Technological music, Electronica in all its forms is sort of like the rust covered dead mech or robot warrior a good Transformers movie keeps cutting back to. There in the rubble of that facility – still – seemingly now, at long last – lifeless.

Just when it seems all is lost for it. That it has gone the way of Disco and show band music. Then something happens – a freak lightning strike or vocoder accident, a lone strobe light flashes on and somehow it rumbles back to life. Quickly it reconstructs itself from the embattled rusting corpses of other genres and comes striding and smashing out of that old disused facility. Probably to a drumbeat made up of tangled barking dogs, a flamenco guitar all to the mark of a sea shanty.

When last you left us – Techno had rambled back into town and had just coldly shot Indie-Rock music in the face for laughing at its donkey. Which, is incidentally a drug mule filled with pounds of top quality pills and coke. Now tired and with a little bit of a jaw, it was looking for a place to bed down for the night.

Dublin has House music. Dublin has House music like a two dollar hooker has thrush and warts. Reoccurring and seemingly forever. Every sort of House, cheap house, deep house, crack house. We boringly have it. Goofy faced men you suspect use tanning beds peddle it at parties, swanning around with a pair of technics, a mixer and some records as if they’re just some how more equal than you.

Yes…House music…

If this was the western it is being written like, that last bit would be said by me, the weeping house wife in the old floral pattern dress, as I collapse weeping at the side of my porch. The air of its voice carrying the unspoken sentence of “Why won’t you die…why?”

Dublin has Indie-Rock music. In much the same way someone has middle stage Rabies. Fatally. Thanks to U2, we will always have grinning pretties with wah-wah pedals clogging up our bars dishing out aural mud.

It also has the problem that most of the pub DJs – even the interesting ones – appear to play often the same sets night in, night out. If it’s not the same set, it will be about a third or more the same. This might not sound so bad, I mean just how annoying can Rock The Kasbah really get? Except that, drunks, have that enforced Alzheimer’s thing going on – which can lead to very foggy conversations and full blown arguments over whether or not it’s the same set. Often with people getting off their stool and walking over, closer to the DJ – as if somehow being closer to the source of the music will help them remember what was played on Tuesday.

Coupled with the fact that – Dublin, Ireland overall really has an over abundance of inspid surface grazers and beings so empty the only faint echo of their passing will be a wasted grave and the faint smell of stale beer – really the time could not have been more ripe for what was about to happen.

I mean, if you look at it, it could be quite easy to see how Ireland is apparently viewed with such affection by all the non-nationals who come to live, work or just party here. How those abroad look at us with a warm gloss. Never before in the history of the planet has one small Island managed to party so hard with such a large supply of shit drugs and a variety of things other people might view as handicaps. Such as oppressive government and a distinct lack of character once you’ve sobered up and seen the real them.

You could look at our diligence and determination to rip the tits off it no matter if those pills made you throw up every time you took even a half and only really go “Wow man, look at them, that really escalated quickly…” .

Rather like the reaction you’d have if an arsonist managed to burn a house down with only a glass of water and wet matches.

Gradually we weren’t alone though. Out there, in the wider world, a shortage was bimbling up, and bumbling down.

With China already hard on the case. Sassafras oil waxed and waned as Cambodian authorities got more in line with Western drug policies and other agencies decided to target it’s production as a way of stopping the dread plague that was Ecstasy.

Something shifted out there in the ether though.

When thought about – it almost feels like the opening speech from Jeff Wayne’s War of the worlds.

“No one would have believed, that out there, somewhere in Europe, that party affairs were being watched by the timeless worlds of chemists. No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinised as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiple in a drop of water.

Few of us even considered the possibility that life may come back to drugs.

And yet, across the gulf of Europe, minds immeasurably superior to ours, regarded this famine with envious eyes, and slowly, but surely, they drew their plans for us.”

Personally, I find the best way to mark a sudden swing is by the presence and quality of Acid. Acid these days seems to stand like Death in the book of Revelation – when it appears there on the hilltop of my perception, sat astride a pale horse, apparently all alone. Rainbow caftan rippling in the soft breeze.
And when I can touch it, and I mean really get up in that man, like, dig my fingers into the hood, root around, really play with the colour.

Then, I’m usually aware that what follows behind that hilltop is some sort bubbling babbling hysteria of brief renewal and those bastards have better have brought the base with them this time or the Rapture just is not happening. Not this time damn it.

So it was with giddy hope we welcomed Acid back at the Electric Picnic, and with it the beginning tide of fresh waves of pure MDMA pills. With the swell of MDMA, flocking back as it was, came more 2CB, more ketamine, better quality hash, grass and the same shit cocaine. Bad street heroin all but disappeared due to a disease sweeping fields in Afghanistan and I heard rumours of DMT and other whispered things. Base didn’t return, so the Rapture was cancelled and the angels sent back to their kennels.

Skipping merrily hand in hand with all this – was – Techno.

Alternative art spaces were beginning to reappear and run music nights – riddled as they were with Techno and Electronica like a dog with worms.

Late Clubs had begun to resurface again. Splattered across the city where they could fit in – down back alleys, off in the suburbs, warehouses, houses, disused supermarkets, galleries, wine bars, basements, cardboard boxes and I’m pretty sure I saw a group of people having a rave around a car in a car park.

Groups of beautiful people with purported talents and connections seemed far more prone to having parties again. And these parties appeared to being frequented by models actors and other beings just a little bit more equal than you.

Raves were happening – off out there in the wilds, in the studios, warehouses and other haunted buildings left fallow.

Pubs did their best to muscle in on the action – with nights and mornings wherever they could jam them. The George Bernard Shaw, the basement of the Sweeney Mongrel, and the old faithful, Pygmalion, amongst a motley crue helping to drive the greedy hunger for beats like gimlet eyed enabling relatives.

Larger events drifted by – single nights with multiple DJs, and smaller beautiful festivals like Síbín and Life bloomed and kicked the teeth in of the bigger impersonal brewery and money hungry promotions companies like MCD.

The shift was beginning to move from the massive festivals to the smaller boutique. Usually with a good spine of Electronic music. People were bitter about many things. If it wasn’t the Scottish security at the Electric Picnic who on the face of it seemed to be mostly on the game of getting more out of it than the punters . But with a closer look, were confiscating drugs to sell back to the crowd or in some cases mysteriously furnishing people from their own supply – acquired somewhere distant, like Narnia.

Then it was the poor bar state of affairs when it came to licensing. Breweries appeared to be allowed to buy the sole rights to gigs. Customers who paid through the nose for tickets were forced to attend events where they may have only a choice of three alcoholic beverages. Where late licenses were a whispered thing that appeared to happen off in the city, along with blue moons and the second coming of Jesus.

What was the point of going to a three day festival if the bars closed at normal times?

What was the point of spending nearly or over two hundred euro for a ticket alone when poorly trained, greedy security staff were confiscating alcohol at every juncture?

Festivals were supposed to be adult playtime. Echoes to ancient times when we danced around fires and howled at the moon – making beasts of ourselves to rid ourselves just momentarily of the pain of existence. Revelling in uninhibited contact with each other, dancing, laughing, in a mild break from the sheer drudgery of existence.

At least, unless I missed something?

Yet here, they became sandboxes of curfew operated under a climate of fear least the security confiscate the last of your booze, you missed the one bit of music after 3AM somewhere or Godzilla help you – you got caught doing something that you weren’t supposed to.

Don’t even mention the toilets…
We can put men on the moon yet only the Danish can manage the problem of sewage at a festival?

At the same time, they became things heavily centred, spined with Electronic music. The main acts on the main stages were more often than not people like The Chemical Brothers or Leftfield. Minor Major acts on other stages often older, dust brushed electronics outfits – the busiest tents often those with the likes of Cold Cuts, Mr. Scruff, Sven Vath or any number of names ripping the proverbial tits off it with three and four hour sets.

Which considering what the late ‘80s and most of the ‘90s had thought us as a species was really like the silent nod to take something that made you dance and go a little happy. If heavy metal was the music of the devil and young women being fucked backstage with a cephalopod – then with Electronic music, was the hysteria was the music that skipped hand in hand with drugs. Yet here the big corporate festivals were, building the core of their entities around Electronica.

At the time cop-security-rat-regulation heavy…

We drifted on, like ghosts through some sort of mixed message hysteria.

The general public were forced by the powers that be to become fun ninjas. Deft at the arts of obfuscation and hiding on the ceiling – lest someone somewhere figure out it was happening and put a stop to it, for the greater good.

The Electric Picnic, a little loose in its first years became the “boutique” equivalent of having a sleep over where the mother came in to tell everybody to hush and turn off the light. While the older brother made sure to get a cut of all the sweets all your friends had brought.

Oxegen – whatever little it had, dissolved into a sort of bacchanalian wild west. With reports of mad out of it appendage dragging barely sentient ameobas erecting toll-points into campsites for people pass through, mass tent burning and other such general darkness. A strangelands where the underage slipped in, made life difficult and vomited in their tent. The only sign that some of these people are even marginally human is the brief pause where they break into a famous Irish tune like ‘We spit at the Brits’ or shout something equally Republican to their friends while telling a terrified German how they don’t hate all the British. At least, not as much as you hated the Jews. But then, we can’t talk about that can we? Or the fact I see them stumbling about the transit system barking into a phone about how great Oxegen was even with the tent burnings.

Which is a bit like saying – great place to live, sunny – shame They bulldozed my home.

No we can’t talk about that.

MCD may come down with the mighty legal ban hammer like they did with Boards.ie. Denial is the beat of the day and when you have the money you can change the face of the digital landscape with the stroke of a lawyer. It used to be that every forum on Boards.ie had a stickie ordering you to refrain from mentioning MCD events. (Editor: These appear to have since disappeared)

Fun and music came to resemble the edges of some obscure urban ritual. Where through official means, you had to rush home at an allotted time lest some sort of Hammer Horror evil nodded and winked of but never spoken about found you out on the streets.
And the unofficial meant that if we just changed clothes and lighting a bit, it might feel like an Italian heist movie.

A nation of Don’t.

In a wider European Community of, Here let me do that for you, Maybe That’s Not Such A Good Idea and you shouldn’t be doing that. With the firm favourite of – I’m not sure what you’re talking about are you sure you have the facts correct?

Ireland stands like the old woman running the gate at a third world European historical attraction.
She smells quite strongly of piss and off-butter should you, and you will be – forced to deal with her.
She won’t give you your correct change.
She may follow you around expecting you to steal something.
And you can be damn sure she disapproves of everything you think and do.
And has probably such dark recesses at the back of her mind that she is disapproving of you doing things you couldn’t even dream of, let alone attempt without a goat, a bottle of Burma shave and a box of razors.

That we even managed to hold a single rave just goes to show you the raw tenacity and determination a small chosen few of Irish people have to extort money out of their lesser brethren.

And those good hearted few who just wanted to have and provide others with a great time.

To Be Continued…