Let’s talk about Dave

Dave’s not his real name. He might be you, he might be someone you know. But he’s out there. But we’re not interested in Dave now – he’s successfully buried somewhere in the advertising or marketing world. We want to know about Dave then.

“Then” was 1989, approaching the “Summer of Love” in the UK, set against a backdrop of economic recession, rising unemployment and civil unrest. Thatcherism had empowered the working classes but now – as with the East Germans who were granted accession to the West in the same year – the initial euphoria gave way to a feeling of inadequacy. Consumerism had already indoctrinated the youth into wanting “more”.

There were no mobiles back then for youth – only large bricks, ones carried on shoulders or worse still the pop-up phones found in luxury sedan handrests.

Yet, it was a time when mobiles would have been much in demand. Dave and his peers would spend a Friday evening phoning round a convoluted network of answering machines and pagers being directed to the next number of voice mail in search of the “venue” for tonight’s rave. It could have been a warehouse in blackburn or a field in the middle of nowhere – anywhere as long as young people could gather, listen to their music and escape the attention of police.

Dave’s hometown in Blackburn, Northern England, was precisely the gritty industrial backdrop where the Acid House and latter Rave scene found fertile ground to grow.

“It were bangin’” Dave said with a hint of both excitement and nostalgia, in the vernacular of the time. “We’d spent most o’ weekend running from police, from service station to next just so we could mash up with our people.” “Mashup?” he was web 2.0 way ahead of his time.


(Some things are timeless: Police break up a rave in Czech republic 2005 pic courtesy of Wikipedia)

Of course Dave’s memories of youth were distorted by the copious amounts of ingested ecstasy and LSD that went hand-in-hand with the scene but the sense and vocabulary used were timeless – here was a place were Dave could be part of a wider peer group, coming together to celebrate values, network, connect (spend all night in sweaty Ecstasy fuelled hugs and handshakes). He’d talk of some of the local “heads” who held personal records on chomping “tabs” and “pills”. Drug consumption was one element of status but the most important was that you could claim to have been at Raindance in 1988 or knew of DJ whateverhisname when he was but a bagboy runner before he ever made it big.

You could call it a youth “scene” because it was a synthesis of the key defining elements of the time – values of freedom, politics of free love and brotherhood, the drugs, the fashion (dayglo sticks, them 21″ flared baggy jeans, the long hair) and, of course, the music.


(if you can understand the charm of standing around for hours in muddy fields, DIY fashion, deathtrap warehouses masquerading as niteclubs then perhaps you were Dave?)

Rave was quintessentially non-commercial (except when you had to pay $60 for a ticket) but once you look beyond the shady network of fly-by-nights and would-be criminals that operated in the shadows of the scene there was a defining ethos reflected in the music of a shared group perhaps best embodied in the “hit” song “One Family”. (I use “hit” loosely here because there appeared to be no official chart with all popular songs relying almost entirely on word of mouth and grass roots activism by the labels).

Perhaps one of the few brands to ever be assimilated into the scene was Lucozade – the orange fizzy energy drink cousin of Gatorade in the US and perhaps the original precursor to Red Bull. First made famous by Adamski on the cover of his seminal NRG album, Lucozade became an iconic brand of the generation. Any outsider reading the NRG cover would make the obvious assumption from the adverts that Lucozade was an energy drink, therefore it’s use in an album of that name seemed appropriate.


(Adamski NRG)

However, as with all peer group communications there is a subtle ulterior agenda. If you were “in the know” back in 1988/1989 like Dave, you knew that Ravers drunk Lucozade because they spent all night dancing thanks to amphetamine fuelled supplements. Unlike their previous generations, Ravers didn’t drink alcohol – the orange liquor (with its “acquired” taste) was their beverage of choice. Just as we saw in text messaging emerging 10 years later, symbols defined the generation themselves and while they reinforced peer group bonds they sought to alienate those who were “out”.

Initially alarm bells rung throughout Lucozade’s PR department. Did Adamski ask for permission to license our logo and trademark? Contact the licensing department and find out. When some “insider” tipped them off that Adamski was making a subtle reference to a rather shady illegal youth movement, the elder bigwigs ran for cover for fear of tabloid headlines reading “love drug turned bad”… “she was only 17 years old and try to fly from the top of the marquee holding only a bottle of Lucozade”.

The press did run similar stories but Lucozade’s response was brave and perhaps more the result of a healthy dose of uncommon sense as opposed to marcomms tyranny. On the one hand the marcomms kneejerk was to sue the artist for plagiarism resulting in Adamski being forced to donate £5000 of royalties to charity (a half-measure).

However, Lucozade later decided to go with the flow and bus shelters and low-key advertising spots across the UK ran with a campaign that comprised a simple retort. Lucozade turned their orange bottle upside down to form an exclamation mark next to which the simple letters read from top to bottom “N R G”.

Lucozade’s sales rose rapidly over the next 3 years hand in hand with the scene’s growth whether they liked it or not.

The brand had to do little marketing as the tightly knit scene relied heavily on trust and word of mouth. The simple upfront and low key statement was a subtle message to Dave that “we know” with an acknowledging wink.

Although the symbols of the movement change from generation to generation the drivers remain constant. The scene fulfilled the two key drivers of youth consumer behaviour – the need to belong and the need to be significant. As Dave would recall the opening sample of the seminal hit by Liberation “I am….Somebody!“.

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