Scotland's rave legends reflect as Beats airs at Glasgow Film Festival

Largely shot in the city, director Brian Welsh adapted the coming-of-age film from Kieran Hurley’s award-winning hit play which was first performed at Glasgow's Arches in 2012.

Beats spools back almost twenty years to 1994, just as new legislation started to be enforced across the UK clamping down on acid house parties, a phenomenon at its peak in the summers of 1988 and 1989.

Despite the Criminal Justice Act having effectively outlawed “public gatherings around amplified music characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”, Beats sees teenagers Johnno (Cristian Ortega) and Spanner (Lorn Macdonald) prepare for the night of their lives at a now-illegal party.

Set to a thrilling soundtrack chosen by Keith McIvor aka JD Twitch of club legends Optimo and Pure, the film will stir the memories of those who were there, those who wished they were and those who can't remember if they were or not.

Many of the DJs spinning the records back then are still key figures in Scotland's dance scene today. They've seen first-hand how changes to the law shifted parties into the clubs where they could be better policed, licensed and monetised.

Ahead of the film's premiere, we speak with some of them and others inspired by an era bursting with rebellion and creativity. People, they said, danced for days.

Keith McIvor aka JD Twitch: Pure/Optimo

You can't escape the fact that a huge part of it was the arrival of ecstasy. It took the rise of acid house for electronic music to become popular. I was already djing for a while before Pure and was a kind of an evangelist for electronic music but people were really resistant at first.

Hearing this electronic music from a sound system in a big room full of people high on ecstasy was very seductive and for a lot of people it was very literally the gateway drug into this music that they wouldn't have heard normally.

It was very exciting, it was exploding and getting bigger and bigger by the week. Music was changing incredibly quickly too, every week there would be exciting new sounds, new experiments.

There were a lot parties in Glasgow at that time; you'd go back to someone's flat and there would be turntables. Quite a lot of times the police would come, often with some justification. But they would go off with the turntables. From the Summer of Love there was this Utopian idea that the world was changing for the better, but the Criminal Justice Act was something they felt strongly about because it was directly aimed at them.

Jonnie [Wilkes], who I do Optimo with, was telling me the other week about a party he did when his turntables got taken away for months and months.

The thing that was different then was the complete newness. But I think if you're young now, you're probably having an exciting a time as people were having back then.

Brainstorm: Pure

Pure started in 1990 and there was a club before that called UFO that lasted about six months. I had started DJing in about 1988 and I feel very lucky to have seen the birth of a scene. You've got the big youth movements like punk and rock n roll, and we seem to have caught the tail-end of the last one. There doesn't seem to have been anything since that's had the same impact, just from speaking to people over the years. Myself too, I made lots of good friends and had mainly positive experiences.

Rather than regular weekly clubs like Pure, the CJA seemed to be aimed more at the massive acid house parties that had been going on down in England – they were what got me into the whole thing.

I was recently at a kind of trade party for the film at the Berlin Film Festival. They got me in to play some records from the olden days. Though there's loads that I don't play very much any more, there's loads of good stuff from that era. And there seems to be lots of new stuff harking back to it as well. There's an air of simplicity there, and a bit of rawness.

Orde Meikle: Slam

Orde Meikle (left) and Stuart McMillan

It's a worn-out phrase, but it's a bit like Woodstock: if you remember what was happening, you probably weren't there.

Stuart [McMillan] and I kicked off Slam in 1987, so we were around for when the Summer of Love exploded in 1988.

We had already been involved in what I suggest would be the forerunners to this film. We'd already been doing quite sizeable one-off events, which was quite new for Scotland at that time. We did a thing at the Tramway in 1988 with people like 808 State, Derrick May, Inner City with Kevin Saunderson and in 1990 we had Slam in the Park in Strathclyde Country Park, which was an all-nighter on an island in a tent for about three and a half thousand people.

The time in which this is set, it all felt very organic, it was all being done for the right reasons. There were no financial considerations. That's not why you did it. It was because you were so enthused by all this music that was coming from different parts of the world and you wanted to bring some of these protagonists to Scotland to play. That's still an ethos that we have with some of our nights.

You definitely got the feeling that the authorities weren't happy with it. In their view, it had gotten popular way beyond what they could understand. The numbers becoming involved were becoming quite sizeable. It's all tied up with alcohol and drug-use and venues losing out.

There were a number of red flags there for civil servants and the political classes, that there was a chance of this slipping beyond their control. They didn't want to facilitate it. Then again, I don't they do now, to be honest.

In Glasgow there's an air by the authorities not to accept the influence Glasgow night life has on the economy and on the global, outwards image of Glasgow. We played Berlin once, at the end of a 96-hour party where they sold more coffee than alcohol. That would never in a million years happen in Scotland. Maybe young people will see this film and wonder if anything has changed.

James Harrigan aka DJ Harri

I started to play the Sub Club every week with the Slam guys in 1990. At the end of 1994 they went off and did their own thing which was more techno.

What I did was more house-y, and I started doing it with my friends Oscar [Fullone] and Domenic [Cappello]. At that time I had a residency in London and was playing all over Scotland too, places as far as Elgin and Inverness, where there was a big rave scene. We'd always have a night at a club and an after-party at somebody's house.

There were loads of record labels in Glasgow at that time and there must have been 15, 20 record shops. I would go down to London on Friday night and get my car from the airport and spend my Saturday going round them; they'd all have put a bag aside for me of new releases. It was massive: nearly everybody I knew was involved in promoting a night, DJing, or doing the graphics or something. And it felt like that was happening all over Scotland. There was the Rhumba Club in Perth, Fat Sams in Dundee, there were good nights everywhere. It was very fertile.

In 1994, you saw the same people out every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and the places were always busy. Young people now are more likely to save up and maybe go to Ibiza or to the big one-offs in Glasgow like the Riverside Festival.

My son Jasper [James] is a quite successful DJ now and when I'm preparing every week I always try to play some new stuff to keep it fresh. But he's of the opinion that I'd be better playing my old records.

Carole Kelly aka DJ Carole: Pure, Wave

I was djing until about 1995, mostly at Pure where I was the resident DJ on Saturday nights in Pure's sister club, Wave and would cover for Keith or Brainstorm at Pure if they were on holiday. At the time only Jacqui Morrison, myself and Trendy Wendy were the only female DJs in Scotland, we were quite thin on the ground. I djed mainly in clubs but also at bigger things with Rezerection and at Barn Owl which was held in Glasgow in a massive barn with big name DJs.

It was a great time. I was out every weekend partying. The weekends got long and longer. Back in 1988 or 1989 Brainstorm and I ran a one-off event at the Edinburgh Festival called Subconscious. He had been converted in Teneriffe because his dad lived there and had been converting a lot of people to dance music. He taught me how to DJ but when we started UFO, the club before Pure. Unfortunately we started to get lots of casuals in Edinburgh who'd go around trashing pubs and clubs. That's why we had to open Pure as a members-only club.

In its early days Pure was more what you'd call crusty than rave, with travelers from Glastonbury, people bringing sounds from all over Europe, particularly Balearic. And then bus loads of people started coming through from Glasgow and that's when it really took off with its own party-dance identity.

I didn't feel discrimination because I was a woman. It was gender neutral, just as it was inclusive of people from all walks of life, you never felt there was any animosity. You just felt people were excited to be part of a welcoming, loving scene.

DJs can be very competitive and only once had another DJ – a guy – ask why I had a 'better' slot than him. They did change the time slots, from me playing 1am to playing 4am. But the clubs finished in Glasgow at 3am and I got another bus load of people.

Jill Mingo aka DJ Mingo-go

At the time I was a music publicist living in Edinburgh working for people who made electronic dance music. My boyfriend and I were going to a lot of parties all over Scotland. It would usually be at a club, but you'd just call it a rave.

Sometimes it would be out in the middle of nowhere and you'd be struggling to find where it was. People were bringing out generators and their sound systems.

Later, in the mid to late 1990s there were underground parties in Glasgow, supposedly in the sewage tunnels. The idea didn't appeal to me.

A lot of the parties then were the after-parties in people's houses. But with the CJA people were getting their sound systems confiscated. If the police marched in, they would take your equipment, your records. So people were not going to go out to a field with a sound system to have it all taken from them. It wasn't that they were just going to shut you down, they were going to take your stuff. People would often need their equipment to play at clubs etc. They couldn't afford to do it any more. It was too much of a risk.

There was always the weather issue in Scotland too. We once went out to a party on the summer solstice – my birthday. We didn't stay that long as the weather was very brisk – that is, it was pure freezing.

To me, the after-party thing was much bigger deal than outdoors things. It was a given that there would be one. But I don't hear young people talking about going to them now. Instead there are some places up by the Glue Factory where people go regularly, but they are venues.

Jason Pussypower: Pussypower

In 1994 Pussypower Productions were hosting a weekly club night in Industria – now the Cathouse – every Friday night with guest such as Aphex Twin and Carl Craig.

We were also running all night raves in various locations in and around Glasgow, running buses to and from each location.

The scene was active throughout Scotland, as well as Glasgow there were gigs in Dundee, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, the Borders and the west coast.

It was busy, vibrant, lots of promoters and lots of small pub and club gigs with loads of creative activity. There were house parties that Pussypower played held every weekend all weekend, especially in Glasgow’s west end.

I remember a party we put on around the end of 1989 in a block of flats in Castlemilk which was almost empty as it was being prepared for demolition. The party was in the basement and buses came from the north east of Scotland with DJs and punters.

Then, most of my life was spent being involved in production, djing, organising and promoting these events with my friends who were hanging out in the scene. It was a continuation of the DIY ethic I had learned during the 1970s and 1980s being into punk rock in Glasgow.

Lynn Macdonald: Pussypower, Soundhaus

I lived in the Netherlands in 1994 and used to bring my brothers Pussypower over from Scotland to do large dance parties in the Hague. Through that we hooked up with Czeck party organisers called Technical Support and did outdoor festivals there, some with Spiral Tribe.

Pussypower were the very first people to ever do any kind of rave at The Arches, when it was still just a theatre. They teamed up with organisers NVA (formerly known as Test Department) to do an event called Blast Off around 1992.

There were also lots of ramshackle attempts to put stuff on in various old tunnels and squatted buildings, but it took a few years for them to get started properly and lots of busts and police raids before then - and rip-offs.

Before things went stellar, lots of people just had actual house parties. It was house parties that started Terry and Jason (Pussypower) off djing from about 1988.

When it started to get too big people had to take the house party out of the house, thus all the illegal raves which really just started in Scotland about 1990, but others may know different.

I didn't come back here until 1995 and by the end of that year the Soundhaus was born as a club. Times were great then, still underground. It's so different now. I still prefer the illegal stuff on farms though; there was more freedom and fun.

Nick Stewart aka DJ Bosco: Let's Go Back

I'm from Glasgow but I was living in Shotts at the time as my dad owned a pub there. Me and my friends were travelling to raves from about 1989.

You could be at a rave in Ayr, then move to one in Livingston, then Glasgow. It was phenomenal.

The thing that was acid house didn't really have a name in Scotland. In 1990 it became rave but that only really lasted, with the original people who were in it, until 1992. Then there was a split in the music.

When I came back to Glasgow in 1995 I started clubs, like what I'm doing now – Let's Go Back is 19 years old – and putting on parties where SWG3 is now. There were parties in the tunnels by the old Transport Museum, as well, illegal ones. There were parties in the Campsies in 1995, 1996.

As far as I can remember, we were left alone. They went on for days.

Later, where SWG3 is now I ran parties and we were getting 15,000 people in over a weekend. It wasn't legal and the police eventually caught us. But usually we would get notice and we had time to shut things down. There are still parties run in Glasgow like that.

We have a few residencies, in La Cheetah for example. I'm 46 and my DJ partner is 48 and seen a lot of scenes. I DJ even more now than I did back then, that's how healthy the scene is. The kids we play to are very open-minded. They will listen to anything, something that's 40 years old or just been released that day.

There's definitely still an appetite for clubbing but things are a lot more controlled now.

But it was better back then, definitely better, if I'm honest. It was new, it was exciting. People from different towns, different football teams, different religions, it broke it all that down.

Maggie McKeown aka Maggie Joy: JOY

Alan [Joy] and I were very much part of the start of the LGBT movement when I first came to Edinburgh in 1987. It was a time of high tension because of Clause 28 from the government of Margaret Thatcher, and also in light of the Aids epidemic. It was sweeping the UK at that time at a huge rate. A lot change was happening.

I got involved with a very unique cafe just off Broughton Street call The Blue Moon. Alan, the founder needed a room and I needed a flatmate. Alan also needed some help in the cafe and we bonded over a mutual love of music.

We started to do these huge parties. We'd have 200 people in this little cafe. Because that went well we did a one off on bank holiday weekend at Walkers nightclub, in Shandwick Place. We got a thousand people though just putting up one A4 poster in the Blue Moon Cafe.

We had been quite bored with the gay scene at that time. In the 1980s, there was this amazing nightclub on Princes Street called Fire Island. By the time I arrived in Edinburgh that was sadly coming to an end. It's now a Waterstones bookshop.

We started to do these huge parties. We had been quite bored with the gay scene at that time. We liked rave music, dance music, techno. We'd go to raves throughout Scotland and to illegal raves in London in these big old empty houses that are now worth millions.

We wanted to create that kind of environment and energy with JOY. We were privileged to be part of that and we wanted to create that on a smaller version for the gay scene in Edinburgh.

Because of what was happening politically there was a great drive for everyone to unite. Men and women. Before, it was very separate – men and women. So it was great to see two communities within a community being united.

JOY united so many different people who would not normally hang out – the straight community, the gay community, the trans community, the bisexual community. With the Aids epidemic, a lot of people were shunned by different parts of society. JOY and the little Blue Moon Cafe on Broughton Street welcomed everyone.

Paul McLuckie aka Se7en (Ibiza)

Without a doubt my experience of that time in the early 1990s was really where my initial passion for house music, the rave and club scene and my eventual path into djing years later was born.

There was such a diversity of music in the late 1980’s together with the political climate in the UK and the emergence of the rave scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The CJA in 1994 is what channeled that scene into the nightclubs and why we evolved into the festivals and events in the last two decades.

There was nothing quite like the dance moves of a 1990s raver, the true definition of 'cutting shapes’. You danced alone, yet you raved together. The dance music culture had created a unity and togetherness through music, something that the youth of that time embraced, a space and a place to call their own, at one with the music.

In 2007 I decided to take a trip to Ibiza with my younger brother Ryan who had promoted and ran his own club night in Dundee the early 1990s.

I guess we were looking to find something that rekindled us with our youth. After a week of insomnia I came home, bought a set of decks and began my journey as a DJ. If I’m honest, 12 years down the line I’m still looking to rekindle those feelings from my youth.

Vicki Watsonian: She-Bang Rave Unit

I wasn't djing in the early 1990s, I was dancing. Then it was all about going out and as there were no female DJs – or, at least, none I had heard about. It didn't cross my mind that I could possibly get into that side of things. But when I was dancing, I would go up and watch what they were doing, I was really into that.

The djing didn't come to me until I was five months pregnant with my second child in 2010. I still liked clubbing and me and my friends got together and thought: 'Let's do a girl djing thing'. The girls I started She-Bang Rave Unit with are the girls I used to go raving with back in the early 1990s.

Then, we'd go up to Aberdeen, to the Pelican and we'd come down to go to Pure. There used to be raves up near Aberdeen in a farm. You'd go into a barn and there would be this blaring techno, come out again and there would be chickens everywhere.

I remember the farmer and his wife – someone must have given them a load of cash to do it – and at the bottom of the lane from their there would be all this polis waiting in their cars to bust people. I remember going to things that were just marquees in a field.

It was a case of: 'get a generator, put it in a field, and we're there'.

After the CJA, I can't remember being part of another rave in a field. It was so ridiculous, with a tiny amount of people making a rave. It seemed a bit desperate. In my sphere of friends, that had kind of lived its day anyway and by then we were more club-based from then.

Now the rave-in-a-field thing is done in festivals. But a very nice field, beautifully decorated with a boutique bar. Back then it was all quite basic. It was about secret phone numbers and cars driving around with people spread-eagled over the bonnet.

Beats, Glasgow Film Theatre, 7.15pm, sold out. glasgowfilm.org/festival

Beats is screened in cinemas across the UK in May.