STEP INSIDE SYDNEY'S EARLY RAVES, DOOFS & FESTIVALS
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“High Fidelity
meets Human Traffic…Australian style"
Dr Noel Burgess (Vision Four 5)
A journey through the rave crucible into the birth of modern Electronic Dance Music.
Explore the Second Summer of Love through its farthest-flung outpost: Sydney, Australia.
CRAZE
A deep-dive in to Sydney’s early raves, doofs and festivals, and though them, the history of Electronic Dance Music. A story shaped by those behind the decks and on the dance floor; written by a 35-year veteran of the electronic dance music community.
Trace the technological, chemical and musical strands that fed the Electronic Music Revolution. Dive into the Rave Crucible, experience the birth of Electronic Dance Music and explore the fracture that lead to both modern underground ‘Techno’ and main room ‘EDM’.
A Vinyl Legacy
In the 1990s, Sydney’s lower Oxford Street was home to up to 17 vinyl dance music stores. Today, just one remains: RecordStore.
Born in 2003 from the ashes of BPM Records (est. 1994), it carries the spirit of a cultural phenomen shaped by the city’s queer underground, unrelenting music pioneers, and dance floor misfits.
The author’s journey from baby raver and BPM customer, to owner of the Recordstore mirrors the evolution of Sydney’s DJ culture.
Arriving in Darlinghurst in 1991 he found a place where music and community collided.
From the first moment, he knew it was home.
Zine
Zines are hand-made, cut’n’paste mini-magazines — raw, personal, and often photoshopped in someone’s lounge room or photocopied at a local print shop. Popularised in the punk era of the '70s, they gave voice to people and ideas who didn’t fit into mainstream. But they trace their history back through sci-fi ‘fanzines’ of the mid 20th Century and arguably to the ‘pamphleteers’ of the late 1700s
In Sydney’s '90s rave scene, zines like Hallelujah and No Frills captured the energy of the moment. Hallelujah ran through 1992 with listings, interviews, and scene commentary, while No Frills had a more artistic bent and offered a critical take on life and authority. Both were passed hand-to-hand at parties and record shops.
Rave Naked With a Blue Light
At some stage in Sydney, in the very early 1990s, a raver catching the train home one morning noticed something on the wall of a carriage.
It was a State Rail safety sticker that read ‘At night, travel near the guard’s compartment marked with a blue light’.
Using nothing but a humble key to make a few subtle modifications this sticker, our raver made history.
It wasn’t long before every sticker on every train in Sydney had been converted like this and so was the legend born.
What makes it amusing — beyond the imagery it evokes — is that in Sydney, in the late 1980s, the police ran blue light discos for ‘kids’ to party safely.
Craze is full of history like this and is available as an audiobook, e-book or in the form of a pulped tree.
Crazy Journey Into Sound
Video editing: DJ Matrix. Audio Collage: pH (author). Original Wecome ‘92 rave footage by Tony Curry. Samples used listed below.