The Detroit records arrived in Britain in 1988 and landed in the middle of something already under way. What followed was not a scene adopting a genre so much as two things colliding and neither surviving the collision unchanged.
Ibiza and the Second Summer of Love
The conventional origin story runs through Ibiza in 1987, where a small group of London DJs (Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling, Nicky Holloway and Johnny Walker among them) encountered the resident DJ Alfredo at Amnesia playing an unusually catholic mix of records to an unusually uninhibited crowd.
They brought the format back to London. Rampling opened Shoom in a fitness centre basement in late 1987. Oakenfold ran Future and then Spectrum. In Manchester, the Haçienda, open since 1982 and losing money throughout, finally found its audience. By the summer of 1988 the British music press had named the thing the Second Summer of Love, and MDMA was inseparable from it.
It is worth being blunt about this, because sanitised accounts tend not to be: the speed and scale of the change owed a great deal to a drug that encourages crowds to behave with unusual warmth toward strangers. The music and the chemistry reinforced each other.
Acid
The sound that defined the British end of it came from Chicago, not Detroit: acid house, built on the Roland TB-303 that nobody had wanted. Phuture's Acid Tracks, recorded around 1985 and released in 1987, is the usual starting point.
The 303's appeal is that its filter sweep is a continuous gesture rather than a sequence of notes, a rising and unstable squeal that can be worked in real time against an unchanging drum pattern. It gave a machine music a soloist.
Belgium and R&S
The other major European contribution came from Belgium. New beat, slowed-down EBM and Italo records played at the wrong speed, dominated Belgian clubs in 1987 and 1988 and burned out quickly. What outlasted it was R&S Records, founded in Ghent by Renaat Vandepapeliere and Sabine Maes, which became the most important techno label in Europe.
R&S released Derrick May in Europe, and it released the records that pushed the music toward hardness. Joey Beltram's Energy Flash (1990) and, as Second Phase, Mentasm (1991) introduced a distorted, detuned synth stab called the "hoover", which would define European hardcore for the next three years.
Warehouses, fields and the law
By 1990 British raves had outgrown clubs entirely. Events moved to aircraft hangars, warehouses and open fields, organised by telephone, advertised by flyer, and located at the last minute via motorway service stations. Attendance ran into the tens of thousands.
The state's response escalated across three years and culminated after the Castlemorton Common Festival in May 1992, an unlicensed event in Worcestershire attended by an estimated twenty to forty thousand people over several days. It was extensively covered, and it made legislation inevitable.
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 gave police powers to shut down gatherings playing amplified music, defining that music, notoriously, as "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats". A British Act of Parliament had written a genre description into law.
Divergence
By 1992 the mass rave scene was fragmenting along tempo. Hardcore accelerated toward jungle and then drum and bass. Happy hardcore split off. And in Sheffield, Warp Records, founded in 1989, released Artificial Intelligence in 1992, a compilation explicitly framed as "electronic listening music" for home rather than for a dancefloor, which seeded what would be called IDM.
Techno itself, in the narrower sense, went in the other direction. Back underground, and toward a city that had just acquired several square miles of unclaimed real estate.