In the summer of 2005, at their ad hoc London club night Gauche Chic, the party people Niyi and K-tron pulled out a best-of-1990s-rave-hits CD and played it to a crowd of teenagers and twentysomethings. The kids were too young to have felt the full force of Let Me Be Your Fantasy the first time around. But they liked what they heard. Playing old rave tracks alongside demented new disco, ragga, crunk and arch pop music chimed with the nightlife lunacy that was building. Rave felt like a fresh source of inspiration in an emerging club culture.
From its inception at the end of the 1980s, “old rave” (as it is now called) gradually degenerated into a dreary free-party scene, where men of a certain age cavort to increasingly chin-stroking dance music. But the early spirit of rave never died; it was just waiting for its time to come round again. New rave is a second coming: not just a throwback to the lawless euphoria of its golden age, but an aesthetic focus for a new generation of club kids, artists, fashion students and night-time celebrities who just want to dress up and get down. New rave was publicly christened by the singer of its fluoro-coloured flagship band, Klaxons, who are at the tipping point of crossover success. The scene has thrown up a raft of great, slightly idiotic new pop groups and DJs, including Trash Fashion, Shitdisco, Silverlink, WarBoy and Namalee ’n’ the Namazonz. It has its own pin-up — Jet Storm, the singer from Trash Fashion — and its own couturiers, in Gareth Pugh, fashion’s current golden boy and an architect of out-there clubwear, and the directional designer Carri “Cassette Playa” Mundane, who borrows the cartoon style of Sega, Pac-Man and all manner of gaudy neon ephemera and turns it into joyous club clobber. Her manic designs can be seen in the London retail palaces of Kokon To Zai and Dover Street Market. The movement also has an in-house publication, the fashion zine Super Super, and a Factory-style creative collective, !Wowow!, whose unofficial leader, Matthew Stone, has been described as a walking zeitgeist. “We think about new rave on a daily basis here,” says Steve Slocombe, founder of Super Super. “I can look at a plant pot and think, ‘How new rave is that? And can I wear it?’” To which the answer is? “Yes, clearly.”
Not everyone is so enthusiastic, however. The clubbing magazine Mixmag has dismissed new rave as just being about a few silly kids in east London. But they are missing the point. All radical shifts in nightclub culture are about silly kids somewhere. The Haçienda was about a few silly kids in Manchester, Taboo was about a bunch of silly west London woofters in the early 1980s, and Studio 54 in New York was about Bianca Jagger, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Andy Warhol mostly being a bit silly. This group of silly creative mates is no different. A new club moment is upon us.
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NICKY LONDON COLUMN