Cult heroes: Altern-8, the pop jesters who took rave music to the playground

For those of us who entered their teenage years in early-90s Britain, rave culture was a strange, alluring thing. We were too young to actually go to raves but we would see evidence of them in brightly coloured flyers and on nightly news reports, where the fun that ravers were clearly having was weighed against grim warnings of drug addiction, jail and death.

Then there was the music. Rave was so big in Britain that, from 1987 onwards, a stream of house and rave records became massive chart hits, showing up on Radio 1, Top of the Pops and The Chart Show, where they would find a receptive teenage audience.

For older clubbers, who had grown up on rare groove and funk, early house records were often rather shocking, and their minimal machine grooves and simple vocal hooks stuck in the craw. For youngsters who had grown up on the Pet Shop Boys, Erasure and Duran Duran, however, this was just another type of pop – one whose simple synth hooks you could recreate on the family piano, and whose playground-friendly chants were well suited to the early teens.

What rave music lacked was stars: the kind of weird, arrogant, ridiculous pop figures that lit up our Thursday nights on Top of the Pops. The all-inclusive, everyone-can-do-it ethos of rave culture was all very well for those attending raves. But the anonymity of producers such as Steve “Silk” Hurley or MARRS was unsatisfying for the young teenage mind.

What we needed, it turned out, was Altern-8. I can’t quite remember when I first saw them, but I suspect it was when the video for Infiltrate 202 appeared on the Saturday morning music video programme The Chart Show in 1991. For someone who was 13 at the time, their appeal was simple: the duo of Mark Archer and Chris Peat wore matching dark grey chemical warfare suits and bright yellow dust masks, and they battered away at their keyboards like it was the most fun, most ridiculous thing in the world.

It was the video for Activ-8 (Come With Me), a No 3 hit later that year, that really set me off. Much as with Infiltrate 202, the video starts with the valiant duo thrilling a crowd of ravers (this time from the back of a lorry parked outside Shelley’s club in Longton). At around the minute mark, things get decidedly strange. The action moves to what a stately home, where Altern-8 stomp around in the company of dancers and a fire-juggling stilt walker, then pull out violins to play along to the song’s synthesised string hook, their faces barely visible behind the yellow masks as they ham up their performance like a couple of rave jesters.

This was dance music with an image – and an easily copied one, as I later discovered when dragged to a DIY shop to look at paint. Altern-8 were genuine top-10 pop stars, and they appeared to be having an absolutely brilliant time with it.

They would perform fantastically surreal acts of pop star weirdery, too. Peat stood as a candidate for Stafford in the 1992 General Election, representing the Hardcore (Altern8-ive) party and finishing fourth. The video for 1992’s Evapor 8, meanwhile, saw the duo, having evolved into a kind of rave Laurel and Hardy, fulfil every boy’s dream of buying a tank. Some of their pranks held the promise of a kind of rave anarchism, such as when they brought a witch doctor to exorcise the spirit of rock at a rave in Birmingham. “The crowd loved it,” Archer told the Guardian in 2002. “It was still dance-v-rock, fighting against the establishment. Even at that event there was a huge police presence, so we were basically up on stage sticking a finger up.”

Then there were the rumours. Those dust masks they wore, the playground insisted, were filled with of Vicks VapoRub, a mentholated ointment that, if inhaled Altern-8 style, would guarantee the kind of buzz we were far too young to understand. (It didn’t. But we weren’t to know that.)

Altern-8’s music was the perfect reflection of this anarchic, cartoon energy. It was, at root, the kind of hardcore that was then popular at UK raves, all synth stabs, sub bass and galloping breakbeats. To this, they added a pop edge and a general frivolity that proved irresistible to impressionable young teenagers. “A lot of people said [we were] taking the piss by doing this,” Archer told Red Bull Music Academy in 2013. “‘It’s like rave-by-numbers.’ It wasn’t meant as a serious project, but it wasn’t meant as a joke.”

, Altern-8’s music stands out a mile from the one-dimensional cartoon rave tracks of the time, a world away from Smart E’s Sesame Street-sampling Sesame’s Treet or Slipstreem’s Rod Stewart take off We Are Raving.

Archer and Peat initially made their mark as well respected techno duo Nexus 21, and their production nous was evident in Altern-8’s sample-based rave stew. Their riffs, for example, were ridiculously catchy – brutally effective four-note runs that would give AC/DC a run for their money – and they created vocal hooks that stayed in the head for days. To this, they added ecstatic crowd noise, which brought the thrill of the rave to daytime Radio 1, and splendidly irreverent vocal samples, like schoolgirl MC Crazy Claire solemnly intoning the rave mantra of “Top one, nice one, get sorted” on Activ-8.

To top it off, they threw in lengthy samples of existing rave hits, such as 808 State’s Pacific 202 on Infiltrate 202 and Rhythim Is Rhythim’s techno classic Strings of Life on Evapor 8, which confused me greatly when I finally heard Strings of Life some years later.

“It’s in key? It goes!” Archer explained of their approach to sampling in 2013. It sounds exploitative, even shameless, but in the context of Altern-8’s three-and-a-half-minute pop explosions, it undoubtedly works. And that’s what Altern-8 were, really: a pop band. For all their rave connections, Altern-8’s music worked best in isolated three-minute bursts, showing up against the dull greyness of the rest of 1990s pop.

Altern-8 made one album: 1992’s Full On ... Mask Hysteria, which made it to No 11 in the UK charts. But while most of the tracks were brilliant on their own, 75 minutes of Altern-8 was too much for me.

After the chart peak of Activ 8, Altern-8’s fortunes slowly declined, and in 1993 Peat and Archer parted ways. By that point, their teenage audience had moved on to “intelligent” dance music, Britpop and grunge. Those Altern-8 cassingles were moved further towards the back of the collection.

For years, I didn’t listen to them. Dance music went from strength to strength, but we worshipped the sleek efficiency of minimal techno or the monumentally dark beats of drum and bass rather than the cartoon energy of rave. Altern-8 seemed a joke best forgotten. Simon Reynolds, in his celebrated rave history Energy Flash, compared Altern-8 to Slade: bands that had a run of huge hits but left little mark on history.

But the arrival of the new millennium seemed to give dance music pause for thought, and rave nostalgia, old-school nights and retrospective compilations flooded the market around 2001 and 2002. Then there was the “new rave” scene of 2005, which introduced whistles, neon and glow sticks to a young indie audience. Clubs including Bang Face started inviting rave acts such as SL2 to appear alongside oddball electronica DJs. Archer returned as Altern-8 in 2004, blowing the roof off the Bloc festival. In 2013, there was even a campaign to make Activ-8 the Christmas No 1. It failed, but the chart placing of 33 was the band’s highest since Hypnotic St-8 in 1992.

Archer told Stray Landings of his misgivings, when he took over from Skream and Benga on the decks at the Bloc festival: “The crowd was going absolutely mental and to follow this had me wondering if the old skool was going to cut it,” he said. “But by a few tunes into the set I’d got no cause for worry. Hands were going up for every tune, the crowd knew the words to all the vocal tracks and the total singalong to Prodigy’s Out of Space at the end just blew me away.”

And that’s Altern-8 to a T: hands in the air, singalong dance music with personality and heart. Reynolds’ comparison to Slade may have had more to do with the two bands’ historical obscurity, but it makes a lot of sense: Slade and Altern-8 both have hooks that could kill, prodigious pop energy and a distinctly British sense of humour. And both have seen their reputation improve significantly since Energy Flash was published in 1998.

In the end, it was Altern-8’s contemporaries The Prodigy who would go on to conquer the world. But when British adults of a certain age look back on the glory days of rave, it will be Altern-8 who remain in our hearts: tanks, dust masks and all.