Welcome to Acid House – Behind the classic tabloid cartoon

While the UK tabloid press initially embraced the acid house movement – The S*n’s £5.50 t-shirt offer being a memorable highpoint – it didn’t take long for the focus to shift to this new ‘menace’ that was ‘corrupting’ the nation’s youth.

Published in the November 2, 1988 edition of the same paper, the Welcome to Acid House cartoon, by longtime resident artist Franklin, sums up the tabloid frenzy around the new musical movement.

Here at 909originals, we’re not sure what captivates us most about this – the hooded Smiley character clutching a myriad of non-descript tablets, the Hieronymous-Bosch-esque despair on the face of the would-be raver as he descends through the trap door, or the subtle, yet classically-redtop subtitle, ‘Trip To Hell’.

As thousands of party people would discover over the coming months, acid house offered quite the opposite proposition… 🙂

Both the front page and page of that day’s paper featured more classic S*n fodder, a report that claimed that ‘bouncers wielding baseball bats and pickaxe handles’ were patrolling a London acid house party, alongside warnings from DJ Simon Mayo, TV presenter Philip Schofield and Matt Goss of Bros (remember them?) to ‘beat the growing menace of the Acid House cult’.

Of course, it would have the opposite effect.

In 1995, author Sarah Thornton argued that a British youth movement would be hard to envision without tabloid intervention. Coverage such as this – along the lines of ‘ban this sick filth’ – undoubtedly played a significant role in igniting what could be considered the last major musical movement.

Nicky Holloway of The Trip concurred, as mentioned in Richard Norris’ official biography of Paul Oakenfold, stating, “The S*n newspaper did the most substantial PR for us. If you were a young person who hadn’t experienced one of these events and read about them, you’d undoubtedly be enthusiastic and eager to attend.”

For us, though, the highlight of the 2 November report has to be the small section at the bottom, as S*n readers are urged to wear a badge featuring a depressed Smiley… in very small print, at the bottom, it notes that the paper has decided to withdraw the Bizarre Acid T-shirt offer, barely two weeks after launching it.

Reach for the lasers! 🙂