What was 1988’s Second Summer of Love?
Over three decades from the original countercultural explosion that rocked the 1960s, 1988 saw the Summer of Love rear its head once again among the UK’s dance clubs and field gatherings dotted up and down the country.
The “make love, not war” idyll still looms large in pop culture all these decades later. Into the 1960s, a youthquake explosion of rock and pop vitality, sexual liberation, distrust of the Man, political protest, chemical experimentation, and a radical shake-off of their parents’ stultifying conservatism fuelled the hippie plume that exploded from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood and swept across the Western World with psychedelic upheaval.
Flower power felt like ancient history by the arrival of the 1980s. Hippies were viewed as a bad joke in punk’s aftermath; a leaden economic malaise had long coarsened popular appetite for revolution, and a new form of aggressive individualism was meted out onto the country with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal bludgeon on society. Across the yuppie era, material excess, a flagrant celebration of money alongside the City’s financial deregulation frenzy, and a sharp-elbowed competition atomising the former communal consciousness helped realise Thatcher’s “no such thing as society” with grim certitude.
Then acid-house happened. After years of social divisions and post-industrial ruin, the old 1960s collective spirit began to gather in the various dance clubs hooked on the latest house tunes that swept across the Atlantic from Detroit and Chicago. By the late 1980s, all-nighters at Shoom, Future, Spectrum, Trip, and The Haçienda were spinning such four-on-the-floor thumpers, given new squelchy life with the Roland TB-303’s synthy basslines. While Phuture’s ‘Acid Tracks’ would pave the way, the likes of A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Voodoo Ray’, Humanoid’s ‘Stakker Humanoid’ and the pop crossover hit ‘We Call It Acieeed’ from D Mob all bounced around Britain’s key house clubs.
But acid house wasn’t just a genre; it was fast becoming a bona fide lifestyle. Whether dancing all night in legitimate clubs or congregating in empty warehouses and open farmland from the tip-off of coy flyers, a spirited festivity pulled all of society’s otherwise fractured and clashing divisions together in a Day-Glo’d dunagreed whole, where class, status, wealth, race, gender, and sexual persuasions all melted together into a joyous rejection of Thatcherite social stratification and toxic selfdom.
The drugs helped. Essential to acid house was the MDMA, which went hand in hand with the high-energy, kaleidoscopic beats pumped out of the PA, creating a sweaty and very humid atmosphere of gurning revellers exploding with sensory euphoria, shared wellbeing, and a charged battery to dance til the early hours. Influencing the scene’s brightly coloured garb of big smiley-faced T-shirts and baggy, oversized jeans and hoodies, ecstasy, a communal chemical, symbolically booted into touch the yuppies’ cocaine as their drug of choice.
Drug-fueled hedonism, a rejection of conservative values, and a sincere embrace of collective solidarity echoed the Summer of Love that bloomed across the hippie era all those years ago. Suddenly, flower power didn’t seem so uncool. The colourful plumage scoring the youth acid-house culture was soon dubbed the Second Summer of Love by the music press, with the psychedelic edge chiming with the wider indie scene from Happy Mondays to The Stone Roses in imbuing their ostensible post-punk with a lysergic club glow.
Just like the original hippie movement, the establishment soon sought to crack down on acid house. Aside from the sensational drug headlines splashed on the red tops, the Thatcher government knew all too well the untaxed revenues promoters and organisers were enjoying away from the state’s coffers, but most threatening was the assembly of people in social unity at odds with the ‘greed is good’ mantra. How could the working classes be pitted against each other if they’re hugging and dancing on pills in a meadow outside the M25?
The state would hobble acid-house free raves in the end, passing a bill in December 1989 that risked six months’ imprisonment for organising unlicensed parties, then the infamous Criminal Justice and Public Order Act five years later, which scuppered the party for good. Yet, like the original Summer of Love, its spiritual sequel lives on as an enduring chapter of countercultural history and creative expression, lacking the overt politicisation of the hippies but forming an essential thread of resistance to Thatcher’s Britain amid the miners’ strike, Red Wedge efforts, and the later Poll Tax riots.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes, so the saying goes. Acid house’s hippie connection wasn’t lost on Energy co-founder and rave organiser Tintin Chambers, telling The Guardian 30 years on from the Summer of Love’s second shine, “What made us so determined? We were having the most unbelievable time, a unique experience, shared with hundreds and then thousands of people. Really, nothing like this had happened since the 1960s.”
