808 State On Newbuild and Pacific State
“We definitely had a confidence about what we were doing. I wouldn’t call it an arrogance but there was definitely a confidence about what we were doing. Having a great engineer in Graham, having a producer and having all these pheripherals and having Martin as a figurehead bringing half a dozen people together. There was a confidence about the whole collective that naturally Newbuild was gonna happen, like they say the Hacienda must be built, well Newbuild should have been written.”
“That to me was proper acid house. It was real, dirty acid house. Because I still thought that the stuff that was coming from the US had a Prince tinge to it whereas the UK acid house was always a bit more dirty and raw.” Darren Partington
“Our attitude towards that music was that it was pretty disposable. I don’t think we thought we were making history, we thought we were making an acid house record and its importance would last two weeks, a month at most. We didn’t think long term with it.
“The way Pacific State happened was that we were trying to do something like Marshall Jefferson’s “Open Your Eyes” and we wanted to do a track with sort of that kind of mood. We were going to all these acid house raves that were going on in Store Street and all the places like that, there were a lot of illegal raves going on and that record was huge. Put that on at like three in the morning and it was something else, completely off the scale.” Graham Massey
“Once again, it was that thing, could we come up with something better, a completely killer end of the night tune.” Darren Partington
“You wanted an atmospheric, kind of warm, sweaty, tropical thing. “We’re gonna make a warm, sweaty tropical record” and we started doing that for a John Peel session. John Peel used to come in to a café that I used to run opposite Eastern Bloc John Peel came in there after shopping at Eastern Bloc, Alice and Martin who ran Red Alert, she used to bring John Peel up and take him round the record shops and he used to come in so we gave him white labels. He got really into it and started playing Newbuild and Let Yourself Go, those records and then he was like do you wanna do a session. We were like “yeah” and then he went “you’ll have to come down to Maida Vale” and we were like “whoah, we can’t make that kind of music with the BBC staff. We’ll have to make it in our studio.” John Peel was like “oh, I’ll have to see about that, I think we can do it, I’ll try and get a special dispensation. I’m sure it’ll be okay”. So we just booked the studio and started recording and then he rang up and said that it had got to be unionised and by that time we’d started about three tracks, one of them was Pacific but it was pretty basic at that point, pads, a bit of drum programming, not a lot really and it was kind of left on the shelf that one. Then we returned to it at a session when nobody had turned up I pulled a sax out because my mate had left his sax at the studio and I can play a bit. I thought the tune needed a bit of melody so I got the sax out and played over it and it sort of came together.” Graham Massey
Voodoo Ray – A Guy Called Gerald
“Voodoo Ray was totally designed for the Hacienda. That’s was the sounding ground for everything we were doing, even when I was working with 808 State, we always had the Hacienda in mind. It was kind of the place where you thought if we can play it in there that’d be really cool. I actually always wanted to bring the studio into the Hacienda, that was one of my ambitions but it was definitely a place where you’d look towards trying to make one of your tunes work there.” A Guy Called Gerald
“The first time we heard A Guy Called Gerald “Voodoo Ray” that haunting melody and the sparseness of it all. All these records nowadays are fodder for Now That’s What I Call House Music compilations but people forget that at the time they were unbelievable, hairs on the back of your neck, never heard anything like it records.” Graeme Park
“Playing and hearing Voodoo Ray for the first time, that was a moment. Manchester got its first real record of its own.” Jon Dasilva
“Voodoo Ray, that was one of the records I absolutely pestered Eastern Bloc into submission until they finally found me a copy. It was that record at The Hacienda for so long because no-one else had it. It was the record at the Hacienda, it was one of those defining records. It was that, Ce Ce Rogers “Someday”, there were a few records that really defined that 88 to 90 period and they were really hard to get hold of and I remember just craving those records so much that when I finally got hold of them, I wore them out.” Sasha
Hardcore Uproar – Together
“I had the idea for “Hardcore Uproar” when I met my partner, Jonathan Donaghy, who did actually come from Blackburn. I had a bit of an idea for a track and he pretty much put the finishing touches to it. We were pretty much raving in Blackburn but if I had to make a choice between Blackburn and The Hacienda it would have been the Hacienda hands down. It had become our dream to hear a tune that we’d done in that club, that became our aim after a while. We thought that if we did that we would just be happy forever and I’m not gonna lie, it wasn’t that we thought that we were doing something cool or innovative with music.
“We didn’t realise it at the time but because we were ravers, we were probably on a much more commercial edge of house music. I’m trying to avoid the word cheesy but with our air horns, crowd samples and I don’t think my voice made things particularly underground which wasn’t deliberate. Looking back on it, we made a pop record. We thought we’d made a really underground piece of music which the Dj’s loved and got played in the right places but really it was very radio friendly and had catchy elements. It was aimed at the underground which was those bleeps but it did give it a commercial edge as well.”Suddi Raval
