In 1994, Moscow's Britronica Festival hosted Aphex Twin, Autechre, The Orb and Ultramarine for a series of raves. Everything that could go wrong, did.
Back in the early-1990s, the UK was still recovering from a two year-long recession cited by some analysts as the worst experienced since the 1930s. At the same time, a turbulent post-Soviet Russia had not only just narrowly avoided a civil war, but also seen its own economy head into freefall. So the 1994 music press announcement of an imminent music festival involving Britain and Russia felt surprising and optimistic, but also unprecedented. Titled Britronica, the four-day event was being jointly organised by Nick Hobbs, a British promoter and one-time frontman of 80s indie-rockers The Shrubs, and the Russian music journalist and art collector Artemy Troitsky. Vibes wise, the festival would be hosting a lineup miles removed from household-name Western acts, like Queen, David Bowie and The Rolling Stones, who had performed behind the Iron Curtain during the 70s and 80s. Instead, Britronica intended to bring to Moscow the most experimental and innovative of the UK’s music creators — the majority of whom were in their twenties — for a series of raves and shows. The festival’s roster spanned emerging and more established names whose output had soundtracked countless illegal raves, secret warehouse parties and after-hours chill-outs, as well as smaller and major club venues across the UK throughout the preceding years: Aphex Twin, Autechre, Seefeel, Paul Oakenfold, Banco De Gaia and Dreadzone, as well as Alex Paterson of The Orb, Reload, Bark Psychosis, Bruce Gilbert from Wire, Ultramarine and Transglobal, among others. From the moment the motley musical crew landed in Moscow in mid-April 1994, the atmosphere felt unsettling and events went awry. The airport security staff demanded a cash payment before they would authorise taking Ultramarine’s equipment from the plane, for starters. Sarah Peacock from Seefeel remembers feeling an intense feeling of culture shock as soon as the Britronica group arrived. “We all got on a very old bus and drove through mile upon mile of identical vast high-rise housing blocks. There were no shops anywhere, only kiosks lining the streets selling vodka, cigarettes and chocolate,” she says now. “Everywhere people were standing with random stuff in their hands to sell — shoes, clothes, handfuls of herbs.”
After they had checked in at the hotel — converted from a concrete former Soviet conference centre, and home to many-a-cockroach — Peacock later noticed “a steady stream of immaculately made-up women we assumed to be sex workers, arriving and leaving. One floor of the hotel was out-of-bounds and guarded by army officers.” Following a welcome buffet comprising of miscellaneous sliced meats, cabbages, and assorted cartons of juice, the sixty-odd members of the Britronica gang were whisked to a Red Square-based hotel named Manhattan Express for a reception event. It was soon apparent, however, that there was little feeling of joy there. Devoid of young clubbers due to the prohibitive $40 entrance fee, it was instead full of suited middle-aged mafia guys, accompanied by designer frock-wearing sex workers, none of them remotely interested in listening to the ambient dub sounds of Banco De Gaia, who performed later that evening. “Clubs seemed to be mafia-controlled — not a totally unusual situation, but maybe the extent was unusual — and the people in the clubs were ultra-rich,” recalls Mark Pritchard of Reload. “Really, what stuck in my mind was the disparity between the people who had money and the people who didn’t.” This incongruous context would set the tone for much of the ensuing Britronica events. Within 24 hours, Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin, was hospitalised with severe food poisoning. He spent the next few days recovering in a pokey, bleak room with a barred window; doctors did their best to help, administering mysterious injections that left him feeling even more befuddled. He was discharged, but still looked sick and was seemingly lost for words while interviewed by inquisitive Russian music journalists. James’ puke-fest paled in comparison to that of Mark Pritchard, who subsequently became critically ill and was rushed to hospital after his intestines were attacked by a rare Giardia parasite. The long-term effects of this included serious damage to his stomach, as well as two years of related panic attacks and depression, before he gradually recovered. Pritchard continues to make music to this day, but was so traumatised by this experience he didn’t return to perform in Russia for another eighteen years.