We took techno legend Chris Liberator to a virtual rave, here’s what went down

Chris Knowles, better known as acid techno pioneer Chris Liberator, arrives at London’s Barbican Centre on foot, with a frayed fictional paperback glued to his right hand. Wearing three-quarter length shorts, a black tee (merch from the record label Smitten, which features a white illustration of the Roland TB-303 synth), he puts his book away in an Eastpak backpack, extends his hand and says: ​“Chris.”

One part of the Liberator trio (alongside Julian and Aaron Liberator), he is credited with being one of the pioneers of acid techno in the early ​’90s; an uncompromising sound defined by the squelchy, screaming resonance generated by the exact model of synthesiser featured on his t‑shirt. 

We’re here to visit In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats: A Virtual Reality Adventure. It’s essentially a VR music documentary that requires the audience to have various electronic devices strapped to their extremities. You physically navigate through a night out in 1989 through the eyes of sesh heads trying to find an illegal rave, the people putting the party on, and the police who are equally enthusiastic about stopping it going ahead. It’s on until August 3. 

After helpfully hoisting us into various contraptions, the member of staff turns serious for a moment. ​“Don’t try and sit on the furniture,” she says. ​“It’s not really there.” 

There’s a silence. 

“Okay, cool! I say, and we slip our headsets on and descend into VR like a meme-ified Homer Simpson receding into a bush. 

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Although we do eventually land at a massive rave towards the end, the whole thing is more interactive music documentary than an attempt to recreate a rave in a digital space. Even if you weren’t born when this was set, it’s a journey that most people can relate to: Hanging with friends pre-night out with the anticipation building (part excitement, part anxiety), finding a party, getting in, experiencing that transcendent moment together when every trouble in your world melts away and all that matters is the next kick drum, the next baseline, the next hug, the next connection. Then coming down together chatting shit as the sun rises before you peel away one by one. 

As we navigate the night out together, our avatars can see each other and can pass cultural artefacts about – records, flyers, a pack of Polos Mints, a pager, a phone handle in a BT phone box. At every stage, floating heads of real people who were there (ravers, rave organisers, DJs, emcees, security, police) at the 1989 rave being depicted, break out into interviews like a normal documentary. It’s a 40-minute experience dripping in nostalgia, even for someone like me who wasn’t even born when acid house and ecstasy exploded like a cultural nail bomb in the late ​’80s.

Isn’t it funny that you can feel nostalgic for something you never actually experienced? We retire to a bench outside so I can fire questions at Chris. The odd builder shuffles by, meal deal in hand, but other than that, it’s a rare quiet moment in London – a city where even the pigeons seem to rush around. 

The VR experience puts Chris into a reflective mood. ​“I’ve been at some of the best parties ever, parties that I could never have wished to be any better,” he says. ​“I’ve played at some of them. But sometimes I think about the parties I didn’t go to, like the first big ones. But having said that, they were playing house: I didn’t really like house music so I probably would have gone and complained, haha.

“People say: ​‘It was brilliant back then, it’s not as good as that now,’” he continues. ​“That’s not true; I go to parties all the time that are really good. It is a different thing now, it’s a modern version of that, a cooler vibe – but you can still get it. That purity of the ecstasy experience, when we all first took it, is something that…” He paused. “… we can’t go back to that age. But you can still go to a fucking brilliant party now.” 

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“It reminded me of raves that I went to, but also raves that I didn’t go to,” he says. Apparently, people who were actually there during the inception of electronic music culture still have that wistful sense that they didn’t experience it all. ​“Certainly, like a lot of people, I always hanker… ​‘I wish I could have gone to the first of those 1989 raves’,” he says. ​“I love acid house. I love all kinds of acid music, but I still think at the time I wouldn’t have been massively into the music, but having enough Es I probably would have loved it, you know? But just to be at those original parties, the pre-free party rave explosion.”

He adds: ​“Some of the parties I did go to at the time were like that, but I would have loved to go to the Quad in Liverpool for instance. [A loophole in a Sefton council licensing law allowed the Quad Park to be the only legal 24-hour club in the UK at the time.] People always go on about the Quad, they say: ​‘Ahhh, the Quad was fucking brilliant, yeah it was cheesy rave stuff but it was just these quality times.’ I missed those original 1988/89 raves, so I would have liked to go to one of those.” 

In VR, our avatars (having deciphered cryptic messages on pirate radio, ring the party line, successfully circumnavigate the police’s determined efforts to stop the party, and drive to a remote location using a physical A – Z map) arrive at a massive warehouse party. ​“I do remember being in raves like that and loving it,” Chris tells me. ​“Everyone you spoke to was like, ​‘FUCKING HELL, I’M BUZZING ON THESE PILLS. IT’S AMAZING!! I LOVE YOU!’ 

Chris discovered punk at the tender age of 12 and his life was never the same again. ​“The freedom those ideas gave me changed the way I see the world,” he says. In the early 1980s, firmly embedded in the anarcho-punk movement by then, he drummed in his first punk band, Hagar The Womb, which was formed in the toilets of the Wapping Anarchy Centre. Years later, he formed another punk band, Dogshite. He still drums for them now. 

In 1990, he met Julian Sandell on the squat scene in Stoke Newington, Hackney. They bonded over their respective record collections. One day they were playing tunes at Julian’s squat and there was a knock at the door. It was Aaron Northmore. ​“I’m Aaron,” he said. ​“I live at another squat in Stamford Hill, I’ve heard about you guys playing techno. I don’t know anybody like that and I’m a DJ as well.” This was the moment that the legendary Liberator crew first came together. 

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Their first party was in Julian’s squat (punk bands in the basement, techno on the first floor) and was attended by a couple of hundred people. ​“We didn’t really call ourselves anything,” Chris remembers. ​“It was just us three DJing at parties.” One day they made a flyer for a party and used an image from a magazine containing an advert for a BBC sci-fi show called Blake’s 7. The image featured the spaceship in the show, which was called ​‘Liberator’. Because of that flyer, people started calling the trio ​“The Liberators”, and it eventually stuck. 

In 1993, they launched the original acid techno label, Stay Up Forever, which later became a collective incorporating new labels under that umbrella (Guy McAffer’s RAW, DJ Ant’s Powertools, and D.A.V.E. The Drummer’s Hydraulix, for instance, amongst many others). The collective has since released thousands of tracks. Notable anthems include ​‘Lochi — London Acid City’ (co-produced in 1996 by Chris and Lawrie Immersion), ​‘Scum Like Us Like Acid’ (by Chris and Sterling Moss in 2017), and of course ​‘One Night In Hackney’ (Chris, Dynamo City, and D.A.V.E. The Drummer in 2004) to name a few.

Throughout this process, Chris regales me with tales in a way that only an underground DJ who’s been on a mad one for 35 years can – being booked in Arizona by a millionaire ecstasy trafficker, for instance. (“It started to go wrong when we realised they hadn’t sorted out anywhere for us to stay.”) Or when Julian was booked to play in Russia in 1991, as the Soviet Union was unravelling like a ribbon in the wind. ​“Everything was black market and mafia-controlled, it was so sketchy that many artists were scared to leave their hotel rooms.”

In 1998, after managing to install a landline phone at his squat in order to take bookings, Chris was offered a gig in Venezuela. ​“They said they were going to organise this rave in the middle of nowhere, it’s going to be brilliant, they said, and they want some techno DJs,” he recalls. ​“I said I was up for it, but he asked me if I could buy my own [plane] ticket.”

After explaining that he didn’t have any money, he promised that if a ticket was sent to him, he would come. He never received any more instructions, but a paper ticket arrived in the post just as he was being evicted from the squat. ​“I didn’t know what I was going to come back to because I didn’t have anywhere to live,” he explained. ​“But I thought ​‘fuck it’, I’m just going to take my records, go, and see what happens.”

The driver on the other side, who was to deliver him to the party, stopped in Caracas on the way. Chris was warned not to get out of the car. ​“It was one of the murder capitals of the world at the time,” he says. The party he was being taken to, which took place during the 1998 solar eclipse, was ​“a total disaster”. The promoters lost a load of money, but connections were forged. ​“The Venezuelan crew that were running one of the sound systems that powered it all, this little guy called Oddo, loved acid techno,” Chris recalls. ​“We befriended him.” One of Chris’ crew, Damian, met a woman on that trip, fell in love, and stayed in Venezuela. ​“He and Oddo started doing raves there, we all went back loads of times, and a massive rave scene happened from that.

“I had a shooting on the dancefloor when I was playing there once,” Chris tells me, referring to one of the subsequent parties Oddo and Damian threw. It was a gang-related incident. ​“I was just playing and someone shouted, ​“GET DOWN!! ​‘THERE’S FUCKING SHOTS!!!’ pew, pew, pew.” Chris mimics a Wild West gunslinger. 

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I ask if he carried on his set after the shootout. 

“Well, I tried,” he replies. ​“But they told me to get down. But as soon as it was all finished, yeah.” A smile crept across his face. ​“I just got up and carried on.” Punk is not, it seems, dead. 

A nearby helicopter hovers above, interrupting the interview. We stop talking, heads darting up. 

“What’s going on today?” I ask.

“A rave?” Chris jokes. 

An interesting aspect of Chris is his ability to juggle the need to make a living with music while maintaining anarcho-punk ideals that rail against corporate mentality. You’ll see him at festivals and clubs, sure. But you’re probably more likely to see him at a free party, squat party, or just anywhere with a generator and army of people vowing to ​‘protect the rig’. For many major DJs, I’m sure toeing this line of authenticity is anything but easy, but he appears to straddle these worlds seamlessly. 

And it has won him cross-generational appeal; when I saw him B2B with Mark EG at Balter Festival a couple of weeks earlier, the blur of people congregating, marinating in the squelchy acid sound and generally getting on the sesh like a Tory politician in lockdown, there was an extremely diverse age range. From 18 year olds to people in their 50s (“first generation ravers”) and everything in between. 

Back at the Barbican, we retire to a nearby pub for pints and salt and vinegar crisps. The conversation ping-pongs from ​‘chasing your dreams’ to outrageous moments at parties over the years to the early incarnation of festivals, until Chris has to leave to move out of his flat. He wants to attend the final meeting of the group that promotes the rights of residents in the block. 

I later receive an email. 

“Was great to meet you and Josh [the photographer], wish I could have stayed tbh, that took a feat of immense will to leave at that moment!”

In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats is produced by East City Films and created by immersive artist Darren Emerson, and is on view at The Barbican Centre until August 3. It will tour Leeds Testbed August 15 to September 17, Warwick Arts Centre September 29 to October 13, and Wales Millennium Centre Cardiff October 23 to November 23.

Simon Doherty is a freelance journalist specialising in drug harm reduction and club culture. Follow him on Instagram.

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