Dancing on the volcano: how ‘aciiiiiiid’ conquered the Netherlands in the early 1990s

In 1988, four British DJs organized the very first warehouse party in the Netherlands, in a squatted warehouse in Amsterdam. It heralded a decade of collectively professed escapism.

In a distant and internetless past, DJs weren’t stars, crossing at least five time zones every weekend. There were no dance festivals where ecstatic crowds gathered. In fact, there was no ‘dance’. There was only the energizing madness of house pioneers who had heard the new exciting dance music and wanted to share it with others.

Four evangelists from the west came to bring the glad tidings to the Netherlands. The Soho Connection – DJ Graham B, DJ Paul Jay, Maz Weston and DJ Groovemaster Johnson, who already lived in the Netherlands – had seen the light of day in London during the second Summer of Love of 1988. At the end of that summer, the group organized the very first warehouse party in the Netherlands in three rooms, the smallest of which was devoted to new dance music. And behold, on September 3, 1988, modern club culture was born in a squatted warehouse on the Levantkade in Amsterdam. And the baby crowed: “Aciiiiiiiiid.”

According to Groovemaster Johnson, that party was a turning point. Because yes, house was already being played in the Netherlands, but tradition also tells that the audience of the Roxy in Amsterdam did not like the new music that house patriarch Eddy de Clercq was the first to try out in the Netherlands.

Johnson: ‘It wasn’t until after our Warehouse party, ‘London Comes To Amsterdam’, that people picked up on it here too.’

Electronic sounds mangled through a filter

What is now called ‘dance’ was still known collectively as ‘house’, or as the subgenre ‘acid house’ with its electronic sounds mangled through a filter. House was named after The Warehouse in Chicago, a club-turned warehouse where legendary DJ Frankie Knuckles first played the genre. It was the start of a club culture that has grown in almost 35 years into a huge cultural and economic factor that involves hundreds of millions. An industry within the music industry, with its own clothing, its own entertainment venues and its own drug culture. Not only was the music new, but also the ecosystem around it.

Johnson: ‘The nightlife as we know it didn’t exist then. People went to the disco to dance, not to lose themselves in the music for hours on end.’

The clandestine nature of the remote location also contributed to the atmosphere and the success of the party. Although Johnson did detect some uneasiness in the new potential audience: ‘Nobody had heard of flyers. When we went out with our self-folded leaflets, people looked at us as if we were Jehovah’s Witnesses.’

The enthusiasm at the party was no less. Also came through about three hundred Englishmen who had made the crossing with party paraphernalia in their luggage: referee whistles, glow sticks and acid wear from the first hour, the smiley T-shirt. And as Danny Rampling, the British DJ who discovered acid on party island Ibiza, poured out the overdriven electronic crackle over the crowd, two thousand men collectively experienced a new transcendent experience. Music, smoke and a never-ending strobe, that’s all it took to get into a trance. It ‘Can you feel iiiiiiiiit‘ from Royal House formation was confirmed by loud approving whistles.

A hat in the shape of a giant poppy bulb

Arno Adelaars, writer, free spirit and teacher who at the time was doing drug research for the University of Amsterdam, was one of the visitors and described the modern tribal experience in his book Ecstasy†

‘Hundreds of dancers disappeared every fifteen minutes into the thick clouds of the fog machine, which were so dense that in the end I could only see the silhouettes of my own hands against the stroboscopic light (…) The thousands of visitors let themselves be immersed again and again in the smoke. This was premiere audiences, from the dressed-up cousins ​​to the dazzling schoolgirls, from the fashionably-packed yup to that tall Chinese lady with a hat shaped like a giant poppy bulb.’

How different the organization experienced it. Johnson: ‘Because a huge work of art, outside the gate, spewed out metres-long flames, a garbage container caught fire. In no time the flames reached the roof. By order of the fire brigade, the doors had to be opened, after which everyone could enter for free.’

Then there were entire tribes who had discovered a shortcut past the loading entrance of the warehouse and Rampling’s DJ spot, the tailgate of a parked truck. There were two toilets for every two thousand visitors. The drink ran out, after which one of the organizers rushed to the club Mazzo. And just like at the Biblical wedding at Cana, where Jesus improvised the catering, a miraculous multiplication seemed to be taking place. According to the myth, a can filled with water went around a circle of visitors twice before it was empty. The proceeds of the party went down considerably and each member of the Soho Connection had to contribute 800 guilders.

Whether Johnson still felt like organizing such a party after the financial debacle? ‘Absolute. Because despite all the setbacks, everyone was wildly enthusiastic.’

The 1990s cried out for collectively professed escapism

So two weekends after that, another party followed, and another, and another. The Roxy, the place where Eddy de Clerq did his misunderstood missionary work, became a place of pilgrimage for everyone who wanted to taste the hip hedonism. There was the first wave of star DJs like Dimitri, Remy and Erick E. French Kiss became the first instrumental house record to reach number one in 1989. The (acid) house spread like an oil slick, until somewhere in the mid-nineties you could also buy your smiley T-shirt on the Albert Cuyp and even your mother could imagine something vague with that ‘aciiiiiid’.

And so the big city music from warehouses and (gay) clubs in Chicago and Detroit also took root in the Netherlands. Emerging from disco but stripped of unnecessary frills like verse and chorus, and pumped up with rhythmic electronics, house became the most extreme and effective dance music.

The times cried out for collectively professed escapism. The 1980s were blackened by the Cold War and nuclear threat. Where punk at the end of the seventies already provided the cynical soundtrack for social discontent and the hopelessness of existence, in the late eighties house made you dance on the volcano. Punk said ‘No Future’. House replied ‘Who Cares?’, and ushered us into the merry nineties.

And then house also had the power to break down the walls between social groups. The Warehouse, a club where, like resident DJ Knuckles, the visitors were gay and black, also attracted white straights because of house. One meeting of the minds, as Eagles also saw with the gays, students and yuppies in Amsterdam. Acid house was already included when that word was only used to indicate that you could get the batteries somewhere for free.

Cuddle drug ecstasy as intoxicant for the second Summer Of Love

eagles in Ecstasy: ‘Unknowns danced and talked to each other (as far as possible). Was this a re-experience of the peace & love of the sixties, the Second Psychedelic Wave?’

Maybe. And just as LSD was associated with the first Summer Of Love, ecstasy became the standard intoxicant for the second. A cuddly drug that helped enormously with that dance floor fraternization.

Adelaars: ‘The pill helped people overcome their blockages and made them social. The stimulating side of ecstasy provided enough energy to dance the night away.’

But ‘the pill’ was also viewed with suspicion. Ecstasy was immediately included as a hard drug in the Opium Act in 1988, because of the ‘unacceptably high risk’ to public health. Out of concern about drug use, the British government took a more rigorous approach and banned all ‘raves’ in 1990. “Gatherings of more than twenty people, in the open air, with music characterized by a succession of repetitive beats at a volume high enough to cause discomfort to the local population” was now illegal.

It was the mistrust and disdain that the local community reserves for each new youth culture. The clubbing crowd was seen as a collection of empty-headed walkers who danced to equally empty-headed music. And then there was the image of clubbers who, due to dehydration, caused by dancing and drugs, fell to their feet on the dance floor. A nihilistic hobby for people who apparently had nothing better to do.

That disdain was perhaps one of the reasons that ID&T, the dance empire that organizes parties such as Sensation and Mysteryland, had the first large-scale dance study done by KPMG in 2002 with the subtitle ‘The meaning and impact of dance on the Dutch economy and society’.

As it turned out: even then, 488 million euros was spent annually in the dance scene. KPMG concluded that dance is an important cultural expression of contemporary youth culture ‘in which individualism, freedom of choice and collectivity (…) are central.’ take that, good community! And those ecstasy accidents were also negotiable. ‘Approximately 0.9 percent of visitors to a large-scale dance event call on local medical assistance.’

EDM as a main course is on the music menu of young people

That economic strength only increased. In 2010 Europe brought dance back to America as ‘edm’, electronic dance music† The collective name used from then on for electronic dance music that is now a main course on the music menu of young people worldwide.

And now? A report from the ING Economic Bureau published in 2019 identifies dance as a driving force that accounts for 75 percent of Dutch music exports. Moreover, for seven years in a row, more than half of the worldwide DJ top ten consists of Dutch DJs such as Tiësto, Armin van Buuren and Martin Garrix. The top ten collectively earn about 230 million euros per year. Anyone who still claims that culture is a left-wing hobby may wish that he had such a well-paid job.

Admittedly, the adventure has worn off here and there. You know that dance is also a bit domesticated when Armin van Buuren is allowed to play records for the royal couple. But dance has also received the broad social credit it deserves. Almost 35 years after the Netherlands’ first warehouse party, Our House opened its doors in Amsterdam: the first dance museum in the world. And see: nightlife culture has become heritage.