was a big tune on the UK charts,
it was a track called Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald
that became the defining British acid house anthem.
Voodoo Ray, you know, when I heard that,
I couldn't believe that an English person had made that record.
You're just like, "Wow, this guy from Manchester's made this."
I just remember hearing that, thinking "Oh, there's a way forward, that's brilliant."
The feeling of the bass line in Voodoo Ray
was like the hollow echoing sound of The Hacienda,
and the toms and the drums were basically
the steps or the dancers, like, stepping.
Voodoo Ray went Top 20 in 1989,
a track made for the UK's clubbing underground had become a pop sensation.
I was very surprised about Voodoo Ray getting into the charts.
It was mainly, like, an underground acid house track,
and not anything to do with chart music.
These days being a club DJ is as cool as it gets.
But it hasn't always been that way.
If you told anyone you were a DJ in the '70s, a full-time club DJ,
they'd just assume you worked at Butlins.
When I started DJing
you were just above the glass collector in the pond life of clubs.
DJs were the naffest people in the world.
Suddenly it became the coolest thing.
♪ Superstar DJs Here we go. ♪
In 1993 Paul Oakenfold was asked to support
the biggest stadium rock band on the planet, U2,
on their world tour.
In that moment the superstar DJ was born.
♪ Superstar DJs Here we go. ♪
I never thought I'd get offered a tour as the opening act in stadiums with U2.
I think the tag of the superstar DJ only came about
because we was playing to so many people.
The two monitors, turntables and mixer, and a DJ,
rocking the house of 20,000 people.
Never before had club DJs been so idolised.
By the late '90s, DJs had officially become the new rock stars.
There was a period in the '90s when, you know,
there was a ridiculous amount of money being spent on DJs
and it was great.
I done Mick Jagger's 50th birthday party, then they asked me
to go on tour with The Rolling Stones.
But I said no.
Because they wouldn't pay me enough money.
Most DJs aren't really oil paintings to look at
but become superstars, sort of, by default
because we put bums on seats, and so we get treated like rock stars.
So, there you have it,
from the village disco to the biggest venues in the world,
the club DJ has conquered it all.
Pack your glow sticks and join me after the break
as we head out to the sunny island of Ibiza,
we try and figure out what the blouse and skirts Jimmy Savile has to do with all of this,
and get our heads around some proper dirty drum and bass.
Selecta!
Welcome back.
We've been counting down the most defining moments
in the history of clubbing.
To fully understand the explosion on the modern club culture,
we have to hop on a plane to Ibiza.
Terrible.
In 1987, a young Paul Oakenfold decided to
celebrate his birthday on the island with a few mates.
What they discovered would change the course of club culture forever.
It was my birthday and I wanted to go to Ibiza
and spend it with my friends.
Four of us went on holiday to Ibiza
to celebrate Paul Oakenfold's birthday.
That's when house music was emerging
and there was all these wonderful open-air clubs.
One night, the birthday party went to a club called Amnesia
for an experience they'd never forget.
You're on holiday, dancing under the stars,
it's the first time I'd been in an environment where I felt free.
The man on the decks at Amnesia was a DJ called Alfredo,
and his non-stop eclectic mix of tunes created a vibe
that the lads from London had never experienced before.
Basically, I tried to play music from every country.
Every style, of every time.
You're listening to Cyndi Lauper, next to Run DMC,
next to Farley Jackmaster Funk doing a house record.
And you're like, "Well, where the hell are we going here?"
I know for a fact if someone had done that in London in '87,
people would have thrown bottles at him.
Once you set it in a magical setting,
it just becomes something that people,
you know, that they just live for it.
The sensation I got from the dance floor, the atmosphere,
I wanted to make them dance.
I really wanted to make them dance.
What they had discovered
was an entirely new Balearic clubbing lifestyle,
and they were determined to take the vibe back home with them.
We didn't really want the holiday to end,
so we ended up bringing the music back with us.
It was, "OK, we're gonna do this back in London", that's what we did.
And we went our separate ways and we did our own thing.
The holiday that has gone down in clubbing folklore.
But what exactly did they do when they got back to London?
Well, bear with me, we'll get to that later.
The figure of the club DJ became so big in the '90s that suddenly
any pop star worth their salt wanted a piece of clubbing's cool.
The age of the club remix was upon us.
♪ And I miss you
♪ Like the deserts miss the rain... ♪
I think, in the '90s, what basically happened
was people understood that power of dance music.
And then you got a large amount of records that were being released
where the remix was better than the original version.
In 1996 Armand Van Helden was asked to remix a song
by a kooky American songstress, Tori Amos.
The result bore no relation to the original whatsoever,
and took the idea of the remix to a whole new planet.
I was given Tori Amos' Professional Widow original with the parts.
♪ Prism perfect
♪ Honey bring it close to your lips, yes... ♪
The song is not a very radio-friendly crossover type record.
♪ It's got to be big, I said... ♪
I have the bass track, which is just a guy on the base for 3? minutes.
You know, live bass. ♪ Do-do-do, do-do-do. ♪
I just heard one little bar,
I was like, "oh!" And then I looped that bar, and there's your bass.
I just found little vocal snippets, chopped them up on the sampler,
like she would say something, I would hit a line and hit a line,
and it's almost like
so you're kind of like making another melody with the vocals.
♪ Honey bring it close to my
♪ Honey bring it close to my lips, yeah
♪ Honey bring it close to my
♪ Honey bring it close to my... ♪
Armand Van Helden turned it into a worldwide smash.
These remixes were so good, they were so much better
than the original version that it's completely reinvented
the way that we look at producers, the way that we look at musicians,
and the way that we kind of look at music in popular culture.
Pop quiz.
Who invented the art of club DJing as we know it?
David Mancuso? Grandmaster Flash? No, think again.
Hello, ladies and gentlemen. How are you today?
Jimmy Savile did invent the DJ in the way we know it today.
There's no question.
♪ Jim has fixed it for you... ♪
In 1947, a young ex-miner called Jimmy Savile
became the first person to play records continuously,
and charge people to come and hear him play.
First DJ I ever saw with two decks was Jimmy Savile.
And, I have to tell you, he was fantastic.
When this record was playing on this side,
I'm getting the record ready for this side.
And the fellow says, "My God, are they in that much of a hurry?"
And I said, "Yes, my people are",
and that's where the two decks came from.
And now that's a worldwide phenomenon.
Top groups, top records, top everything.
In the early '90s house music began to get harder,
faster, and fragment into different styles,
jungle, hardcore, hard house, trance, happy hardcore,
speed garage, UK garage, drum n' bass.
But, their essential DNA remain the same,
electronic beats you could dance to.
One of the catalysts for this musical fragmentation
was a club called Rage, put on by DJs Fabio and Groove Rider.
We noticed that when we was kind of like,
kind of embellishing the music with break beat,
the energy changed a bit.
♪ Let me hear you... ♪
It got a little bit more darker, a little bit more people were
kind of grooving in a slightly different way.
It was our chance for us to create this proto-jungle style.
When a young raver called Goldie went to Rage,
he was inspired to start creating tracks of his own.
Goldie had so much swagger that,
even though I didn't know who he was,
I was like, "Who's this guy?" His pivotal moment came with Terminator.
What was different about it was Goldie used time stretching,
for the first time ever.
♪ You're talking about things I haven't done yet... ♪
There was a lot of equipment in the studio,
and I'd seen a HF harmoniser.
The daddy.
♪ Terminator is out there... ♪
By misusing an old piece of guitar kit, Goldie invented
a revolutionary technique called time stretching.
If you want to play a guitar at one pitch you can play it,
but then if you want to sound like it's ten guitars you can have
guitars playing pitch down and guitars playing up.
But they're playing at the same time. Hmm.
So, if I put break beat through that, digital break beat?
"I don't know, no-one's ever done it."
I'm like, "Let's wire it up."
In that moment the pitched up sounds of jungle became
the serious sounds of drum n' bass.
We're running this break beat, it was the funky drummer,
on constant loop, and I remember holding it.
And I said, "Check this out, it goes duf duf, duf duf.
"Let's try do do do, doo doo, doo doo, doo doo."
And it was just like the most,
it was like every hair on every follicle on my entire body
just stood up, and it was like, "What the hell have we just done?"
Drum n' bass before was kind of slighted for,
this music was speeded up vocals, it sounded cartoonish,
and this was serious, this was science.
♪ Inner city life
♪ Inner city pressure... ♪
In 1995 Goldie released Timeless, it was a genre defining album,
and cemented Goldie as the popular face of drum n' bass.
I think with drum n' bass,
you can't hark back to anything in the past that sounded like it.
It was the first thing since punk, that we could call British,
ours, it was invented here.
I was a big drum n' bass and jungle fan at the time,
and the UK kept that thing like the royal crown.
I mean, they were not letting anybody get a touch on it.
My solution basically was,
"Yeah, OK, but nobody's put it over house beats, dancing."
In 1996 Armand Van Helden's remix of Sneaker Pimps' Spin Spin Sugar
accidentally created an entirely new sound.
Speed Garage.
In essence, it was a house record but he took a real strong
jungle sort of bass line, and added it to American garage beats.
From that speed garage was born,
and from speed garage, the two-step sound came.
♪ With a little bit of luck we can make it through the night
♪ With a little bit of luck we can make it through the night... ♪
The roots of UKG and even though it's like the US... has come from US house,
we kind of took it and kind of stamped our own way.
♪ Hollering the rinsin' sound
Hollering the rinsin' sound
♪ With a little bit of luck... ♪
I can one word it. Catchy.
Yeah, OK.
That's it. Little Bit Of Luck, catchy. You don't forget it.
Artful Dodger, Rewind, catchy. You don't forget it.
♪ Re-rewind
♪ Enter Selector... ♪
In 1999, Artful Dodger featuring an unknown Craig David went platinum.
UK garage was suddenly a household sound.
The first time I heard that was at like an under-18s thing
in Croydon, and it was likethesong.
Like, everybody just went mad, girls were screaming.
♪ From the front to the back, that's where I was at
♪ You know, you know the Artful Dodger do it like that... ♪
It was different, it was kinda weird, like, you know, a bit wacky,
and there was a lot of fun in it.
There's certain sounds in it that if you heard in a record now
you'd go, "Oh, my God." There's like a little oink.
But it made sense, it was huge, that record.
♪ When the crowd go wild... ♪
That was the record that introduced the world to Craig David.
And, for a lot of people, that was the record that introduced
a lot of people to this two step sound.
♪ Do you really like it? Do you really like it?
♪ We're lovin' it, lovin' it, lovin' it
♪ We're lovin' it like this... ♪
UK garage was the moment that clubbing got seriously blingy.
♪ We're lovin' it, lovin' it, lovin' it
♪ We're lovin' it like this... ♪
You'd see huge crews of people driving around in Audi TTs,
drinking champagne.
You know, DJs being given wads of cash.
It did get very, very bling, very champagne.
Everyone was like, had the champagne life, with like lemonade wage.
Do you really like it? Is it, is it wicked?
Course it is.
Don't go anywhere, folks, when we get back,
club culture goes for a spin around the M25,
picks a fight with the police,
flirts with Tony Blair, and we go back to the night
that set the template for modern British clubbing.
Sin.
Welcome back to our countdown of clubbing's most significant moments.
I'm Idris Elba, in case you were wondering.
Now, in the late '80s, as the popularity of house music exploded,
a whole generation wanted to dance all night long.
Unlicensed warehouse parties in city centres were springing up everywhere
but the police would shut them down.
This new British youth movement was reaching critical mass
and something had to give.
I think the kids just felt like, "We need something."
And, you know, the funny thing was, there was a feeling this was coming.
You know, it felt like a revolution.
It really, really did.
A handful of young entrepreneurial house-heads began organising
huge illegal raves in secret locations around the M25.
In a world before Facebook and mobiles, getting to raves was a bit of a mission.
Well, apparently only one person knows where it is.
What, in the whole place?
Getting to the party
was equally as exciting as actually being at the party.
What happened, you'd go to buy the tickets, when you bought the ticket
you were then given phone numbers that you'd call from call boxes.
'Thank you for calling the location information line concerning biology.'
We had to put our 10p in to find out where these parties were
and then get out our A-Z, our street maps and work out
where we were going to be going at two o'clock in the morning.
If you're going to find this party, you've got to get on the M25, find exit number 15 and awayyou go.
I remember, like a scene from Close Encounters,
we just saw this light beaming from about a mile in front of us
and we was like, "Wow, that's it."
Overnight, the M25 raves became a matter of national concern.
Middle England was outraged
and the man in charge of policing this new phenomenon
was former Chief Superintendent Ken Tappenden.
When this all first started, we were quite mystified.
We didn't know what to think and we were bemused by it.
In these small towns, the biggest problem they had was,
like, missing cats and dogs
and here they had 30,000 people off their head on drugs.
My constituents were ringing up, saying that
"There is an absolute commotion and chaos here in the village.
"Just hundreds of cars have appeared with thousands of people.
"They're all going to some kind of show and, my God, we can hear it."
♪ I cannot bear to see you leave me
♪ I'm begging you, don't go
♪ Begging you, begging you... ♪
As you can see, this is the expanse of the field
and you can see how, eventually, there was 20,000 people
in this field and no way could we stop that for three nights.
What they couldn't understand was here were all these people
that had the ability to mobilise thousands and thousands of young people every weekend.
The government and the police were looking for the ulterior motive.
They just didn't understand that all it was for
was so that people could go and take drugs in a field.
I had never seen anything like it in my life
and neither had the MPs when we called them out.
They could not believe we can't do anything
and someone put in the paper
they thought they saw the Commander dancing.
But the music was wonderful.
That M25 raves were clubbing as it had never been seen before
and, against the backdrop of Thatcher's Britain,
they reflected a divided generation's desire to get together and party as one.
This wasn't an elitist thing, it wasn't just about London
and cool people.
This was about everyone.
Everyone could be a part of this.
A party for everyone.
Sounds like a politician's dream.
In their 1997 election campaign,
Labour presented themselves as a young, with it alternative to the previous Tory government.
Modern, forward looking, utterly in tune with the times and instincts.
What we do say is that Britain can be better.
♪ Things can only get better... ♪
At number 15, it's Labour campaign anthem
Things Can Only Get Better by D: Ream.
A club banger that had been around for four years.
Of course, young people like catchy tunes
and it was no doubt very effective
as part of Labour's appeal in the '97 election.
But was it just a handy slogan
or was Labour trying to speak to a whole new generation
of Cool Britannia clubbers in a new way?
Blair was the new wave, wasn't he?
He would adopt anything and everything to make himself
look cool to those people and it kind of worked for a while.
♪ ..Can only get better... ♪
How much this song swung Labour's landslide victory we'll never know
but, any way you cut it, raving politicians?
No, mate.
While Tony Blair was moving into 10 Downing Street,
two French producers called Daft Punk
were redefining the limits of what dance music could be.
In the 1997 they released their debut album Homework.
People weren't able to pull off dance music albums before Daft Punk.
It was totally way off what was happening at that time.
They were such big risk takers.
Like Around The World, let's just say.
Slow and had the vocal and everything.
It was like, "What? No. What is that?" It was crazy.
♪ Around the world Around the world
♪ Around the world Around the world... ♪
But it wasn't just their sound that blew people's minds.
Dance music videos were always, like, cheap, cheesy and, you know,
Daft Punk came, working with the best directors, like...
They were coming with an artist statement and that was new.
The follow-up album, Discovery,
turned the generation of kids into urban beats on to house.
A lot of kids of my generation with a similar background to me,
that was the album.
Because what they did is they made a house album with hip-hop techniques.
♪ Harder, better faster, stronger. ♪
Kanye West was introduced to Daft Punk by DJ A-Trak.
That then resulted in Kanye sampling Daft Punk on Stronger.
♪ N-N-Now that that don't kill me
♪ Can only make me stronger
♪ I need you to hurry up now
♪ Cos I can't wait much longer. ♪
Most of the music from Homework on till now in dance music
and, by the way, and R&B and rap now
- homage to Daft Punk. Without a doubt.
♪ Our work is never over
♪ Work it harder... ♪
They are the Led Zeppelin of dance music, as far as I'm concerned.
♪ Our work is never over. ♪
Right, remember the holiday Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling took in Ibiza?
Good.
Well, here's what happened when they got back to the UK.
In Ibiza, we found something that no-one else did
and when you find something no-one else does and it's fantastic,
the first thing you want to do is share it.
Paul Oakenfold and Danny were trying to recreate the scene that they had found in Ibiza.
God bless them, they wanted to recreate that on Streatham High Road
on a wet Thursday which shows a beautiful, you know,
it's a beautiful dream to have.
Determined to recreate the Balearic vibe,
the boys started their own club night.
Danny and Jenny Rampling's club Shoom which opened in 1987
has gone down in clubbing folklore.
I created a club called Shoom in a basement in SE1
which was a very rundown area on the South Bank of London.
We were left alone to do what we wanted, really.
Within months,
Shoom helped transform a holiday epiphany into a clubbing phenomenon.
In complete contrast to other clubs at the time,
Shoom was a place where everybody could party.
You had black and white people dancing. You know.
In the '80s it was kind of a bit like black guys danced.
You know, white guys stood around the side and watched, you know what I mean?
This was for everyone.
♪ As we walk hand in hand
♪ Sister, brother
♪ We'll make it to the promised land... ♪
I was talking to some posh girl
and I said that my dad was a painter
and she said, "Oh, fantastic.
"My mum has got a gallery in Mayfair.
"Maybe we could get him in."
And I was like, "No, he works for Greater London Council.
"He paints garages, doors."
That's really where the blueprint for the rave scene came out of, Shoom, actually.
It was an intoxicating mix,
to say the least.
Shoom had set the blueprint for the modern clubbing experience
but the design for the first flyer would give birth
to the unifying logo of the acid house generation.
Danny Rampling approached me and said I need a flyer.
The only requirement he asked for, to this day I remember, was,
"I want smiley faces on it."
Originally designed in 1964 as a logo for an insurance company,
the smiley face was hijacked briefly
by American counterculture in the '70s
before crashing back into popular consciousness
with acid house in the late '80s.
♪ You hear it in Phuture Shoom and Spectrum
♪ We call it acid. ♪
We adopted the logo.
It represented what we were about, peace, love, unity and happiness.
But, to the establishment and the tabloid press,
the smiley face came to symbolise the evil of acid house.
That symbol was our culture and they made it,
"Oh, anything to do with that, that symbol is bad, is evil."
The smiley face was the symbol for the acid house generation.
It represented how we were feeling.
It's just a secret Masonic signal of, "Yeah, I'm down with that."
But if we are talking about clubbing
and branding then none come bigger than this.
Ministry of Sound was started by a bunch of people
who had an absolute obsession
to recreate a state-of-the-art New York nightclub.
In 1991, a disused bus shelter just up the road from Shoom
opened its doors for the first time.
The Ministry of Sound would quickly establish itself
as the most powerful brand in clubland.
It was the first time where what we had as a cottage industry
became an industry and that was the significance of the Ministry.
It's always been that backbone to everything else that's gone on.
In the wake of Ministry's success,
other clubs like Renaissance, Fabric and Cream opened around the UK.
This was the age of the super club.
When I was resident at Cream, I used to go up there every single Saturday.
Two years, every single Saturday
and people would drive from all over the country.
It was amazing.
It was a very, very good time for the club scene here in the UK.
The '90s was the golden era.
By the turn of the millennium, the bubble had burst.
The golden age of the super clubs may now be over
but the power of the brands they created have extended
far beyond the confines of the nightclub.
The super clubs, you know, were more about a lifestyle rather than an environment.
I mean, the Ministry has gone through any number of musical evolutions
but its alternative, live for the moment lifestyle
has lasted a lot longer than any of the individual forms of music that it plays.
Can you feel that?
No? OK.
That, my brethrens and brethren-ettes,
is the feeling of the top 10 on the horizon.
Now, you stick around cos we are going to go clubbing in Manchester,
look at how the dancefloor has taken the gay culture
into the mainstream and play with a machine
that kick-started the revolution in the music industry.
Boom.
This is it, we're in top ten territory now,
there's no turning back.
Now, despite having a huge following in the early '90s,
dance music was still operating on the margins.
Unlicensed warehouse parties
and outlaw raves were where you got your fix.
The last place anyone expected dance music to succeed
was Glastonbury Festival.
Home of hippies, crusties and rock and roll.
There was this real sense that there was a lack of, you know,
dance music, or acid house, at Glastonbury.
It took a while to seep in.
They had sort of jazz world
and blues world and everything, but there wasn't a dance tent.
And, so, we always just used to play little side parties
out of burger vans and things like that.
But, in 1994, two brothers who played techno
with torches strapped to their heads,
were booked to play the Other Stage.
No-one was quite sure how it was going to go down.
I remember being back stage tuning my synths,
probably for the 20th time,
and I just heard the roar of the crowd for the first time.
I was just getting sicker and sicker,
I actually vomited before I went on stage, honestly.
I think I nearly lost it then, you know, it was just like,
"Oh, my God, what have we done?" You know?
At number ten in our countdown,
Orbital's performance at Glastonbury in 1994
has gone down as one of the greatest festival performances of all time.
It went so well, it was so obvious that people wanted this type of din.
Michael Eavis is going,
"Oh, well, actually... Well, that worked, didn't it?"
Let's open a dance area.
The flood gates had been opened, and ever since, electronic music
has been taking centre stage at festivals every summer.
♪ God is a DJ... ♪
It was quite a proud moment, I think,
of our acceptance into pop culture, that we'd broken out of nightclubs
and were worthy of a stage at a festival.
Rocking the main stage in front of 40,000 people...
"Not bad for a couple of blokes pushing buttons," you might say.
But technology has always been at the heart of dance music.
In 1987,
a couple of house heads from Chicago stumbled across a piece of equipment
in a second-hand store that would kick-start a musical revolution.
For those that don't know,
this here is called a Roland TB-303 Bass Line.
Me and Spanky and a group called Phuture,
we picked this up at a second-hand shop for 40 bucks.
And this was basically designed to emulate a bass guitar,
and it did a real crappy job of it.
But... I realised that, you know,
I can make this bass sound...
do like, some weird stuff, so.
I was like, "I'm going to just twist these knobs in a crazy way,
"cos I like warping that sound."
And I was like, "All right, let me start twisting the knobs."
And then we was like... Like jamming, like this.
And we were just, "Yeah, keep doing that."
He said, "Pierre, keep doing it," so I was like, "OK, OK."
I'm turning the knobs, and then we got a sound real crazy.
And then I started turning like this,
and then we was like, "Oh, that's it right there, that's it."
The resulting tune was Acid Tracks.
Our number nine - a relentless 12 minute, 303 mind warp,
which single-handedly invented an entire new sound...
Acid House.
When Acid Tracks came out they lost their minds.
You know, I don't know what happened, man, with that song.
You know, something just like...
That machine, that TB-303
had triggered his brain cells and stuff.
It didn't really have a beginning,
or middle, or an end.
It just was.
It's a point of genius.
This was ground-breaking DIY music being made on a shoestring budget.
Now everybody could get involved.
It's very cheaply done, very affordable, very street,
very gritty, which is what the scene was all about.
Technology was coming down in price at the time.
So suddenly you could afford to buy bits of kit, to make these records.
There's a bit of that punk rock spirit...
anyone can do it, just get up and do it.
You were in control.
You didn't have to go to outside agents and knock on the door
and say, "Please, can I make some art in your studio?"
You didn't have to ask anybody's permission.
For the current generation of bedroom producers,
making a massive club tune has become
more affordable and accessible than ever before.
Because of laptops, anyone can make a beat at home,
put it on the internet and create a huge hit.
So, this is a very, very big revolution.
People can go from zero to hero so quickly.
You've got a French kid called Madeon in his bedroom in Nantes,
who literally listened to The Beatles,
listened to Daft Punk records and kind of worked out how to make music,
almost like cracking a multi-level Xbox game or something.
Posted a link on YouTube and...
You know, a few months later he's headlining Coachella.
Making a track in your bedroom is all well and good,
but breaking into the charts is another thing entirely.
♪ Charley says, "Always tell your mummy before you go off somewhere." ♪
In 1991, The Prodigy released Charley,
sampling a talking cat from a public safety campaign.
Many initially dismissed it as a novelty record.
I remember Mixmag - the biggest magazine of the time...
absolutely slagged it off and said,
"What kind of music?
"They're using this cartoonish, kind of, you know, take on music
"and they're breaking it down into the lowest common denominator."
♪ Charley says, "Always tell your mummy before you go off somewhere." ♪
Charley is musical genius, because it was so simple.
Anything that comes out of that track just hits you in the face,
and slaps you one side and backslaps you on the other side.
Defying their critics, The Prodigy went on to become
the face of rave culture for the MTV generation.
I think that a lot of artists in the electronic area,
before The Prodigy, hadn't necessarily delivered it
in a really easily definable way.
It was all a bit faceless.
When I toured with them in '92 they were all wearing harlequin costumes
and it was all big celebratory hands-in-the-air rave music.
And then, a few years later, they were tough rock guys.
I think the clever thing about The Prodigy is that
they've always been a band,
even though only really Liam does the production
and plays the instruments.
There was the sense of all of them being on stage together,
all of them performing together.
It wasn't just this faceless producer behind a wall of equipment,
it was a crew.
♪ I'm the trouble starter Punkin' instigator... ♪
Their influence and unbending dedication to dance culture
over the last 20 years is truly incredible.
The Prodigy arethe ones that has changed the face
of everything that we know today when it comes to rave music.
The longstanding legacy of it is, it allowed dance music a chance
to get into the charts without compromise.
♪ I'm a firestarter Twisted firestarter... ♪
But Prodigy's Keith Flint isn't the first flamboyant figure
to grace our dance floors.
Believe it or not, and hear me out,
he owes a lot to early gay club culture.
♪ We're lost in music
♪ Caught in a trap... ♪
If there wasn't gay clubs in New York in the '70s,
inventing disco music,
then dance music as we know it would be a completely different thing.
And if gay people weren't looking for underground electronic sounds,
then house music wouldn't have existed either.
♪ We're lost in music... ♪
In 1969, it was against the law to be homosexual in the US.
Gay men faced a lifetime of oppression.
Their clubs were a haven. All too often, raided by the police.
♪ To me, is a tragedy... ♪
There weren't allowed to be gay clubs.
It was all very secretive.
Gay culture was clearly an illegal culture.
Everything would change on the 28th June
at the Stonewall Inn, New York.
The police came to shut down a party, but this time,
after years of persecution, the gay community had had enough.
I think that night, they were being pushed around a lot by the police.
People just got very excited - "We're not going to take it."
And they really exploded, and started turning over cars,
and it really got everyone together.
With Stonewall, gay people were saying, "Actually, no."
You know? So, it's not that the world changes, youchange.
And when you change, you know, you kind of liberate other people
because you say, "You can't do that to me any more."
♪ You make me feel
♪ Mighty real... ♪
After Stonewall,
gay culture was out and proud on the dance floors of New York.
And that was just the beginning of mainstream acceptance.
I think there's probably an acceptance of gay culture
by the way that music crossed over into straight clubs.
I think when people realise that you dance to a record that goes,
"You think you're a man, but you're only a boy,"
or "It's raining men,"
you realise you kind of got sucked into the gay world
without prejudice.
Flamboyant freedom of expression hasn't been the only legacy
of New York's sexually liberated club land.
At the dawn of the '80s, New Order visited the city's nightclubs,
and were inspired by what they saw.
We'd seen very under-designed clubs in New York,
and really enjoyed them.
And come back to Britain
and Rob Gretton and Tony Wilson had a vision.
They had a dream about people like us
having somewhere to go in Manchester.
The result was The Hacienda...
part live venue, part art experiment.
When it opened in 1982, no-one was really sure what it was for.
It looked great when there was nobody in it, which was quite handy,
cos the first seven years there was nobody in it.
The first few DJs that I ever hired said, "Where's the microphone?"
I said, "Well, I've ripped it out, we're not having a microphone.
"Play music, people don't want to hear you talk."
And it was so unusual in those days.
This boy knows a hot tune, he definitely knows a hot tune.
But then the soundtrack changed.
By 1989, the club was heaving.
At number six, it's the moment that Hacienda got a cloakroom.
♪ Move your body Move your body... ♪
When house music happened it was just full of people.
It was like this space had been designedforthat music.
Every time I went to Manchester I felt like I was in Chicago.
You know, the energy was glorious.
The Hacienda was fantastic.
The Hacienda had made Manchester the coolest place on the planet.
And the whole city reaped the rewards.
Students came to Manchester specifically to go to The Hacienda.
People like The Chemical Brothers, they were in Manchester
and they kind of formed out of that. It was really, really important,
it brought a whole new generation of creative people into that city,
and a lot of them didn't leave.
But the vision turned sour when the city's gangsters cashed in.
As the violence increased, the public decreased.
So, literally towards the end in '95/'96,
you had a club full of gangsters.
With spiralling debts, the club closed its doors for good in 1997.
But the spirit of The Hacienda lives on.
The Hacienda was a kind of gift from New Order
to the people of Manchester, and I will for ever be grateful to them.
Don't even think about flaking out now.
Go get a cup of tea, some biscuits, but, when you get back,
I'll be looking at the top five
defining moments in the history of clubbing.
I'm going to show you how the power of rave
terrified the Government, changed the law, changed the way we holiday
and look at how our special relationship with the USA
may have just got a little bit more special.
Welcome back to How Clubbing Changed the World.
This is it.
Get your heads down, get your hands in the air, we're going top five.
Now, by the late '90s, clubbing had firmly established itself
as Britain's most lucrative leisure industry.
A generational shift from the traditional family holiday
to the clubbing holiday was occurring.
In 1997,
a television show hit our screens that captured this new phenomenon.
Ibiza Uncovered just redefined the way that we look at going abroad.
'Tonight on Ibiza Uncovered, we join Kelly, Lucy and Sian,
'who've just finished their A-levels
'and are ready for a week of club madness.'
I think, for a lot of people,
the rite of passage is going on that lads' or ladies' holiday abroad,
whether it be to Ayia Napa, whether it be to Ibiza or Majorca
or Cos or Malia.
And the thing that draws people over to those islands
is the events that happen, and it's the big club nights.
A trip to the Med to see your favourite DJs, the clubbing holiday
has become a yearly pilgrimage for every British teenager.
My first clubbing holiday was Ayia Napa.
That was amazing.
Every single night, clubbing.
Even though everyone gets ill, I remember like thinking,
"I can't survive any more",
cos raving every day for two weeks kinda takes its toll.
But I loved Ayia Napa so much. I'm going to remember it forever.
Things like cheap flights to places like Ibiza,
took people out of their environment. You know?
You don't have to go clubbing on Doncaster,
you can go clubbing on a beautiful beach. You know?
So, it opened people's minds to that.
Ibiza, Ayia Napa, dream gigs.
But to make it there as a DJ, you have to start somewhere,
and often, it's not entirely legal.
Pirate radio stations, the underground at its most raw.
The thing that gave me a break
into like music was definitely pirate radio.
I remember being in the kitchen with my mum and like trying to
sort our aerial out so we could hear it and try to tape it.
And it just absolutely blew my mind that
someone in like North London could hear my voice.
♪ Darkness can't get me to sleep yet
♪ I'm not that weak yet
♪ I just want it louder... ♪
If you lived in South London, you listened to Delight FM, or Upfront.
But then if you lived in the East, there was Rinse,
which was like kinda playing the same stuff
but you'd always say, "Well, your one was better."
To run one takes nerves of steel, and a head for heights.
At one point, we had the pirate radio station running from my bedroom.
And I remember people running out of my kitchen,
and picking up whatever they could find, in case
they found someone up there that was trying to steal the antenna.
You're in tune to Kiss FM, London's premier unlicensed radio.
One of the biggest and most influential pirates in London
was Kiss.
Back then, home to renegade DJs like Trevor Nelson,
Gilles Peterson and Tim Westwood.
In the early days, pirate radio was so integral to dance music culture
because there was no outlet for it on the radio.
Kiss was the most amazing radio station.
For a few years, it was the voice of London. It was in
every shop you walked down Oxford Street or the King's Road,
everyone's car, it was brilliant.
♪ I'll take you down, deep down where the love lives... ♪
So, at number four,
Kiss becomes the UK's first legal dance station in 1990.
The establishment can no longer ignore the clout of club culture.
In 1991, Radio One responded by grabbing a pirate DJ of their own.
Pete Tong.
It was, you know, very old school, and they were very supportive
but supportive in the way of like, "Do whatever you want to do,
"we're all off down the pub on Friday.
"Here's the keys to the radio station."
He started The Essential Mix show
that continues to spread the love of dance music globally.
We were able to fan the flames of something that was really genuine,
and then it kind of caught fire.
Whether it's pirate radio or illegal raves,
club culture has always presented a challenge for the authorities.
By the early '90s, the M25 free party scene had spread nationwide.
And renegade ravers were forging an unlikely alliance
with the traveller community.
When 40,000 revellers gathered at Castlemorton
for a free rave in 1992, the government had had enough.
This summer at Castlemorton and other places saw outrageous
and unacceptable examples of the problems caused
by New Age travellers and ravers.
There was a problem, and it was a problem which
I think government couldn't ignore, and government had to deal with.
There will be no soft option under the Criminal Justice Act.
In 1994, the government passed the Criminal Justice Act.
A piece of legislation aimed at gatherings of more than 20 people,
listening to music characterised by a series of repetitive beats.
They can't shut down Glyndebourne, they can't shut down, you know,
the Rolling Stones comeback tour.
They can only shut down a group of people
who want to listen to house music. I mean, it's outrageous.
Well, no-one ever suggested that orchestral music was being played
in circumstances which caused serious distress
to inhabitants of any locality.
The people's right to party versus state control.
It was a battle that went straight to the heart
of British civil liberties.
Submission is a crime. You have a duty to resist this Bill.
The Criminal Justice Act is still around today.
That Bill did a lot of damage to the outdoor party scene,
but it actually fuelled the indoor super-club scene,
and clubs became bigger and business became bigger.
The rise of clubbing as a global commercial phenomenon
over the last 25 years has been unstoppable.
But there's always been one place
where dance music never quite caught on.
For the last two decades, the dominant sound of US youth culture
has been hip hop and R'n'B.
I remember that in 2007, like, to hear dance music,
you had to go to the committed dance station.
♪ You can find me in the club, bottle full of bub
♪ Mami, I got what you need if you need to feel a buzz... ♪
The big change for electronic music
came when Lady Gaga and Black Eyed Peas took electronic rhythms,
put it on their commercial songs, and that got played on pop radio.
♪ I gotta feeling Oooh-oooh
♪ That tonight's gonna be a good night
It's not what David Guetta did on the song,
it's what David Guetta does every night.
I'm featuring the culture.
♪ Tonight's the night Let's live it up
♪ I got my money Let's spend it all. ♪
Together, we created a record that really changed
American pop music, you know?
♪ Here we come, here we go... ♪
I Got A Feelin' opened up mainstream America's ears
to the sound of four-to-the-floor house beats.
It's crazy because now it's dance music only on the radio.
It's unbelievable.
I did not see this coming.
I definitely did not see this coming.
♪ Yellow diamonds in the light
♪ Now we're standing side by side
In 2011, British DJ, Calvin Harris, produced Rihanna's We Found Love.
It spent ten weeks at the top of the US billboard chart,
going quadruple platinum.
We Found Love, essentially,
is Calvin doing what Calvin's done over here
for seven years, but putting Rihanna over the top of it,
and all of a sudden, a lot of people are going,
"What's this? I like this."
♪ We found love in a hopeless place
♪ We found love in a hopeless place... ♪
It's been a long time coming, but the US mainstream
has now finally caught on and they've given it a new name, EDM.
Electronic dance music.
The hottest R'n'B artist in the world raving it up in a field.
America may have invented house music,
but Britain invented modern club culture.
And now, we're selling it back to 'em, man.
That's the weirdest thing is,
it's kind of people talking about this new EDM thing.
It's like, "You invented it 20 years ago
"and we've been loving it for 20 years."
UK magicians take something that comes from America,
and turn it into something that can appeal to masses.
Club culture has been the greatest British cultural export
of the last 30 years.
Now, it's finally cracked America, it looks like it's here to stay.
Dance music, and the DJ, help resuscitate a dying industry.
It shows the power of this music, and this music that I heard
in Red Records in Brixton, and if you would have told me at the time,
you know, it would even been around in 2012,
I would have said, "No chance."
Over the last two hours, we have been looking at how club culture
has become the most pervasive musical and cultural phenomenon
on the planet.
But what is the most significant moment in club culture
that has shaped the world we live in?
It's time to reveal what was voted in at number one.
What I heard, it was made for marriage guidance,
that's what I was told, in America.
In California, wasn't it?
It was first synthesised... Ah...
Was it in the '80s?
I'm guessing in the '60s.
Was it '45 or something?
We used to make our own when I was a teenager.
100 years ago, Anton College, a German chemist, was attempting
to develop a lifesaving drug that would help blood clot.
The drug he synthesised was MDMA, aka ecstasy.
♪ Sweet sensation
♪ The music that we play... ♪
1912!
Wow.
Oh!
Wow, really?
Now that I dig. 100 years ago.
MDMA sat around in laboratory drawers for decades
before an American doctor, Alexander Shulgin, rediscovered it in 1976,
exploring its psychotherapeutic effects.
But the mass social impact of ecstasy wasn't truly felt
until it collided with house music in Britain in the late '80s.
There were two major drugs revolutions of the late 20th century.
One was in 1968, people taking LSD.
That was a tiny group of people.
20 years on, ecstasy, everyone took it,
and it totally altered the world.
It turns out increased levels of serotonin and dopamine
had a side effect - it made you want to dance all night.
What ecstasy, MDMA, did, was it kind of released a lot of inhibitions.
You know, you really just felt at peace with the universe.
I remember my first ecstasy experience was in Scotland,
and I remember about 90 minutes later going to a friend of mine,
I was like, "I don't think it's working, I don't feel anything."
And he looked at me and he was like,
"Your pupils are dilated, you're dancing like crazy,
"you're grinding your jaw, and your hands are sweaty,
"and you're going like this." He's like, "I think it's working."
I was like, "Oh, yeah, you're right."
One night, someone gave me a pill and I just suddenly went wwhhooaa,
I get it now.
And the tune was going,
"Finally, it's happening to me, right in front of my face."
And, yeah, I got on a table and danced and celebrated
this kind of awakening of a part of me that I never knew existed.
By the early '90s,
a million Es a week were being taken in Britain alone.
This was illegal recreational drug taking on an unprecedented scale.
The euphoric effect of MDMA
was even filtering onto violent football terraces.
We're doing this club,
and we got Millwall and West Ham and Chelsea,
their crews in the club,
and I'd be like, "If this goes off, we're all in trouble."
And then the next minute, they're all popping pills
and cuddling one another.
And then you're thinking, "This is unbelievable."
♪ Eezer Goode, Eezer Goode
♪ He's Ebeneezer Goode. ♪
On the terraces, they stopped singing
"You're going to get your fucking head kicked in",
and they started singing, "Let's all have a disco."
♪ He's Ebeneezer Goode... ♪
The Premiership owes a lot to ecstasy.
Like any illegal drug, ecstasy came with its own dangers.
I know that there's been lots of people that have been
brought together through ecstasy.
I'm sure there's equally as many people that have fallen out over it.
And even more people that have developed
really serious mental problems from it.
One of the down sides of ecstasy was that we didn't know what was in it.
You didn't know these were the consequences, so...
Then you had people who were unfortunately dying
on the cocktails of drugs that they were taking for the night.
There are parents who say goodbye to their 17-year-old daughter
on the Friday evening, 5.00,
and the next time they see that daughter is in the mortuary.
And that's the danger of drugs.
Despite the real dangers, people still take the drug.
Ecstasy has caused a chemical and cultural revolution
on a massive scale, and our society has been changed for ever.
The world you live in now is shaped by ecstasy.
The creative industries came out of that.
The whole informality of our culture, the class,
the seeming classlessness of our culture, came out of that.
Definitely, barriers were broken down,
and I think a lot of snobbery was broken down.
It's about love, unity,
equality and empathy for the person,
you know, dancing next to you.
So, yeah, it opened up a lot of people's minds.
These guys who were doing these raves, they were either a banker
or a brick layer, or working in the bakery,
and then suddenly, they were like, "I want to try something",
and, you know, "I can do this. I can start something."
There was a lot of, a real lot of positivity came out the movement.
So, there you have it. Ecstasy.
The drug that met house music and transformed our society.
These days, clubbing has become a global language. In an age
where we have less opportunity for communal experience,
clubbing has become a way for people to get together
and worship as one, in the church of dance.
I think dance music and club culture
is the most powerful thing in the world.
It's an international language.
It doesn't matter where you're from or where you're at,
you can be dancing to the same tune and you relate to people.
There is this spiritual component to it,
where there are thousands of people with their hands in the air,
having these transcendent sort of communal experiences.
There is something about the unity in a club that I've just never seen.
It's almost like Utopia, it really is.
Now, if my countdown has got you in the mood for a proper rave up,
there's no need to head out. Just push back your sofa,
pump up the volume, get your bredrens over,
as Channel 4 brings six of the world's top DJs
live into your living room for the ultimate house party. Yeah!
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