"The Weak Become Heroes, The Stars Aligned": John Calvert's First Pill

My First Pill is a series where writers tell the story of the first time they, well, took a pill.

After Clive Martin, Joe Bish, Jack Blocker and John Doran comes the turn of THUMP's John Calvert.

There were people banging on the bathroom door, but what did we give a fuck for? So what if someone had left a monster jobby un-flushed in the bowl? Fuckin' good on you. Who are we to judge? Shine on, you big bastard. The cracked tiles, the queasy fug of a combined 15 cigarettes, the shower-mat nudie mag, the large crop of black mould beneath the bath we sat in, huddling together for the sunshine of our mutual love - none of it mattered to me or my best mate Cogzy because, as of 2pm that afternoon, we had ecstasy in our lives.

The toilet door opens, forced I think, and Third Eye Blind's 'Semi-Charmed Life' pours in sounding like Beethoven's un-fucking-believable symphony followed by Cogzy's girlfriend Clare, who's scream-laughing like a beautiful, mad clown. All she can do is point and flop forward onto our ceramic nest. Now they're all diving in, half the party. Someone burns my collarbone with a cigarette. A laugh-induced tommy squeaker emanates from somewhere within the tangle. Then, the song changes. It's Crazytown – 'Butterfly'. It's the single greatest thing I've heard in my life. It wasn't even dark yet.

Folk like me (who left school in 1999, at the height of the trance), "our time" was just a shit footnote in the otherwise glorious trajectory of dance history. In 1999, Welsh dance-twat Justin Kerrigan released Human Traffic;an embarrassing, post-Trainspotting cringe-fest that was the post-Ibiza generation's strained attempt to fake its own cultural significance. But there was no movement to speak of. This conversation was over. My crowd were brought up to believe that ecstasy experiences were life-changing epiphanies, played out in the cathedral-esque expanses of laser-webbed super-clubs. The first true MTV dance genre, countless trance videos of the time depicted scenes of mass reverie with thousands of clubbers Jim Jones-ing it to the classic, euphoric breakdown. I wanted that. It's a terrible thing to be born too late.

My first ecstasy experience would play out at a house party in March 2001, in grubby tower block on a dying council estate in Newcastle. It was a virginal experience that was very of its time. Much like cannabis and cocaine before it, ecstasy had outgrown the confines of its original habitat; Ibiza as Mecca, the 'ardcore, Madchester, the dream of British dance music dreamed by Oakenfold and even the golden age of the super-club ('94-'97) had come to pass, and the second summer of love a hoary 12 years old. The pill experience was now this decrepit, domestic joy-fest.

Like me, Cogzy had bottomed out on his A-levels, and by happy coincidence the clearing system had shat him out into the same grey-brick pisshole as I had started at a year prior, Northumbria University. This was pre-redevelopment Newcastle. The city had been left alone to tick by in more or less the same state Heath had left it, so it might as well have been 1983 when there I arrived in 1999 - and especially in the ghostly Benwell, the semi-deserted estate where our university-owned tower-block The Larches was situated. The Larches would soon be torn down, along with the 20 or so half-empty towers that surrounded it.

I was barely through the front door of the 12th floor flat when Cogzy tapped me on the shoulder, and gestured for me to follow him back outside to the hallway. He was sweating mildly so when, with an air of regal solemnity I didn't recognise in him, he sat me down beside him on the hallway bench, I began to fear the worst. "Oh fuck," I thought, "he's going to tell me he's terminally ill." There's a pause, and he turns to me: "Mate," he said, "I took a pill about an hour ago. Do you want one?"

I was scared. I was scared of the 'What would you do?'-style teen issue scenario I was now living out, and I was scared of Cogzy himself, the way you are the first time you see your Dad drunk. But mostly I was scared that, even after all the horror stories that us 90s kids had been subjected to in the post Leah Betts-era, my answer would inevitably be "Yes". Which, of course, it was. "Aye alright," I said. The smile he had been suppressing for the duration of our serious chat broke free of his holdings in a burst of rainbow-coloured, let's-get-fucked-ness.

I was walking round the petrol station shop with a packet of Scampi and Lemon Nik Naks when it hit me. A rising sensation at the base of my stomach, it felt as if God himself was filling me with helium so as to better deliver me into his arms. Cogzy had suggested we get away from the ever-maddening crowd and take a walk to the local garage, until the little purple Misti we'd split took effect. We exited Esso and life itself. We walked back along the motorway against the midday traffic, laughing. I'm pretty sure I skipped part of the way. An hour later and I'm a fucking rocket man. The weak become heroes, the stars aligned.

We're sitting side-by side in Cogzy's bedroom, laughing hysterically nose-to-nose. I even phone a mate in Northern Ireland to tell him. I remember The Cardigan's 'My Favourite Game' was playing on the CD player. I always hated that fucking song, but these days my hatred of it has merged with my self-loathing for having reckoned myself such a superior cunt.

We entered the main room of our 2 bedroom super-club, the rammed living room from Ken Loach's worst nightmares. Now that we were pretty sure that we weren't dying of deep brain thrombosis our next dose was a full pill, straight up. Imagine Delorean's As Time Breaks Off, but swap pastel-hued, Basque Country neon vistas for the image of 30 wankers in a council flat. There was the communal dancing to Dr,. Dre's 2001 in the ad hoc hip hop room, and the mass sing-a-longs to late Britpop standards like James' 'Tomorrow' and Travis's 'Driftwood'. This was the final death throe of anthemic indie. The following September, The Strokes would put an end to big chorus, football terrace indie.

Kelly pulled the guy from the off-licence and Cogsy danced until people got bored and walked away. Then, there were the confession sessions. Clare harboured a desire to fuck a big cat, like a puma. Neil admitted he was still a virgin (secretly Cogzy and I would later piss ourselves at that, despite the fact I had only been deflowered the previous October, by a rough Notts girl with a lisp and boyfriend at home). Even Hayden was alright: this Midlands, Jon Favreau-looking motherfucker, with a jealous streak and a penchant for hardcore Swedish porn. Cogzy's well moody flatmate, a vaguely jaundiced-looking stoner whose Dad ran Rolls Royce, sat dead centre of the throng playing Sega Tennis on the Dreamcast and insisted on playing dreary East Coast backpacker rap, which was then experiencing its second dawn. Repeated listens to Mos Def's crusty old 'Oh No' met my MDMA-firing aural taste buds like junkie-turd on strawberry cheesecake.

And then just like that, like a rusty Model T coming to a slow halt in the desert of my mind, the drug ran out. I had stopped being high. It was the next morning at around 11am, and I had spent the half hour dancing on my own in a bedroom in front of a mirror to Daft Punk's Homework, the only house or techno CD I could find in the entire flat. My older brother's mate Gary had once told me that dance music on a pill was out of this world, and I was damned If I was going to miss out.

I wanted to be one of those ravers I'd seen in the video for Prodigy's 'No Good (Start The Dance)', or the Castlemorton rinser from archive news footage, or one of the justified and ancient; the chem'd up neo-hippies bound for Moo Moo Land, or that Italian women from Black Box who didn't actually sing on 'Ride On Time', or any of the other cultural totems that, as a kid born in 1980, had back dropped over half my life. I began my assault, and never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined how amazing I looked dancing on a pill.

I'd got as far as way half through 'Burnin' when the record began to sound slower, further away, and every sound in the room that wasn't music was sentient. I whispered under my breath a sad "Ohh". It was then I realised that, even for a man, I had incredibly small nipples. What was before a vision of Dionysian majesty, my semi-naked reflection in the mirror was part white-man dutty wine, part Elliott Gould's ballbag. I had become the greatest asshole in Northern England. I found an empty bed and passed out.

They say there's nothing quite like your first pill. I say there's nothing quite like your first comedown. I woke up at night time. Some girl (whose name I think was Nicki) was now beside me on the bed. I walked from room to room in slow motion. A guy I didn't recognise was asleep on a beanbag in the corner of the living room. God knows how long Urban Hymns had been playing at full volume. I went to the toilet and looked at my reflection in the darkened window above the loo. Beyond my face lay a vast and soundless sodium moonscape – this city of silver on the edge of heaven was transformed into a post-industrial nightmare of my own making. I was cold, couldn't find my shoes, and the front door was lying wide open. Cogzy had gone.

Desperate for salvation, I could see no other option but to watch Wayne's World 1 and Wayne's World 2 back to back on the dusty VHS. I didn't laugh once. I was Curtis watching Stroszak; Travis and the daytime soap, and I could swear the guy on the beanbag was only pretending to be asleep and was in fact silently sniggering. It would be the first of many bizarre comedown video sessions in the following months. By May, I had dropped 20 pounds and was frequenting hardstyle' club nights like Sundessential; the super-club era's very most wretched of operations, hosted on Sundays around the country, a wasteland where serotonin-bereft whizz-zombies came to die at 170 beats per minute.

A month later, I was suicidal. I had fucked up. I had taken 5 dud pills at Shine. I never came up, and was plunged into a state of psychotropic turmoil. I was again in the arms of a friend, this time Fozzy Bear Forster, as we waited on Belfast's Shaftsbury Square for a taxi while around us raged the mother of all street-fights. It was hell. By the following Tuesday, I was losing it. A month later, in the staff area behind the staff hospitality tents at Wimbledon, I wrote a suicide note which I subsequently lost. I might be the only man in history to have mislaid his own suicide note. It would be another 12 years until I came to.

Drugs, eh? Totally mint until someone develops chronic anxiety, and a heightened sense of their own mortality. The sense of Protestant guilt was awesome. Only a 13-year stint in a plough field would save me from eternal damnation.

You can follow John Calvert on Twitter here: @JCalvert_music