The Story of Acid House

Acid house is built around one instrument: the Roland TB-303. Roland released it in 1981 as a bass accompaniment for guitarists, and it flopped. Its squelching, resonant tone sounded nothing like a real bass, and it was soon selling cheap in second-hand shops.

In Chicago in the mid-1980s, producers began twisting the 303 in ways it was never designed for, sweeping its filter and resonance while it looped. The result was the liquid, acidic squelch that gave the music its name. Phuture’s "Acid Tracks", made in 1987, is widely credited as the track that defined the sound.

The music travelled to Britain through DJs and clubbers who had heard it in Chicago and on holiday in Ibiza. By 1988 it had found a home in a handful of London and Manchester clubs, and it spread fast.

What made acid house more than a genre was the culture around it: all-night dancing, a warm and open crowd, and a sense that the normal rules of the night were suspended. The scene took the yellow smiley face as its emblem, and it became shorthand for the whole moment.

Demand quickly outgrew the clubs. Promoters began throwing parties in warehouses, aircraft hangars and fields, often without a licence, spread by word of mouth and coded phone lines. These were the first raves, and they turned acid house from a club sound into a mass movement.

The authorities pushed back hard, and the tabloids ran moral panics, but the scene kept growing. Acid house had opened a door that would not close, and everything from hardcore and jungle to trance and modern house traces back through it.