Chapter Three
Twenty-Four-Hour Party People
18 records, in the order the book names them
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001
Bummed
Happy Mondays
Bummed was recorded under the influence of Ecstasy, the band practically shoving it down Hannett’s throat.
Factoryalbum Open ↗ YouTube -
002
Wrote For Luck
Happy Mondays
After a failed attempt at scoring a hit with a Paul Oakenfold house remix of the brilliant Bummed track ‘Wrote For Luck’, Happy Mondays finally got to Number Nineteen in December 1989 with the ‘Madchester Rave On’ EP. The lead song, ‘Hallelujah’, was a twisted stab at a Christmas single.
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003
Madchester Rave On
Happy Mondays
After a failed attempt at scoring a hit with a Paul Oakenfold house remix of the brilliant Bummed track ‘Wrote For Luck’, Happy Mondays finally got to Number Nineteen in December 1989 with the ‘Madchester Rave On’ EP. The lead song, ‘Hallelujah’, was a twisted stab at a Christmas single.
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004
One Love
The Stone Roses
The time is now.’ But the Roses’ next single, ‘One Love’ – an insipid retread of ‘Fool’s Gold’ – failed to sustain the sense of momentum or define what was at stake.
all Silvertonetrack Open ↗ YouTube -
005
Step On
Happy Mondays
In April, Happy Mondays threw their own pseudo-rave equivalent of Spike Island, with a gig at Wembley Arena timed to coincide with the band’s and Madchester’s biggest hit yet, ‘Step On’ – a stomping, vaguely house-ified version of Johnny Kongos’s 1971 boogie smash ‘He’s Gonna Step On You Again’ – which stalled at Number Five.
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006
Pacific State
808 State
After working on New Build, an album of acid jams, Simpson quarrelled with the rest of the group over money and went solo as A Guy Called Gerald – but not before contributing heavily to a track called ‘Pacific State’.
ZTTtrack Open ↗ YouTube -
007
Voodoo Ray
A Guy Called Gerald
But he could take solace from the fact that he’d beaten 808 to the punch with ‘Voodoo Ray’, a Number Twelve hit in July 1989 and the first truly great British house anthem.
Rhamtrack Open ↗ YouTube -
008
Ex-El
808 State
On their next album Ex-El, 808 State plunged even deeper into the realm of nineties fusion, revealing its pleasures and pitfalls.
ZTT/Tommy Boyalbum Open ↗ YouTube -
009
The Sun Rising
The Beloved
Alongside 808’s ‘Pacific State’, there was S’Express’s ‘Mantra For A State of Mind’ (described by Mark Moore as ‘music to cleanse your mind’), Innocence’s ‘Natural Thing’, The Grid’s ‘Floatation’, The Beloved’s ‘The Sun Rising’, The KLF’s Chill Out and The Orb’s ‘A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of The Ultraworld’.
WEAtrack Open ↗ YouTube -
010
Killer
Adamski
‘I much prefer the positivity thing we have now.’ Ironically, he’d just scored his biggest hit with the gloomy and harrowed ‘Killer’, an awesome slice of techno-blues that cracked apart the jollity of Top of the Pops with its grievous ache of loss and longing.
MCAtrack Open ↗ YouTube -
011
What Time Is Love
The KLF
‘When you’re at a rave and there’s thirty thousand of you in a field and a record comes on and you all love the record together, that’s a religious feeling.’ Dedicating themselves to a sound they called ‘stadium house’, The KLF recorded thrilling pop-techno stampedes like ‘What Time Is Love’, ‘3 AM Eternal’ and ‘Last Train to Trance-Central’, scoring four Top Five hits and a Number One between late 1990 and early 1992.
KLF Communicationstrack Open ↗ YouTube -
012
The White Room
The KLF
In the video for ‘3 AM Eternal’, The KLF are garbed in ceremonial robes and move in formation as though enacting a religious ceremony, while The White Room album featured songs like ‘Church Of The KLF’.
KLF Communicationsalbum Open ↗ YouTube -
013
Happiness
The Beloved
‘The whole of 1988 from March onwards is a complete blur,’ he told iD. ‘An orgy of parties.’ Shoom appears to have made mush of his brain, judging by the lyrics of ‘Up Up and Away’ on their breakthrough album Happiness: ‘Hello New day . . .
WEAalbum Open ↗ YouTube -
014
En-Tact
Primal Scream
After an awkward transitional phase in which they combined anti-Amerikan agit-prop lyrics with trance-dance rhythms, The Shamen shifted to full-on positivity on their breakthrough album En-Tact (the name came from ‘entactogen’, the pharmacologist’s neologism for Ecstasy).
One Little Indian/Epicalbum Open ↗ YouTube -
015
Weekender
Flowered Up
‘It’s On’ expressed the elation of pulling off ‘the biggest deal of your life’; ‘Phobia’ evoked the nocturnal paranoia caused by taking one E too many; the Top Twenty hit ‘Weekender’ was a heavy-riffing epic about the punishing syndrome of living for the weekend’s big blow-out, with Liam warning the party-hard hedonist not to get burned out, and samples from Quadrophenia underlining the rave-as-mod analogy.
Heavenly/Columbiatrack Open ↗ YouTube -
016
Unbelievable
EMF
‘Suddenly this chair flew through the window section between the lounge and the kitchen, followed by a person.’ On a similar sixties-into-nineties mod tip as Flowered Up, EMF were a gang of West Country reprobates (the name stood for Ecstasy Motherfuckers) who’d started out throwing micro-raves in the Forest of Dean; their irresistibly swaggering ‘Unbelievable’ got to Number Three in the winter of 1990.
EMItrack Open ↗ YouTube -
017
Higher
Wink
Certainly the lyric (about being your own god) recalled the solipsistic sovereignty of ‘Anarchy In The UK’ (albeit fuelled by Ecstasy rather than amphetamine), but what Gillespie really meant was that ‘Higher’ was a rock-historical ‘cut-off record – it makes everybody else look ancient’.
Strictly Rhythmtrack Open ↗ YouTube -
018
Second Coming
The Stone Roses
Bad memories of this dark period inspired ‘Begging You’, the most thrilling track on the Stone Roses 1995 long-time-a-comin’ follow-up album Second Coming.
Geffenalbum Open ↗ YouTube
Nothing matches
No record here carries that word. Clear the filter to bring back all 18.