This is a transcript of a recent RA Exchange, edited slightly for clarity.

People probably know you from your film last year, which covered rave culture and looked at it through the eyes of the younger generation by showing lots of footage to young students in London. But you've been incorporating dance music and rave culture into your work as an artist for quite some time. Where did that start?

Well, you're right, the film was called Everybody In The Place and it was on TV last year. In a way, it was just another extrapolation of my interest in the music, but also the culture and history that surrounded it. That started in the mid-'90s. I always knew and suspected, and you knew if you were there and you saw it, that what was going on with dance music in the late '80s was a very important moment. And it seemed like a moment, historically something important was happening, and I was interested in exploring it. I think in '95 I made a series of posters for exhibitions that I wanted to see, and one of them was about acid house culture, memorabilia and imagery and so on. Then I did something with a brass band playing acid house music in '97. So, from the mid-'90s onwards I was thinking about it as a serious moment in British life.

Acid Brass took on a life of its own, it became its own thing. Separate from the galleries and your exhibitions.

It did, quite. Well, it never went into the galleries, it was just an idea for a brass band to play acid music, to play the music really well because I loved the music and I always thought it didn't really get looked at properly because people were looking at the drug culture around it and people dancing and whatnot. But actually, a lot of the music was amazing and so I wanted to see if it was possible to get a brass band to play this music. I did a diagram connecting these two musical forms and in a way, it was trying to tell a story of a country through music. It was like the history of these two musical forms actually encompasses so much history of Britain in the 20th century. So, it had a serious intent but actually, it was meant to be a very enjoyable, life-affirming event to see a brass band playing songs that you loved.

And particularly the KLF track and "Voodoo Ray" by A Guy Called Gerald—I've heard people play them.

Well, I think it's a testament to those songs because they're very musical songs—full of great riffs, full of great melodies. So, they can be translated into a brass band and a brass band can play them and feel like they are playing really good music. It's not like a novelty even though it has a novel aspect to it. It was always meant to make brass bands play contemporary music and feel good about it, but also for people who like that music anyway to understand that these are very well-made, well-constructed songs. I think it worked both ways really.

There are many reasons why it touches people's hearts. A lot of the time with older dance tracks, people tend to assume it's because of the memory connections and that you heard it off your head and that's why it made a grown man cry—I think that's partly why a lot of the tracks didn't get the musical analysis they deserved.

And I think the drug culture got in the way of the appreciation because it was easier for journalists or whoever to dismiss the music because there was a drug culture associated with it. In a way, I was dealing with almost instant nostalgia because I was getting a brass band to play songs that weren't even ten years old. You know, dance music was still happening then but acid house very much within dancing memory.

Things moved so fast between 1988 and 1995 in terms of the musical evolution. It's almost impossible to get your head around it now. I was thinking about it the other day... Acid, as such, like the 303 and the gurgly acid noises, were passé by 1991.

Absolutely, it's a bit like what happened with rock music in the '60s. When you think of the Beatles in 1963 or '64 and then think about what they looked like in 1970 or '69 and how music had grown up and constantly evolved. Rock music, you could argue, stopped evolving at some point. But dance music has this ability to constantly reinvent itself. And you're right, by the mid-90s people's dancing experiences were often in these massive sheds, these super clubs that had taken over. I went to Cream, I went to a few of them and they were kinda horrendous experiences really. These mass-market, mass events in these spaces—there's no space to dance often. But that was a very quick change and you're right, you could get nostalgic about acid house because it just seemed so long ago but really it was just under ten years. The change had been so rapid.

And yet it was more than 20 years from you having that idea to the Saatchi Gallery actually saying, yes, let's have an exhibition of rave flyers.

Yes, it's interesting. I did a series of posters at the time about rock music but also music culture of which acid culture was one and of those posters now, I think four have actually been made into exhibitions for other people. I did about eight and some have yet to be done but I think about three or four have been done. So they're all prophecies almost, they're all coming to fruition. But yeah, I think it's a generational thing. You start getting wistful at a certain point in your life about your past and your youth and now people's youth isn't punk, it's actually kinda that punk is now retiring, you know, they're getting to the age where they're retiring, as will we, but it's quite interesting to reminisce about something that feels ultra-modern and futuristic.

We'll talk about this mainstream acceptance in more depth in a bit because a lot is happening at the moment in terms of soundsystem subcultures being accepted and absorbed. But before we go any further on music and your art, I realise I didn't do a very full introduction. How do you explain what you do? You know, a conceptual artist is kind of...

Yes, it's quite dry that phrase, isn't it? It's a bit, not elitist, but it can put people off. But, a conceptual artist is true, an artist who works with ideas. I'm an artist but in a very broad sense. So I muck around a lot really, and a lot of it is mucking around and mischief-making but I'm a very broad artist, which doesn't mean I'm a musician and I don't paint or draw, but I do a lot of things. I work with musicians, I make films but I live in the art world, I would say.

Can we do a potted history of how you got to that point?

Yes. I'll try and do it in 30 seconds. I left college in 1988, I studied art history, I didn't study art. I was unemployed, I worked on and off. I was unemployed for about eight years on and off but with other jobs part-time and so on, and all the time I was trying to figure out what to do with my life really, as a lot of men do in their 20s. I knew I liked art and I liked being around it. I took photographs that developed into something else in terms of making things and very modest things. But I was always interested in making things and getting to know people, and living in London it meant you could get to know people and understand what the art world was and how to get along in it. I mean, you have to do that in a way, especially if you don't go to art college, you've got to teach yourself how to operate in this world and so, I just got to know people and then worked out what my place was within it. My big break, really, was the brass band playing acid house. Before then, I was just doing little flyers and making little prints and stuff. Then it became, "Wow, I can work with people I don't have to work with objects and paper and ink."

And during that time, as a teenager and going through college, what were your music tastes? Pre-acid house?

Well, pre-acid house they were quite broad. I was really someone who listened to the radio and watched Top Of The Pops, so for me, it was the charts that were interesting, but the charts were in themselves very broad because there's anything from goth to dance music to hip-hop, so you've just got a really good mix. I was a bit of a goth when I was 16 to 18, so that's like 1984 to '85, which was a pretty good time to be a goth. I got into hip-hop or rap, I don't even know what you'd call it—Run DMC, Manatronix. I went to a lot of concerts and clubs for that, then I took a bit of a swerve into indie and dance music via heavy metal. I just went everywhere basically. I missed out on the first wave of acid house. I think I was just looking elsewhere at the time and so, for those years, until about 1989 or '90, I was looking somewhere else for music. I'd never make out that I was there but I was aware of it.

I was at school around a similar time and the fascination with subcultures as you discover all these people from Yorkshire and The Sisters Of Mercy and goth and it's like, wow, this is a whole new way of living. Then, you go and see Run DMC for the first time and everything from the shoelaces upwards is part of how you express yourself and what you are. Was subculture something you became fascinated with early on?

Absolutely, I always had been and probably always will be. But yeah, it's funny you mention The Sisters Of Mercy. I was very into that band, and Run DMC almost at the same time, it's quite funny really that you can do that. But yes, I think music culture drove fashion, youth fashion, maybe more than it does now. I don't know what's going on with young people now, but it was very important, it was almost like all you had really. So I was a big consumer, in terms of just watching telly and listening to music on the radio—it was everything for me.

1989 was a particularly interesting year. We've just had the beginnings of Top Of The Pops 1989 on the TV and I'm trying to pick apart how much of it is nostalgia and how much is the fact that it was actually an explosive year. Because suddenly the British contingent start making acid—S'Express, Coldcut and all of those people were expressing a very British identity through it.

It was a lot more pop actually wasn't it? I mean, the fact it was on Top Of The Pops meant that it almost had to be, but I think you're right, I think a lot of British dance music at the time was made by people who grew up watching Top Of The Pops and who wanted to be on it almost. And so they were making very friendly music in comparison to the Americans, who were making much less chart-friendly music.

And also British hip-hop like Cookie Crew and Rebel MC was coming though as an uptempo thing because they were playing at raves. Suddenly you've got this breakbeat-hardcore fusion with house music that will expand into other things throughout the '90s.

No, you're right, you watch those Top Of The Pops now and it's so different to 1987 Top Of The Pops. It was very dull, you'd just get these very surprising acts to come on.

And Sean Ryder...

Yeah, of course, that was a good year when things went mainstream. I can't locate myself in 1989 but I was there.

And so, mentally, were you stitching together connections between these different things that you'd come up in?

Yes, I was making connections. You know, the '80s was a very authoritarian moment in British life. The government was very powerful or felt that it was. The police was very powerful, they felt like they could do what they liked, and so a lot of the imagery thrown up through rave music in terms of police stopping raves and being very heavy-handed was very reminiscent of what was going on with the miner's strike and the industrial disputes and so on. It felt like dance music, weirdly, was becoming part of a political story in a way that you'd never be able to predict. No one could've predicted that.

There's that inner sleeve from The Prodigy album that a lot of people laugh at...

Ah, I love that...the painting?

It's beautiful, all my friends had it on their wall at university. There's a horrible city on one side of a chasm and then there's this hippy and he's cutting the bridge and the police are on the other side and he's in the beautiful countryside and I think he's giving the finger and cutting the rope on the bridge. The image is that everyone's gone to the countryside for the rave and discovered colour and light and friendship and beauty.

It's actually a brilliant painting and it should be in a museum somewhere because it really did sum up how people felt at the time.

And it's so naive but that sense of we've stepped over something, we've gone to something else.

Yes, you can't go back on something if you've experienced something, been somewhere, done something. I'm not even talking about drugs now, but going into the countryside and being with a group of people and dancing, you can't un-forget that. That was a life-changing moment for a lot of people. Experiencing the countryside in a way that they'd never expected and, in the film, that's a really important part. I talk about the British attitudes towards the countryside. Our relationship to the countryside is quite fraught if you think about it. Being from a city, not really knowing what your place is within the countryside, and feeling quite threatened by it, really. To be able to go out and socialise in the countryside was a big deal for someone in the cities and I think it still is, so that was something that I was very interested in. Strangely, Liam [Howlett] from The Prodigy wrote to me and he was very complimentary about it and we had a long conversation.

The film, of course, takes its name from a track by The Prodigy?

It does, yes, even though The Prodigy don't appear in the film... That's another story. But I think Liam really liked the film. A lot of people who wrote to me after the film were musicians involved in that scene. They were really glad that I looked it in a way that was a little bit different, but also didn't go on and on about DJs and drugs. It looked at the wider picture, the bigger picture, step back and look at it, the importance of it really.

It was quite a personal film. It didn't pretend to be a definitive history.

No, and I think I even say at one point to the young people that "these are just ideas, it might not be the truth but this is how I see it." I wasn't trying to make an authoritative history of this movement because I don't think there is such a thing really when it comes to making films, unless you're making a 12-part documentary about acid house in Britain or dance culture in the late-'80s and early '90s. You'd need about ten hours to do it frankly. So, I was just throwing words out and seeing what stuck and which ones people reacted to. I was talking to people between the ages of 16 and 18 who would not have necessarily know about that history of Britain.

They were in a London school?

In a school in North London, a very diverse group of young people. A lot of those young people in that film, their parents were not born in Britain, so their parent wouldn't have any memory of this because their parents grew up all over the world, so it wasn't handed down to them necessarily as like, folk memory. So, I was giving them a bit of British folk memory about the '80s, good and bad... A lot of it bad actually. I think their reaction to it was very raw because they had no idea about the miner's strike or travellers and so on. They were interested and shocked and entertained by it.

It was funny, it really gave me vertigo watching. With the mass availability of everything right now, all of our culture is recorded and kept on video, so suddenly the past doesn't seem so long ago. The '80s now, don't seem as long ago as the '50s did in the '80s, because there was less footage and the footage was in black and white.

Absolutely, and it's pre-Beatles, which is like the big revolution in Britain.

Whereas, acid house has always been there but your film made it really clear how far away it was.

Yes, definitely to them. To us, less so, but to these young people it's a world before the internet, which for them is absolutely almost unimaginable and certainly before social media. Whether they feel it defines them or not, it appears to define them. Yes, it's a very alien world without the internet or mobile phones or anything like that. For that reason alone, I think, the clothes less so, maybe the dancing they were less shocked by, but people danced like that because they weren't being filmed and appearing online the next day or simultaneously or being live-streamed. You could behave differently, you didn't have to police your behaviour.

You mentioned the travellers, you mentioned punk and DIY. Quite a bit of the soundsystem culture you depict in the film and that you talk about was acid frazzled and mystical because of that hippy connection.

The traveller connection, yeah.

Did you at the time think of the mystical qualities of it all?

When I was going out, you mean? Back in the day type of thing?

Yeah.

I didn't really do much in the countryside but I did go to some of the Spiral Tribe gatherings because they actually used to do a lot in the cities.

But they came out from that kind of Throbbing Gristle industrial music.

All this industrial music but yes, all these connections to the anarchic eco world. I went to Glastonbury in the '90s and there was a lot of that going on as well, this connection. The music was a great way to introduce groups of people who would've never been introduced to that lifestyle because they'd follow a soundsystem, get in their cars and go out for weekends and then be exposed to a certain way of life and a certain way of thinking about the world through the music. It was actually a really great way to entice people into considering a different way of living. I'm sure it had an effect on some people, not everyone obviously. I think a lot of people go for the party, but I'm sure there's a good percentage where it changes their lives and they're in a situation like that.

Absolutely, you'll talk to a fairly hefty percentage of inner-city drum & bass producers who have a lot of beliefs about aliens and stuff that I swear came from the mid-'90s playing raves.

Cyberdog and pictures of aliens, it was quite heavy wasn't it? It was quite big. The iconography was quite interesting... There was a lot around the time of Terence McKenna and the KLF were throwing in The Illuminati and stuff. So it was kind of a good space for free thinking and free thinkers and people who were on the fringes of thoughts to get an audience.

But was that part of your conceptual framework? Because there was this obsession with connectivity even before the internet kicked in. People were talking about global communication and all of this sort of thing.

That's right, there were a lot of words for it right, what were the words? There was a lot of talk about cyber and about technology that was just about to be invented or was spoken of because it was being researched, like 3D, cyber, virtual reality. These things were spoken about in the early '90s as if they were just about to happen. You could do 3D graphics, which were all on rave and album covers, so it was super futuristic on the one hand, and on the other, it was quite pagan and pre-Christian. You had this mix and they often existed together, so dance music was often a very good space for radical ideas to exist. Because a lot of it didn't have any lyrics, you could interpret the music as you wished. It wasn't just traditional rock lyrics about women or men or relationships; it was like a blank canvas, it was like abstract art, you could see within it, with what you wanted.

I've got a theory that a huge amount of the conversation that was being had at that point has been shut down out of pure embarrassment—I mean, all of that hip and mystical stuff was a lot more mainstream than people like to admit. I recently saw some footage of The Shamen, who were the frontrunners commercially of that mystical rave imperative with Terence McKenna on their records and so on, and they were at the Smash Hits poll winners party performing "Destination Eschaton." The eschaton is the five-dimensional object at the end of the world in Terence McKenna's tooting philosophy and this was, like, pop culture. So many mainstream ravers would find themselves having these conversations of "it all went a bit David Icke."

Well, that's the thing, it can actually lead you into really bad places like David Icke and then sort of far-right conspiracy theories. You go on about The Illuminati maybe, you go on about Jews running the world and all of that stuff, and you can probably get quite heavily into the wrong thing. Then add drugs to that. They were into psychedelics, weren't they? There are paths to take and some of them you probably don't want to end up on because it was sort of a dead-end and it could get a bit ropey I think.

I guess it's a combination of that and the fact that no one wants to admit they were wearing fractal trousers or seeing the vision of beauty in the eyes of some guy called Dave from Potters Bar, where they were having a conversation for the first and last time.

Yeah, but I think it's good. I think people needed that after the '80s, which was so grim in a lot of ways that probably a lot of people needed an experience like that to jolt themselves out of it. To show them a different way of living but also the potential future. So it's good that people probably did take drugs from time to time. Or it was a drug that was necessary for that environment, in that time, because it had just been really quite horrible for a long time.

And here we are again: people really underestimate how bleak it was and how swift the change was, on the high streets especially. I remember certain cities where in 1988 you wouldn't go on a high street on a weekend night and then, by 1990, everyone was going "Woohoo!"

Well, if you did you wouldn't go out wearing colourful clothes or a hat or shorts or whatever. I would get laughed at in the '80s for wearing clothes that were a bit odd—they weren't even that odd really. But then, a year later, two years later, people were wearing the same clothes that you'd been wearing because they'd had an experience. Men were wearing shorts, it was fine for men to wear shorts or have their hair long, for example, it was OK. Yeah, so I think it did change that—it made it less tense. And also, your social life wasn't built around the city centre nightclubs, which were just a magnet for violence for some reason, from the door staff down. Everyone seemed to want to have a fight and also some clubs didn't let in black kids so that's why soundsystems were so popular because you couldn't get into regular clubs. It was almost a joke that almost all those city centre discos that were run by breweries that just wouldn't let in black kids and it was just...

...and gay culture was completely segregated.

Yeah, literally it was underground so this music actually allowed everyone to be in the same place and it wasn't threatening. It wasn't booze-based, breweries weren't running the clubs so it wasn't imperative to sell alcohol and money was made elsewhere obviously.

Well, we can't pretend it was a panacea but things did change.

It was a kick up the arse I think and it's what was needed in that decade—it was very necessary.

Going back to that mystical question: where does your henge come in? Because you made a bouncy Stonehenge.

Yes I made a bouncy Stonehenge in 2012. It's called Sacrilege and it was made for a big art festival in Glasgow. Then it was adopted by the Olympics and then it toured Britain, London and the world, which is funny in itself. I just wanted to make something enjoyable. I mean, it was very rave-based in a way, you can imagine that at a rave. It would've been amazing to have an inflatable Stonehenge at a rave.

The bouncy castle was a big part of the rave experience in the mid-90s.

Yes, but this one is immense. It's 100 feet across. It's a scale model, a replica of Stonehenge. It's actually a bit smaller because you couldn't make it exact size. After all, Stonehenge is so big that you can't make inflatable structures that are that tall that are unsupported—anyway, I won't go into the technical details but, it's big, it's really big, it's fun, it's meant to be a way of us getting in touch with our ancestors and our past, but in a lighthearted way. It was just meant to be stupid really and it is. But wherever it goes in the world it has the same effect on people. It's a great leveller in a lot of ways. Stonehenge is a mystery and always will be, and it's mystery that represents Britain or England. It's great that we're represented by a mystery. It's the most famous structure in the country I would say and yet, it's a total mystery. I think that's great, there should be a bit of mystery to ourselves and our identity.

I think it did create a rave vibe like I said, I've been on it twice: once when my kids were toddlers and came to Crystal Palace Park and once at actual Stonehenge.

Ah did you go then? It had grown up a bit by then.

Yeah, so it was really nice to have a bounce on Stonehenge as milestones, literal mile stones.

That's great. It wasn't in the site of Stonehenge because that would've caused car pile-ups by the A303.

It was by the visitor centre.

It was, yes. You could just see two Stonehenges on the horizon, one of which is moving because people are jumping around on it, but as soon as you get on it, you turn into a kid.

It permits you to lose your inhibitions.

Exactly, and no one can look good on it. You just prat around on it. It's a sense of abandon and fun and ridiculousness and, in a way, raves had that playfulness around them as well. You can't be self-conscious and everyone will look a bit silly on it, and that's good.

It's really interesting to see the way people chase that abandon nowadays because rave culture continues to exist in a myriad different forms: in spectacular mainstream versions and down in underground tunnels mutating in its own little ways. But also people do this sort of day-rave thing and sober-rave thing and, you know, my wife runs family raves and each of them has different people trying to find... And it's so difficult when it's conscious.

Yes and I suppose you're trying to get your kids to come along and say "no, this is a great song, come along and dance with dad to this song," to 808 State or Frankie Knuckles. But still, I'm sure kids love listening to that music, don't they?

They really do... it's full of lights and bubbles.

Well yes, it's also something that happened at the time. I really remember the infantilising aspect of it, which was so different to what clubbing had been like. You look at footage and you begin your film by looking at [UK TV show] The Hitman And Her, which was looking at these big clubs in city centres all around Britain and just filming people dancing to this mid-tempo dance music. All the men would dress as if they were going to work or a wedding reception. The women dressed differently from work but the men had dressed very conservatively with proper shoes and a tie and a shirt.

Epitomised by Pete Waterman presenting it dressed in full yuppie gear.

Exactly, in a kind of Armani suit, and that was how you were expected to be. That's a stressful thing in itself. All the bouncers were in sort of dinner jackets and bow ties—all were very violent with it. This era of respectability by dressing like you were going to work in a bank made it a very un-fun experience, so no wonder people drank a lot to get over that, like being in school or something. So raves where you could just wear whatever you wanted, look as stupid as you wanted and danced as freely as you ever wanted, that's a sort of freedom, isn't it? It's like being a child again, being allowed to do that.

Yeah, the fact that people had dummies and romper suits more or less...

Yeah, that was amazing all of that, all of the accessories and stuff.

And once again, it's one of those phases that's often either written out or looked down on out of embarrassment, especially serious drum & bass producers who would go, 'God do you remember that "'Trumpton tune."

That's right though, there were so many remixes of children's theme tunes and of adverts, like "Charly" by The Prodigy, which was used in a road safety advert I think.

It was, and Mixmag at the time did a cover feature: "Did The Prodigy Kill Rave Because Of Charly?" And there was Sesame Street, "Trumpton" and "Roobarb & Custard."

Yeah, and that's just the ones we knew about. I think it's to do with sampling, the availability of sampling. And a lot of people going to raves were very young, about 13, 14, 15. A couple years ago, they had been watching those programmes, but the mid-20s/30s people were already going, "Haha, do you remember Pacman?" Well, it's a kind of nostalgia even at the moment, it's a nostalgia for something. I always liked it when people dressed up and had funny dances, I always loved that. The novelty stuff, I see nothing wrong with that.