A DUMBARTON writer has co-authored a book of short stories and poems throwing back to the psychedelic daze of the 1990s “Acid House” scene.

Stephen Watt, poet-in-residence at Dumbarton Football Club, teamed up with writer and friend Jason Golaup to pen a series of short stories and poems glorifying the days of Acid House – a house music craze that originated in the mid 1980s by DJs in Chicago.

The genre is defined by electronic sounds and bass-lines created from a synthesizer.

The genre even became popular in literature in Scotland, with writer Irvine Welsh setting his characters and stories in its music and drug culture.

And now Stephen and Jason have written Voodoo Daze about the “unifying” days of their youth that Acid House music brought.

Stephen told the Reporter: “Jason lived and breathed the acid house scene in Easterhouse shortly before I got interested in Britpop, triphop, house, trance, techno, etc.

“I met him in 2011 at a spoken word event where he was reading a short story about the Chemical Brothers and I was performing a poem about The Happy Mondays.

“We hit it off immediately, and a short decade later we understood what a great idea it would be to unite that shared interest in dance music with the collection which became Voodoo Daze.

“Thankfully, indie publisher Speculative Books were as keen as we were to put it into the world and gave us four to five months to pull it all together.

“I was a little young to belong to the acid house/rave sub-culture.

"However, the “old skool” dance records held great importance for me and a lot of childhood memories relating to what was on the news seemed to propel the rave scene into my psyche – the drugs deaths at Hangar 13 in Ayr; the prisoners dancing to The Happy Mondays on the roof of Strangeways Prison in Manchester.

“Childhood is often considered with rose-tinted glasses, but I really appreciated the positive and unifying message which acid house brought from Chicago.

“I can’t see a third Summer of Love happening any time soon and, in that sense, the acid house scene was like heaven to me – a utopian place which can never be visited.

“I have delved frequently into punk which was over before I was born, but the ethic of DIY is core to what I want to achieve with my writing – and acid house certainly germinated out of punk genes.

“Personally, I wanted to visit a place of escapism during the Covid-19 pandemic and nothing sounded more appealing to me than addressing that time in the late 1980s when people were pulling together like some almighty hedonistic magnet towards the sub-woofers and synthesisers.

“When an opportunity to be creative presents itself, it is something I like to get my teeth into immediately.”

And the pair will be performing excerpts from the book at a launch event to be held at the Stereo venue in Glasgow’s city centre on September 22.