Unbeknown to us here at FPPHQ, someone has created a map based on the entries on our blog. Click on a Love Cabbage and it gives you some info about the party, together with a link to the party report on our blog, give it a try!
P.S. This site, and all other linked sites, appear in a column on the right hand edge of the blog. If you notice that any of them are dead, or have one you wish us to add, just let us know at freepartypeople (at) yahoo dot co dot uk.
A disclaimer first: we were involved in a little background work (figuring out e.g. dates of parties) for this documentary, so what you are about to read is a little biased.
I had been looking forward to Aaron Trinder’s documentary for a long time, and even though I had heard plenty of positive feedback from others, nothing could replace experiencing it for myself. It was well worth the wait. This film is joyful, inspiring, and nuanced, and provides a crystal clear view of times that we often spent in a euphoric cloud. The main achievement for me though was that, considering the subject is so multifaceted, the view of the scene is nothing short of panoramic. Trinder has wisely balanced this out by zooming in on pivotal aspects of the history. He, however, managed not to get too bogged down in the nitty gritty of the chronology. Figuring out the right dates for everything, working out which sound system or DJ was at which event, and making orderly lists, as I may have mentioned before, is perhaps the least pleasurable aspect of chronicling our scene, and Trinder thankfully seems to be of the same school of thought!
Even though there are plenty of hard facts for the avid rave historians among you, parts of the documentary are as colourful, psychedelic, and disorientating as befits the topic. In fact, they are reminiscent of the coming up sequence in Beats*.
The introduction describes acid house, but it is not lingered on unneccesarily. The absence of the Achilles heels of acid house (the pound signs reflected in the glistening eyes of both organisers and opportunistic criminals, the cops getting on top) were transformed into some of the strengths of our movement, at least for a couple of years…
We meet key figures in the scene but are never told that certain individuals or particular crews were more important than the others. Collectives like Free Party People, Spirals, DiY, Bedlam, Warp and Tonka are the main focus, with a nod to the second-gen deep housers influenced by DiY and some footage of more recent UKteks at the end. Important forerunners such as Circuses Normal and Irritant, and pre-acid house fluoro lunatics Mutoid Waste Company are also invited to the party. Early and reasonably unsung heroes such as Fun-de-mental and Sweat get a mention too.
Inclusivity and cooperation are central themes, as they should be. It is great to see the sentiment that ‘everyone is Spiral Tribe’ expressed here. It is a principle many of us partygoers were aware of at the time, but this aspect of Tribe history is often forgotten in the rush to canonize the core Spirals, and turn back the clock to the idolisation and guitar solos the house and techno scenes of that era were moving swiftly away from. The Do it Yourselfers, too, were welcoming, unless, as Grace says, ‘you’re a total knob’.
Although I am not fully in agreement as to the importance of Glasto ’90’s place in the discourse as number one mothernode of free party folks and travellers, the argument made in the documentary for this is very strong, and the elements of a great oral history are all there: the KLF turning up with a tape, the spangled Mondays, the dancefloor horse.
On the last leg of the road to Castlemorton Common the embattled Spirals are plagued by stormclouds of doom and paranoia. After the police brutality at Acton Lane in the spring, and a Roundhouse party in the new year where everything seemed to go pear shaped, the mood was dark, and the Tribe escaped to North Wales to, as was said in the sixties after the first flush of psychedelia passed, get it together in the countryside.
There are of course plenty of fond reminiscences about the golden years of the free party and the rebirth of the free festival, but not everything is projected through a rose-tinted lens. The racket and the mess that was made at the larger events, and how that affected locals, is one of the issues touched on. Mark Spiral, outside the courtroom, having just been acquitted, seems genuinely spooked and contrite about the scale and noisiness of Castlemorton, a huge contrast with the other bookend: the trial began with an militant platoon of shaven-headed Spirals in their uniform Make Some Fuckin’ Noise Ts marching in to the court.
We learn about the free festival’s musical progression, from the original space rock riffing to the future sound of pumping techno and house. The legendary pyramid tent is used to illustrate this (r)evolution. It belonged to Nik Turner of Hawkwind and covered the main stage at Stonehenge free festival from the early seventies, and a couple of decades later housed (pun intended!) DiY’s legendary outing at Glastonbury Festival’s Travellers’ Field’s colliding of cultures in 1990. The traveller-raver subculture clash is not glossed over, it is made clear that the new blood flowing onto festival sites was not always welcomed by one and all. Having said that, this shift meant that ‘Five years of suffering’ were over, at least for some of those who lived on the road. Don’t remember who said it (I will have to watch again!) but this is a beautifully expressed explanation of the ecstatic rebirth of traveller events half a decade after the violence of the Beanfield.
I hope that this film will serve not only to spread the word about what an amazing time we had back then, but more seriously to bring witness accounts of shocking of police brutality at parties such as Acton Lane to a wider audience. I see this as part of a broader movement (see also Dreaming in Yellow, A Darker Electricity) to document our culture as it was in the early nineties.
* Have you seen Beats? You should, it’s another great film about early nineties free parties, only it’s fictional. The visuals the protagonist sees soon after dropping his first pill are… well, you should watch it yourself!
P.S. We always add categories to our posts, and as you can see from the enormous list at the top of this entry, we went a little overboard this time! Any comments about the functionality and navigation of this site are most welcome 🙂
P.P.S. This is a short teaser version of a more detailed review, so if you want to read more, including the reactions of a certain blogger’s festivalgoing mother to the film, watch this space 🙂
P.P.P.S. Where can you see this documentary? Right now, your only chance is to catch it at a film festival near you. For the moment this is not available on general release or streaming services. If you want to help to make that a reality, please follow the link to donate: https://freepartydoc.info/donate Here is a list of upcoming screenings: https://freepartydoc.info/screenings-1
It comes as no great surprise to learn that Ed Gillett helped Jeremy Deller with his (highly recommended by us) Everybody In The Place documentary. What is surprising, considering the incisive insight Gillett has into subcultures of the early nineties, is that he was a child in that era. As with other great titles on this topic, Garrett’s Once in A Lifetime and Collin’s Altered State to name a couple, it is clear that Gillett is a part of our scene and, as is the case for those other rave chronicles, I don’t think a book like this could have been written without that love of dancing.
The titles and subtitles of the chapters provide a clear picture of the themes tackled. Here are three of the first four, and these are the ones I’ll focus on as they match the remit of this site the most:
This is not to say, however, that the rest of the book isn’t fascinating, and I couldn’t stop reading once I had reached the end of Make Some Fucking Noise. I reckon you won’t be able to either, even though some of the material about, for instance, the current state of superclubs, is rather depressing. Thankfully, the author’s idealism and faith in the scene carries a note of hope through to the end.
One aspect of Party Lines that sets it apart from previous works on the subject is the fact that marginalised groups very much pioneered the outlaw, underground, under-the-radar dancefloor. This forms the foundation of chapter one and continues throughout. The narrative proper commences with a blues party in St. Pauls in 1973, which sociologist Ken Pryce is attending to secretly conduct research into “‘lifestyles, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of [Bristolian] West Indian communities'”. Pryce is stated to be “far from the only observer to draw insalubrious associations between late-night dancing and criminality”. Ed Gillett though, counters this with his position that “over the second half of the twentieth century the blues dance would go on to become a vital source of refuge and release for Black and other marginalised people”. A Jamaican-run shebeen in Brixton is cited as being an unambiguous example of this, catering for Black and Gay communities at a time when the mainstream was not welcoming to them. As many of my British readers may already know, the reason establishments like this existed was the ‘marginalisation of Black… people in twentieth-century Britain’. Gillett points out that the exclusion of dancers based on race was not made illegal until a new act of Parliament in 1968. This fascinating first chapter deserves to be read in full so I won’t attempt to tell you much more.
In the second chapter we learn about Windsor and the other early British free festivals, and Gillett joins the dots between the suppression of Black soundsystem culture and that of ‘predominantly white’ hippy subculture. Again, I urge you to read and digest this chapter, it places the pivotal events and currents in hippy and New Traveller subcultures in context. Few have written on this sprawling and multifaceted topic so concisely and lucidly*.
Chapter three commences with a surprising appearance by Paul Grady, performing at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in 1987 as the infamous Lily Savage when a police raid occurred. As the first policeman burst into the pub, O’Grady recalled thinking that the copper was a stripper! Again, Gillett provides us with evidence of the systematic and persistent authoritarian suppression of subcultures, in this case the battle was an element of Thatcher’s wide-ranging ‘war on deviance and disorder’.
The fourth chapter, while sticking to the well-trod Spiral Tribe and DiY→ Castlemorton→ Criminal Justice Act path, manages to reveal fresh perspectives on the rise and rise of the free party, and the early nineties renaissance and subsequent fall (for the second time) of the free festival. As in Dreaming in Yellow and the Free Party: A Folk History documentary, the Travellers’ Field collaborations at 1990’s Glastonbury Festival are seen as being the root of the cooperation between old and new subcultures that culminated in Castlemorton. Although I myself feel this is an oversimplification (we could go back a year or two and find similar events at which these two subcultures shared spaces), it is of undeniable importance. In an important footnote, an interview with Youth is quoted, in which it is pointed out that all night dancing occurred at Glastonbury long before acid house in the form of reggae soundsystems.
From the very beginning, this rubbing together of acid housers and New Travellers created sparks. One particular second-generation New Traveller left Glastonbury in a huff due to his elders not allowing him to bring the bleeps to the festival. As we now know, however, many of those frictions gave rise to joy. Roger Beard, a familiar name to those with knowledge about this topic, is mentioned here, and this is the first I have read about his part in a foiled scheme to transport busloads of Future-bound London clubbers down to Stonehenge for the Spring Equinox in 1988. Beard served a cross-culture conduit in both directions, bringing ‘Traveller contacts into the clubs and his DJ friends out to the fields’.
Gillett tackles the excesses of Castlemorton with realism: ‘Allegations of antisocial, destructive or self-indulgent behaviour levelled against those involved in the free party scene might have been exaggerated, but they were not imaginary.’ He balances this with the realisation that the marginalised New Travellers, picked on by establishment and the press alike ‘felt no urge for deference or politeness towards the world of privet hedges, pristine tea rooms and twitching net curtains which so clearly disdained them.’ It was in one of these pristine tea rooms that myself and a small handful of my fellow unwashed free partiers enjoyed cream teas on a stolen credit card on our way home from a free festival in 1992.
Gillett indicates the major role the press had in advertising Castlemorton (it was the lead item in the Six O’Clock News). He also states that by the time of Castlemorton, they were not in possession of much of their own, functioning kit, so had to rely on others. The tribe only played ‘a peripheral part in proceedings’. As I have long held, the tribe often lent their name to events to which they brought little apart from a DJ or two and some backdrops. The punters would turn up in droves and the real identity of the organisers would become that little bit trickier to uncover if you were asking for the wrong reasons. Sometimes, though, the Spirals did make a huge noise about the fact that they were the people responsible for making, er, such a huge noise, and because of this they receive some (in our view) deserved criticism from a member of the underground press for ‘putting raves back in the establishment’s crosshairs’. Another indicator of some Tribers’ arrogance that one is quoted as saying they ‘rediscovered the scattered remnants of the free festival scene’. The crossover between those two scenes began a good year or so before the Spirals turned up.
The machinations behind the scene of the diverse participants in the anti-CJA movement make for an interesting read, featuring the ubiquitous SWP bandwagon-jumpers and their polarising Kill The Bill slogan, as well as the fluffy Vs. spikey discourse of the times. Suspicions, long chattered about underground, that a couple of prominent anti-CJA campaigners were ‘spy cops’, re-emerge in Party Lines.
Other chapters cover: God’s Cop, how pirate radio stations joined the establishment, New Labour and their bleak re-labelling of ‘creative industries’, the (also bleak) superclub, the drug trade, the televising of the revolution, the demonization of Black genres and events, Business Techno, the Plague Rave, and the future.
One angry quote from later on in the book sums up what Gillett (and I agree with much of this) thinks is wrong about the tendency in dance music literature to perpetuate a creation myth with specific named heroes we would raise onto pedestals, point a spotlight at, and worship in the way we did those rock dinosaurs we wanted to replace. He points to a nuance lacking in much popular discourse and explicitly condemns the widespread whitewashing of subcultures and countercultures by capitalistic currents. This nuance, though, is not missing from Gillett’s story:
‘It gives us heroes to venerate as the sole progenitors of an entirely new cultural form, instead of a knotty mess of interlinked subcultural influences to untangle, from the blues dance to the free festival. It serves financial interests by cultivating desire: you too can have your very own Balearic experience for the low low price of a ticket to see Paul Oakenfold DJing. And it also arguably serves a social or political function, stripping out dance music’s associations with Black, queer or marginalized cultures, enabling a larger and more lucrative mainstream audience to claim it as their own.’
Although there is much to be set to rights, the throbbing drumbeat of the book is warmly optimistic throughout. We finish on a high note as the writer, at an after party connected to the launch of a documentary on the subject of free parties, watches, in sweet harmony, ‘past, present and future dance with each other, coloured lights playing over my face.’
I’ll certainly be rereading Party Lines– it’s returning to my bookshelf as soon as it’s returned by the two friends I have promised to lend it to once this review is completed!
* For a less concise but very informative take, you owe it to yourself to bookmark https://www.ukrockfestivals.com/ and have a long slow browse through the heaps of posts they have about the rise, fall, and rebirth of the new travellers’ scene.
First off, a disclaimer: this review is going to be biased. Why? Firstly, because Dreaming in Yellow is a veritable treasure trove for anyone documenting the free party scene of the early 1990s. When I started reading it I did so with a pad of post it notes next to me, and by the end there were over twenty stuck to its margins to indicate events that weren’t yet on my radar or existing entries to which I would add quotes from the book. Part of the reason for this is that few details on their parties have been offered up by DiY peeps on this page. So if you’re out there, let me know! I’ll be adding quotes from the book in the future but if you can help me fill in the gaps that would be very helpful, ta! The second reason for this bias is that it’s impossible to separate my personal connection to DiY from the reading experience.
Dreaming in Yellow is a heartfelt account of a memorable era, and it’s so humorous that it’s up there with Jane Bussmann’s Once In A Lifetime in terms of rave books that convey the sheer unbridled reckless euphoric fun we had back then. Sure, it’s balanced out with some political rants, but the sense of enjoyment never really disappears. The story takes the DiY bunch from ‘wide-eyed idealistic chancers’ to ‘battle hardened, veteran chancers’. One of the myriad reasons the publication of Dreaming is welcome is that no-one who ran a soundsystem back then had written their own account. Another reason, and it’s related to the first, is that there hasn’t been too much written about DiY. They were wary about playing the fame game and keen to be seen as what they really were, a collective, refusing requests for ‘a couple of faces’ to put on their magazine’s cover. One black and white image in the excellent photograph section includes the whole collective, each of them obscuring their own face with a strategically placed 12″.
The back story on how DiY came about, as well as Harrison’s own pre-acid-house roots in the punk and free festival scenes are, for me, just as interesting as the main events of ’91 to ’93 that my blog usually concerns itself with. Attending free festivals from a young age, Harrison bears witness to a change from bands to DJs, from violence to peace. He sees the tribes coming together and notes that, before electronic dance music and ecstacy hit, free festivals were dying a slow death.
Harrison’s love of music is a driving force, and of course it did not start with acid house. He, like his late friend and DiY co-conspirator Pete ‘Woosh’ Birch, is devoted to Factory Records and he finds Blue Monday inspirational. For this reason I can perhaps just about forgive him for being on the ‘wrong’ side of the Smiths divide. I hate The Smiths, I mean, I did try, and Meat Is Murder is a cracking name for a song, but I just find them too, I don’t know, whiney. Otherwise there are more than a few intriguing mentions of music Harrison enjoyed in his youth, so I did end up using some of my stack of post it notes to indicate bands and tracks he lists for later reference.
While still at school, he was disappointed that his mum didn’t let him go to see Joy Division supporting the Buzzcocks. Later on though, she took him to see New Order at the Haçienda: “And as I sat in my mother’s Ford Fiesta heading up the M60 back towards Bolton, wide-eyed and electrified, I wondered idly what would happen if this new electronic medium was cross-pollinated with that lust for freedom and chemical experimentation I had witnessed in a field near Blackburn or allied with the angry political purity of Crass.” During his school days, one of Harrison’s teachers had a dim view of him and his friends, dubbing them the armpit gang. He visits his first free festival in 1984 or thereabouts.
The scene started in the ‘unsettling political environment’ of 1980s Thatcher-ruled Britain. The book of course touches on this, but also joins the dots from the events of Paris in ’68 to ’70s free festivals to pioneering anarcho-punks Crass to the tragic events of The Battle of the Beanfield in ’84 to Castlemorton Common, the Woodstock of the Rave Age.
In pre-acid house times, subcultural student/dole life involved ‘ a gleefully ramped-up diet of hot knives, psychedelics and amphetamines’. I can’t say things were any different for us in South West Dorset. As with our bunch, one of the staples was Psilocybe Semilanceata, aka the Liberty Cap fungus, and like us, a pressing concern was the choice of a driver on mushroom-picking expeditions, to be frank, a driver who wouldn’t be too tripped out to be behind the wheel.
When E came along it ‘moved the chemical goalposts’. Unfortunately, as was the case with the author, my first E experience was rather disappointing, but things picked up after that. Their first proper rave, an expensive Biology event, is similarly lacklustre, leading them to conclude ‘we could do better ourselves’.
The collective’s house parties, organised by then core members Harrison, Digs (now Grace Sands), Woosh, Simon DK, Jack, and others, kicked off in 1989. That year also witnessed the first time a house sound system was brought to a free festival. This took place, according to the writer, at Avon Free Festival (Avon Free was the weekend which ended up being Castlemorton three years down the line, just in case you didn’t know). The festival took place at Inglestone Common, and it was Sweat who brought the rig. Details on this are scant, but I have created a post about it so, dear readers, feel free to add details if you can remember any!
The outlaw Blackburn warehouse parties, witnessed by an enthusiastic Pete Birch in 1990, led them to gleefully realise that acid house had ‘turned political’. On the other hand that same year saw the Freedom To Party campaign and rally in Trafalgar Square. Harrison is critical of this, and rightly so. Even though the massive pay raves of 1988 to 1990 were responsible for bringing the culture to the masses, for many of the organisers the bottom line was now the only thing that mattered, and the freedom they desired was simply the freedom to make millions. Another disappointing trip down south in 1990 (Energy at Docklands, a licensed party which somewhat pathetically ended at 11 which Harrison likens to being ‘trapped in the Top of the Pops studio on bad drugs for hours’) gives them even more motivation to do it themselves.
1990 was an important year for DiY for other reasons, not least Glastonbury Festival. At Glastonbury that year, along with Tonka and Circus Warp, DiY gave the traditionally band-oriented Travellers’ Field a well-deserved kick up the arse. It wasn’t all easy going though, as the music was slated by some as ‘that disco shit’, and access to the sound system and tent was only secured thanks to a weekend-long ‘running battle’ fought between DiY and ‘various other factions’. Harrison holds that this was ‘the first real moment of synthesis between the travelling community and the urban sound systems’. Other pivotal events include the legendary Pepperbox Hill parties near Salisbury that summer, and the violent busting of a DiY party in Dorset later in the year. The first Pepperbox parties weren’t DiY affairs, but, after some of their DJ’s played at one, Harrison joined them for their party in September. Unfortunately, so did the police, who threatened the organisers until the decision was made to pack up. Then, at Bloxworth, in the autumn, police took a harder line, ‘pushing and striking partygoers randomly’ and wrecking sound equipment after having had the music turned off. It was clear to Harrison that the police weren’t there to enforce a particular law but to ‘teach the ravers a lesson’. This is followed by another bust, this time at a disused airfield in Hampshire, where a cop told them that they were ‘too scruffy’ to be rave promoters.
Although he’s evangelical about the combination of intoxication and house music, he doesn’t deny that there were casualties. By 1994, as was the case with many of us, DiY were guilty of letting hedonism overshadow politics. Hitherto, according to Harrison, these unusual bedfellows had been in a kind of equilibrium. For us lot in Dorset, the pills and potions became the most interesting aspect of the parties, and people started to look at other, less ecstatic ways to alter consciousness. I know this was the case in many other communities at that time.
At a free festival in ’91 DiY came across Spiral Tribe for the first time, finding them ‘surprisingly together’. Harrison chatted with some of them, finding them relaxed and friendly, and came to the realisation there was more than enough room for both crews on the festival scene.
1991 was also the year in which DiY become ‘slightly wary’ of the big free festivals. The number of noisy rigs was increasing, as was police and media attention, so they begin to experiment with smaller scale outdoor parties, often in collaboration with their progressive traveller friends who had by then moved up north. DiY seemed to be wisely wary of disturbing travellers living on site with their families. This sensitivity was not shown by some of Spiral Tribe, who on occasion had a very different approach to their temporary hippy neighbours at the festivals. DiY as a collective realised that traveller sites were not, in the long run, the best locations for parties: ‘Better to take a temporary site for a night and day than attract unwanted attention to a living space’.
People have made assumptions that all the sound systems and travellers knew about each other’s events and joined up when they could, but the connections were somewhat looser than that, and the U.K. actually had enough travellers and ravers to occasionally sustain two major parties or even festivals the same weekend (for example, there were two Summer Solstice festivals in 1991, one at Longstock and one at Peasedown St. John). Lechlade, which DiY didn’t go to because they were putting on a legendary party elsewhere the same weekend, happened without their knowledge.
For us lot, that is, the Dorset people I went raving with back then, DiY was a name we had heard many times. My first encounter with them probably occured thanks not to a party but to a Pezz tape which I still treasure. That progressive sound from ’92 is what really got me hooked, although I usually heard it on sound systems belonging to Frequency Oblivion, Lazy House, Democracy, Prime, Vibe, or any of the anonymous South West crews.
My second encounter with DiY was their tent at the Mind Body Soul and the Universe pay rave in 1992. I wrote about it at length in another post, so all I want to tell you here is that their Bounce tent was a welcome sanctuary from the tops off gurnathon on the rest of the site. Listening to the tapes from that night (I swear I can hear the moment where I jog the decks by dancing frenetically on the platform), there’s a rather sweet moment when a DiY person (Harrison, perhaps?) promises the dancers protection from the muggers roaming the site.
DiY’s New Year’s Eve party near Bath the same year received glowing reviews, but (again) I didn’t make it. The first main reason we didn’t get to attend many DiY dos was that by the time we started going to free parties on a regular basis in 1992 and 1993, DiY’s parties were further north than they previously had been. This was at a time when free parties were being organised much closer to home. Aside from that, when DiY played at festivals they were often just one of the rigs present, alongside more techno sound systems like the Spirals, and because a couple of our friends were hanging around with the Tribe, that’s where we ended up spending our time although most of us loved the kind of house DiY were known for.
Many people were doing what Harry Harrison and his friends did in the U.K. in the 1990s, and many of them were the heroes and heroines of their own local scenes. One might think that one of the people responsible for a rig with a reputation such as DiY’s might want to show off and take all the glory, but no. Not only does Harrison spend a hefty portion of the book making sure he’s named most of the people involved in the collective effort that is DiY, but he also spends time crediting the people responsible for other rigs that were essential parts of the scene.
Harrison’s take on Castlemorton is refreshing, due mostly to the fact that he includes the police reports of the time. Unlike the confrontational and non-stop on-top make some fuckin’ noise Spirals, DiY left Castlemorton earlier, carefully arranging for the rig to be smuggled back to Notts separately from their main transportation. Not long after this they decide that festivals were ‘too much hassle’.
Spiral Tribe’s go-to man for pithy soundbites and catchy slogans was Mark Harrison, whereas DiY had the ‘gobby’ Harry Harrison. The two had a surreal encounter at Castlemorton where they discovered they were actually both Mark Harrisons. This confused friends of the DiY Mark, who couldn’t understand why they were seeing quotes about techno attributed to Mark Harrison, considering he was such a diehard house head.
In their decades together it goes without saying that DiY (like the rest of us) got up to all sorts of naughtiness, often, but not always aided by hallucinogens, stimulants, and euphoriants. Dreaming, like Once in a Lifetime, provides a very long and very funny list of these, but here’s a quick teaser in the form of three of my favourites:
Free parties cost money, which may surprise anyone who hasn’t been involved in organising one. The custom built Black Box rig alone was worth £12,000 and the loan had to be paid off every month. Other unexpected costs would also drain the bucket of donations, for instance the cash used to bribe a reticent farmer into letting the party on his land go on a few hours longer, or the £100 bribes used to persuade a meat-selling cafe and an ‘arythmic’ drum circle to leave a DiY club night. Other factors beyond their control helped to empty their kitty, or at least slow down the rate at which it filled up, for example the bouncer at one club night letting punters in the back door without giving DiY a cut. When Harrison asks the owner to stop this, he’s told to fuck off.
In the long term, then, there wasn’t much cash coming in when DiY were throwing weekly free parties and barely-profitable club nights. This was apparently one of the motivations for starting a record label, a process which is catalogued towards the end of the book. The jury still seems to be out on the wisdom of going into business: Harrison even now feels ‘plagued’ by the question of whether they ‘should have got an office and attempted to play the capitalist game or should have stayed as idealistic party renegades’. Their attempts to play the game were half-hearted or non-existent. They refused, for instance, to do the press interviews demanded by Warp.
Almost twenty years after my first encounter with DiY, I attended an old school festival in Cornwall. I knew that some of the DiY DJs would be playing but I didn’t expect them to have the legendary Black Box rig in tow. I asked someone early on in the weekend whether they were the original speakers from the 1990s and they said no. Later on that night, an unmistakable wave of warm bass pummeled into my ribcage and I realised that it just had to be the same old rig, an observation later confirmed by someone else. I have to admit that I was a tiny bit disappointed they weren’t playing the old records. I’d still love to hear them playing some classics, but having said that, they’re probably sick to the back teeth of hearing them!
I disagree somewhat with a handful of Harrison’s views, one of which is his take on what a free party is. As a part of his argument he explains that some have held that the first free parties were ‘conventional club nights’; it would be interesting to know who proposed this misguided notion. As for his own points, I can see no reason why ‘events for which no payment were demanded’ could not be considered as being among the first free parties to take place, provided they are unlicensed, for instance the first Hedonism event. Even though there were ‘four walls [and] security’ the licensing authorities had no idea of its existence and it certainly didn’t end at 2 in the morning. Contrary to what Harrison suggests, many free parties (including some of DiY’s) happened indoors, although of course it is worth noting the significant difference in atmosphere as opposed to an outdoor party under the stars, or one in a tent or under a tarp. The absence of security is another factor that Harrison considers vital for a party to be classified as free. However, security was of course present at many free parties, although no-one would have called it that, and often the arrangements were made far more informally and much less visibly than at paid events.
Harrison is right though in suggesting that the ‘free’ in free parties connects them to the past in that they are outgrowths of the seventies free festival movement. The surprisingly widely circulated position that a free party is only a proper free party if it is connected to travellers is thankfully not one expressed in Dreaming. Although there were of course many of this type that DiY and their cohorts were involved in, this is certainly not the only formula.
However, as a free party historian who made one ill-fated attempt to start a soundsystem compared to someone who founded and helped to run one for decades, our perspectives are obviously going to differ, and that’s absolutely fine, inevitable, even! I neglected my monitors somewhat, birds nested in them after I abandoned them in a friend’s woodshed.
So what’s the winning formula for a free party? That’s complicated and outside the remit of this review, but something I’d like to add is that it’s not about how large the parties were. This is something I have believed for a long time, and it’s great to see Harrison agreeing. Some people think it is about size, but it really, really isn’t: ‘At the end of the day, it matters not about the size of the party, it is the vibe that is all-important’. The best nights of my life have been spent in the company of a mere barnful of fellow ravers. That, dear reader, is all you need.
The first edition of Trevor Miller’s Trip City had been on my wants list for a decade or so, but the price was always prohibitive (and remains so, £150 on Discogs last time I checked!) I was enthused about the idea of a tale based on acid house as well as the soundtrack cassette by no less than A Guy Called Gerald.
Praise be, then, to Velocity Press, an independent publisher that is rapidly emerging as a leading chronicler of rave culture, for bringing out a new edition. The imprint also boasts Matt Anniss’s in depth Join The Future, about the Sheffield Bleep sound (highly recommended), and State Of Bass by Martin James, covering jungle and drum’n’bass. Junior Tomlin’s book of flyers and cover art is one of the many other intriguing Velocity publications that I have not yet read. Harry Harrison’s forthcoming Dreaming In Yellow, about the rise and rise of Notts free party heroes DiY, is coming in the spring of 2022, and I sincerely hope to be reviewing it here, seeing as it’s Velocity’s most relevant publication to date, as far as this blog is concerned.
And speaking of relevant, why review Trip City here? Well, one of the earliest documented free parties, Hedonism, was attended by the author, and, more importantly, the pivotal London clubs and raves he frequented, MC’d at, and used as inspiration for the novel also served as spawning grounds for those who went on to throw free parties.
Miller himself started clubbing years before acid house. He graduated to DJing and MCing. In this latter role, he performed as Mr. Love in London clubs in the mid-80s, when speed and acid were the favoured fuel for nocturnal escapades. Mr. Love was once chased by furious DJ legend Harvey from Tonka because he had gonged him off at a so-called DJ Gong Show.
By the Second Summer of Love (1988), Miller was squatting and involved in designing flyers as well as some murkier hustles. He was still Mr. Love and his access to E was “steady”.
Although
Acid House and ‘E’… galvanised disparate groups of revellers into one cross-cultural ‘loved-up’ movement or moment1
E-culture is not the main focus of the novel, but a vividly painted backdrop to some of its events.
In his foreword to the 2021 edition, Miller reveals that
in a heart-beat, minds were expanded. Consciousness touched beyond the beyond. And adventurers like myself were pushing the boundaries. Taking every pill or powder I could get my hands on. And there was a proliferation of designer drugs.2
We did the same at the free parties we attended at the start of the 90s. There were Fantasies, there was DOET, there was K. In fact, FX, the green crystalline chemical the book revolves around, is advertised as having no comedown, which is reminiscent of how fellow ravers talked about Ketamine in the beginning. Remember when you first heard about it in 1991? “It isn’t even properly illegal”, “it’s used in medicine, so it must be safe”, “no-one’s ever died of it”. Oh, hold on, there was that guy at Glastonbury. “But he took too much”. And so on.
Back then, you could not simply whip out a smartphone and see what the wise wizards at Erowid had to say about it, you just made that decision based on… well, not much! Neither could you crumble the edge off a pill, drip Marquis reagent into it, and wait for the telltale colour change, let alone send it to a lab that would thoroughly test it for free! Of course, there were sporadic fragments of information which a few of us tried to piece together. However, for the most part, late 80s and early 90s recreational drug taking involved many more leaps into the unknown than it would in later decades.
Valentine, jaded promoter and ex-speedfreak, makes his shambolic re-entrance into London on a coach, clutching a bag of Tennent’s Super. He has no job or accommodation lined up. His crew was busted in 1984, like most of the London warehouse posses. He didn’t, however, stick around to suffer the consequences, but dropped his friends in the shit and escaped to the north. Trip City covers Valentine’s re-entry into the London party scene.
Will he manage to evade his former partners? Is he ready to face up to them and pay his debts? Will he stay off the sulphate? He, like young Londoners throughout history, is looking for the new high, and it seems that, for Valentine, sex and drugs are entirely interchangeable.
‘What’s it like?’
Virginia breathed heavily. The hit was inside and outside. It was the world. A surging passion. It flowed white hot. Tearing as it raged. It made you feel like you were God. No crappy coke rush. No boozy skaghead downer. It was purity. Control beyond control. Situations melted into one. One big orgasm. Unstoppable. Unsurpassable. There was nothing to equal it. Even the comedown was good. Like landing in Concorde. There was a surge. Then a floating. A few short bumps. Then solid ground. Time snapped back into place. (95)
FX is free, given to those deserving few. Virginia, a little too generous with her stash, offers it around like cigarettes. The takers swallow it without too many questions about what it is they are sticking in their gobs. And no, fellow ageing raver, you shouldn’t judge. Remember when you first swallowed a Yellow Cali in 1991? Remember how little you knew about ecstasy back then? No information society, no Erowid, no Bluelight, no Wikipedia. But you took it anyway. And probably fucking loved it. Didn’t you?
The new drug turns out, surprise surprise, to be worse than expected, that ground Virginia mentioned is no more solid than quicksand, the trip is liable to restart with no warning and without the consumer even realising. “Worse than ecstasy or MDMA or acid or M25… An endless trip…3” The hallucinations are “so real, you couldn’t tell” (260). Everything floats “into green madness” (195).
FX has the prestige of coke. Like Charlie, it’s yuppy fuel, a commodity exchanged for information. Like Social Media, it is supposedly free to use, though you pay for your hit with your data. FX, too, works like this: we provide information, we receive the dollar-coloured shards.
Everybody was screaming. Trying to get ahead. Killing each other. Greasing the wheels. With booze. With coke. FX was no worse. It was a reward. (269)
When my friends and I were just getting started in 1991 and excitedly scrambling up the dancefloor foothills to euphoria, we were already meeting those jaded climbers who had seen and done everything and were on their way down. We raised a quizzical eyebrow or two at them and carried on our merry way, only to find ourselves tumbling down unceremoniously two short years later. This perpetual cycle of innocence and euphoria and cynicism had already started years before we came on the scene, and Valentine bemoans feeling old at 24 in the clubs he used to frequent.
Under pressure from a smooth-tongued and manipulative promoter, Valentine reluctantly agrees to relaunch his old night, Underground, at a glossy club in the West End
…the Tower of Babel, with the biggest sound system in London. Its shadow engulfed the pavement. This was where the scene (22) had been heading. Predictable legality and contrived wildness. It stank, the new promoters were businessmen. DJs had mortgages. Suburbia in the West End heart. The journey had been worthless. (23)
Why does he do it? Money. Money and perhaps ego. He ensnares former associates into his scheme. He lures a heroin-addicted retired DJ to one last gig with a heavy bag of brown.
It’s not just Valentine who betrays his friends. He is surrounded by other blaggers, including one former partner who drags him into a toilet cubicle. When the man reaches into his pocket, Valentine cannot ascertain whether he is searching for a wrap to share with him, or a knife to stab him with.
Valentine’s immediate surroundings, then, are not characterised by universal love, cheers of “get right on one matey”, and sweaty euphoric smiles exchanged with strangers, but by “[f]riends killing each other for greed.” (106) Others, though, deep in the dancefloor crush, do seem to be feeling it: “The dancers were swaying their arms. Manic, with invisible football scarves. Aeroplane landing signals.” (192) Being from the Northern Soul era, Valentine, a serious dancer, looks down witheringly on Virginia’s lack of coordination. However, when he attempts it himself, his by now ridiculously excessive substance intake makes him flop about clumsily.
On reflection, Valentine realises the good old days never existed. Even at the top of his career, “[I]t had not been so good. Loss usually outweighed profit. The flat was always cold. Good fortune was always around the corner. He was a compulsive liar.” (178). Valentine is the kind of narrator you feel has tricked you into being on his side. He knows he’s a blagger, a scammer, a hustler and a liar, but still you want him to come out of this… well, alive at the very least!
Everyone else is hustling too. It’s Thatcher’s Britain. Every fucker for themselves. High Spend is king. Both the users of FX and The Tower’s clientele are pawns of Big Business. As grandee of Underground, Valentine is “the butcher at the meat-market, hacking off slabs ready for consumption.” (189)
We’re back in 1988 and many sections of the novel feel like the British Saturday night before the twin tsunamis of acid house and rave had irrevocably altered the landscape. Outside the Mambo “[t]he throng struggled like maniacs. A fight to the death for a free beer. A blood rite over the women” (106). The meat market is still the dominant template for the nightclub: “Women were packed tighter than sardines.” (50) At the Tower Valentine belittles the punters who are engaged in “[b]uying each other for the price of a pint. He had the antidote. They did not.” (209)
There is however an undercurrent of hope in Trip City as Valentine has occasional flashes of awareness of how close to drowning he is, and attempts to swim back to dry land. The visceral descriptions of his binges, though, do depict someone heading for the rocky seabed. Reader, heed this warning: there are body fluids aplenty.
The London portrayed in the novel is familiar. It is a city small enough to bump into your mortal enemies but large and impersonal enough to utterly lose your mind and your moral compass in. Anyone who has spent time high in London will be able to join the dots between this and Burial’s ‘too young for the rave’ hydroponic comedown melancholy. However, this is not just for those readers, for the picture Miller paints sucks you into the drugvortex as immersively as Jeff Noon’s Vurt, Niall Williams’ Grits or Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting.
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References
All quotes are from the novel Trip City unless listed below.
1Trip City State of Mind 2021, Miller, p.xv
2 Trip City State of Mind 2021, Miller, p.xv
3Trip City State of Mind 2021, Miller, p.xvii
UK Free Parties and Free Festivals 1988-1994 