GAY ACID HOUSE NIGHT
It's just that, a night of 80'-90's acid house. Smileys, glo stickes, dungarees, acid house.
House grew out of disco, and the underground nightlife of urban LGBTQ+ communities in America is also central to house’s story. In 1977 The Warehouse opened in Chicago, and they hired as their house DJ a black queer artist from NYC, who would go on to become the godfather of House: Frankie Knuckles. Frankie played a mixture of disco, soul, R&B, and Euro-disco, which he mixed with beats he’d edited on tape. This unique mixture helped set the template for House. The Warehouse was a club that broke down barriers, but when it opened in 1977, it was actually a members-only gay club whose clientele was primarily black and latinx. The roots of acid house start here in America.
The late 1980s in the UK saw the effect of Thatcherism in full force. Strict austerity measures impoverished large sections of Britain, with areas in the North being hit the hardest. Mines were shut down and thousands of jobs were lost, yet the Tories’ neoliberalist agenda positioned those struggling as simply not working ‘hard enough’. Class inequalities widened and the myth of meritocracy worked to keep systems in place. The dire political state of Britain generated a collective need for escape, and what arose would change the nature of rave and dance culture forever. The counterculture that emerged saw the emergence of mass free partying on a scale never seen before. Simultaneously, a subgenre of house music from Chicago and Detroit was making its way over to Britain and came to be known as acid house. The name ended up lending itself to the entire rave movement, and was characterised by ‘squelching’ repetitive bass produced by the Roland TB-303 synthesiser. The acid yellow smiley face became synonymous with the movement and still remains an icon of British counterculture today.
What makes the era of acid rave so unique is the organic nature in which it developed. Though the movement never began as an intentionally political act, it was created as a direct response to the hardships faced by the youth of Britain. Those who felt incapable of inciting any change turned to dance culture to escape, and a community was created as a result. Putting on raves required intense planning and teamwork; locations had to be scouted, sound systems needed to be obtained and set up, and people from all walks of life pooled together to make it happen. Profit was not the priority; it was to put on a night that would make you forget about everything else. Raves were frequented by almost everyone. From the working class, LGBTQ+ people, football hooligans and hippies alike were a part of the movement, and it is still one of the largest in youth culture to ever exist.
So join us for a night of beats and breaks, our usual intro chat with archive footage of the scene and maybe even a bit of acid brass thrown in too!