Helter Skelter

 

After turning the clock back 25 years at the end of each month I realised it's 25 years since I first discovered Helter Skelter. Then it got me thinking it was also 20 years since I was at the Millennium Jam which was the last Helter Skelter so maybe I should do a post about it. Then I realised the Millennium Jam was in-fact 21 years ago, not 20 as it was new years eve 1999.

In 1995 I had only just made the transformation from grunger to raver and therefore my music collection was a bit thin on the ground. It consisted of the 2 Prodigy albums, the "Set You Free" single and a 4CD Best of Jungle compilation. The big rave at the time, or more specifically the first big rave I'd heard of was Dreamscape.

I heard there was a clothes shop in a nearby town you could buy Dreamscape tapes from. When I went there they told me they didn't have any Dreamscape tapes in but they did have Helter Skelter. Being new to the scene I had no idea whether Helter Skelter was any good or not, so I left it.

It turned out the Helter Skelter was in a lot of ways like Dreamscape and they were both held at The Sanctuary in Milton Keynes. Unfortunately that clothes shop closed down shortly afterwards. I can't remember what my first Helter Skelter tape was, but it was a copy. I then purchased a Helter Skelter tape pack from someone who had moved on to house music. On the tape pack there was an address where you could sign up to their mailing list, so that's what I did.

After a rave had taken place, I'd receive a newsletter, a flyer for the next rave and a list of tape packs available to order. It would take 28 days for a tape pack to be delivered, so by the time I'd get to hear music from an event it was almost time for the next one. That was just normal back then.

When I'd receive the tape pack I would always listen to the Vibes tape first. By the turn of the millennium I owned a tape pack from pretty much every Helter Skelter event from 1995 onwards. One I didn't own though was the Millennium Jam, not sure why. 

Although a Helter Skelter rave would be better known by its actual name rather than number, the events were numbered HS1, HS2, HS3 etc. What struck me was that HS1 was in 1993, but Helter Skelter first started in 1989. It was therefore always a bit of a mystery what happened between 1989 and 1993.

At the Millennium Jam we all were given a video exclusively for attendees that night which had the story of Helter Skelter on there. It's on YouTube now, but from watching it I learned that the first Helter Skelter was an illegal rave in 1989 with a lot of big names on the lineup which they ended up losing a lot of money from because people thought it may have been fake.

Then they went legal and started off in Banbury, then moved to Milwaukee's in the countryside north of Bedford, then to Oxford, then to Telford and then HS1 was their first event at The Sanctuary.

Lots of Helter Skelter flyers can be easily found on the internet these days, but I've found absolutely nothing about their time in Banbury. The only reference I've ever had to that is owner Dave Pratley saying they had events in Banbury after their first event, so what happened between their first event in September 1989 and their first Milwaukee's event in May 1991 is still a bit of a mystery.

Helter Skelter did come back in 2001, but it wasn't really Helter Skelter in my book. It was more Sidewinder and Compulsion using the Helter Skelter name and it gradually fizzled out after the closure of The Sanctuary in 2004.

The set I've posted is the Vibes set from Helter Skelter Odyssey in 1996.