4. The Shamen - "Ebeneezer Goode"

Or, "How much can one song go over your head?"

“A great philosopher once wrote. ‘Naughty, naughty, very naughty’.”

So begins “Ebeneezer Goode”, The Shamen’s biggest hit and the song that cemented by pre-pubescent love of rave music while teaching me absolutely nothing about drugs.

In 1992, I enjoyed pretty much everything I heard on the radio but I especially loved rave. In retrospect, it’s easy to see why. It’s a style of music that’s specifically designed to be high energy, high tempo and appeal to people who are completely off their nut, which young children generally are a lot of the time.

In the early 1990s, dance music also came with a lot of child-friendly imagery. It may no longer have been the Second Summer of Love or the salad days of the Haçienda (affirms the guy who was six years old at the time) but there were still day-glo colours, wall-to-wall smiley face logos, and novelty hits.

Largely thanks to The Prodigy’s "Charly”, a 1991 song which heavily sampled an old public information film, there were a load of similar, sugary confections that followed.

So, in the wake of “Charly”, we get “Sesame’s Treet”…

…and “Tetris” (executive produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber?!?!) among others.

Anyway, back to rave.

I loved rave. The first cassettes I ever owned were rave compilations. These two, in fact.

”Ebeneezer Goode” was one of my favourite tracks though—it was just so silly. A silly man doing silly rhymes and a chorus you could run around singing at the top your voice without the faintest idea what it was about.

Yes, apparently a song with the chorus chant of “‘ezer Goode, ‘ezer Goode” might have been about illicit substances. As well as celebrating (and, to be fair, offering warnings about) ecstasy, there were also references to rolling joints (“Anybody got any Veras?” refers to ‘Vera Lynns’ being Cockney rhyming slang for ‘skins’ and ‘Got any salmon?’ is included as ‘salmon and trout’ is slang for ‘snout’) which had Very Concerned People clutching their pearls.

NB: I only learned that thing about salmon today.

It’s kind of hilarious, though, that a song that prompted moral panic about the influence it would have on children was thoroughly embraced by this one child who had absolutely no idea of the furore that surrounded it. “Ebeneezer Goode” didn’t get me into drugs but it did make me addicted to rave. One listen to this and I relapse again.

Oh, and it reached Number 1 during the BBC’s Drug Awareness Week. Hilarious.

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What didn’t get to Number 1 because of this song?

• Undercover - “Baker Street”

I won’t mince my words. This was absolutely shit.

It also had the dubious distinction of being performed at half-time during Sky Sports’ first ever Monday Night Football broadcast of the nascent Premier League. A terrible cover version, cheerleaders on a muddy field, and a 1-1 draw between Manchester City and Queen’s Park Rangers. What a time to be alive.

• Dr. Alban - “It’s My Life”

Another rave classic. 223 and a half million listeners on Spotify can’t be wrong.

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Post-Script

In 2012, I was desperate to write for as many publications as I could and was pitching ideas almost daily. I threw some ideas The NME’s way and the one they liked was an opinion piece about how the sound of early 1990s rave was informing the dance music of today. I was excited but there was a problem—they only gave me four days to write it and they wanted me to get quotes from as many early 1990s rave artists as I could.

I reached out to Baby D, Paul Oakenfold, Moby and Mr. C from The Shamen, explaining the concept of my piece and asking if I could have some one-line answers to a handful of questions to give my article some colour.

Four days came and went and only one artist had responded to me: Mr. C.

Not only had he responded to me, he’d done so within two hours of my email, and had written an entire paragraph for every single question I asked. It had been two decades since the heyday of The Shamen, but even his writing style was as frantic and enthusiastic as his group’s music.

Here’s one of his responses (copied and pasted directly from the email):

Joe: Have you noticed the influence of early 90s dance becoming more prevalent in modern music and do you personally have any theories as to why there might have been such a resurgence?

Mr. C: I think that the late 80's & the early 90's are being a strong influence in todays music because Underground dance music is crossing over & the kids today want good bass lines, trippy melodies & a playful & mischievous attitude & when you make dance music like this, for sure it's going to sound like the late 80's Chicago House & Acid & Detroit Techno & the music that was influenced by those sounds in the early 90's as dance music started to spread more globally from America to the UK & beyond, which is what we're hearing in todays music. As we went into the mid 90's, dance music & the people involved got way too serious about the music & themselves which is now no longer the case. The new kids on the block know how to have fun, know what's up & can teach some of these miserable old gits a thing or two.

What an absolutely stellar guy.

And if you’d like to read the full piece… you can’t. It never appeared in the print mag and The NME pulled it from their website years ago. Bastards.