I began to notice it happening when I was working on the door of the Café de Paris. A new drug called Extasy arrived from New York, Fat Tony started playing some new records from Chicago. That was house music. It was called house music because you could make it in your house - it was supposed to be home-made. It shared the egalitarian gesture of DIY with punk but was no artless three-chord thrash. This was machine music strung out on an electronic pulse. The records were repetitive, sparse, powerful and tuneless, created by DJs using cheap technology, the lyrics limited because there was nothing to say. Extasy induced the same sense of emptiness. As a nation we took the new music to our hearts, distorted it, and called it acid because it sounded weird. Acieeed.

LRB 28 September 1989 | PDF Download