As I walked into London's most celebrated Neo-Rave party, Bang Face, I felt nostalgic to say the least. Sheepishly passing a huge queue of frustrated party people and waving a press card at the Electrowerkz door girl, reminded me that I’m in the now, not back in the day. But as I walked into the club everything looked the same as it did back then: a winding corridor made of jet-black breeze blocks, bodies chatting and bouncing up dirty concrete steps, a vast warehouse style nightclub – and best of all- a happy and friendly crowd, thrusting an amalgamation of rave toys into the air to the decadent sound of bass. There were blow up dolls, colorful acid house smileyface balloons, and the signature Bang Face logo molded into party masks (you can download artwork from their website). Each iteration of Bang Face is themed, and this party, the 51st in the series, was Whisky-A-Go-Go- disco inferno meets rave- meaning lots of the Bang Faces sported afros in an almost comical collision of dance music fashion styles.
I was attending Bang Face to get some cultural insights for a futures report Angalossy will be producing later this year “The Future of a Good Old Knees Up." Using existing research by Derek Woodgate’s team at Future Lab and some of our own, we hope to plan a sustainable and fun vision of what the Future holds for the entertainment industry – it was definitely a night were pleasure and business were mixed.
After my anthropological adventure I returned home with a cruel hangover, but what a great night I’d had: 808 State offered-up a sizable dose of nostalgia and Hellfish gave me the injection of Gabber I often crave. Aside the fun I’d had, I was left feeling miffed by my Neo-Rave experience. Saint Acid, or James as I’ve become to know the man responsible for the night, spoke of a phone call he received last year when the New York Times asked him to explain the difference between New Rave and Neo-Rave – they’re the same aren’t they? That started me thinking- what is Neo-Rave, apart from the obvious connotations?
Saint Acid explained that when rave returned, it was confused with a fashion fad. "Some people actually thought that when we started three years ago, it was us who started the whole movement up again," he explained. New Rave essentially describes a look - 14 to 24 year olds who read Super Super Magazine and listen to the Klaxons According to Dr. Stuart Bothwick of John Moores University “Neo Rave is less a rebirth of rave, and more a rebirth of indie-dance. In 1989/90, a rock/rave crossover [happened] in the form of bands such as Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, The Farm and Flowered Up was briefly popular on dance floors.” But as we well know, it was more of a cultural than a musical crossover. This musical crossover is quite new, B-Pitch’s Modeselektor, regulars at Bang Face, typify this trend. Their latest album Happy Birthday features Indie/dance infusions from Thom Yorke alongside a heady mash of electro, hip hop, grime and bass. Bothwick continues: “As the 1990s progressed, this scene declined whilst house, techno and later, jungle and garage increased in popularity. Come the early to mid 2000s, we saw a second generation of NME-friendly bands whose audience was younger than the now thirty-something plus clubbers of the 1990s, and who were rejecting the divide between rock and rave that had developed since [the birth of acid house].” Neo-Rave is more of a demand for a “melting pot of musical genres” as Saint Acid says, than a fad or trend in itself. Party revelers need more than nostalgic rave tracks from Shut Up and Dance et al, they require a whole mix of Indie, Industrial, Gabber, Techno, Electro, Jungle, Breakcore and so on, and by the turnouts at Bang Face – they seem to be getting the mix right.
If you are in London, Bang Face 52 is on February 8 at Electrowerkz
Posted by James Friedman
