ACID HOUSE - MY GATEWAY INTO RAVE CULTURE (1987-1990)
Late ‘80s - spreading the acid gospel to the good people of Greece.
I’m going to take you back to Exeter University, 1987…
I didn’t arrive there in the usual way, slightly tentative, figuring things out as I went. I’d already made a slew of unfortunate mistakes a couple of years previously at Birmingham University, but on this, my second run at further education, I had the advantage of having a friend of mine from school already in his second year, and he’d built this great little ecosystem around himself - a proper group of lunatics and outliers - people who were creative, social, active, and curious about everything. So instead of easing my way in, I stepped straight into something that already had a pulse.
Technically I was living in halls of residence in my first year, but in reality I was almost never there. I’d drift between houses, parties, kitchens full of people talking about music, art, politics, whatever happened to be in the air at the time. It felt like a much bigger world than the one I’d just come from, and I grabbed it with both hands.
By the time my second year rolled around, a group of us moved into a house on Howell Road. It should have housed five people, but the greedy slumlord had converted it into housing for eleven - complete with rice paper walls and barely enough room for a single bed. Six lads, five girls, and absolutely no sense of restraint. The place was adjacent to Exeter Prison, which added this strange, almost surreal backdrop to everything. There was an alleyway between us and the prison walls where, most nights, you’d hear spectral voices drifting into the night like caterwauling car alarms long after midnight; girlfriends shouting up to their boyfriends inside, prisoners pressed up against the bars, calling back down, the metallic echo of bars being rattled for emphasis. It became part of the fabric of the place - theatrical and dense.
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I’ve started writing again - longer form, less filtered, covering everything from where this all began through to how things are evolving now.