Some years do have ‘em. And in a period of a maximum velocity, 1994 was certainly a chaotic, fevered dream. It was a year where hip hop collided with psychedelic techno, distorted guitars were married to acid house and electro was injected with dub. Jim Butler attempts to make sense of a wild 12 months; what it all meant and what changed…

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As far as we’re aware, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov’s ruminations on the vagaries of electronic dance music went largely unrecorded. When it comes to the year 1994, however, the notion that momentous events can often be compressed into short periods of time – most notably expressed in a quote ascribed to Lenin: “There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen” – is wholly apt.

At a time when dance music was still accelerating, evolving, shifting, transforming, rupturing and transmogrifying at a dizzying pace in the fallout of the music’s late-80s cultural explosion, the 365 days that made up 1994 were off the scale.

To kick off the year, Underworld (in their most renowned guise) released their debut album ‘Dubnobasswithmyheadman’ to rapturous acclaim, Melody Maker gushing that it was ‘The most important album since ‘The Stone Roses’ and the best since ‘Screamadelica’’. And over the course of the following 11 months, it was followed by ground-breaking albums from the likes of The Prodigy, Orbital (not forgetting their performance at Glastonbury that year), Portishead, Beastie Boys, Aphex Twin, Massive Attack, Depth Charge and Sabres Of Paradise. This was complemented by vital 12-inches by Tricky, The Dust (later Chemical) Brothers, Dave Clarke, Beck, Carl Craig, DJ Shadow and Daft Punk. And all of this against a backdrop of protests against the Criminal Justice Bill, the rise of Britpop and the emergence of New Labour.

“If I could go back and do one year again it would be 1994,” says Robin Turner, co-founder of the Heavenly Sunday Social, the pivotal night that ran for 13 weeks from August that year and which crystallised a new-found musical eclecticism for some, reawakened the aesthetic for others and transformed the lives of most who attended. “I wouldn’t want to do it now, but it was incredible fun. Musically, you were constantly hearing really brilliant and interesting records. They weren’t necessarily new records, in fact quite a lot of time they weren’t. But you were hearing records like ‘Chemical Beats’ for the first time or the Dust Brothers’ remixes of Primal Scream’s ‘Jailbird’ or ‘Voodoo People’ (The Prodigy).”

It was, in short, a time of incredible cross-pollination. A point at which genres had yet to be coined and codified – trip hop emerged as the year progressed, the unfortunate term big beat followed later – so creativity flourished. James Lavelle, the founder of Mo’Wax remembers it as a time when “there was a great melting pot of people and ideas coming together. When everything, for a minute, got put into one pot: Big beat, trip hop… it was all the same thing. People spoke about us, Portishead, Moloko, Weatherall, the Chemical Brothers…”

Looking back today, with 30 years’ distance, the idea that those five acts/producers/labels could appear under the same stylistic banner might seem fanciful. Back then, there was a sense that anything was possible and, moreover, anything that wasn’t straight down-the-line house or techno was casting its net of inspirations wider.

“You could bring all sorts of influences,” remembers Jon Carter, an obsessive supporter of the Sunday Social’s anti-purist fusion. “You’re mixing dub with hip hop; you’re being creative on the decks and with your record collection. Depth Charge and Renegade Soundwave were pioneers when it came to pure experimentation. J Saul Kane (Depth Charge) bringing in his Hong Kong samples and Renegade Soundwave, very punk, but also very funky. And that was before Tom and Ed (The Dust/Chemical Brothers). I’ve always rated Jonathan (Depth Charge) as an unsung hero.”

For Norman Cook, who would go onto find global fame and fortune as Fatboy Slim, rewiring musical conventions and breaking the rules particularly appealed. “Absolutely,” he responds with relish. “It gave me carte blanche to mess about and the more rules we broke the more people liked us. It was like being a kid in a sweet shop and every excess was allowed. For some of us, like me and Tom and Ed, it took us to international stardom.”

He remembers being invited to play in Detroit for the first time. He laughs and recalls that much like Joe Pesci getting whacked in ‘Goodfellas’, when his character Tommy thought he was being inducted into the Mafia, he too believed he might get a tap on his shoulder by some UR disciples. “I thought they were gonna go: ‘For bastardising techno into what you’ve made it, this is for you…’”

Oh yeah, back when all this musical freedom was still fresh and exciting, the anti-purism came with a healthy side dish of irreverence. Or as Cook would have it: “It was a heady brew.”

Justin Robertson is remembering an interview he gave around 1994 where said house had become a bit like Northern Soul, reduced to a classic formula. “I was completely wrong of course,” he laughs today, only slightly squirming at the memory. “It only took a few months before someone like Matthew Herbert came along to reinvent it. And Daft Punk.”

And while it might seem churlish to say house and techno had run out of ideas at a time when Larry Heard, Richie Hawtin, Masters At Work and Dave Clarke, among many others, were releasing records, labels like Nuphonic and Paper were establishing themselves and DJ Harvey was exploring the outer reaches of disco with his Black Cock edits, there was a reaction against the increasing predictability and the rampant commercialisation of dance music.

“Once dance music became big business,” says Robertson, “and you get into the realm of superclubs, money and the age of the quadruple-packed remix, there was a reaction. Against the purism of techno too.”

Damian Harris, the face of Brighton label Skint, agrees, pointing not only to mainstream house becoming bloated as superclubs began to take hold, but also the deification of Sasha on the cover of Mixmag as the possible (the magazine quite wisely qualified it with a question mark) Son of God?. “All of that didn’t fit with a lot of people who were just going: ‘Come on, it’s just a big disco’ to use a phrase. It was all about silk shirts and leather trousers and commerce and advertising.”

Cook smiles and utters one word: “Handbag.”

Over in Belfast, meanwhile, David Holmes had just become bored. Bored of the mountain of promos he was sent and, more importantly, bored with what he was doing. Like Robertson, Cook and co, he was an avowed acid house acolyte, but also – and much like those mentioned – he had a musical history before 1988. He’d been running clubs since he was 15.

“I was always listening to other music during acid house,” he explains. “And as a DJ I just got bored. I just followed my heart because I was getting into people like Ananda Shankar, whose drums were heavier than any record of that time. That was really exciting to me. I wasn’t feeling what I was doing. I’d run out of steam because I didn’t see the point of repeating myself when you had this incredible melting pot of ideas – which was your entire musical history up to that point.” His 1995 and 1997 albums, ‘This Film’s Crap Let’s Slash The Seats’ and ‘Let’s Get Killed’ respectively, are a testament to his restless spirit that was also amplified elsewhere at this time.

As Big Ben chimed midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1993, Robin Turner was getting frustrated with going to clubs. Or rather, he was getting frustrated at trying to go to clubs. A fan of Boy’s Own, he wanted to go to the clubs where the likes of Terry Farley and co were playing. There was just one problem – an extension of what Harris outlined before – his face didn’t fit in. Or rather, his clothes. And his trainers.

“There was a point after acid house where it suddenly went quite selective again,” he recollects. “People don’t often talk about it, maybe because the DJs involved wouldn’t have seen how that was playing out. It was like: ‘No, you’re dressed wrong’ or ‘There’s three blokes together’. On the other side, techno was just getting harder and harder and harder. I remember being at Ministry of Sound, and – this seems insulting to Richie Hawtin but it’s not meant to be – he was playing ‘Spastik’ or something and it went on for 20 minutes or so. I just thought: ‘Fuck, there’s got to be something more than this.’”

And thus, was born one of the germs of the manifold ideas that would eventually coalesce into the Heavenly Sunday Social. Another catalyst was being back at Heavenly boss Jeff Barrett’s house – by now Turner was working at the label – with the likes of Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons and Barrett “banging on about [Barry White’s group] Love Unlimited Orchestra or [Bobby Womack’s] ‘Across 110th Street’. It was like: ‘Fucking hell, imagine hearing these records in a club’.”

The club’s 13-week run at the Albany in central London was, without fear of hyperbole, a complete gamechanger. In a reversal of usual club etiquette – more rule breaking – guest DJs like Robertson, Cook, Holmes, Andrew Weatherall and, erm, Tricky – would warm-up for the club’s residents, The Dust Brothers. In another repudiation of accepted clubland mores, Tom and Ed’s set was, in the words of Turner, ‘ruthlessly worked out’. Although that era is often described as a time where ‘anything went’ – and it often did – for a pre-Chemical Dust Brothers it was much more focused.

“Week-on-week it was very similar bar one or two things,” explains Turner. “The end section was pretty much the same. People knew what they were going to get. It was like a band playing a greatest hits set. It was laser focused and it worked brilliantly.”

One of the peak points of their set was when Tom and Ed mixed the visceral intensity of Emmanuel Top’s nine-minute techno track ‘Lobotomie’ into the Beatles’ rousing ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. “It became this pivot point in the set where it all went fucking bananas after that,” Turner remembers fondly.

“Hearing ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ on the dancefloor, with the poppers, it was like: ‘Jesus Christ!’” says Jon Carter. “You got a new perspective. That was the best dance track that year.”

Daniel Ormondroyd, who would later find success in FC Kahuna, knew Tom and Ed from watching them DJ at Most Excellent in Manchester and Venus in Nottingham (“We were Balearic Networked out of our mind”), plus clubs in London.

“They always played cool music, but there was a feeling it was a backroom thing,” he says. “So going down to the Social on that second week was insanely refreshing. I’d never heard people play cut’n’paste hip hop records next to Emmanuel Top. You didn’t want to leave the dancefloor. You just wanted to experience it. Everything hit. Maximum impact. It just blew my mind.”

For Norman Cook his experience of the Sunday Social was similarly Damascene. Down in Brighton he was playing a not dissimilar brand of ‘weird’ eclecticism (“Sort of James Brown mixed with sped-up trip hop records”). One day his former singer in Beats International Lindy Layton rang him up. “She said: You know that kind of set you play, sped-up breakbeats, it’s not house and it’s not hip hop, but it’s all of those things, there’s this club called the Heavenly Social and they’re doing the same thing.’ She dragged me there and as soon as I walked in I was like: ‘God, this is right’.”

He immediately became fast friends with “Jon Carter, Derek Dahlarge, the Big Kahuna boys, Mark Jones and Tom and Ed”, the latter twosome congratulating him on his track ‘Santa Cruz’ which they were playing at the Social. “We bonded over copious amounts of alcohol and whatever greased the wheels and instantly I joined their gang.”

For David Holmes the diversity on show at the Albany wasn’t anything new. “The first time I saw Weatherall he was playing that crazy mix of music that people were trying to do at the Heavenly Social. It was something that had been forgotten and it was pulled back in essentially.”

Robertson believes something else was brought back around this time – not just the mix of music, but the blend of people too. He highlights how acid house prompted an “explosion of different people from different backgrounds who were thrown together in this kind of joyous stew. And [around 1994] it felt a little bit like going back to that, where people were chucking the rule book away and having fun. As much as anything else it was the perfect collaboration between hedonism and musical experimentation.”

“Everybody was there,” says James Lavelle. “Tricky was there. I was there. Primal Scream… anybody kind of cool. I mean I was going out every night so paths would cross. If something was happening, whether it was Metalheadz (which actually began in the summer of 1995) or the Sunday Social or that mad techno club Lost, I was doing everything. Ministry, Harvey, Wall Of Sound parties, then going to Bristol to hang out with Massive. I just wanted to hear the best music and the best DJs.”

One of the key tracks at the Albany was Mekon’s ‘Phatty’s Lunchbox’, an emblematic mix of hip hop scratching, sirens, crunching beats, a grinding guitar riff and a lolloping decelerated groove, it became the second single on Wall Of Sound. The imprint would capture the essence of this ‘scene’ on its era-defining ‘Give ‘Em Enough Dope’ compilations (its three iterations featured everyone from Ballistic Brothers, Basement Jaxx and Faze Action to Kruder & Dorfmeister, Howie B, Portishead and Larry Heard – thus making a nonsense of the later prescriptive and utterly restrictive ‘big beat’ description).

The label had been established by failed 80s pop star Mark Jones (his band Perfect Day were a hit in teen magazines, less so in the charts) and if the label was Jones’ revenge on the music industry, it was both timely and exhilarating. Jon Carter was just starting out in his production career, touting his dub-influenced, hip hop leaning and rock’n’roll sampling tracks across London when someone told him to go and see Mark Jones.

“I played him these three tracks I’d made under the name Artery and he told me to go to the Sunday Social,” Carter says. “Mark was so pivotal. He was a master of getting attention, a tornado of energy. Very forward thinking.”

Another unforgettable tornado of energy in and around the Sunday Social and Wall Of Sound was Derek Dahlarge. Him and Carter recorded a few tunes as the Naked All Stars, but it was his magical Trickshot track ‘Ceasefire’, featuring some memorable Al Pacino samples from ‘Carlito’s Way’ that encapsulated the spirit of the times.

“’Trickshot’ was a very important track,” says Carter. “Derek was a bit like Peter Cook, crucial for a short time and then didn’t do a lot more after.”

For a time, Wall Of Sound was mentioned in the same breath as labels like Mo’Wax and Ninja Tune, British labels that put their own unique spin on club culture, dance music and style tribes. Mo’Wax’s James Lavelle was a music obsessive; a hip one-man Beastie Boys who DJed with Gilles Peterson at That’s How It Is and Patrick Forge and loved Andrew Weatherall and cult Japanese production outfit and label Major Force equally.

“What excited me was when I got Richie Hawtin and Carl Craig to remix La Funk Mob (a pre-Cassius pairing of Hubert Blanc-Francard [Boombass] and Philippe Zdar on their majestic ‘Ravers Suck Our Sound’) it just felt obvious,” he reflects. “It felt normal to put these things together.”

Lavelle saw himself as part of the first post-acid house generation. Although he was only a couple of years younger than The Chemical Brothers, Holmes, Robertson and co, he was too young to have gone to Shoom or The Haçienda in its heyday. He had grown up on hip hop and acid house, but from the sidelines.

“We were the second generation from that world,” he says. “The music had evolved, the culture had evolved, the palettes had got wider and there was a great melting pot of people coming together.”

In 1994, Lavelle’s label put out essential releases from Japanese producer DJ Krush (‘Strictly Turntablized’), La Funk Mob and Krush’s split release with DJ Shadow, ‘Lost And Found S.F.L.’/‘Kemuri’. This was bookended by two label primers, ‘Royaltie$ Overdue’ and ‘Headz’. The sounds – ranging from abstract hip hop to futuristic jazz by way of looped electronica – were as diverse as the roll call of musicians’ nationalities. This was a global set of visionaries tapping into a well of influences and pushing the idea of what electronic music – underpinned by hip hop and turntablism – could be.

In Bristol alone, Portishead and Massive Attack came out with the momentous ‘Dummy’ and ‘Protection’. Meanwhile, Tricky stepped out of Massive’s shadows releasing ‘Aftermath’ and ‘Ponderosa’, setting the scene for his unforgettable 1995 album, ‘Maxinquaye’.

From one vantage point it would seem everything was leading up to 1994’s freestyle cultural explosion. If you were 21, it had; both figuratively and metaphorically. This was a new time because it was your time. Being into Beck, Björk, Portishead, The Dust Brothers as well as the Beastie Boys, Daft Punk, Oasis, Massive Attack and the Wu-Tang Clan was normal. The mods, ravers, punks, skate kids, hip hop lovers and other Generation X misfits had come together again – much like a few years previously.

And for Holmes, that is key. “Acid house wasn’t year zero,” he affirms. “Before acid house I’d had a love affair with so many different kinds of music like rhythm and blues, soul, Northern Soul and just the 80s in general. And then house music crept in and once you had that collision of MDMA and house culture all the clans were united and acid house happened.” The mid-90s just repeated this.

Norman Cook sees it in similar terms. “[This period] was people of a certain generation who’d grown up listening to the Beatles and pop music, then we’d been punk rockers when we were teenagers, then we got into hip hop and rare groove and then acid house. When we were getting dissatisfied with where house had gone, we sort of looked back and took the hooks of pop music, the attitude of punk rock, the breakbeats from hip hop and the energy and electronics from acid house. It was all my musical history in one package.”

Crucially. Justin Robertson views the era as not just a reaction against a perceived moribund dance scene but also a celebration of untold possibilities and the untapped power of electronic music. “Electronic music was starting to be taken seriously – I mean we always took it seriously, but the possibilities of what it could achieve and what it could be cross-fertilized with were becoming more apparent. You had early adopters like Björk and Primal Scream, but other people started to explore the possibilities of incorporating electronic techniques and mixing these things together.”

For his outfit Lionrock its initial flowering as a marriage between dub and house – he cites Guerilla Records’ dub house disco aesthetic as a touchpoint – soon began to incorporate other musical avenues. “There was a definite feeling of stretching your legs out… I was madly into Stereolab and that dub narcotic stuff, the Beastie Boys were massive. Beck was really refreshing. Those are the sort of things I touched upon.”

The elephant in the room of course is the term big beat. DJ Shadow couldn’t understand the description trip hop (Lavelle says Shadow “saw himself as a hip hop artist”, something that most listeners probably accept today) and Portishead’s Geoff Barrow certainly recoiled in horror at the phrase, but generally, the hatred towards trip hop had nothing on the problematic big beat.

Before too long, the genre was defined, a blueprint laid down and records were being made to order. No longer related to trip hop, big beat put on the afterburners and ate itself at the first opportunity. “The irony was that the genre was based on breaking rules and not falling for any formulas,” says Norman Cook. “And it became a formula. All the tunes started sounding exactly the same.”

Two years previously this wasn’t the case. Tunes that went on to be tarred with the big beat brush were far better and far more versatile. For example: Death In Vegas’ ‘Dirt’, Depth Charge’s ‘Shaolin Buddha Finger’, the Leftfield remix of Renegade Soundwave’s titular track (“Pretty much the blueprint for the sound of the Social really” avows Turner) and ‘Chemical Beats’ were respectively much slower; moodier; more strident; and an inimitable excursion into acid-tinged techno. The Freestylers and The Crystal Method this was not. To appreciate the brilliance of some of those early records check out the still fresh – and still awfully-titled – ‘Brit Hop And Amyl House’ compilation.

By 1996, the always-innovative The Chemical Brothers had long since set course on another exciting singular path. Their psychedelic techno vision fully realised in 1997’s ‘Dig Your Own Hole’ and 1999’s ‘Surrender’. Jon Carter had also moved on.

“By that point I had gone back to house and acid,” he explains. “That sort of initial anarchy became more blokey. And I wanted to get away from that. The Chems, (Richard) Fearless, Depth Charge, Renegade Soundwave… they built this thing up and then it got assimilated and taken over. History will look back and blame us. We were the architects of big beat, but no, no, no! The early days were very different to what it became. Same with punk. Johnny Rotten saying: ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ Same here.”

The Sunday Social’s Robin Turner also rankles at the phrase. “It felt restrictive because you would hear anything [at the Sunday Social and its various iterations, most notably at London’s Turnmills, thereafter]. Were Love Unlimited Orchestra big beat? Was ‘Weekender’ big beat? ‘Sabotage’ by the Beastie Boys or Emmanuel Top’s ‘Lobotomie’? Was Tricky big beat? No, all these things just fused.”

The usually level-headed Damian Harris is conflicted by how it all ended – or rather, regressed. While bridling at the countless – and factually incorrect – descriptions of Skint as solely a big beat label (“Norman’s success probably skewed people’s view”) he can also accept the inevitability of every musical moment having its time in the sun.

“It’s the cycle of it. I had worked in shops, I had been a music journalist, you knew how it went,” he reflects sanguinely.

Of course, the true spirit of 1994 – the sense of adventure and possibilities – didn’t really die. The best musicians, producers and DJs continued to adapt and evolve. The same as it ever was. The real legacy of this period and its influence on the years that followed was twofold: firstly, that every now and again clubland, and music in general, needs to be spun off its axis and secondly, there are only two types of music: good and bad. The best music in 1994, 1995 and into 1996 was unforgettable.

“It wasn’t random,” James Lavelle admits today. “The dots did join, It was interesting. It felt like a new take on things. Things started to open up and it was cool to be eclectic.”

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This article first appeared in the fifth issue of Disco Pogo. Which you can buy here.

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