1988, Acid House

In 1988, Acid House Swept Britain. These Fliers Tell the Story.

Thirty years ago, British youth culture was transformed by acid house music and the drug Ecstasy — with, surprisingly, a little help from a group of flier designers.

LONDON — In early 1988, Danny Rampling, a D.J., asked George Georgiou to design a flier for his club night Shoom in a south London fitness center.

“They used to clear all the equipment away and put a sound system and a D.J. in the corner,” Mr. Georgiou said. “It was extremely loud, very crowded, this awful strawberry smoke everywhere, strobe lights going off all the time.”

He was given one condition for the flier: It had to feature a smiley face. Mr. Georgiou knew it well; his mother had sewn one on his jeans when he was a child. “It wasn’t a graphic symbol I was particularly fond of,” Mr. Georgiou said. “I just found it a bit silly, to be honest. I thought, how do I make it different?”

Genesis was one of the first promoters to hold large-scale raves in warehouses around London. Despite this flier's protestations, the events were rarely legal.

His solution was simple: He made the smiley symbol three-dimensional and also played with its face on one side of the flier, so it looked like an overindulged partygoer. “Everyone interpreted it as an Ecstasy pill, but it wasn’t really. It was just me trying to make it 3-D,” Mr. Georgiou said.

Shoom is often regarded as Britain’s first acid house club night. To the country’s tabloid press, the new music that swept the country in 1988 was headache-inducing, enjoyable only to partygoers on Ecstasy. The Daily Mail called it “the biggest threat to the health and welfare of Britain’s youngsters since the crazy drug cult of the ’60s.”

But to the British teenagers and 20-somethings gathering in these raves, that admonishment was a compliment. They christened 1988 the Second Summer of Love, in honor of the one that blossomed in San Francisco in 1967. To them, 1988 was another moment when a particular music, people and drug came together and changed a country’s culture.

“Times were so hard in ’88, you know,” said the D.J. Paul Oakenfold, who ran pioneering acid house nights. “You had Margaret Thatcher closing down the mines and the steel and all that. It was really tough.” But acid house changed that, he said. “Suddenly you could go to a place and express yourself through music. You felt like you were part of something really special.”

As Mr. Georgiou put it: “It was like our punk. It completely changed how people acted. You suddenly had football hooligans filling up clubs all loved up, hugging each other.” You also saw celebrities dancing alongside teenagers from working-class neighborhoods, bankers alongside students, he said, and no one cared.

Some acid house fliers, slips of photocopied paper used to promote clubs in the pre-internet era, are today regarded as design classics. The Victoria and Albert Museum has some in its permanent collection, while Mr. Georgiou’s Shoom flier was just on display in the Vitra Design Museum’s “Night Fever” exhibition about club culture, in Germany. Collectors regularly trade fliers on eBay.

Thousands of people lined up to get into Paul Oakenfold’s Spectrum night. “Monday was the only available night,” Mr. Oakenfold said to explain his choice of day. “The crowd was a real mixture of gay, white, straight, black. It was all people who had a like-minded attitude — all looking for the same thing: Expression.”

Many fliers from the time are surprisingly basic, often featuring little more than the club’s name and address, or an image stolen from a comic book — Batman appears in several. Genesis, one of the first promoters to hold large-scale illegal raves in warehouses around London (it would break into buildings to stage them), filled its fliers with messages to convince people — including the police — that the event was legitimate, the promoter Wayne Anthony said in a telephone interview. “We are totally legal!” their fliers said. “Fire officer on site!”

The events would also claim to be invitation-only private parties, which gave Mr. Anthony an argument to give to the police when they inevitably turned up and tried to shut down the events.

One club did try to up the game in flier design: Mr. Oakenfold’s Spectrum night, held on Mondays and finishing at 3:30 a.m. Many of the over 1,200 people who attended each week went straight to after-parties and then in to work, Mr. Oakenfold said.

The Spectrum flier was the first of the acid house era to be printed in full color, despite the expense involved. “I started out as a storyboard artist for Saatchi & Saatchi,” Dave Little, the flier’s designer, said in a telephone interview. “I was airbrushing chocolate adverts and getting about 500 pounds a day. But what was I doing?”

Mr. Little started doing sleeves for a friend’s record label, which led to the work on fliers. The Spectrum job did not pay well, he said — “I think about £100 and free entry to the club for life” — but he put a lot of effort into its fliers. He was told that the design had to feature an all-seeing eye, and he tried to give the flier a direct link to ’60s psychedelia, filling it with coded references to the Grateful Dead’s artwork. “Maybe three out of the 10,000 people made the reference,” Mr. Little said. But everyone who picked up one kept it, he said. “No one threw it in the street.”

Acid house quickly became a phenomenon in Britain, as tracks like S’Express’s “Theme From S-Express” topped the pop chart, and D. J.s like Mr. Oakenfold, Pete Tong and Terry Farley gained renown.

By 1989, the music was no longer confined to clubs. Instead, tens of thousands of people would go to raves in fields, their locations announced at the last minute via a telephone line to prevent the police from stopping them. (Eventually, law enforcement and the government would largely halt such events, especially after lurid tabloid coverage around several drug-related deaths).

When acid house’s popularity blew up, fliers stopped being needed to promote events; word of mouth, pirate radio and previews in the listings magazine Time Out were good enough. But the importance of fliers in 1988 is clear — and they still evoke strong memories for old ravers.

Alex Lazar, 58, has a shoe box full of fliers from his early days of clubbing. “I sold my ’88, ’89 and ’90 ones following a motorcycle accident a few years ago,” he said in a telephone interview. “I paid my rent for four months doing that.”

“I always knew they’d be collectible,” Mr. Lazar added. “I was 29 then, and I knew about the first Summer of Love, with all the beatniks going out to the fields. And it was like that. It was such a movement.”

“I’ve watched my two children being born,” he said. But taking Ecstasy and dancing to this new music in a rave for the first time topped even those memorable experiences: “It obviously beats that.”