So, image the scene: 2007, a few of us sit around the sink in some student halls rather excitedly. Our party is greeted by an extra member who turns up with a small paper bag, its contents known to all of us.  A small ripple of excitement overcomes the group.  He handles the bag in the same manner one might handle some highly illegal pornographic material.

The lad opens the bag and takes a vile of the stuff.

“Is it working?” I pipe in with

“Give it chance” replies the chappy.

A moment passes, I glance at the ipod dock/clock. The clock appears to be out to some degree, I contemplate this momently trying to think of a poetic comparison to the current situation, however after a moment’s of pondering I decided it was inconsequential to the activities we were about to partake in.

“Its gone in my eyes!…s**t”

It appears said party member decided to pour a vile of the stuff over his face for effect. The effect is desirable but it comes at a price.

Our subject in question just applied a tube of glowing material over his head and hair. Resulting in an effect that’s so incredible, that  quite frankly I consider risking my own eye sight to have a shot of achieving it. Our party member is currently unappreciative of his new position of king of cool and seems to be spending way too long over the sink trying to wash it out. That’s not rock and roll, in fact we don’t want it to be rock and roll. It’s 2007 and we are in the midst of the ‘revolution’ known as to us as…. NU RAVE. I am not entirely sure what is in glow sticks but here is a picture. Not the kind of diagram I would want in my eyes  for sure.

New Rave. Such a flash in the pan. The name itself is amusing.  Take an old genre and just put the word New in front. New Folk, New Rap, New New Wave or maybe, just maybe one day New Dave. This genre appears to have been forgotten as quickly as it started, remember that odd fashion craze where girls started wearing ponchos for about 2 weeks?  It was the musical equivalent of Nu Rave. It came and went within a year practically. A friend went travelling around the world that year. They came back and they seem to have missed the rise and fall of an entire musical genre. I think new rave has earnt its place in this series of musical genres that don’t exist since Klaxons (lets be honest the original nu ravers) said this;

“..they won’t shut up about the scene that doesn’t even exist. ”

But despite saying such things and banning glow sticks from there gigs it was too late. People like me were out buying rave dummies and reliving the past we were not cool enough / old enough to go to. AKA the acid house parties.

 

So a little about rave. Not sure where the actually word  ‘rave’ originally came from and since my go-to spot wikipedia is not sure this will remain a un-researched mystery throughout for the rest of this article [oh no it won’t! See Comments on this blog for the OED details for rave – Ed] . Am gonna have a stab, it appears to have been used in the 50s to describe the beat generations good time hootenanny style antics. I proposes therefore, that  it possibly grew from the term raver (as in raving lunatic). But rave as we know it did not really kick of until I was born in the 80s with the discovery of sounds that operated in a post 120 bmp world. This combined with the fact that everyone was a bit down in the late 80s meant that a bloody good party was in order. Anyhow it was all getting a bit killed off in the mid 90s by ‘the man’ and grew a somewhat of a bad reputation;

“the devil takes many forms and happy hardcore is one of them ways”

would be something a typical politician may say in this era.

Raves still went on, but just as that whole free party scene that we all love so much right? Cos everyone loves Techno, Jungle and so on and so forth.

So fast forward to 2006(ish) and some chappy slips on the term ‘New Rave’ on a flyer to describe Klaxons first gig. NME (who seem to keep coming up) jump on the term and start publicising it as the NU revolution. This is a sign for people like me who like colours and dressing up start wearing said colours and dressing up even more.

I went to see a NME NEW RAVE TOUR! gig that had Klaxons, New Young Pony Club, CSS and The sunshine underground playing in the same night. It was a treat but I was failing to see the rave connection at all. Most of these bands seemed to be playing that same old electronic sound (that I bloody love) but there was no rave like quality to the music they were playing. It seems that the term new rave seems to have been applied to bands that were just a little more noisy than we were used – Late of Piers, the Bears are coming is a perfect example.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFIyPZnmcyo

The thing got sooooo large that local government got its knickers in a twist about what nu-rave actually was and confusing it with old rave. They thought that the bands listed above were heading up some anti-festival movement  that would see more people been put out by illegal raves in the country side and breaking all the rules like letting dogs off leads and leaving gates open. Check out this brilliant press release

“The last couple of years has seen a rave revival, with ‘Nu Rave’ music acts growing in popularity among mainstream audiences ”

So New Rave is another term that makes no sense, If it were really new rave then surly we would be treated to some mental sounding resurgence from the techno scene. Sadly the techno scene appears (externally) to have changed very little in recent times. But at least it knows what it is. Poor old new ravers they probably never wanted to be called it ever. The best thing we can do is to consider the whole thing as some kind of ironic media construction.

To Quote the Observer in 2007

“New rave is dead”

At least we can hopefully look forward to Newer Rave right?