Stakker - The Evil Acid Baron Show

"The Evil Acid Baron Show released in 1988 was the first acid house video, created by Stakker, with music by Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk, Tyree, Baby Ford, Royal House and S’Express. The first video that I saw was actually the more accomplished Eurotechno, which came out the following year. Eurotechno blew me away when I first saw it at a house night in Cornwall and I went to Woolworths to buy a copy on VHS, which thankfully I still have. The pulsing, ever-changing graphics go perfectly with the futuristic acid soundtrack and is just as fresh as it was then.

Stakker were video artists Mark McClean and Colin Scott. After using other people’s music for their first video, they decided they wanted their follow-up to feature music they had commissioned themselves so that the music could more closely match the visuals. They teamed up with Brian Dougans and together produced the classic track, ‘Humanoid’ (released as ‘Stakker Humanoid’ on Morgan Khan’s label, Westside). Stakker and Dougans had already split by the time the record was released, and the Eurotechno soundtrack, which had been begun by Dougans with input from Garry Cobain, was completed by Scott and Simon Monday. (Cobain and Dougans went on to release projects under the names Smart Systems, Yage, Indo Tribe, Mental Cube and most famously, The Future Sound Of London.)

 Here is the first part of The Evil Acid Baron Show. For this and the Eurotechno videos, McClean and Scott used a Fairlight CVI graphics machine, which was the video “sister” to the Fairlight CMI digital sampling synthesizer made famous by the likes of Herbie Hancock and Art Of Noise.