Dance music is cool again for a new generation bored with indie. When I joined Mixmag in 1991, it wasn’t. Mixmag, now celebrating its 25th year and billed as “the world’s biggest clubbing and dance music magazine”, was then based on an industrial estate in Slough. As far as the national media was concerned, dance music had died, along with the illegal M25 raves of 1988 and 1989.

Yet under the radar, clubs were opening across the UK, while innovative producers proliferated. We decided to celebrate with an A-Z of dance music issue, a Herculean task that involved the full-time staff of three – myself, the editor, David Davies, and our one designer, Chris How – working a gruelling 36-hour deadline shift.

Somewhere around 7am, we faced a daunting pile of records. Redeyed, wired on instant coffee, we found one powerful enough to inject some life back into us. A one-off, self-titled German single by Age of Love, remixed by Jam & Spoon in Frankfurt into something spacey and hypnotically funky. It was the beginning of trance, one of the most dominant dance music sounds. We finished the issue and headed home. The next day Davies revealed that he’d got the day wrong and we’d worked all night for nothing.

As the British club scene exploded so did Mixmag’s circulation: 11,000 copies a month in 1991, 90,000 by 1997. By 1994, thousands of readers were charging around clubs all over the country – then, rather worryingly, driving home high. We conducted a completely unscientific experiment called “Can you drive on drugs?”

Three volunteers drove a slalom course of traffic cones sober, with a driving instructor. They then took marijuana, cocaine and ecstasy and did it again. Their driving ability decreased. As, once this piece was published, did the number of clubbers driving home in similar states. What we didn’t reveal, under legal advice, was that for the cocaine user, one line had improved his driving.

Dance music is drifting back into fashion, yet the magazine is at its most vibrant when its culture stays outside the mainstream. Which is why now, with an independent publisher, it is in as rude health as ever.

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