Before Underworld, The Chems, Leftfield, even Orbital, there was 808 State. Formed in the white heat of Manchester’s late-80s acid house revolution, the innovative and always shifting alliance of forward-thinking DJs and producers, established musicians and agent provocateurs led to some of Britain’s best dancefloor sounds. Looking back over their almost 40-year career, founding member Graham Massey recalls a journey of incredible highs and devastating lows to long-time fan Luke Bainbridge. “I’m still very proud of all that music,” he proclaims...

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They were the first British acid house group, born out of acid jams made by a loose collective of revolving members on a hodge podge of equipment in basements. An unlikely Bash Street Kids gang of ground-breaking innovators who took acid house from the warehouses and nightclubs on to ‘Top of the Pops’ and into unsuspecting living rooms across Britain. Their biggest hit, ‘Pacific’, one of the seminal early British house records, still sounds unique, fresh and timeless today, as does much of their extensive back catalogue and their cultural importance and influence as early electronic innovators is often criminally underrated.

But along with the highs, 808 State have experienced some pretty devastating lows, particularly in recent years, which have left founding member Graham Massey as the only remaining member of the band and keeper of the 808 flame: a position he’s still getting his head around. “I feel things really personally and to me there’s a lot of scars in there,” he says. “There’s been death, there’s been prison, there’s been mysterious disappearances… those things loom large in my personal view.”

Now 64, Massey is a true leftfield musical polymath, a counterculture icon with a fascinating 50-year musical journey that encompasses prog rock, punk, post-punk, jazz, electro, hip hop, psych-rock, acid house, and pretty much any other leftfield genre. He thinks his forays into musical rebellion might have started when he was denied the chance to learn an instrument as a teenager by the music department at Burnage High School in the early-70s. He smiles: “I just thought: “Fuck you! If I can’t have an instrument, I’ll have ALL the instruments.” 

He joined his first band as a teenager, a short-lived Gong-influenced band called Aqua, who soon split into two bands, Crispy Ambulance and Biting Tongues, both of whom ended up signing to Factory Records. Massey was the youngest member of Biting Tongues and it was a huge learning experience for him. “There was some amazing talent in that band.” The singer worked for a publisher in London and used his contacts to get them gigs including The ICA and Seven Dials Club and as a Factory artist he had a free pass to The Haçienda when it opened in 1982.

By the mid-80s, his life revolved around what would later become Manchester’s Northern Quarter, enrolling on a production course at the recently opened School of Sound Recording and running a café opposite the influential record shop Eastern Bloc. “It was quite a music café,” he recalls.
“I used to DJ and John Peel would come in when he was in town - people would bring in demos for him.”

Then owned by an anarchic co-operative, Eastern Bloc was one of the first shops to sell acid house and was a magnet for young Mancunian DJs and musicians. One of Massey’s regular customers was one of Eastern Bloc’s owners, a larger-than-life character called Martin Price: “He used to come in for a butty and we just got chatting.”

Through Price, Massey met various young musicians and rappers that hung around Eastern Bloc, including Gerald Simpson (A Guy Called Gerald), Nicholas Lockett (who went on to become the rapper MC Tunes), hip hop outfit Shure-4 and two young whippersnapper DJs, Darren Partington and Andy Barker, from Ancoats who called themselves The Spinmasters. This loose collective came together and made a record under the name Hit Squad Mcr, each contributing a track. Apart from Massey, who was in his mid-20s and Price, who was in his early-30s, the rest were teenagers. Although a lot of the record was more hip hop-based, some of those involved, especially Simpson, Massey and Price, were being increasingly influenced by the imported acid house that was beginning to be played at The Haçienda, Stuffed Olives and on Stu Allan’s radio show on Key 103. 

“When I met Gerald, he was well ahead,” says Massey. “He was just so into music, he walked around with headphones on the whole time and just made music. He’s not changed all these years later. You went to his house and he had everything set up in the attic with these massive bass bin speakers made from chipboard and bits of wardrobes and things. His mum used to bring us pizza.”

When they did a gig to promote the Hit Squad Mcr record at the Boardwalk, Massey, Simpson and Price did an acid jam at the end. He still has the tape from that gig, with the jam credited to the Thermo Kings. When they went into SSR to record some more early acid jams, he wrote on the cassette State 808. They were then booked for an early warehouse rave and the name was printed wrongly as 808 State, but the embryonic group decided that sounded better and stuck with it.

At the time, things were quite loose and fluid. Nobody had a record deal and there weren’t really any set line-ups. Simpson would play with 808 State, but Massey would also often accompany him for A Guy Galled Gerald gigs, like the infamously chaotic gig at Victoria Baths which was broadcast on Tony Wilson’s ‘Other Side of Midnight’ show. 

“Gerald got booked for that and I just bumped into him in town and it’s like: ‘I’m doing this thing you wanna come down and help me out?’”

Through his Eastern Bloc contacts, Martin Price managed to convince Nine Mile Distribution to advance 808 State £500 to make a record, by telling them they were Britain’s first acid house group, which was pretty much true and the trio of Simpson, Massey and Price recorded ‘Newbuild’ over a weekend. Named after a housing project that Price and his Eastern Bloc partners were involved with in Bolton, ‘Newbuild’ was raw and futuristic, and some of the tracks, like the incredible ‘Flow Coma’ still sound like nothing else today.

What did Graham think of the record when it was finished? “I liked the density of it. But that was also its biggest criticism at the time, that it was too many things, as it’s not as stripped-back as some of the US stuff, whose beauty lies in it being primitive and stripped-back. It never got played in The Haçienda because it would just sound wrong in there, as it’s too thick and too polyrhythmic. It didn’t fit into the acid house scene and wasn’t embraced by anyone other than John Peel. He started playing it, which meant it got wider distribution and ended up in the record shops in places like Cornwall, where Aphex (Twin) got hold of it early on.” ‘Newbuild’ was hugely influential to the then teenage Richard D James, and a decade later he would reissue it on his own label Rephlex, along with a compilation, ‘Prebuild’, of very early 808 recordings and all-night jams, including the recording of that first Boardwalk gig as Thermo Kings. If you want to hear the roots of 808, ‘Newbuild’ and ‘Prebuild’ are the best place to start.

Impressed by ‘Newbuild’, John Peel invited 808 State to record a Peel session for him. 808 knew New Order had recorded a Peel Session in their own studio, rather than traipse to London and use the BBC studio like every other band had to and decided they wanted to do the same. “John Peel was like: ‘Yeah, I think we can do it’. And we just started.” By the time the BBC came back and said actually they wouldn’t allow 808 to record up north, the band had already come up with the bones of what would be the breakthrough hit. 

‘Pacific’ got its first plays at The Thunderdome (a notoriously rough club in north Manchester that even Shaun Ryder once told me was a bit “moody” for his liking) where the Spinmasters were now residents. They would play the early version of ‘Pacific’ off cassette, to a huge reaction. The band also handed out a few white labels. “I remember me and Gerald taking it to Stu Allan’s radio show on a Sunday night and to The Haçienda, so Jon Dasilva had it early,” says Massey. “It had a good six months of its own life before Gary Davies heard it in Ibiza and he started playing it on Radio One in the daytime. It wasn’t even a single, it was on the album! It just got all these nudges all the time like John Peel playing it, then he [Gary Davies] put rockets under it.”

In the six months to a year that it took for ‘Pacific’ to take flight, Simpson was increasingly focused on his own music. He had a huge hit with ‘Voodoo Ray’ and had just released his debut album ‘Hot Lemonade’. Simpson was always something of a lone wolf, so it was inevitable he would ultimately end up as a solo artist. He went on to release the ground breaking ‘Black Street Technology’ and carve out a fascinating 30-year career of his own.

After Simpson left, Price suggested to Massey that they bring in The Spinmasters to augment the 808 line-up. The Spinmasters had been DJing since they were 11, getting their first DJ gig at the Salvation Army in Ancoats when they were 13, wearing matching grey and maroon Adidas tracksuits. One of their early residencies was a rough boozer in Ancoats where the decks were placed on top of the chest freezer behind the bar. Every time a customer ordered a burger, The Spinmasters had to lift their decks up so bar staff could rummage in the freezer and pull out a frozen burger. Not something DJs get asked to do at the Warehouse Project nowadays.

Darren and Andy jumped at the chance to join 808 State, completing what would become the group’s most successful line-up. They also brought an extra element to 808, as they were at the heart of the early warehouse scene in Manchester, helping Andrew’s older brother Eric, an iconic figure on the scene, to put on early raves.

“I didn’t like it when it was badged the ‘Second Summer of Love’ and associated with Woodstock and hippies and all that,” Partington later told me. “I hated that. For me it had fuck all to do with hippies. Me, Andy and Eric spending Saturday afternoon sweeping out a warehouse in the city centre, then installing a generator so we can have a huge party and have it right off that night – what the fuck has that got to do with middle class hippies? Fuck the hippies – they had nothing on acid house.”

Shortly after the Spinmasters joined, 808 were offered a Tuesday night slot on the influential Manchester community radio station Sunset Radio. “Initially all four of us went and did it,” says Massey, “but it quickly became evident that those two [Spinmasters] as a double act were just brilliant, they had a kind of natural exuberance going on.”

The 808 Radio Show completely captured the zeitgeist, the raw energy and euphoria of the era and the underground house scene. It was a smash hit in and around Manchester, so much so that people would schedule their midweek around it, having house parties around the radio. The Spinmasters would play the latest releases and imports, which you couldn’t hear anywhere else and were hard to get hold of, so everyone taped the show and they would also do ‘shout outs’ to whoever phoned in. The only problem with Sunset was the signal area was so small, people on the outskirts of Manchester struggled to receive it. As a 15-year-old in Rochdale, north Manchester, I bought a huge T-shaped aerial from Tandy that covered most of my bedroom wall so I could get the 808 State show. Tapes of the show were shared at school and in record shops and Massey says they would sometimes hear tapes of the show on tour abroad, in cool clothes shops or record stores in Barcelona or New York. I’ve still got my tapes of the show and listened to them so much back then, I can still recall the quirky adverts like the one for Stolen From Ivor: ‘They’re in the Arndale, nice and handy, next to Argos, opposite Tandy...’ The 808 Show was our Hot Mix Dance Party and the Spinmasters were our Hot Mix 5.

How did the Spinmasters joining change the dynamic and musical direction of 808 State? “Well, you have to think of the characters,” says Massey. “Martin could be any one of five people on any given day. He was a big character, when he walked into the room he could dominate a whole room of people with ideas and it can be a million miles an hour… but Darren’s not far behind. Darren would also be a hyper billion ideas an hour. Andrew was always a lot quieter, but as a duo those two as The Spinmasters also had their own inner dynamic. Andrew had a stubbornness as well, when he decided on something he’s going to stick to it. Then there was me in the middle trying to deal with everything.” 

But the dynamic worked, as the new line-up went in and recorded ‘Quadrastate’, the follow-up to ‘Newbuild’, six tracks and less than half-an-hour long, including the first released version of ‘Pacific’.

The journalist and co-founder of ZTT, Paul Morley, had missed 808’s early releases, but when he saw them performing a track with MC Tunes called ‘Dance Yourself to Death’ on Snub TV he was intrigued. He arranged to get the train to Manchester to meet them and discuss signing them to the label he’d started with Trevor Horn in 1983, which had already had huge success with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Art of Noise and Grace Jones. 

“He wasn’t aware of ‘Quadrastate’ or ‘Newbuild’,” says Massey, “and he came up and discovered there was the radio show, the record shop and the studio and it was like a perfect storm you know? It’s like: ‘Oh, this is very attractive, isn’t it?’

“Trevor Horn was really excited about what we were doing, because it was somewhat in parallel with what he was doing – making kind of records out of noise you know, making collages and using the latest production stuff.”

ZTT re-released ‘Pacific’ and it ended up reaching the Top 10 and everything changed for 808. “I quit my job as a roofer and suddenly we were on ‘Top of the Pops’,” Barker told me back in 2012, still in slight disbelief. “My mam said: ‘What are you lot doing on ‘Top of the Pops’!?” 

Did Massey have any idea ‘Pacific’ would have such a long life?

“Oh no, not at all!”

‘Pacific’ has now long been a key part of the soundtrack to the lives of a generation, way beyond the dancefloor. A song that, 36 years on, people still choose for their funerals and weddings. 

“It’s hard to say what makes it have an emotional impact like that. I remember when trying to make that record at the back of my mind was ‘Open Your Eyes’ by Marshall Jefferson and the way when you dropped that record the atmosphere in the club literally became humid. Sometimes those chemicals in your body change to music and it was like chasing down that feeling of euphoria in a tropical situation.”

The band then quickly recorded the ‘90’ album, which is a brilliantly vivid snapshot of the British house scene in 1989/90. Most of ‘90’ has aged remarkably well, for a record that is now 35 years old in a genre that likes to pride itself on reinvention. Much of the press were still wary of acid house at the time, but The Guardian declared that with ‘90’, 808 had ‘mapped out the future of club music, utilising techno, ambient and rock...’ The NME gave it 10 out of 10.

808 had started work on their next album ‘ex:el’ in Revolution studio in Cheadle Hulme, a quiet commuter suburb of Stockport, when they got a phone call from Iceland. 

“I was like: ‘Is it Björk?!’ and it was!” Björk told Massey she’d been listening to ‘Newbuild’ and ‘Quadrastate’ on tour with the Sugarcubes and was interested in working with 808 on her first solo album. They were due to appear on ‘The Word’ with MC Tunes, so Björk came down to the recording. “She had this boom box with a cassette of some of the tunes from ‘Debut’ like ‘The Anchor Song’ and ‘Violently Happy’ but done with a brass band and no vocals. She was like: ‘This is where I’m up to and I want to go electronic.’

Massey ended up inviting her up to Revolution to guest on the new 808 album. 

“She did it in two days. She went off in the rain to write lyrics wandering round Cheadle Hulme.”

Massey and Björk really hit it off and used to send each other tapes of music. “I’m a complete jazz nut and she was a complete jazz nut and had worked in a record shop in Reykjavik. Her depth of musical knowledge was huge so there was a lot of bonding over things like Brazilian music and artists like Deodato.”

Björk even wrote a song about their musical pen pal relationship called ‘Headphones’ (with the opening lyrics ‘Genius to fall asleep to your tape last night’), that she dedicated to Massey on her second solo album ‘Post’. He also co-wrote ‘Army of Me’ and ‘Modern Things’ on ‘Post’.

‘ex:el’ featured Björk and Bernard Sumner from New Order, as 808 set the template for electronic bands to feature guest vocalists that many other outfits like The Chemical Brothers would later adopt to great success. ‘Leo Leo’ from ‘ex:el’ could almost be an early proto-Chemical Brothers track. The album also boasted two Top 10 singles, ‘Cubik’ and ‘In Yer Face’, the two most bonkers hit singles that year. After ‘ex:el’ was released, 808 State then sold out the 10,000 capacity G-Mex, then the big hometown gig for Manchester. 

The band had also signed to Tommy Boy in the US and were all set to embark on their first US tour, when at 7pm the evening before the rest of the band got a call from Martin Price to say he wasn’t going. Shocked, the other three went round to his house to try and talk him round, but Price was adamant. Massey, Barker and Partington decided there was no way they were going to blow out the US tour and got on the plane to America the next morning without him. Price then left the band. He started a short-lived electronic outfit called Switzerland, then did some production work including the brilliant debut single by Rochdale rappers Kaliphz, ‘Vibe Da Joint’, but then disappeared off the radar.

808’s fourth album, 1993’s ‘Gorgeous’, included guest vocals from Ian McCulloch and an unexpected reworking of UB40’s ‘One in 10’. On the ‘Gorgeous’ tour, they took Moby around the UK tour as their support. Massey put him up at his house, took him to The Haçienda and introduced him to Tony Wilson. “Almost no place in the world has influenced me more musically than Manchester,” Moby told the crowd at the Mancunian date of his ‘Play’ 20th anniversary tour recently. “Going to The Haçienda with Tony Wilson and Graham from 808 State… I thought I was going to spend my whole life as a tutor at community college and then I’m hanging out with these legends…”

Their last record for ZTT, 1996’s ‘Don Solaris’, featured guest vocals from M. Doughty from New York’s Soul Coughing, Louise Rhodes from Lamb and James Dean Bradfield from Manic Street Preachers. Their sixth album, ‘Outpost Transmission’, in 2002, included guest appearances from Simon Lord (Simian), Guy Garvey (Elbow) and Alabama 3, and although they didn’t know it at the time, it would be the last 808 album for nearly two decades. 

After 2002, came a long, not necessarily planned, hiatus from the studio. 808 State continued to perform live sporadically, but also had their own projects on the go. Partington and Barker DJed regularly and also had day jobs, while Massey embraced his more leftfield musical tendencies with various side projects, including Toolshed, Massonix and Sisters of Transistors, the UK’s ‘Premier Ladies Combo Organ Quartet’. He also played with Paddy Steer’s Homelife.

Then, a decade ago, the 808 wheels began to come off. In July 2014, Partington was arrested after being found in possession of heroin and crack cocaine. By then he and Barker were living different lives; the childhood mates were not as close as they used to be, so Barker and Massey weren’t even aware of the court case looming over Partington. The first they knew was a news story in the Manchester Evening News in January 2015, saying Partington had been jailed for 18 months. In court, Partington’s lawyer said that after he had run up a drugs bill ‘on tick’ his dealer had pressurised him with threats against him and his family into working for him.

Partington had become the de facto frontman of 808 in the 00s, still playing percussion but also prowling the front of the stage as an MC, whipping up the crowd, so his departure meant another new chapter and rethink for the band. Massey and Barker continued to perform as 808 State, with additional musicians, and did a 30th-anniversary tour at the end of 2018. As a duo, they then recorded the first 808 album for 17 years, ‘Transmission Suite’, named after the historic abandoned Granada Studios, where they set up their own studio and recorded it, which was released in 2019. Unfortunately, Covid affected the promotion and subsequent touring in support of ‘Transmission Suite’.

Then in 2021, to the shock of everyone, 808 State announced on social media that Barker had tragically passed away after a brief illness. He was a hugely loved member of 808 and tributes flooded in for him from the dance music community. His sad passing left Massey as the sole remaining member of 808 State.

“The optimism of a new album was quickly sandbanked with the pandemic. My partner’s cancer care during Covid, followed by the complete shock of Andrew’s sudden passing has left a bit of an existential re-evaluation of what I do for a living. I don’t take the luxury of music creation for granted. It can seem a trivial pursuit in times of death, illness and political unrest – who needs some more electronic music on the pile? But I want to believe I can add to the music that saves me in the dark times. I want to stay open to that.”

How does he view the future for 808? It must be discombobulating to suddenly look around and find he’s the only one left at the party, the sole remaining member and gatekeeper? 

“There is a kind of responsibility to the legacy,” he says. “I’m still very proud of all that music and I want it to get across to different generations. I’ve been heavily involved in digitising and reorganising the back catalogue.”

A lot of the 808 back catalogue still sounds fresh and hasn’t dated nearly as much as the music of their 90s peers. “I think other bands played by the dancefloor rules more than us, which has given it [808’s back catalogue] a longer life. It’s got more substance because it comes from a British subculture tradition and hasn’t really dated as much as some of the others.”

As for the future, 808 State are about to play a big hometown gig to celebrate the 35th anniversary of ‘90’, which involves playing the album in full, then a second set of favourites and emerging new 808 music with an augmented band. Massey is also starting to think about beginning work on a new 808 album, although the fact that he’s the only member left doesn’t mean it will be an indulgent jazz-psych-rock album. 

“I know how to put my 808 hat on!” he jokes.

For Massey, the best way he can honour the legacy of his former bandmates is by making sure the music of 808 State stays alive and keeps reaching new generations of fans. “That’s one of the things I love about doing festivals. You might get a bunch of 808 shirts in the front row but you’re playing to a whole set of new people of different age groups. My main mission with 808 State is, as always, to push technology to share something loud and beautiful. It’s intergenerational… it’s not dusty old music.”   

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.

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