Podcast Corner: Tales of highs and lows in Ecstasy, The Battle Of Rave
Ecstasy: The Battle Of Rave has Shaun Ryder and others telling tales from the era.
Big news from the BBC last week as it finally announced the rollout to international audiences of its BBC Sounds app.
It had only been available in the UK since its unveiling in November 2018 - the broadcaster's biggest product launch in a decade.
BBC's slate of podcasts are all available in the usual places, but we chose to try out Sounds for the new 12-part series Ecstasy: The Battle of Rave.
It's half-documentary, half-drama. Six episodes chronicle the rave-scene in Britain in the late 1980s and how the drug ecstasy took hold, while the other six see actors such as Adrian Edmondson, David Morrissey, and Monica Dolan take on imagined roles.
These short pieces are fine but the main event is so compelling you won't want any interruptions.
Presented by Chris Warburton, he tells us from the outset that this isn't 'the' story of rave, but rather 'a' story, of how a new pill on the scene changed everything for a whole host of people.
The show definitely has one of the best soundtracks of the year, with the likes of Frankie Knuckles' 'Your Love' and Joe Smooth's 'Promised Land' running throughout (Sounds has an hour-long music mix that you might be running to straight after the last episode).
The first episode makes E sound like the best thing in the world: Lads who usually go out looking for trouble are instead spending the night on the dancefloor, people who feel like outsiders suddenly start to feel the love.
And then there's Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays who is forever associated with the era.
He explains: "For the first time in my life I didn't feel odd... I wanted to be polite to people, everybody. That's just me - but it doesn't work for everybody."
However, it ends on a downer of warnings and the series proceeds to examine the real effects of the drug, how it darkened a vicious trade and claimed young lives, such as 21-year-old Janet Mayes, as told, in stop-you-in-your-tracks fashion, in episode four, 'Blackburn Ravers'.
There are bafflingly laugh-out-loud moments, too, though. One drug supplier is asked if he was nervous bringing his biggest haul - a couple of million tablets - into the UK. "No, I think your arse is twitching all the time until it gets into England," he replies.
The story of rave and ecstasy has been told before, but the interweaving of paths done on this series is a thrillride. It's one of the best podcast series of the year.
Now, anybody for a rave?
