The latest in a series of blog posts from Carl Lee. I hope you are enjoying them as much as I am... this one starts on the coast of India back in the late 1980s, when I was just starting my teaching career.
From Goa to John Lewis
In 1988 I found myself heading south from Mumbai on the night-train to Panaji, the state capital of Goa on the west coast of India.
Goa had been a Portuguese enclave, once part of the ‘Estado da India’ that also covered trading ports from Gujarat (Diu) to Kerala (Cochin), with roots as far back as the early 16th century. On India gaining independence from the British Empire in 1947 Goa remained a part of Portugal until 1961 when the Indian army invaded and seized control.
Yet it was not until 1987 that Goa became a full state within India.
Since the late 1960s, Goa had been an integral part of the over-land hippie trail.
To some it was the final destination after Kabul, Kashmir and Kathmandu. An under-ground culture of beach-based hedonism developed, fuelled by hashish from the 3Ks.
I would be disingenuous if I did not admit at this point that such hedonism was part of the attraction of Goa as I headed south on the train, and the fact that it was one of the few places in India you could get a cheap cold beer.
Christmas was coming and Goa was beckoning.
I stayed for 6 weeks; co-renting an old, falling down, Portuguese colonial house from a nun, with its own well and ‘pig toilet’ (don’t ask). It was under a palm grove on the edge of the village of Vagator, a couple miles north of the ‘legendary’ beach resort of Anjuna with its hippie market and full moon parties. I was looking forward to going to a full-moon party and getting down to some Bob Marley, maybe a bit of soul and funk. What I wasn’t expecting was what I initially disparagingly called Italian electro-disco but later found out was some of the very early roots of acid house music. When was anybody going to put some reggae on?
In the quiet rural Goan nights, finding a party wasn’t difficult - just head towards the thumping beat. And it was that beat, a repetitive four on the floor 120 to 150BPM, which jarred my musical sensibilities. On the beach at Vagator parties kicked off at sunset and rolled on way past sunrise. In such matters I was seriously lightweight - I only knew that they went on post sunrise because they kept me awake, woke me up, or we’d bump into the spaced-out stragglers as we sauntered down to the beach for breakfast.
The disparate nationalities that were drawn to the Goan beach-party scene at that time were primarily European, a fair number of Australians and a surprisingly large Israeli contingent. Plenty of life’s flotsam; its damaged, its wayward, its idealistic and hedonistic was washing up on those Goan beaches but what they were listening too had legs way beyond the sand.
The mash-up of electro, house and trance sounds that were being explored by those pioneer Goa DJs proved to be influential on the birth of acid house and its multitude of sub-genres that blossomed in the UK from 1988 onwards. It even spawned its own sub-genre ‘Goa Trance’ which had a particularly strong following in Israel with acts such as Astral Projection, Infected Mushroom and Astrix to the fore.
Geographer Arun Saldanha’s 2007 book ‘Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race’ ethnographically deconstructs the Goa dance culture through the prism of a materialist theory of race, which Brown University academic Masha Hassan extended with her 2025 analysis entitled “India’s Right-Wing Raves: Hindutva, Zionism and Psychedelic Trance’.
You can waste an hour or so looking back on these Goan beach parties on You Tube with this one of ‘Goa trance party at Vagator, Goa 1992’ being pretty much as I remember, albeit four years previously.
Goa trance party at Vagator, Goa 1992
Wild abandon on the dance floor where nobody cared what shapes you were throwing, and tracks that went on and on until they changed and you had not really noticed. Look closely and you’ll see that this is broadly a ‘Western’ event with locals relegated to servicing events: chai, food and taxis.
The burgeoning dance music scene that exploded across the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s became a significant cultural game-changer as well as having significant social impacts. It was open, accepting and crossed ethnicities and classes.
It was not long before dance music escaped its under-ground transgressive vibe; the illegal raves in fields, warehouses, Castlemorton Common, SMS messages and the wave of ecstasy.
By the early 1990s dance music jumped up everywhere, the charts, in the high street clubs and was cemented in popular culture when Primal Scream’s 1991 album ‘Screamadelica’ won the inaugural 1992 Mercury Music Prize.
Here's the track 'Movin' on up'.
In 2025 the much-anticipated John Lewis Christmas television ad referenced those heady days of dance music frenzy to a generation now much more grown-up.
A father and his son on Christmas Day, hesitant around each other, make a connection through the gift of Alison Limerick’s 1990 floor-filler of a groove ‘Where Love Lives (Come On In)'.
A track artfully selected by John Lewis’s ad company for maximum emotional impact. The father drops the needle and is taken back to those hedonistic dance floors of the 1990s when optimism was still in the air. Limerick's track was so explosive at the time blowing up clubs all over the world that early acid house DJ Danny Rampling said of in 1992 ‘that it will still sound good in 20 years’, and he is not wrong.
Hear it for yourself with the classic club mix.
It’s a bit more melodic than the squelchy beats and bleeps of the early Goa raves but its connection with them is clear.
From spaced-out raver to ‘centrist dad’. It’s a journey many have probably made.
References and reading.
“India’s Right-Wing Raves: Hindutva, Zionism and Psychedelic Trance’.
‘Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race’
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
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