Music
From pirate radio to Twitter, the ways ravers have innovated to keep a step ahead of the authorities
From ten of thousands of kids dancing in rented farmer's fields to inner city squat parties shaking to booming techno, Britain has a long, vibrant history of illegal dance parties. Read on to learn how technology has operated as battleground between the illegal party promoters and the authorities that seek to shut them down.
Throwing an illegal party has always been a cat and mouse game. Organisers try to keep a lid on their plans for as long as possible, and police try to be the first there to shut things down. But from flyers to Facebook, landlines to texts, the rules of engagement are forever changing.
ANARCHY IN THE OUTDOORS
Following the unifying ethos of the free festivals of the 1970s, the late 80s explosion of ecstasy and acid house changed the course of UK youth culture. With Britain’s live music venues still hamstrung by outdated licensing laws that saw many clubs forced to close their doors at 3.30am, entrepreneurial young promoters looked elsewhere, turning their hand to hosting huge outdoor parties.
Here, amongst hired fun fair rides and lasers, kids could dance to alien new sounds right through to dawn. Others set up their own sound-systems and put on free parties, spreading the news via tight-knit networks.
This spirit of freedom peaked in 1992 with Castlemorton, a week-long rave in the Malvern Hills where rigs like DiY Soundsystem and Spiral Tribe presided over an anarchic independent state of an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 people, too big for the authorities to shut down.
The Tory government's repressive Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which specifically legislated against “repetitive beats”, ensured that nothing on the scale of Castlemorton ever happened again. But far from giving in, intrepid promoters continue to seek out locations, setting up soundsystems in warehouses, abandoned schools and drained swimming pools, or remote rural locations.
PIRATE STATIONS AND PAYPHONES
In an age before the internet or mobile phones, it was pirate radio stations like the London-based Centreforce – home to pioneering DJs like Kenny Ken and Randall – that spread news of upcoming parties. Mainstream clubs also offered a route to reach up-for-it clubbers, with flyers handed out at closing time, printed with landline numbers you could call to get the news on the weekend’s events.
MC Kinky – who now records as Feral Is Kinky – is a female ragga vocalist whose collaboration with E-Zee Possee, Everything Starts With An E, was an anthem during 1989’s so-called ‘Summer of Love’. “I used to get a call on my landline” she recalls. “It was about phone books then. They'd give you the vague location. ‘It'll be off the M25. Are you up for it? We have to keep it quiet because of the plain clothes, or people start talking about it and think it’s going to be too big…’”
Journeys involved stopping at pubs or convoys pulling into service stations to use payphones to call for the next set of instructions. “There was a lot of faith and trust!” she says.
Jerome Hill, who runs the Roots of Rave show on veteran pirate turned internet radio station Kool FM, recalls the importance of United Systems, a one-stop number you could dial to get the latest news on squat parties or crews setting up soundsystems in everything from closed down cinemas to empty office blocks.
“It was one number the wider community would call,” he says. “They'd say, you've got [sound-systems] Jiba and Virus on this road in Acton tonight. Then you’ve got Insanity and Aardvark over in London at this address.” Often, ravers would congregate in a location in central London together before making a call. It was by ringing the number during the day and chatting to the owner that Hill secured himself a spot DJing on Jiba. Later, as the internet rose in popularity, forums such as SquatJuice and Urban 75 helped spread phone numbers, with the location of soundsystems left on answerphones.
GOING SOCIAL
Perhaps inevitably, the rise of Facebook and other social networking sites has largely supplanted this network of phone numbers and pirate radio. Many free parties operate their own group pages, some closed and invite-only, others open to the public. Raving is now the preserve of a new, online generation who have swapped payphones and paper A to Zs for smartphones and Google Maps.
A sign of social media’s organisational power came in October 2010, when party promoters Scumoween threw a party that raged for 18 hours in an abandoned eight-story Royal Mail depot in London’s Holborn. News of “Scumoween” spread rapidly on Facebook, sucking in ravers and the moral opprobrium of tabloids alike. Police tried and failed to enter the building using tasers and batons, but ravers forced them out, and it was eventually decided that the party should be left to fizzle out naturally.
Perhaps smarting from their humiliation, though, the next Scumoween party – planned for that December in an Enfield warehouse – was nipped in the bud when police raided the houses of organisers and impounded the soundsystem. It seems evident that high-profile events like Scumoween have prompted the police to a state of new vigilance. Devon and Cornwall police have reportedly introduced number plate scanning, and have admitted to checking online to try and stop countryside parties.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
“None of us really want to be tied to Facebook but everybody is,” says Chris Liberator, who along with Julian and Aaron Liberator runs the acid techno label Stay Up Forever (Chris’ tune with Dave The Drummer, One Night In Hackney, is a sonic distillation of the punkish attitude behind squat parties). Chris reckons that social media has in part been detrimental to the free party scene, “since everyone else can see it, including the police”. “Some people think it’s a good thing. But we didn't have it back then, though you did sometimes end up in the middle of nowhere scratching your head!”
Although newer systems like Stinky Pink have a social media presence, they declare “If you need to know you will know! No info will be given over Facebook.” Celebrating DiY's 25th anniversary last August with a party in the Midlands, founder Pete Woosh reckons phone lines are still the best tried and tested method for giving out details, with landlines now replaced by mobile answerphones and text messaging: “It's a case of using the internet to get stuff out but not giving the whole pitch away.” Embracing this, some systems like New Era Collective have even become savvy in the ways of modern data harvesting, collecting numbers and texting potential ravers once their next party is up and running.
Indeed, like the wider culture clash in clubland, the free party scene also reflects the pull between advancing technology and old school heritage. While Hill says that some of the younger drum’n’bass acts now DJ off laptops, many soundsystems still use Technics turntables just like they did in the 1980s and 90s. Still, there's no doubt that instantaneous communication, from WhatsApp to BBM has changed what was once literal 'word of mouth' to a rapidly spun digital web.
So what’s the future? It’s plain that, as phones evolve to become ever more powerful computers and the UK authorities push even further to access people's private communications, this battle will get deeper and more complex. Woosh reckons that even with their extended powers of snooping, authorities are unlikely to be able to stop every party happening – especially in the countryside, where once a crowd has gathered, it’s very difficult to disperse.
Sometimes, though, it’s not new technologies, but traditional old media that’s behind the biggest illegal raves. Woosh remembers back to Castlemorton, the biggest free party of the 1990s. “Rather foolishly it ended up being on the Six O'Clock news on the Friday,” he says wryly. “That's possibly the best bit of advertising that could have happened!”
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