1. You don't need to emerge from nothing

Various compiled by DJ Hell - International Deejay Gigolos CD Five (2001)
Adult. - Resuscitation (2000)
Peaches - 'Fuck the Pain Away' (2000)
Ladytron - 604 (2000), 'Seventeen' (2002), Witching Hour (2005)
Girls On Top - 'I Wanna Dance With Numbers' (2001)
Kylie Minogue - 'I Believe In You' (2007)

Not being from London, I was initially deeply seduced by it, its noise, its speed, anonymity and architectural polyphony, its illumination at night, the ease of obtaining all manner of esoteric commodities, at least before Amazon, Soulseek and freelancing made my residence here entirely symbolic and needlessly expensive. The first and probably last time I truly exploited London's possibilities was between 2001 and around 2004 when, as a Goldsmiths student with obligatory charity shop wardrobe I started going to The End, to Trash on Monday nights, specifically. The End is in the perfect part of London, in that the journey there, by bus or overground, involved traversing the West End at its most dramatic and least touristy, and then to back into a side street near the Op Art facades and glass walkways of Centre Point, to queue up in an alleyway overlooking the sort of dead space which would soon be built on, to enter a neon-lit and always curiously deep space. I was, semi-regularly, going to a club and actually enjoying it, something which certainly wasn't the case with the frumpy, po-faced drum and bass night at Fabric I was dragged to by former school friends in 1999. Here was what I had imagined London would be like, in that queue of overdressed, gleefully artificial boys and girls (most of whom were no doubt about as authentically London as I was). With one exception I never 'engaged' much with all this show, I merely looked at the young women in fur coats, polyester dresses and enthusiastic mascara, never having the courage (or, as far as I was concerned, the bloody cheek) to use the display in the club as a pretext for 'pulling', and my own low-budget attempts at glamour via stripey acrylic shirts and £1 blazers presumably did me few favours. Regardless, I was there to dance.

I don't really do raving. I was too young and in the wrong place at the wrong time for jungle, too indie and poor for 2-step (though I loved the singles) and though I was a major grime enthusiast for a while, I won't lie and say I was making brrap noises at Eskimo Dance, because I wasn't - my experiences of grime live were as sanitised as can be, as will be explained in part 2 (or 3, or 4). So Trash was appropriate, as it was a club for people who didn't like clubbing, although its ethos of dressing-up and synthetic music made it closer to a provincial Saturday night with electro instead of hard house, without the violence and menace, than Proper London Clubbing. More than that, it was a club quite explicitly designed by and for provincials and suburbanites who had spent their teenage years listening to the Manic Street Preachers and Suede, although who largely disdained Britpop for being too lumpen, nowhere near glam enough. At the end of the night the obvious indieness of the entire affair would be made apparent via 'Motorcycle Emptiness' (hurrah), 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' (which got pretty tired) and Bowie's 'Rock & Roll Suicide'. But for that, it was not one of those many indie discos which have flyers listing all manner of eclectic musical pleasures which you would attend only to have to put up with 'Girls and Boys' as accompaniment to happy hour tequilas. Most people at Trash danced, and they danced to dance music, which was at least as important (although not more important) as the clothes.

There were things wrong with Trash. It practically pioneered two pivotal and irksome things about 00s pop - the mashup and the seeming lingua franca of a vague electro 'influence' upon four-square dirges - and the likes of Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party, with their Trash-issue assymetric fringes, can trace themselves from it, although they dropped its sonic artifice for a return to lumpen indie. There were horrible scenesters (though I did once take satisfying revenge upon the Rod Stewart-haircutted patrolman of the queue), and no doubt loads of cocaine, though I never saw any of it. Yet the main thing was the sheer synthetic pleasure of unrepentantly cheap and machine-made music, with tunes and whatnot largely subordinate to the pulsebeat, as in any other dance music. I vividly recall first hearing Fischerspooner's 'Emerge' there, and having exactly the same 'what on earth is this unbelievable music?' response I would later have to Dizzee Rascal's 'I Luv U', except this was different, in that it was properly physically experienced, not at a remove. It was because of this side of Trash that I went there, not for the off-chance that Erol Alkan would resort to The Strokes. So in terms of music, the record which most nearly explains what made this worthwhile, is a quite prosaic compilation (as opposed to this sort of scene-summing-up), the DJ Hell-compiled International Deejay Gigolos 5 . While its deeply naff Schwarzenegger/Sid Vicious cover exemplified the boring 'iconic' posturing of (some of) the scene, the side that would end up as Vice magazine, the music defines what made it something other than another retro gesture, an I-heart-1981 fest to go along with all the others.

I'm not one for Simon Reynolds-bashing, but I was never convinced by his reflections on (if you will) 'Electroclash' at the time. His critique was based on it not having stars or great pop tunes, unlike the New Romanticism it so often referenced. This seems a category error - there was a functionality to much of this music, it wasn't meant to produce a Billy Mackenzie or even a Phil Oakey, because it was really techno, albeit with a floppy fringe, techno for Suede fans (the criticism makes more sense when applied to the non-stars of the new new pop, the nondescript likes of Rachel Stevens or Annie, however briefly wonderful their records). The tracks he claimed offered hope of such a thing occurring - Linda Lamb's 'Hot Room', Tiga's 'Sunglasses at Night' - never really convinced me either, because the dynamics were all wrong, based on big choruses and ostentatious (rather than wilfully blank) singers, both tracks lacking the rectilinear arpeggios and spasmically convulsive 808 pulses that were really thrilling. Nonetheless, both are on (ahem) IDJG5, along with some Liquid Sky-aping New York rubbish, and lashings of the things that moved me at the time and still do, some of which are a bit odd. Steril's 'Grey' (the names! The titles!), for instance, a series of pulses while a woman mumbles in Japanese over the top, proved how utterly alien this music could be, while relentless Moroderfests by Savas Pascalidis and the delightfully named Fillippo Naughty Moscatello had the requisite forward motion. Elsewhere, the Detroit inspirations of the music became more obvious, through the presence of various Gerald Donald pseudonyms - Dopplereffekt's sinister Neue Sachlichkeit, Japanese Telecom's 8-bit kitsch, Der Zyklus' haunting Krafwerkian emptiness.

The obvious 'big tune' on this record - though it isn't a tune, merely an almost infinitely extendable build, was 'Emerge'. Unsurprisingly for this absurdly self-conscious (if not always self-referential) music, 'Emerge' was 'electroclash' commenting on itself, pleading that it could still be futurist while deriving its sartorial extravagance from London 1981, its synthesisers from Munich 1977, and its rhythmic force from Chicago 1986. 'You don't need to emerge from nothing', to be truly futurist and ex nihilo, not if it 'looks good/sounds good/feels good', and not when the absurd, cataclysmic climax of the track makes accusations of 'retro' seem somewhat misplaced. Its argument is both undermined and supported by the dominance of this sound over the next 8 years, to the point where being a-bit-electro is positively compulsory. The other thing to have the same impact on me was hearing The Teaches of Peaches for the first time. The nearest there was to a star was this 30-something Canadian drama teacher talking about sex with the essential earnestness only North Americans can muster. The first minute of 'Fuck the Pain Away', with its sheets of kickdrums and yells, seemed to announce The New as much as any pirate radio product from the same time - although the album later becomes something rather more pomo in its play with and mockery of rock's cocksmanship, and is equally hard to find exciting today, although the obvious influence on lyrics and aesthetic of instantly available hardcore pornography gives this end of the scene at least some historical interest. She played Trash at one point, doing the nudge-wink female Iggy thing to admittedly compelling effect. The stars in this scene were usually underwhelming (Miss Kittin, etc), as in the 00s extravagance had to be constantly qualified, cokehead ambition had to pretend to be self-effacement, and the most interesting groups commented on this rather than merely reflecting it.

Given that this is techno for Suede fans, the total package of band and aesthetic was undeniably part of what made it interesting, and in Ladytron there was a group who were both part of and a commentary on the whole thing - the adoring scopophilia and high drama of 'The Way That I Found You', the hungover ennui and invariably disappointing sex of 'Another Breakfast With You', the 'Playgirl' who 'sleeps her way out of her home town', with the fitting admonishment 'why are you dancing when you could be alone?' In the video to 'Seventeen' they presented their audience as a crowd of Siegfried Kracauer's Angestellen - these are temps, whether in office or modelling agency, their clothes and hair Gattaca-perfect, used and discarded like any other commodity, the release of dancing only another CV performance, fittingly for the lower-middle class demographic of Trash (even the fact that it happened on Monday nights suggested that the club favoured the 'flexibly' employed. We weren't all students). It was only appropriate that after making their point so definitively they became a new Depeche Mode, a periodically brilliant mystique-and-bombast electro-goth stadium act more understood in continental Europe than in the UK. Adult. too had an aesthetic far more interesting than the ironic mullets, trucker hats and artfully distressed John Hughes film frocks that seemed to mark the scene in the USA and later in Hoxton (though you seldom saw any of that in Trash). Nicola Kuperus' cover for the singles collection Resuscitation might be my favourite of the decade, the precise greyscale perfection of the air hostess' suit and the strip of Asphalt, the private jet and deceased salaryman on the runway, the tension between dispassion and drama. The music is glintingly hard, the business-obsession of electroclash at its most unforgiving, the lyrics a litany of late-capitalist mental tics and 'new objects' - suppressed neuroses, nagging habits, mobile phones, credit cards, handbags, cigarettes, 'pressure suits' and 'dispassionate furniture', with a mockingly, stiltedly arse-shaking low-end that owed more to 2 Live Crew than Martin Rushent.

The side of it which appears most indefensible is the mash-ups, the point where all this bloodlessly blank glamour and Moroder functionalism found itself forced to vampirically feast upon the personality and individuality of earlier eras, or other musics - those join-the-dots montages of pop and/or R&B vocal with electropop backing track that some managed to make a career out of, something that was mainly the fault of Richard X and Trash's Erol Alkan. Even at the time I thought that the reverse would have been preferable, the baleful tones of Oakey over the metallic chassis of, say, Brandy's 'What About Us' rather than vice versa, as the real sonic futurism was there, not here. There is one record which is my case for the defence, and it's above, albeit not pitched up to the appropriate pitch of yearning and desperation, as I remember it. It makes clear in the most reductive fashion just how far from revolutionary this scene was, in that the Whitney vocal is simply stapled onto Kraftwerk's 'Numbers', with nary even an attempt to create a new music. That can't explain the deep, inconsolable sadness of 'I Wanna Dance With Numbers', the catch in her voice over the clatter and chatter of what Otto Werckmeister described in Citadel Culture as 'the sound of the stock market', the icy desolation and longing for warmth and consolation at the heart of this record. When this sound went properly pop, it was in the spectacularly uninteresting figure of Kylie Minogue, whose small army of songwriters and producers created an apotheosis of synthpop and postmodernism celebrated by Paul Morley to decidedly dated effect. 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' might have been unavoidable, a piece of utterly efficient engineering which it is pointless to deny, but 'I Believe In You', written by the abhorrent Scissor Sisters, was the last of these electropop records I liked enough to buy rather than download - catching the same non-specific electronic melancholy as 'I Wanna Dance With Numbers', the lack of fulfilment that pervaded the night bus. Blank and poignant, it speaks of transience and pointless optimism. It now sounds incredibly slight.