I was due on stage at 8am,” recalls the acid-house pioneer Trevor Fung. “It was a beautiful sunny morning. I’d never seen so many people in my life — there must have been 20,000 out there. There were three juggernauts in this huge field; two were piled with speakers. I got on the one in the middle with the decks on. I just walked on, waved, dropped the needle on the record... and it all went off.”

This was towards the end of the second summer of love, the name given to the period in 1988-89 when dance music, youth culture and a generation’s expectations of fun did, indeed, go off in a singular and spectacular way. That summer of love was, for those who were there, a fortuitous collision of several cultural phenomena. There was the little-known acid-house music coming out of Chicago. There was the importing, by a group of young London DJs, of a very Ibizan way of partying, with abandon and a total disregard for respecting the boundaries around musical genres (and the little matter of the MDMA they found there, which was a popular agent for their hedonism). With their passion for the music, they blew the existing free and illegal warehouse party scene wide open, making it accessible to people more used to the dire Hit Man and Her-style clubbing of Ritzy’s, on the high street. In the summer of love, Britain found fun — and found it on an epic scale.

Famously, those who found nirvana included everyone from football hooligans to aristocrats. Sometimes, abandoned to the euphoric, loved-up experience of being on ecstasy, they hugged each other. All types of people came in their thousands to party every night of the week. By 1989, parties were happening with numbers more normally seen at cup finals. The nation’s youth had found its antidote to Thatcher’s Britain: squelchy, uplifting electronic sounds and MDMA, the love drug. Hooligan culture went into decline. Smiley culture took over. The rave generation crossed class and race divides. For those that experienced it, it was magical. Just recently, I was reminiscing about what fun we all had with the guy who came to fit my carpets.

The most famous pioneer of the scene is the DJ, producer and now LA-dwelling film-score composer — and very rich — Paul Oakenfold. “I knew it was a hugely strong movement when I saw it on the cover of The Sun,” he says. “It gave young people a sense of belonging to something special. Britain was miserable — materialistic, grey, unfair. It gave people a lift, gave them the will to believe in themselves. Life was a struggle back then. It gave you the sense you could achieve things.”

Sarah HB, one of the few female DJs pushing the house-music sound via pirate-radio slots, says: “We were on a ride that was either going to take us somewhere great or leave us swamped by the drugs. Initially, it was these great Californian Es, then bastardised and bad drugs came in. I certainly dabbled. My mum read the papers. She understood why I was calling her from the M25, saying, ‘Sorry, but I’m not going to make Sunday lunch.’ But the music was its beating heart — what gave it that big, euphoric ride — not the drugs. Dance music is so emotional; it’s so great for women. And people danced. Even men.”

I was talking to two rather serious professional girls about raving recently. They reminisced about their silly clothes — tie-dye T-shirts, cycling shorts, ludicrous high-top trainers — and the old chestnut of not making Sunday lunch. “Ah, them were the days,” sighed one. “And still are sometimes,” muttered the other.

For a generation that was fed intense fun, euphoria and abandon at the nascence of adulthood, hedonism became a way of life. Sarah HB thinks the summer of love shaped Britain hugely: “It gave us a new entertainment industry, created jobs in fashion, radio, music, publishing, TV and clubs. It revealed a new world of talent and possibility.”

On a social level, she sees a thirst for excitement and adrenaline persisting among her peers of the time. “They’re adrenaline junkies, without a doubt, and they love bouncing off other people’s energy. I know that drugs can do terrible damage, but it’s got to be said, they can be quite fun too.”

The Sun’s front pages screamed of the “drug-crazed” world of acid house and the “evil of ecstasy”. “Yeah, we were all going to die, according to the alarmism in the tabloids,” remembers the DJ Jeremy Healy. “But we didn’t.”

Paul Staines, the libertarian political blogger whose website, order-order.com , has been compared, in mischief-making terms, to the Drudge Report, adds a meatier voice to the argument. At the time, he was working with the entrepreneur Tony Colston-Hayter (who has turned his attentions to businesses in Africa’s mineral-rich — and trouble-rich — countries) on the Sunrise parties. “Now,” Staines says, “I’m 40 and fat, but if I bump into the right people and my wife’s not looking, I’ll still take a pill. A lot of the political crowd hitting 40 now, if they were at university and middle class, would have been exposed to ecstasy and raving. A lot of politicians come from that era and, believe me, they know the score. There’s a conspiracy among them that they have to be against drugs; they have to pretend. But I don’t think they want to be hypocritical. That era taught people, by personal experience, that there were casualties, yes, but mostly it [drug-taking] just entailed a bit of short-term depression.”

The first summer of love was in 1967, a period that was about far more than dancing and getting high. The hippies who gathered in San Francisco 40 years ago were tied to a global movement protesting against the stricture of post-war society and about the war in Vietnam, and it was, primarily, a political and revolutionary period. In France particularly, the words “nineteen sixty-eight” inspire great romantic memories of popular and intellectual unrest. Fast-forward 20 years and everyone is off their heads on pills — in 1988, politics was not on anyone’s mind.

Yet it did become political. In the wake of the second summer of love came Staines’s Freedom to Party movement, his political response to the ever more fervid desire, on the part of the police and the media, to stamp out this “scourge” of the nation’s youth.

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