808:88:98 - The Story So Far, by John McCready
Of course it now falls into place. Now that we've had ten years to think. Now that other groups have taken fragments of these fresh experiments in rhythm that bounced off the club walls of the possible and used them to create careers.
Not that 808 State - an eclectic electric cocktail of techno, hip hop, rock and jazz - would claim to have invented this sonic pile-up we call dance music. But the refractions of it and to an attitude which left people like me to decide just what it was that they were doing while they got on with doing it.
Graham Massey, Darren Partington, Andrew Barker and Martin Price formed 808 State in 1987 (an earlier line up had included A Guy Called Gerald Simpson) at a time when cheap technology was about to spell SHIFT for a lot of well fed pop musicians who could no longer care less. Japanese boxes full of blinking red lights signealled that ideas were everything and, from the start, ideas flowed like water in 808 State. Graham, a musical cartographer and technological philosopher informed by a lifetime of making things happen, was already looking forward to a time when the American template could be thrown out of the studio window. He proved himself more than able to channel the raw energy of an underground culture that could pack dangerous Lancashire warehouses until daylight. Djs Darren and Andy, transfixed by hip hop but seduced by the electro-fixated subtext of early techno, pushed hard insisting that things had to count in even the most remote corners of the clubs they played. Martin, who later left to persue his own maverick vision of how things should be, saw it as clear as day. They were all catapulting forwards in the first milliseconds of the Big Bang we came to know as house music. Things accelerated beyond expectation. Within a year the group were playing in front of 14,000 people at Manchester's G-Mex Arena as the culture's first no - cheating live group, a status that performance driven acts like Underworld, Orbital and The Chemical Brothers must surely acknowledge. It's said that people crawled through the air conditioning to get inside. These were high times when Rave meant something. It tagged a break fuelled sound whihc slipped underground and later surfaced as jungle, leaving an E's - Good smiley culutre doomed to become a comic anachronisim.
808 State made music that connected, while almost immediatley signposting a way forward to a place beyond the dance, beyond the drugs and the lifestyle. Sure, this was the only soundtrack for the chemical adventures of a whole generation, but there were levels within records like Ninety whihc suggested ways this music could also soundtrack personal non narcotic space too. Others like the still sublimic Pacific State, Cubik and Olympik worked as bonafide hits without a trace of compromise.
Unaware that they were, to all intents and purposes, giving a masterclass in how to reflect the times without ever worrying whether they were in step with others, the beauty of 808 State is that all this, even now, so intuitive. At least it seems that way. From here, you could be forgiven for assuming that ten years of genre trampling rhythmically obsessed music (it's impossible to ignore the traces of a junglistic urgency in the 808 State records of the early 90's) looks like a plan completed.. The next ten years will show that the plan was and is no plan. And while the few other groups stepping into a second decade of activity have already fallen asleep at the wheel, 808 State are still trying to match their own ridiculously creative standards, inspired by past and present technology and the desire to twist new forms out of old shapes. It staggers me that, from Ex:El to Don Solaris, this is what they have always done. Mysteriously, they are rarely feted in the same way as others who are plainly spinning on out strands from tired old threads.
Not that they'd frankly give a shit. Too busy in their Manchester studio putting wires where wires shouldn't go. Too busy collaborating with a roll call of willing contemporaries like Bjork and Manic Street Preachers. Too busy remixing music from the disparate likes of Quincey Jones and REM for God's sake. Too busy playing across the globe to a world outside with an attention span longer than your average British record buyer. Too busy quietly touring America for the sixth time while no doubt reading stateside magazine stories about British electronic(a) invasions patrolled by cable channel executives and commentators who must have been sleeping when 808 State played to 12,000 people at Long Beach, Los Angeles in 1991: the ink still drying in their passports.
This compilation underlines the considerable acheivements of these there first, and, still there square pegs who couldn't drop into the round holes the record industry so considerably provides for the modern musician. Not even if they tried. I listened to these records again and ended up feeling unsettled and elated by the tones, twists and subtleties I had missed first time around. Some of these records started life scoring the moment. It's clear they're still worthy of your time as the culture they emerged from becomes a nostalgic speck on the horizon.
John McCready