"This Was a Literal Immersion, a Communion": John Doran's First Pill

My First Pill is a series where writers tell the story of the first time they, well, took a pill. After Clive Martin, Joe Bish and Jack Blocker, comes the turn of VICE writer and editor of The Quietus, John Doran.

I was a late starter with ecstasy. I didn't get on one until the mid-90s, despite already spending the decade before that doing speed, mushrooms, acid and weed.

I just didn't fancy it, truth be told. I had one notable false start. When I lived on Dickinson Road in Longsight, Manchester, so did a pair of DJ/producers called The Dust Brothers. I bought a few of their white label 12"s. In 1995, they changed their name to The Chemical Brothers and had a kind of "coming out" party at the Hacienda. My mate Chris bought us tickets to go and I thought, "Well, it would be rude not to…", but the pills we bought were extremely strong tranquilisers. I remember the last big chunk of the gig was just a loop of the drum beat from 'Tomorrow Never Knows' by The Beatles, and a load of sirens and white noise over the top of it. People were going absolutely nuts. Everyone apart from Chris and me, that is. We were moving as if walking along the bottom of a swimming pool filled with Tate & Lyle Golden Syrup.

After moving to Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, and getting a job in a factory in 1995, I celebrated by going on my first ever night out in London. I plumped for the Blue Note Club on Hoxton Square, featuring sets by a pre-success James Lavelle and a pre-fame DJ Shadow. Hoxton felt like a no-go area at the time. Walking from Old Street to the venue felt like running the gauntlet. We got there before the doors opened and the queue was already round the block. It was arguably the buzz around this club, which also hosted nights like Metalheadz that kicked off the whole Shoreditch thing, but at the time there was next to nothing there.

I must admit, I was dismayed by the music at first. There was a lot of smooth hip hop, jazzy breaks and fusion-y noodling going on. Club music that panders to people's tedious notions of sophistication and intelligence is almost always pure garbage. I almost left at one point, but then I ran into a mate from back home in St Helens, and he pressed a couple of pills onto me and my mate Frank. I don't even remember taking them. We went into the main room to watch DJ Shadow and again, the signs weren't good. There was a flock of geeks in expensive trainers crowded round the DJ booth, clutching notepads. "This is the lamest thing ever", I said disconsolately.

Now, I'm aware in retrospect how people feel about DJ Shadow - and I probably feel the same way myself most of the time - but on that night he was a Golden God; as much as any member of Led Zeppelin, The Beatles or The Sex Pistols. He was a benign disc jockey, a dictator/saviour who led me out of psychic captivity and into sweet-tasting freedom. He placed a 7" of 'Back In Black' by AC/DC on the turntable and literally dropped the needle on the plastic haphazardly, pressing play without queuing it up. All the trainspotters looked uncomfortably at one another. At the end of the track he picked the vinyl off the deck and smashed it, throwing the shards at them. Then he repeated the process with 'We Will Rock You' by Queen.

This was so exciting that it sparked an adrenaline surge in me but instead of dying off immediately, it kept on building and building until it became almost unbearable. I got momentarily embarrassed, as it felt like I was going to ejaculate - except, not in the conventional way. Internally, across my entire lymphatic system. It felt like glands I'd never previously been aware of were full of the most delicious liquids possible. There were tiny land mines going off in my pelvis, behind my knees, in my neck, deep inside my shoulders, in my ankles and wrists, all the way up my spine, flooding me with pure, tactile pleasure.

"Holy shit" said Frank, clamping his hand onto my arm. My skin felt electric where he touched me. It was analogous to something darkly erotic and erogenous, but completely asexual at the same time. His hand left a kirlian outline of coronal discharge on my arm. There was a pleasantly acidic glow to everything, but none of the cephalic carnage I associated with LSD. We started grinning wildly at each other. I had a complete realisation - no matter how vacuous - that everything had been leading up to this point. No matter what had happened before, and no matter what happened afterwards, this would make up for it one hundred fold.

Then Shadow dropped 'Soul Power 74' by Maceo And The Macks, and all bets were off.

Weird details were rising out of the music. Aeroplane noises, baby glossolalia, giant engines revving, ecstatic moans and groans. I became immediately aware of how much reverb and echo were being applied to Maceo Parker's burnished saxophone. The three-dimensionality of the recording was really apparent. Normally a good club PA gives you the illusion of being inside the music, but this was a literal immersion, a communion. I started dancing, immediately locked into a groove that wouldn't release me. I knew this record was twenty years old, but it sounded like the most modern thing ever recorded.

A tape recording of a man's voice - "The senator's been shot… been shot… he's died!" - rang out, suggesting a dark significance that I couldn't quite put my finger on. But if I was aware that there was both darkness and light, the light was winning. Another voice intoned: "Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop!"

To the mountaintop. This was where we were going. Up to the peak where the air was purest and the sun brightest. At the summit, the light would scorch our retinas.

The chant of The Macks intoning: "Open up the door… I'll get it myself" locked itself into my brain, looping in my head for the rest of the summer like a mantra. I realised that everything on ecstasy was about loops and imagistic flashes. Perfect moments captured in amber, time-stretched til they broke apart into honey-coloured fragments. A twanging bass note played with much vibrato became a ridiculous wave, travelling along a guitar string like the ripple of an earthquake along a giant suspension bridge. The parabolas of vibrating lines formed a pulsing network; from my nervous system, to soundwaves, to vibrating speaker cones, to electronic pulses, to a vibrating stylus, to the hand of a DJ, to the past, to the future.

I had always thought of everything to do with James Brown and his crew up until that point as radical by association. I knew this track (and others) because they'd been sampled by Public Enemy and The Bomb Squad, but this presented the music to me as it truly was: one of the most radical sounds ever. These people were not only musically great, but they probably represented the high cultural watermark of all Western civilisation.

I don't remember everything, or even that much, about the night. I felt at one point like there were giant church bells tolling in the ceiling. Both Frank and I suffered for years under the misapprehension that we'd heard 'Private Psychedelic Reel' by The Chemical Brothers - a physical impossibility, as it hadn't been recorded then - but this was probably due to how the ecstasy peaking brain interprets music as being impossibly heavenly sounding.

After the club, we went to an illegal rave in a disused NCP Car Park and danced to techno til 8am. The next day a big group of us went to Brockwell Lido, drinking red wine from the bottle in the sunshine, watching the multi-coloured flags flutter against a light blue sky over Brixton. The afterglow was strong. The entire weekend was perfect, really. I genuinely believed that every single night out I had in London would be that good, but in reality it would be a long time before anything remotely comparable happened to me in the capital again.