---
title: "Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture by Simon Reynolds"
date: "2008-03-04T17:10:48+00:00"
modified: "2008-03-04T17:10:48+00:00"
url: "https://rationalists.org.uk/articles/energy-flash-a-journey-through-rave-music-and-dance-culture-by-simon-reynolds/"
post_id: 4926
---

# Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture by Simon Reynolds

![Cover of Energy Flash by Simon Reynolds](https://rationalists.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/images/0803-Mueller.jpg "Cover of Energy Flash by Simon Reynolds")First I should declare an interest. Simon Reynolds is a former, and highly esteemed, colleague. Our stints at the extinct rock weekly Melody Maker overlapped in the early 90s, when I had somehow stumbled into the Reviews Editor’s chair, and he was winding down his massive contribution that had helped make Melody Maker, in the late 80s, the best music magazine ever published and the reason I wanted to be a journalist.

Reynolds, given space and freedom now sadly unimaginable in any similar magazine, wrote about music with a breadth of knowledge and analytical imagination that was always dazzling. When writing about music he didn’t like, he disdained the scattergun invective deployed by the rest of us in favour of forensic exactitude. When writing about music he did like, his prose could be purple to the point of impenetrability – editing the first draft of his assessment of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless was not a happy evening – but was much more often twinkling with heartfelt love and riddled with bleary wit. Reynolds’ previous books, the collections Blissed Out and Bring The Noise, and his magisterial history of post-punk, Rip It Up And Start Again, are magnificent advertisements for himself and for the much (and, these days, sadly often rightly) maligned field of music journalism.

But I must also declare a lack of interest. Rave music and dance culture, the subjects, by subtitular admission, of this edition of Energy Flash, updated for the 20th anniversary of the dawn of Acid House, bore me absolutely sideways. Whatever exposure I’ve had to the music, invariably accidental, has prompted incredulous reflections on the quantity of mind-altering substances one would need to ingest to find the racket bearable, never mind enjoyable. The associated culture, as represented in the photo section of Energy Flash by pictures of crowds of stoned, sweaty gurners in stupid hats woggling fluorescent light-sticks and blowing whistles, precisely resembles my idea of hell.

So, while it may seem somewhat backhanded, the news that I was absorbed by all 500-odd pages of Energy Flash should be read as the highest imaginable praise. Reynolds traces the genre’s development from its origins in Detroit, New York and Chicago, through its climactic budding in the motorway-side paddocks of Britain in the late 80s and early 90s, to its fractious, twitchy, even sinister comedown – a trajectory not dissimilar to that experienced by those who consume ecstasy, the drug that powered it all. Reynolds begins as an observer and finds himself subsumed as a participant, popping the pills, following the crowds, raving amid the throng and, en route, employing his connections as a journalist to meet the prime movers. His digressions on the chemical and cultural effects of ecstasy in particular are lucid and informed, and as such a bracing reminder of how little public discussion of drugs is any of those things.

As for the music, Reynolds writes as wonderfully about dance as he does about any other genre; indeed, he’s very nearly persuasive. Urban Shakedown¹s 1992 hit “Some Justice” is “a seismic undertow of sinewave bass, and a monster riff pulsating in a Morse code pattern”; Underground Resistance’s “Death Star” “sounds like a gigantic, demonic glitterball, flashing off death rays in every direction, pulverising planets and vapourising interstellar armadas.” This is great stuff, and a terrific corrective to the plodding, utilitarian, consumer-guide box-ticking that currently passes too often for music journalism. Reynolds is, however, sometimes guilty of the common critical error of reading more into works than their creators probably wrote into them. Suggesting that Subnation’s “Scottie” “dramatises a psychological struggle between hysteria and resilience” is a bit of a stretch – it seems more likely that it was a cool noise for people to get baked and leap around to – but Reynolds’ enthusiasm and intelligence are amply sufficient to bear the reader past his occasional (and, it must be conceded, more often endearing than not) flights of preposterousness.

The key question, then, was the one posed by Jarvis Cocker at the start of Pulp’s 1995 Acid House reminiscence “Sorted For E’s And Whizz”: “Is this the way they say the future’s meant to feel?/Or just 20,000 people standing in a field?” Reynolds never seems sure. His dispatch from the peak of the early 90s rave phenomenon – the illegal and Daily Mail-inciting 1992 Castlemorton Common rave, attended by perhaps 40,000 people – is exemplary gonzo reportage, but Reynolds tempers his excitement with a disappointed realisation that this (“a scene weirdly poised between idyllic and apocalyptic”) may be all there is. (At the risk of sounding like a Daily Mail reader, if any bunch of noisy hippies made the mess Reynolds describes on my land, they’d be fortunate if I fired the first few rounds over their heads.)

Castlemorton may have been the last moment at which pop culture felt potentially genuinely transgressive (Part V of the 1995 Criminal Justice &amp; Public Order Act specifically targeted raves). Since then, dance/rave music has become as marginal as every other music which isn’t conveyor-belt pop or heritage rock; Energy Flash is in that respect perfectly titled. It’s also thoughtful, meticulous, fizzing with intellectual vigour, a(nother) monumental accomplishment from the best in his business.

**Energy Flash is published by Picador**