Idris Elba's How Clubbing Changed the World Page #8

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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?

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

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