A summer of love is predicted when – if – we emerge from the Babylonian captivity of lockdown in a frenzy of courting. It will be the third summer of love in recent years. The first occurred, in a cloud of hashish and patchouli, around San Francisco in 1967. I was five and living on the outskirts of Kettering, untouched by those events, although I have heard it said the Skew Bridge Ski Club could get quite racy.
The second summer of love I can talk about because I was in it. It was 1990, I was 28, and recently retired from pop music. It arrived on the back of a new party drug, ecstasy. I had come across E – more properly MDMA – in the United States, in the clubs of the east and west coasts, where enterprising leisure professionals realised that its effect on the neurotransmitters responsible for the experience of pleasure could make every venue a Xanadu of irresistible fun.
London’s clubs filled, and spilled over into raves, creating new dance music – thrashing electro at a speed even the most indefatigable disco lovers of the previous decade would have struggled to sustain. There were also new fashions – dungarees, long-sleeved T-shirts printed with giant smiley faces, beads, ridiculous trainers, glow sticks – and a new hybrid subculture.
My favourite club night was Troll, every Saturday night at Soundshaft, which was built into the arches under Charing Cross station. I later found out that the space had once been used to accommodate the corpses of British soldiers repatriated from the western front during the first world war. We must have looked cadaverous ourselves as we emerged from weekend lock-ins, but the parties continued, for days sometimes, running not only on E but also amphetamines, to keep us all going.
And we all fell in love with each other, E being an unrivalled solvent of inhibition and a turbocharger of empathy. Strangers under its spell would go straight to limitless intimacy. Somebody I knew took her first E and gave her Ford Fiesta to the man who had sold it to her as a thank you. One of the more interesting, and lasting, legacies of E was the way it brought together gay and straight clubbers. Before E, the police would arrange for nightclubs to disgorge their patrons into the West End at staggered times, so gay and straight clubbers would not mix in potentially combative situations. After E, that was no longer required as lots of gay people discovered they quite liked straight things – I started going to watch Arsenal, for example. The same thing happened in Ibiza, which was no longer segregated; instead, gay and straight people were united at clubs like Ku and Amnesia, where my summer of love reached its zenith.
A dozen of us, all regulars at Troll, rented two adjacent villas and, for a fortnight, dawn rose on us dancing in water features, stupefied with drugs. After the clubs closed, we would go to the beach, and one day I even bought a speedboat. I also tried to buy an aeroplane with my friend Billy, but the man at Ibiza airport declined to close the sale because we had forgotten to wear tops. Ah, Billy, my unrequited love of that summer – well, not unrequited exactly, but asymmetrical, because he was straight and I was as close to his girlfriend, Lisa, as I was to him.
Unfortunately, summer’s lease hath all too short a date, and once the drugs wore off I had to get a grip and start dealing with reality. Thirty years later, Billy and Lisa are grandparents, we remain good friends, and somewhere, tied to a broken pontoon, or hidden in a secluded cove, the speedboat gently rusts.
