A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Son of God - Sunday Raver [Religion Causes Another War mix] (4 October 1992)

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Hyperbole was a fundamental element of rave culture.  This was music that was going to change the world.  The angst and violence that defined punk and grunge music were replaced by love, love, love - albeit shot through with energy that rejected passivity and which implored its listeners to go into the world and make it their playground.  The raves themselves took on the feel of religious events with the participants worshipping at the altar of the music and the drugs that went with it.  It did not take long for this sense of quasi-religious association to bleed through into the music as DJs worked in classical, hymnal and religious samples into their tracks so as to swell them to a state of ecstatic grandeur as the beat dropped.
Over 1991/92, John Peel included several such records such as Love and Death by Marcoesh, In the Name of the One by Prudens Futuri and No Fortuna by Traumatic Stress that evoked a sense of ecstatic grace on the dancefloors.  Son of God’s Sunday Raver feels a little more down-at-heel than some of those tracks.  Rather than projecting to the back of a cathedral, it’s the sound of Sunday school kids cutting loose outside a church hall in Hackney.  However, the looseness of the arrangement here contrasts favourably to the other tracks’ bombast.  And while we are reminded throughout of the need to “keep the Sabbath day holy”, it does at least sound as though Son of God can have fun while doing so.  This is tremendously important to remember when we factor in that the early 90s were, through the increasing proliferation of things like Sunday trading and Sunday football, the start of the movement to make Sundays less boring than they had been for centuries.  It may seem inconceivable now, but when I was a child, the country came to a stop on Sunday.  It was restful for adults, I’m sure, but for the young it felt interminable and the turning of the tide through the late 80s/early 90s was very welcome. Another example of the many small revolutions and changes that rave culture nudged into being even if the larger scale goal of a loved up world, united through music remained unrealised.

Video courtesy of Michael Eamon Osborne