1985. Since house was first and foremost a direct descendant of disco. Disco had already been going for ten years when the first electronic drum tracks began to appear out of Chicago, and in that time it had already suffered the slings and arrows of merciless commercial exploitation, dilution and racial and sexual prejudice which culminated in the 'disco sucks' campaign. In one bizarrely extreme incident, people attending a baseball game in Chicago's Komishi Park were invited to bring all their unwanted disco records and after the game they were tossed onto a massive bonfire.

It's hard, at first, to see how a story about a building could also be a story about memory, status, nostalgia, money, madness (in)experience, simple greed (and saintly generosity), youth, life, death and violence. Even music. Not really a story at all then. More like a soap opera. As far as most people are concerned, the story of a building which became a club, an idea and even a lifestyle begins in the middle. And the end? Well, there isn't one yet. Because this story is a cultural autopsy with the death certificate lost forever in the post.

First there were a few more club flyers boldly proposing a shift from Acid, if not nationally, at least amongst that ficklest of fraternities, the London club scene. Then came the news filtering through from the States of obscure 12"s on independent continental labels cropping up in weekly dance charts. Top House producer Kevin Saunderson started name checking the discs, Red Rhino started importing them, London Records suggested the inevitable compilation and every A&R man in the land jumped aboard a Sabena airline flight to check out the new talent. A disjointed, subsonic dance pulse is causing the biggest shock waves ever to grace European ears. The sound is New Beat and it's coming outta Belgium. Belgium? C'mon, what the hell is going on?

In its original incarnation, Electro was black science fiction teleported to the dancefloors of New York, Miami and LA; a super-stoopid fusion of video games, techno-pop, graffiti art, silver space suits and cyborg funk. Now that Electro is back, David Toop provides a thumbnail guide to the music that posed the eternal question: 'Watupski, bug byte?'

It's been twenty years since the first identifiably house tracks were put on to vinyl, twenty years which have changed the technology behind the electronic music revolution beyond recognition but left the basic structure of house intact. It's twenty years since it was being said house couldn't last, that it was just hi-NRG, a fast blast that would wither as quickly as it had started. But then the music reinvented itself, and then again and again until it gradually dawned on people that house wasn't just another phase of club culture, it was club culture, the continuing future of dance music. The reason? It's simple. People like to dance to house.