You don’t pick your own nickname, you get given it, don’t you. Since I was at school I’ve always been known as Bez, an abbreviation of Berry. While this coffee table book serves a purpose of entertainment it also hopes to educate and spread awareness by donating 10% of all profits to The Loop.įind out more about Scriven's artbook here, and laugh along to some stories from Vintage Disco Biscuit: The Art Of Ecstasy below. The Loop’s sole purpose is to create a safer environment for the youth of today in city centres, clubs and festivals across the UK,” he adds. “The book has a serious purpose too in contributing a percentage of Vintage Disco Biscuit sales to the selfless work of The Loop, an essential national drug testing and awareness charity that is close to my heart after volunteering as a ‘pilltographer’. “I wanted to look outside of the box, to include contributions from unsung heroes, clubbers and personas.” I’ve attempted to make the book a piece of art in its own right, by creating the theme of an ‘after party’ experience that binds all the artwork and stories together in an environment where the sharing of experiences always occurs,” Scriven says on the artbook. “I wanted to share life and clubbing stories from a diverse selection of people. All in all, don't bother reading this unless you have some sort of obsession with the drug culture of that time period.Read this next: We spoke to an ecstasy dealer from the acid house era There is also a story by Alex Garland that comes towards the end of the book that I was not that interested in, but perhaps would have been if it had been placed near the beginning. Of course, no surprise, my favorite was probably the Irvine Welsh story. Some of the stories I liked were funny, or disturbing or just great depictions of a period in time. Some stories I remember liking (although they all start to run together): "The State of the Pary" - Irvine Welsh, "White Burger Danny" - Gavin Mills, "How Sunshine Star-Traveller Lost His Girlfriend" - Martin Millar, "The Box" - Charlie Hall, "The Snow That Killed Manuel Jarrow" - Douglas Rushkoff. I think I liked more of the earlier stories in the book, but that could be due to the fact that by the end I had grown bored of the whole topic. I don't know that it is a good idea to compile a bunch of stories about the same topic because a lot of the stories are very similar. The stories were rather hit or miss, and looking back it seems they were more miss than hit. Most of the authors are British and so the majority of the stories take place in Britain. This is a collection of short stories by different authors about the club/drug scene of the late 80s/early 90s. In summary - a good slab of creative fiction about the rave scene. It was probably my favourite and it even had a happy ending. Insert some sexual anxiety and party relationships and this story just felt right. He then experiences a bizarre hallucinatory series of events which are quite different from the actual bizarre events of the night as experienced by his friends. A young protagonist takes a modest quantity of drugs that none-the-less are far stronger than expected. The story which I felt said it best was "Heart of the Bass" (Kevin Williamson). There's one or two stories that try too hard with extreme quantities, and in one story a boy dies slowly from bad drugs while remaining quite lucid and calm (implausible and melodramatic). Mostly the descriptions feel very authentic. The use of recreational drugs is the common element in all of these stories. In this story a crack-addled pilot on a passenger flight forces a jungle crew to spin records over the cabin PA. Another fun one is “Mile High Meltdown "(Dean Cavanagh). A bunch of kids eat their rave flyers and visit a scary post-human drain world where electrical appliances are set to rule over a dying planet. One I like is "Electrovoodoo" (Michael River). I thought the best stories were little gems by obscure authors. Perhaps nothing here is going to blow your mind but there’s also nothing here below par. Disco Biscuits is a hefty 19 stories published at the height of global rave fame in 1997. The sequel to Trainspotting is in the cinemas at the moment so let’s get nostalgic and visit some short fiction from the 90s.
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