Acid reign | 10 August 2017

In 1988–9, British youth culture underwent the biggest revolution since the 1960s. The music was acid house, the drug: Ecstasy. Together they created the Second Summer of Love — a euphoric high that lasted a year and a half and engulfed Britain’s youth in a hedonistic haze of peace, love and unity. At the end of a decade marked by social division and unemployment, acid house transcended class and race, town and country, north and south. Amid the smoke and lasers, an entire generation came up together.

How did it happen? The story starts in Ibiza, which by the mid-1980s had outgrown its roots as a hippie commune and was attracting beautiful people from all over the world. The island’s carefree, all-night parties and eclectic music impressed a young DJ called Paul Oakenfold on his first visit in 1985. Oakenfold was determined to bring this blissed-out scene back to rainy London, with its exclusive dress codes and judgmental door policies. Although his first experiment at a Balearic club failed, another trip to Ibiza in 1987 convinced him to try again. ‘I brought a few friends over for my birthday and 30 years later we’re still talking about it,’ he says.

Oakenfold and his friend Danny Ramp-ling each started Balearic nights in London in the autumn of 1987. The Future and Shoom were wildly popular, not least because they coincided with the first major influx of Ecstasy into Britain. ‘The drugs were better than any before or since,’ says James Delingpole, an early convert. ‘Everyone was loved up in a way that subsequent generations haven’t experienced.’ The empathy-enhancing properties of Ecstasy saw people from all walks of life become best friends for the night. After years of beating each other senseless on the terraces, even football casuals were putting aside their differences and ‘getting right on one, matey’.