Rave duo Altern 8 took Acid House and Rave culture into the charts in the early ’90s with their blend of outrageous outfits and infectious dance tunes.

I was never a raver and I was never a hippy: too young for the Summer of Love in 1967, too old for the Second Summer of Love in 1988-89.

But I was regularly immersed in the Rave scene when working for the Evening Standard, spending several nights in lay-bys in Greenwich listening to pirate radio in my car to find out where that night’s gathering would be, before racing off in convoy to find the location.

Plus the time I was sent to some vast outdoor rave in the West Country where my attempts to infiltrate the event incognito – at the height of paranoia about police raids and Ecstasy – were not enhanced by our photographer Jeremy Selwyn’s white linen suit.

Acid House, with its largely anonymous music makers, had a slightly detached relationship with the pop charts. One of the few mainstream success stories was Altern-8, the project of Birmingham duo Mark Archer and Chris Peat.

They took a cartoonish approach, using promotional theatrics borrowed from the KLF, dressing head-to-toe in green MK3 chemical warfare uniforms matched with fluorescent yellow dust masks while performing energetic dance tunes built around breakbeats and heavy electronic basslines, interspersed with samples ranging from disco diva vocals to Detroit techno anthems.

They made their mark with the 1990 EP Overload and released a string of singles playing on the number in their name – Activ 8, Infiltr8, Brutal-8-E, Hypnotic St-8 – and E-Vapor-8, featuring the vocals of veteran soul singer and KLF collaborator PP Arnold, which reached No.6 in early 1992.

With the media in a frenzy about Rave culture corrupting the youth of Britain, the duo boasted, preposterously, of their reliance on drug-enhancing chemicals like Vicks Vapo-Rub, their imaginary habit of spiking audience-distributed pastries with Ecstasy and, most absurdly of all, their planned candidacy in the General Election.

Despite completing an album, Full On – Mask Hysteria, Altern-8 broke up a year later in 1993, though in 2001 Archer mixed a double CD of rave classics titled Old Skool Euphoria. Later in the decade, the duo reunited and made several appearances at dance music festivals across the UK, introducing their sound (and masks) to the newer generations of ravers.