Dr Bunsen
27-08-2006, 05:51 PM
Britannia rules the raves again
Partying like it's 1989? These days, as rave veteran Sarah Champion discovers, the kids are as young as 12, the drug is laughing gas, the venues are forest glades and the music is harder and faster. One thing hasn't changed, though - trying to keep one step ahead of the police.
Sunday August 27, 2006
The Observer (http://www.observer.co.uk/)
Is this it? We pass a Little Chef and turn off the A road into a shadowy lay-by. It's the second to last Saturday in August, yet as dark as November with a steady drizzle. Our beams illuminate a chain of parked cars. One flashes in welcome, as if to say, 'Yes, you're here.' We take a slot near the rear of the convoy. A figure in a rain jacket moves along the line, urgently barking: 'The police have blocked the road, we've got to go now.' A 100 or so shapes emerge from steamed-up vehicles, bass blasting from each. The buzz is infectious, everyone primed for action.
This is the culmination of a day's frantic texting and posting on internet forums. I had to find out for myself whether there was any truth behind the headlines declaring a rave revival this summer. Their eyes on the drinking mayhem in our cities, the police appear to have been caught off guard in the past three months by a series of well-organised raves that arrived out of nowhere. In May Cornwall police broke up a party of 2,000 in Davidstow, seizing £3,000 in cash, drugs worth £40,000 and 12 lorries loaded with sound equipment. More raves followed. Was this another summer of love? Or a bunch of old clubbers who never went away, joined by bumper crowds due to July's heat wave? As a veteran of the 80s scene - both as a clubber and dance music journalist - I was curious.
With tomorrow's bank holiday signalling the last blast of the hedonist season, police have been warning of giant illegal parties kicking off. One local paper printed an appeal for anyone who has 'seen large numbers of vehicles gathering near woods or rural car parks, fliers advertising raves, or broken padlocks on access gates' to report it immediately. Hoping to stay one step ahead, the organisers of a gathering in Kent moved it forward to last weekend.
All we know, as we cruise through the Blackwall Tunnel at 10.30pm, is that Kent's 'big one' is to happen in a forest between Canterbury and Dover. Our driver is a Lydd Airport party veteran, our photographer was at World Dance, and I grew up on raves. So we're sceptical about what we'll find. At 11pm a text directs us to the lay-by near Maidstone.
There a voice yells, 'Go, go, go!' as if we're leaping from the trenches into battle. In clusters of five we sprint across the wet Tarmac and jump the central barrier, unnerved by blinding beams of oncoming traffic. Someone's pointing to a gap in the undergrowth, 'Down there, over the barbed wire.' We scramble down a muddy bank and suddenly we're in a cornfield, and I'm excited and laughing. Yeah, this really is something like the old days.
The night has flashbacks to the cat-and-mouse games in pursuit of 'orbital' acid house parties in 1988. Personally, I experienced the dawn of the movement indoors. At the Hacienda in 1989 I danced in a haze of dry ice and lasers to Chicago house tunes and the British music inspired by it (then called 'acid house', the term 'rave' not coined until the Nineties). After closing time at 2am word would spread of warehouse parties in Lancashire industrial estates or in derelict mills on the outskirts of the city (later they'd all become designer apartments).
At 14 I'd fallen for the punk and indie bands my hometown of Manchester was famed for, but my life was transformed by these events. I didn't listen to another rock record for 10 years. I followed the party to London and out to the fields where I would find myself dancing to early trance and techno on wasteland near Dagenham or hillsides in Sussex.
A decade on and it's suddenly like being back there. There's a stile, a hill, more barbed wire and then we're in verdant woodland, emerging into the most perfect party spot I've ever seen: a lush green hollow surrounded by trees...
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1859099,00.html
Partying like it's 1989? These days, as rave veteran Sarah Champion discovers, the kids are as young as 12, the drug is laughing gas, the venues are forest glades and the music is harder and faster. One thing hasn't changed, though - trying to keep one step ahead of the police.
Sunday August 27, 2006
The Observer (http://www.observer.co.uk/)
Is this it? We pass a Little Chef and turn off the A road into a shadowy lay-by. It's the second to last Saturday in August, yet as dark as November with a steady drizzle. Our beams illuminate a chain of parked cars. One flashes in welcome, as if to say, 'Yes, you're here.' We take a slot near the rear of the convoy. A figure in a rain jacket moves along the line, urgently barking: 'The police have blocked the road, we've got to go now.' A 100 or so shapes emerge from steamed-up vehicles, bass blasting from each. The buzz is infectious, everyone primed for action.
This is the culmination of a day's frantic texting and posting on internet forums. I had to find out for myself whether there was any truth behind the headlines declaring a rave revival this summer. Their eyes on the drinking mayhem in our cities, the police appear to have been caught off guard in the past three months by a series of well-organised raves that arrived out of nowhere. In May Cornwall police broke up a party of 2,000 in Davidstow, seizing £3,000 in cash, drugs worth £40,000 and 12 lorries loaded with sound equipment. More raves followed. Was this another summer of love? Or a bunch of old clubbers who never went away, joined by bumper crowds due to July's heat wave? As a veteran of the 80s scene - both as a clubber and dance music journalist - I was curious.
With tomorrow's bank holiday signalling the last blast of the hedonist season, police have been warning of giant illegal parties kicking off. One local paper printed an appeal for anyone who has 'seen large numbers of vehicles gathering near woods or rural car parks, fliers advertising raves, or broken padlocks on access gates' to report it immediately. Hoping to stay one step ahead, the organisers of a gathering in Kent moved it forward to last weekend.
All we know, as we cruise through the Blackwall Tunnel at 10.30pm, is that Kent's 'big one' is to happen in a forest between Canterbury and Dover. Our driver is a Lydd Airport party veteran, our photographer was at World Dance, and I grew up on raves. So we're sceptical about what we'll find. At 11pm a text directs us to the lay-by near Maidstone.
There a voice yells, 'Go, go, go!' as if we're leaping from the trenches into battle. In clusters of five we sprint across the wet Tarmac and jump the central barrier, unnerved by blinding beams of oncoming traffic. Someone's pointing to a gap in the undergrowth, 'Down there, over the barbed wire.' We scramble down a muddy bank and suddenly we're in a cornfield, and I'm excited and laughing. Yeah, this really is something like the old days.
The night has flashbacks to the cat-and-mouse games in pursuit of 'orbital' acid house parties in 1988. Personally, I experienced the dawn of the movement indoors. At the Hacienda in 1989 I danced in a haze of dry ice and lasers to Chicago house tunes and the British music inspired by it (then called 'acid house', the term 'rave' not coined until the Nineties). After closing time at 2am word would spread of warehouse parties in Lancashire industrial estates or in derelict mills on the outskirts of the city (later they'd all become designer apartments).
At 14 I'd fallen for the punk and indie bands my hometown of Manchester was famed for, but my life was transformed by these events. I didn't listen to another rock record for 10 years. I followed the party to London and out to the fields where I would find myself dancing to early trance and techno on wasteland near Dagenham or hillsides in Sussex.
A decade on and it's suddenly like being back there. There's a stile, a hill, more barbed wire and then we're in verdant woodland, emerging into the most perfect party spot I've ever seen: a lush green hollow surrounded by trees...
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1859099,00.html