by Steve Sutherland, Melody Maker, 4th August 1990
Wake Up America, You're Dead!
'Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the New Music Seminar. The rest of the shit going on in the rest of this building is the Old Music Seminar. This is the New Music Seminar.'
Tony Wilson, TV host, club owner, entrepreneur, pauses for dramatic effect. The Brits in the audience smile. Some applaud. We scent a wind-up. The Americans, congregated this Monday lunchtime in the Astor Room of New York's Marriott Marquis, are silent.
'The New Music Seminar was founded in 1980 to reflect, as the title perhaps would suggest, new music,' Wilson continues drily, satisfied his outrage is having the desired effect. 'There is a new music now, however it is probably only reflected in this particular room in the course of this week.
'I'd like to begin with a quote. The quote is: 'The kids wanna dance'. That does not come from Manchester or Madchester 1989 or The Haçienda or Ibiza in 1987; it comes from the Family Dog in San Francisco in 1964. You used to know how to dance here. God knows how you fucking forgot.
'What people in America don't seem to know is that the music which has come out of Chicago and Detroit in the last 10 years has so changed British pop music-not only dance music but also rock music-that now, if you're a British rock group and you cannot play rock music in the style to which you can dance and with the rhythms that have come out of America but that have been ignored here, then you aren't a rock group that matters. You're dead.
'There are groups that American A&R men go berserk over - The Sundays, The House Of Love, people like that who, in England, are so marginalised that they're completely irrelevant. It's a strange situation to be living in a country like that and then to come over here-which is why this panel is called 'Wake Up America, You're Dead!'
Tony Wilson tells us his task today is two-fold - to recount the curious history of how American House music infected the British indie scene and started making so much money and to try and discover why, if it works in Britain, it's going nowhere in the States. To this effect he has assembled a panel featuring Robert Ford, formerly of Billboard, who virtually discovered rap music: Screaming Rachel, a Chicago House DJ now working in New York: Nathan McGough, manager of Happy Mondays: Paul Dennis, who runs London dance clubs: Derrick May, a Detroit House producer: and Marshall Jefferson, a foremost Chicago House producer of whom Wilson says: 'Things are so bad that personally I'm amazed to be sitting here with this man. He was suggested as a panellist on a producers' panel at this particular seminar. A very senior A&R person from the only American record company still owned by you fucking Americans said, "No no no, he wasn't that important. He should be a reserve panellist". That man should be taken out and fucking hung.'
Keith Allen is also here. He is introduced as Dr Keith Allen of the Post-Freudian Therapy Centre in Geneva and a world expert on drugs. There's an outbreak of muttering when Wilson says this and he doesn't miss the opportunity. 'It's so strange in America,' he says, beaming. 'You're so embarrassed about fucking drugs aren't you? It didn't do Guns N' Roses any harm.'
The early years of House are quickly recounted-how Frankie Knuckles, Farley Jackmaster Funk, Jessie Saunders and others created the music in under-age, non-drinking clubs in Chicago and how it struggled and struggles still because record companies see it as a producers' medium and are not willing to invest in what they consider to be a string of one-hit wonders. Then Wilson picks up the story, citing Mike Pickering in Manchester and Graham Park In Derby as the DJs who brought this music to Britain in 1986/7.
Dr Keith Allen is now called upon to explain the history and the effects of Ecstasy and a few bums start shifting uncomfortably in their seats.
'The basic psychology was,' Allen begins, 'in 1987 in a club called Schoom, I had a load of Ecstasy topped off with a little amyl-nitrate sort of sex-inducing vibe and I would give people one of these tablets and they would give me £20. That's psychology.'
There's much laughter and clapping from the British contingent.
'And we were both very, very happy. Now I should really put this into perspective because I'm now the father of eight children cos, as you probably know, when you get on one, as we say in England, you wanna chuck it about everywhere. And I did.
'It's really weird actually, I'm not a doctor of psychology. It's obvious. I'm an airline pilot.'
Rachel interrupts him: 'I'd like to say something concerning the drug. I don't wanna sound sick and wimpy but a lot of the Chicago people thought that Acid was this natural high that you got from listening to this music.'
Keith Allen laughs: 'I don't believe in natural highs. I think you should pay for it.'
Wilson sees the discussion's heading for trouble and pulls it back on line with a bit of history about how the Ibiza attitude came back to Britain with the holidaymakers and how they latched onto House as the hippest music around. Paul Dennis explains what a rave is for the Americans who don't know, and then Keith Allen chips in again: 'For any of you aspiring promoters over here, a really good way to make money, right, is to book telephone lines, okay? We do it with British Telecom. You book telephone lines and then you give out numbers for people to phone all night long so they're phoning these numbers at 40p a call. Now I take 20p of that phone call myself and, of course, there's no party! Hahaha! I've got 20,000 phone calls between eight o'clock and three in the morning man! I was making loadsa money! It's all part of the vibe, y'know?'
Wilson: 'I went into my club, The Haçienda, two weeks ago and one and a half thousand 18-year old kids were going mental, dancing like crazy to Northside, to Mondays, to Marshall Jefferson, to Derrick May, to Pink Floyd, to The Beatles... I've never seen anything like it in my life and I felt old for the first time. The wave is that strong.
'I think if we talk about the fulcrum moments, one was when the Balearic all-night Ibiza dance attached itself to house music in the beginning of '88 and the other great moment was when people like Ronnie and Paul Ryder, the drummer and bass player of Happy Mondays, began to be able to put the dance rhythms out of Chicago and Detroit into rock music. They soon became the first generation of British groups with the Roses and Inspiral Carpets and now there's a dozen or more.'
Nathan McGough is called upon to explain how that happened and he says: 'We're not really trying to play House music with your traditional rock instruments. It's more that House music became the backdrop and the setting for the club culture which then focused and determined the new attitude and the new culture of British youth which Happy Mondays then took and expressed as a group and, through that, became the focal point, the anti-heroes for the new youth culture. '
'So, in other words,' says Robert Ford, 'your boys are drug dealers, they're not musicians.'
'Correct,' says McGough.
Once more Wilson steps into the breach to realign the row he has so cunningly contrived. 'The point is, kids in Britain for the last few years and still today and tomorrow are having the time of their lives in the words of the 'Dirty Dancing' movie. I don't see any kids in fucking America having the time of their lives.'
