"I Had the Fear of God in My Young Heart": Clive Martin's First Pill

Clive Martin writes for VICE about music, culture and poor life decisions. 

"Whatever you do, don't drink any alcohol. You might die," said my friend Patrick, grimly, as everyone else on the green leisurely worked at their pilfered cans of Foster's, vodka-in-coke-bottle cocktails and prison-thin spliffs. Patrick, you see, was an ecstasy veteran of two previous occasions, and thus can be forgiven for his charmingly naïve impression that knocking down a Mitsubishi with a mouthful of booze was an act of chemical roulette, akin to eating Japanese puffer fish sushi with a shot of Domestos.

I knew enough (Human Traffic, girls in leather jackets in the year above, The Streets - 'Blinded By The Lights', Patrick not being dead) to know that pills weren't necessarily dangerous. But still, there was enough conflicting information around them – enough "do's", "don'ts" and "definitely don't fucking do thats" – to make a very simple and safe process seem like a SATS Chemistry test. I wasn't going to let anyone know it, but I had the fear of God in my young heart.

These complicated rituals and rumours might sound laughable and twee in an era where everyone's younger brother has been thrown out of the Warehouse Project for K-holing in the gent's loos, but we were but products of the years we were born into. The generation that chemical abandonment seemed to skip. Ecstasy deaths were our ghost stories before bed, but we had no actual experience of the stuff. We were only just born at the height of acid house, and that generation's children – who later went on to cut off their own genitals while floating high on a heady mix of legal highs and dubstep – were still eating rusks when we were 17.

It wasn't a great age to be. We were staying at the cheapest hotel in the capital city of the hinterland between adolescence and adulthood; our own personal Kashmir's. We were on a gap year with no travel, no money and no change of anything. College was just a state of purgatory where you got to wear your own clothes. In America, they make movies about being such an age, where obnoxious fat kids learn life lessons and everybody whiteys from their first toke. In West London in 2006, we just sat in parks, trying not to get hassled by rudeboys and wondering if we were going to end up on the front cover of the next day's Daily Mirror.

It was a long, hot summer. England were out of the World Cup, and most of us had just finished our first year at college. It was your quintessential sunny sausage-fest; that smell of B.O, draw and beer was merging into a kind of late-pubescent mushroom cloud around us. I think I had red jeans on.

You might laugh but, believe it or not, you didn't have to be a hairdresser or a member of Swedish House Mafia to get away with red jeans back then. New rave might now just be a joke that prodigious music writers too young to embarrass themselves at the time drop in at the end of pieces about "proper electronic music makers", but in London in 2006, the concept of a glow-stick was a beguiling totem of a new world, and not yet ruined by the "festie chic" brigade.

London hadn't exactly gone stale, but our old, local heroes – Jamie T, Mystery Jets, Larrikin Love (and the likes of Doherty and Bloc Party who came before them) – had slipped into the dark night of the Carling Academy mainstream. We weren't prepared to pay more than four quid for a night out, but we also weren't going home at midnight any more. New rave, with its east London-centric world of big trainers, unsuitable accessorising and girls with fake names represented something edgier, something more "adult". Something which involved class A drugs.

I watched the early evening, late summer amber sun glisten through the baggie as I held it up to get a proper glimpse of the miniature hockey pucks inside. They were tiny, unimposing little things. Four leaf clovers, I believe, but like Tyson or Pacquiao, their volume to width ratios belied a hell of a punch. "Andre said it was a sick batch," said my man George, who alongside Patrick was a fully paid up member of the intermediate pillhead club. Andre was a guy in West Kensington who they bought drugs off,  who's probably dead now.

The plan was to go east, to Hoxton Square. It was a long way, but that was OK. By the time I was 17 I'd been asked whose friend I was and why I was there from Mile End to Ealing, from Brixton to Bounds Green. Maybe life was better when we didn't know where we were going. Everyone else stayed west and were moved on by community support officers a few hours later. I think somebody fell in a river. It was their loss, because me, Patrick and George would have a night that we'll probably be living out when while we're flat-lining in the trauma ward.

The Klaxons – the kingpins of the scene and still, all these years later, its only real "thing" – were hosting an event. An event that was described, unequivocally, flagrantly as "a rave"; something that felt endlessly exotic to a bunch of suburban herberts, reared around pubs where they didn't understand how to ID properly. We cut through the city on the district line, sweating through our T-shirts and staring at the squares. We were packing heat, shitting it, wondering if this train was changing at Earl's Court for Wormwood Scrubs. But eventually we made it, small time drug mules touching down in a free state.

As the millennial maximalism of the city opened and collapsed above us on the walk from the station, it felt as if my entire life had been leading up to this moment. As if everything else I've ever done; every book I'd read and film I'd seen and girl I'd made out with didn't really matter any more, that taking this little pill would allow me into some kind of secret club full of untold riches. Did pill-users have secret handshakes? There was only one way to find out.

We met up with some girls I was in love with in Hoxton Square. I think one of them had coloured leggings on. Maybe something around her neck that shouldn't have been, a CD maybe. The other one didn't really want to be there – she'd have been more at home in one of those sprawling roundabout pubs that still thought college ID meant you were 18. She seemed excited in the presence of these substances, but wasn't gonna throw one down her neck any time soon. She got into them later at university, judging by her Facebook pics. Too late – they were shit by then.

We sat on the grass, Patrick pulled the pills out and I just threw one in my mouth. No questions asked. It was too late to ask questions. That hairspray taste – the one that Skinner spoke about in 'Blinded By The Lights' – spread from the tip of my tongue to the back of my spine. I gagged. I felt like my intestines were going to stream out my mouth if I coughed, but another blast of water and it was down. Thank fuck it wasn't Foster's. One of the girls took one. The other didn't and opened up a bottle of wine instead. One had a great night, the other didn't. By this point, a guy who did cross country and was something of a love rival of mine had turned up. He didn't take one, and boy did he end up looking like a cunt.

As is standard, nothing happened for a while. We sat, we spoke, we called the number that would tell us where the rave was. A now famous-in-that-world south London fashion designer informed us that the rave was in a warehouse behind the Texaco on Shoreditch High Street. I walk past it a lot these days. It's now the headquarters of a made-to-order Italian bike company and something called "ConnectedUK" – a very London story. After an hour or so of waiting, it happened. Oh, fuck me did it happen.

First of all I felt myself becoming a bit more distant, a bit more relaxed, a bit more like I'd had a drink – but I hadn't. It was hard to tell with all the hormones and adrenaline floating around. Then the girl who'd taken the pill stood up and, before she'd fully extended, she threw her head back, stuck out her jaw like a CD tray made of flesh and enamel, and gargled and gasped something like, "Oh my god". I stood up; it was good.

It's solar dust desperately trying to burst out of you. You're pulling a full-body grin, and everything you say is like kissing somebody you really fancy. Everyone is profound and beautiful. It's like being kissed on the neck by God. My massively altered state somehow transformed the grim thoroughfare of Spanish bars and cheap shoe shops that was Shoreditch High Street into some kind of techno-Vegas in heaven. Some bloke gave us more pills for simply guiding us to the venue safely. We liked him, he was safe. We met a Polish girl who was also safe. Everybody was safe.

Now, I'd like to say that my first pill experience also involved a great club experience, but it didn't. The DJs were good but that didn't matter, because, in what seemed like no time, the place was flooded with police. State party poopers harshing our harmless collective vibe. I guess that's their job, though – the bastards. They looked hilarious, though, standing against the wall, pretending they wouldn't rather be on a night out. Their practical shoes and polyester shirts looking wildy incongruous. Lots of girls were touching their hats and faces.

Having literally no moral high-ground to prop themselves against, they just decided to be the worst they could possibly be. Full attack mode. Outside, a wide-eyed girl jumped in one of the open meat wagons. They stomped the fuck out of her and then the boyfriend who tried to protect her, but hey, we were on pills. Nothing was getting us down.

Later on, we reconvened at the square. It had now become a sort of sit-down rave entirely devoid of music, save for a man who I think was Silverlink – a then-big producer/DJ who later worked with Jammer – playing tunes from an old Mercedes and doing balloons. Naturally, being a public space in east London, it also attracted a fair bunch of unsavoury characters, including a chap with a kitchen knife up his jumper who kept asking for pills or money. Patrick and George befriended a homeless Welsh guy, who they spoke to for some time about the Velvet Underground. They said he was God. He agreed. My love rival was having a fucking terrible time, needless to say.

We spent the rest of the night and then the morning wandering around, not looking for things to do, but places to be. Places where we could try and stoke the now-dying embers of our highs, places that seemed unusual and quiet. We ended the night open jawed and shivering somewhere round the back of the city, waiting for the tube to run. I remember lying on some steel bench, looking over to my cold, broken, sober love rival, and knew that this was the start of some new chapter in my life. We weren't doing cross country any more.

The tubes opened. We cut back across the city on the district line, suburb-bound with a new tale to tell. Like Francis Drake's and Walter Raleigh's telling of tobacco and potatoes in the New World, we would spread the word of pills all over MSN the next day, safe in the knowledge that we'd been through the looking glass. In the following years, drugs would come and go in my life. They'd be good, and they'd be really fucking bad. But that first pill – that first shot of hair spray followed by that wondrous, unforgettable madness – has lived with me ever since. I feel sorry for everyone who had to make deal with student union MDMA since.

You can follow Clive Martin on Twitter here: @thugclive