SO WHAT HAPPENED ?
A brief history of the free party and festival scene in the UK....
Now that the mud has been shaken from our trainers, the travellers have been forced from the road by the authorities, the thunderous call to arms of the house revolution has dimmed and become mainstream, the Criminal Justice Acthas made raving a criminal offence; what happened ?
And where did it come from, this youth movement which, largely unseen to the majority and it's eyes and ears, the media, involved hundreds of parties and festivals across the UK and hundreds of thousands of revellers, criss-crossing the rural backlanes in a genuine celebration of life outside the restrictions and barriers of humdrum weekend culture ? The adrenalin, the roadblocks, the dawns, the ecstacy, the service stations, the lack of sleep. All driven by the imported four-four beat of house. For such an extraordinary series of events, re-defining so many accepted faiths, little has been extrapolated or explained.
Compare this with the torrent of interpretation following the social upheaval in California in the sixties, or the Punk phenomena in seventies London. History must out. Emerging from a series of disparate strands, the impact of house and what became (unfortunately) known as rave (rave was always a sad term but... ) has been enormous, becoming in fact Britain's dominant youth culture in the 90's. Techno, garage, jungle, drum and bass, hardcore, ambient, the list of mutations is endless, reverberating everywhere from council estates to boarding schools from yuppie docklands to rural middle England.
This story has two origins, one musical, the other cultural. The convoluted musical trail began in Chicago in the mid 80's, when Frankie Knuckles span the available mix plates with his own creations and threw in a drum machine, and a genuine revolution was unleashed, leading via Detroit, New York, Ibiza and London to the world. In the UK, specifically London and Manchester, these strands came together over the miserable English winter of 1987 and created the concept which still carries such perjorative weight- Acid House. Aceeeid ! From Shoom to Castlemoreton, the very English apparition of house carried all before it.
Allying with the possibilities thrown up by the mid-80's warehouse parties of Dirtbox and Shake and Finger Pop amongst others, the hungry young entrepreneurs of the capital combined the organisational skills of the black-tie ball with the irresistable musical idiom coming across the pond and created Sunrise, Biology, the Orbital raves and the biggest media scare since Punk. Arriving back from Ibiza, those in the vanguard made London a hotbed of smiley-life, drawing inspiration from the truly eclectic sets of Alfredo, Cesar and Pipi, long nurtured in the tolerance of Balearea. From Shoom to the Trip, from Spectrum to Land of Oz, those who were to become the high priests of British house began here: Oakenfold, Rampling,Holloway, Weatherall. Rave On. So new and exciting was this explosion, so explicit in it's reference to 60's California, so loved up and awash with chemical fuel, that the hip mags spokeof "the Second Summer of Love", whilst the tabloids reacted in their usual blind fulminating frenzy.
'Ecstacy Airport - 11,000 youngsters go drug crazy at Britain's biggest ever Acid House Party"
(TheSun June 26 1989)"
" Triumph for Acid Police"
(Daily Express October 9 th 1989)"
"Deadly rave that leads to the grave"
(Daily Star January 1992)
As the rest of the UK caught on, as the Hacienda got on one, as huge illegal parties mushroomed across the North and South of England, notably Blackburn in the North West of England, as the press recoiled from such refusal to play by the entertainment rules, the inevitable slowly happened. The greedy moved in, the beauty of the dream faded, the black, soulful roots of house began to be assaulted by more violent, acerbic forms which ended in Hardcore, painful flyers and £30 admission to sad leisure centres. The time, late 1989.
The revelatory had been assimilated and corrupted. And so the creative, the idealists, the believers, moved again. A new head emerged on the hydra, seeking the freedom this movement had so beseechingly promised. In the fields. And here is where the second strand of this story winds ineluctably with the first. In the fields, in the free festivals of the hippies and travellers, in the ancient fields of England, so long denied to the landless. The hippies, for want of a better word, long marginalised, reactionary in their deliberate harking back to the 60's and beyond, yet still seeking some kind of heaven, and still with an endemic love of freedom, anarchy and, in some quarters, illegality.
Where their story begins depends on who you ask. For Fraser Clarke, long time zippie and counter culture figure, it began with the tension between the farmers and the hunter-gatherers in the very ancient past. Certainly from the tenth century onwards the land of Britain has been owned by the very few . Still is. Over 86 % of England is owned by less than 10 % of the population. Many of the idealistic hippies who appeared in the late 60's and 70's looked back to the England of Arthurian legend, of the mythical Albion, and saw the truly iniquitous ownership and access to the land. They recalled the Diggers and their valiant attempts to save some land for all in the mid seventeenth century, when the despoilation and division of the countryside became total, leaving only sparse common land for the people.With this in mind, the counterculture took it's cue from the huge festivals of America which emerged from the hippy explosion of 1967 and lead to the vast Woodstock and the Gathering of the Tribes' at Monterey and the rest of the California festivals. In 1970 the first attempt at a British free festival, Phun City (this Ph was, bizarrely, to crop up sixteen years later in very different circumstances in Chicago) was organised by the radical underground magazine 'International Times' in Worthing, Essex. Various events followed, including the storming of the 1971 Isle of Wight Festival (not free) where the fences were torn down a la Woodstock (which also was not, remember, intended to be free) in a burst of radical idealism.
The free festival idea really germinated with Windsor Free of 1972, held in Windsor Park, right under the nose of the symbolic head of the British establishment, the Queen. From small acorns. In addition to it's American cousins, these early events were influenced by the very English tradition of the horse and craft fayres which stretched back to the Middle Ages. The first festival attracted around 3,000 people, the second in 1973 around 10,000. The third Windsor Free, following strenuous leafletting, attracted 20,000 souls of all persuasions and was invaded and dispersed, in a harbinger of future developements, by Thames Valley police. That year, 1974, also brought the first happening at what would become the focal point of this movement, Stonehenge, the most symbolic monument to a pagan past in Britain, indeed Europe. Occuring right round the megalitich stones, these huge gatherings continued for a decade, attracting up to 100,000 people at the peak of 1983/4.
Simultaneously, in 1976 Punk rock detonated itself into the public sphere, locked into the paradoxically destructive yet positive wake of the Sex Pistols. Hippies were now to be sneered at, speed replaced pot and acid as the drug of choice. The hippy movement was marginalised for years, the free festivals shrank, the idealism of the early seventies replaced by a scathing anger. Punk birthed many new things, fiery independence, the freedom to express through xerox fanzines, the active rather than the passive. And yet, in yet another of the cultural convolutions which so characterise this story, in the early eighties a strand of punk allied itself with the hippy ideals of the past. In bands such as Crass, Poison Girls and Flux of Pink Indians, a new sensibility emerged, set in stark, furious monochrome against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher's ascendancy, bringing as it did mass unemployment, the government sponsered brutality of the Miner's Strike and the xenophonic media onslaught of the Falkland's War. Now the apparently irreverent playful abuse of the Union Jack in 1977 seemed startlingly tame. This ultra-oppostional blast of anger, declaring "There is no Authority but Yourself " and "Fuck Authority ", with stencilled record sleeves (introducing the "Pay No More Than" idea), stark backdrops, brutal cacaphonic anti-melodies caught a nerve of the times, and Crass in particular sold hundreds of thousands of records and became heroes despite their best intentions.
Those still carrying the torch for the attempted idyllism of the early 70's retreated in the face of urban decay, and it's voice of despair, punk. Some set up utopian communities such as Tipi Valley in Wales. Some, crucially; bought old buses, coaches and caravans and began to travel from festival to festival, always centred on Stonehenge at the Summer Solstice (June 21st, the begining of summer, the axis of the seasons, and the twin of December 21st's Winter Solstice). A seasonal summer calender had established itself by 1979, beginning in May via Horseshoe Pass, Stonehenge, Ashton Court, Ingleston Common, via various other sites to Wales in mid -September.
Those that spent the summer months in vehicles began to call themselves travellers, and the more cosmic, New Age travellers ( a term which most travellers detest ). By 1982, this itinerent mass had christened themselves "the Peace Convoy" when they began to move en masse, extending the season to the Peace camps of Molesworth and Greenham Common over the winter, thus becoming permenantly on the move.This entourage, inevitably, began to attract elements unversed in the ways of the road, and here began a tension which was to reach a head many years later. Meanwhile, up until 1984, that most totemic of all years, Stonehenge Free Festival remained the centre of attraction, and here, if anywhere, the barriers separating hippies, travellers, punks, bikers and hell's angels began to disappear, at least in appearance. It became an act of sartorial skill to know the difference.
The convoy began to attract the ire of the authorities, the blatant anarchy of Stonehenge had become too vast, too blatant for this most power crazed of governments. In a famous aside to the Tory faithful, Margaret Thatcher declared " I am only too delighted to make life difficult for such things as hippy convoys. And we naively thought that the government was supposed to care for all it's citizens. Behind this rabble-rhetoric lay the real intentions of the state, to crush this way of life, more specifically it's spearhead, Stonehenge. And so early in 1985 the government and the police, behind the veneer of the National Trust who in effect own Stonehenge, acted to proscribe the festival. During June 1985, using tactics learned during the militarised Miner's Strike, Stonehenge became an occupied zone. For a radius of five miles aroud the stones, fortified barriers were erected by the police and quite possibly the army. Thousands of officers from up to eight forces were drafted in. Blocked from the stones by the full weight of the establishment, the Convoy attempted to push through and were infamously shunted into a beanfield and attacked without mercy by police officers in full riot gear. The majority of the vehicles were smashed to pieces. People, including pregnant women and children were dragged through broken windows and beaten sensless. Dozens of severe injuries were inflicted in an official orgy of destruction which veteran TV reporter Kim Sabido described as the worst police riot he had ever witnessed in years of globe trotting. This festival, begun innocently as a celebration of ancient culture, had becomethe focus of the state's vicious hatred of all but the rigid, passive way of new Tory conformism. From this point onwards, the momentum which had propelled the travelling community was shattered. Bereft of focus, the next four years saw ever more futile attempts to reach Stonehenge, with no respite from the authorities.
The razor wire stayed. The other festivals continued, Avon Free Festival over the May bank holiday, Torpedo Town, Ribblehead, away from the state's eager eye. The blatant disregard for conventional life of the travellers provoked a now annual media hysteria, often fuelled by TV pictures of mobile social security units visiting sites containing people who clearly had zero intention of looking for work. During these years 85-89 the festival circuit attracted huge numbers of the new urban dispossed, creating yet more disparate sub strata; the crusties and the brew crew bent on self annhilation and total nihilsm, the weekenders who drove out from the city for a spot of camping and drug taking and, lo and behold, the new urban revellers, charged by the new irresistible beat of house but dissatisfied with the bankrupcy of the commercial raves and the two o'clock curfew of the clubs. Ravers.
And here, born of a tortuous cycle of youth cross-fertilisation spanning two decades, the twin legacies of Chicago and Mr Smiley and Woostock and Stonehenge finally met. And exploded. Perhaps some radical souls had thrown free parties during the Summer of Love, but not like this. There was no real demand, the euphoria of those early pay parties was enough, the entry price was no object to the often affluent attendees. At this point the travelling community knew little of house, it was a world away from the band setup still dominating festivals. Regarded at best as irrelevant disco and more likely as an affront to the legacy of Hawkwind, the alliance of acid house and travellers was a very uneasy one until 1991. The popular festival bands of the time, Culture Shock, Osric Tentacles, 2000 DS, and more particularly their sound crews would recoil in horror at the idea of twin Technics and a box a records replacing their live efforts. Remember the 'Keep Music Live' campaign ? But how could these bands, on shoddy equipment and often marginal skill, compete with this four/four hypnotic beat slowly replacing it ? The first signs of this new hybrid possibly appeared at the Glastonbury festival of 1989, and the dust-battered chaos of Treeworgy Tree Fayre of the same year (both pay events).
London crews arrived with pumping systems, reflated the dayglo frenzy of Shoom (itself, ironically a legacy of hippiedom), and blew the bands into oblivion. What four individuals can compete with twelve hours, twenty four hours, three days, of crafted tracks, composed on computers and relentlessly binding a crowd in abandoned unity.
Combine this with another key element, and the new lighting technology available, and you have a truly transcendental situation. That other key element, inevitably, was chemical. Ecstacy. MDMA, or what approximated for it, was the binding spirit of this new community.
The story of E is well documented, invented in 1912 by the German pharmacuetical giant Merck, it's properties lay undiscovered until the early sixties when certain psychologists retreived it from history's medicine chest and began to use it as a tool for personal and relational discovery. Noted for it's properties of empathy, of dream like clarity, it became what speed was to the Mods and Punks, acid to the hippies, heroin to the decadence of Warhol's New York. It may have taken the more old school travellers years to be seduced by this revolutionaty new music, drug and outlook, but, one by one, seduced they were.
By Castlemorton, three short years later, there were at least eight massive house sound systems. To find a band would have required considerable dedication. In that short frenetic time span, house became the soudtrack of the festival. Glastonbury 1990 was, for many, a turning point. Tonka, probably the first house sound system in England, originating in Cambridge in the very early acid days, played in the free section of the commercial festival which existed until 1991 ( when dance music and travellers were effectively banned ), with DiYfurther down the drag. For the first time at a major festival, travellers united with their urban counterparts, utilising their generators, buses, marquees and knowledge with the systems, decks, Dj's and music of the dance possees. For the rest of 1990 this experiment took root and blossomed.
Across the South of England (always the stronghold of the travelling community), innumerable free parties occurred, with systems such a Sweat, CircusWarp, DiY, Circus Normal and many others defining the genre. Away from the major festivals where much hostility still ensued from the old school, fields, warehouses, barns and plain old fields were utilised.
NO MONEY WAS CHARGED, an idea the authorites could never come to terms with. Maybe a bucket was passed round, but this rarely covered the expenses incurred. Locations were spread by word of mouth or by the use of meeting points. The sound sytems, the decks, the DJ's would somehow arrive in the same place, often there would be no cover, often no lights. That was irrelevant. What mattered was the music, and more importantly, the people. At those early parties, suffused with energy and idealism, something happened which is probably unique. Hippy and punk, and mod and even teddy boys had consisted of tribal elements, the defining point had been exclusivity. If you didn't dress like this, you were the enemy (or with hippies, straight) and therefore by definition excluded.
In this scene, under the stars, in some far-flung corner of some county, the dancefloor partners came from every social strata. Young hipsters, fresh from the local club, and wearing hundreds of pounds worth of clobber could sit on a traveller's bus whose total possesions were probably worth less than the raver's footwear. Strange, forty-odd year old hippy veterans could dance next to ravishing young things clad in designer wear. The barriers came down; the dancefloor and the music the great leveller. And what feeling, when all is said and done, can match being in a field at sunrise with several hundred, or thousand, like minded souls ? And so this continued throughout the winter of 1990, into the summer of 1991.
For the first time the major festivals appeared not so much as hippy events but akin to the great orbital raves of 1988. Here, indeed, was the true spiritual heir to the Summer of Love. The commercial rave scene could no longer genuinely claim to represent love, unity or spiritual celebration. Chipping Sodbury, the eventual site of the Avon Free Festival of 1991, featured various house systems and was really the first free festival so explicit in it's reveration of dance music. The antagonisms many travellers felt towards these foreign new sounds, also began to become apparent. Fair point, if you have to live on a site with a baby, five days of hugely amplified house is probably not ideal. However, it is undeniable that the influx of this culture breathed new life into an atrophying festival scene. The Avon Free in 1987, for example, had been without joy, a paean to negativity.
At least the excitement was back, and weren't festivals always about tolerence and freedom anyway ? During the winter of 1991, increasing numbers of youth were affected by this new idea. Dozens of new sound systems formed that year, including Spiral Tribe, some very different in their approach to others. There were, maybe, two main models. There were the out and out techno systems who would play for days on end, attempt entry to all the big festivals, uncomprimising in their music and attitude. This is most clearly exemplified by Spiral Tribe, who were to achieve the highest profile of all the free party systems with their rallying cry of " Make Some Fuckin Noise".
Originating in London, and adopting an Crass-style quasi-military approach, the Spirals would brook no surrender, attempting to attack the beast at it's heart a year later by staging a rave at Canary Wharf. The second model were those for whom the party, and the system, came first, and when berated by travellers or police would sometimes shut down their systems, disappear in the night and crop up intact the next week. For these systems the big festivals changed from celebrations to embittered zones, and so began to throw smaller parties in the fields and quarries of obscure counties.
A party is not necessarily bigger the better. Some legendary parties have been attended by only a hundred or two people, it is the atmosphere which is important, not the size, quality not quantity. Outdoor parties are clearly in direct opposition to that great British institution, the weather. Yet even in the severest conditions, the party continued. Rain, sub zero temperatures, even snow did not halt the fun.
By the spring of 1992, all the elements were in place for some major action. Huge free parties had taken place across the South, especially centred around Oxford and the Wiltshire area. In Luton Exodus had brought true ethical substance to the rave machine, setting up a real self-supporting community and a farm, genuine mutual aid, in addition to the parties. Police seizure brought a spontaneous demonstration by the supposedly apolitical ravers; 4000 of them. The whole of radical culture was slowly becoming locked into an wave of positivity and action, which would lead to the dedication of the eco-protesters and the anti-road activists. And the driving force of this movement were the parties and festivals which managed to combine ethics and priciples with sheer unbridled hedonism.
Much of mainstream British culture was shifting. Madchseter, exemplified by the Happy Mondays, typified the new attitude, fuelled by massive increases in drug use, and the new notion of the 24 hour party people. The subversive nature of this new hedonism is clear. Work, marriage, authority becomes irrelevant in the face of such behaviour. And so we arrive in May 1992. D-Day. Over the first weekend of May of that year, a party took place at Lechlade, Glocestershire. It made page three of some of the quality papers, but generally escaped unnoticed by the media. Not so the tens of thousands of people who could sniff something in the air. Word spread like wildfire. Avon Free Festival, last weekend of the month. Be there.
A member of DiY relates how the phone started ringing on Tuesday and until departure Friday morning, would ring every single time it was replaced. People spent two days trying to get through. News of a site arrived Thursday night; Castlemorton Common, Gloucestershire. Be there.
The turning point in free party history, 50,000 people turned up to occupy that common for a week. Although Chipping Sodbury exactly a year earlier had attracted 15,000 people, this was different. It made the front pages of every paper (see press) terrified the authorities and lead to the Criminal Justice Act. From that point onwards the festival circuit became militarised zones, with thousands of police often throwing roadblocks around large areas of the countryside.
At Laxton, Leicestershire over the solstice, access and departure from a very large festival was denied. The atmosphere there had changed, as it had at Torpedo Town, Hampshire, later in the summer, where a waste disposal factory was gutted by fire. The halcyon days of the free party possees were, unbeknown at the time, over. Although hundreds of parties continued apace, and sound systems began to appear everywhere, they were in effect, in isolation.
Never again did all the participants in this synergetic revolution come together. Blamed for Castlemoreton Spiral Tribe faced a huge legal battle costing five million pounds and resulting a year later in total aquittal. Several allies of DiY wrere arrested and tried following Laxton, again dragged out for maximum effect, and resulting in part aquittal and part prison. Charges: conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, surely one of the most nebulous charges in English law.Since 1992, there has been no let up. Here and now, in 1996, there are probably more parties than ever before. The legacy of the dream lives on. Many of the highest profile systems have been forced abroad, mobile, still out there in Prague, or Rimini or Berlin, so endemic has the stranglehold of intolerance in Britain become. Desert Storm and Smokescreen have risked Bosnia and civil war for the sake of parties and exporting some amelioration.
The concept of the truly free party has been exported further on a global scale. Goa, San Francisco, Dallas,Thailand, Sydney: in all these places the seeds of this peculiarly British freedom have taken root. Despite the strenuous intentions of the press, the courts, the police, the government; the parties continue. Even as the screw is turned and raving, amongst many other things, has been made a crime, so the ingenious nature of youth and it's inexhaustable ability to regenerate, redefine and renew will find new ways of expression and unification. In the words of one of the Blackburn parties, "Live the Dream "
A brief history of the free party and festival scene in the UK....
Now that the mud has been shaken from our trainers, the travellers have been forced from the road by the authorities, the thunderous call to arms of the house revolution has dimmed and become mainstream, the Criminal Justice Acthas made raving a criminal offence; what happened ?
And where did it come from, this youth movement which, largely unseen to the majority and it's eyes and ears, the media, involved hundreds of parties and festivals across the UK and hundreds of thousands of revellers, criss-crossing the rural backlanes in a genuine celebration of life outside the restrictions and barriers of humdrum weekend culture ? The adrenalin, the roadblocks, the dawns, the ecstacy, the service stations, the lack of sleep. All driven by the imported four-four beat of house. For such an extraordinary series of events, re-defining so many accepted faiths, little has been extrapolated or explained.
Compare this with the torrent of interpretation following the social upheaval in California in the sixties, or the Punk phenomena in seventies London. History must out. Emerging from a series of disparate strands, the impact of house and what became (unfortunately) known as rave (rave was always a sad term but... ) has been enormous, becoming in fact Britain's dominant youth culture in the 90's. Techno, garage, jungle, drum and bass, hardcore, ambient, the list of mutations is endless, reverberating everywhere from council estates to boarding schools from yuppie docklands to rural middle England.
This story has two origins, one musical, the other cultural. The convoluted musical trail began in Chicago in the mid 80's, when Frankie Knuckles span the available mix plates with his own creations and threw in a drum machine, and a genuine revolution was unleashed, leading via Detroit, New York, Ibiza and London to the world. In the UK, specifically London and Manchester, these strands came together over the miserable English winter of 1987 and created the concept which still carries such perjorative weight- Acid House. Aceeeid ! From Shoom to Castlemoreton, the very English apparition of house carried all before it.
Allying with the possibilities thrown up by the mid-80's warehouse parties of Dirtbox and Shake and Finger Pop amongst others, the hungry young entrepreneurs of the capital combined the organisational skills of the black-tie ball with the irresistable musical idiom coming across the pond and created Sunrise, Biology, the Orbital raves and the biggest media scare since Punk. Arriving back from Ibiza, those in the vanguard made London a hotbed of smiley-life, drawing inspiration from the truly eclectic sets of Alfredo, Cesar and Pipi, long nurtured in the tolerance of Balearea. From Shoom to the Trip, from Spectrum to Land of Oz, those who were to become the high priests of British house began here: Oakenfold, Rampling,Holloway, Weatherall. Rave On. So new and exciting was this explosion, so explicit in it's reference to 60's California, so loved up and awash with chemical fuel, that the hip mags spokeof "the Second Summer of Love", whilst the tabloids reacted in their usual blind fulminating frenzy.
'Ecstacy Airport - 11,000 youngsters go drug crazy at Britain's biggest ever Acid House Party"
(TheSun June 26 1989)"
" Triumph for Acid Police"
(Daily Express October 9 th 1989)"
"Deadly rave that leads to the grave"
(Daily Star January 1992)
As the rest of the UK caught on, as the Hacienda got on one, as huge illegal parties mushroomed across the North and South of England, notably Blackburn in the North West of England, as the press recoiled from such refusal to play by the entertainment rules, the inevitable slowly happened. The greedy moved in, the beauty of the dream faded, the black, soulful roots of house began to be assaulted by more violent, acerbic forms which ended in Hardcore, painful flyers and £30 admission to sad leisure centres. The time, late 1989.
The revelatory had been assimilated and corrupted. And so the creative, the idealists, the believers, moved again. A new head emerged on the hydra, seeking the freedom this movement had so beseechingly promised. In the fields. And here is where the second strand of this story winds ineluctably with the first. In the fields, in the free festivals of the hippies and travellers, in the ancient fields of England, so long denied to the landless. The hippies, for want of a better word, long marginalised, reactionary in their deliberate harking back to the 60's and beyond, yet still seeking some kind of heaven, and still with an endemic love of freedom, anarchy and, in some quarters, illegality.
Where their story begins depends on who you ask. For Fraser Clarke, long time zippie and counter culture figure, it began with the tension between the farmers and the hunter-gatherers in the very ancient past. Certainly from the tenth century onwards the land of Britain has been owned by the very few . Still is. Over 86 % of England is owned by less than 10 % of the population. Many of the idealistic hippies who appeared in the late 60's and 70's looked back to the England of Arthurian legend, of the mythical Albion, and saw the truly iniquitous ownership and access to the land. They recalled the Diggers and their valiant attempts to save some land for all in the mid seventeenth century, when the despoilation and division of the countryside became total, leaving only sparse common land for the people.With this in mind, the counterculture took it's cue from the huge festivals of America which emerged from the hippy explosion of 1967 and lead to the vast Woodstock and the Gathering of the Tribes' at Monterey and the rest of the California festivals. In 1970 the first attempt at a British free festival, Phun City (this Ph was, bizarrely, to crop up sixteen years later in very different circumstances in Chicago) was organised by the radical underground magazine 'International Times' in Worthing, Essex. Various events followed, including the storming of the 1971 Isle of Wight Festival (not free) where the fences were torn down a la Woodstock (which also was not, remember, intended to be free) in a burst of radical idealism.
The free festival idea really germinated with Windsor Free of 1972, held in Windsor Park, right under the nose of the symbolic head of the British establishment, the Queen. From small acorns. In addition to it's American cousins, these early events were influenced by the very English tradition of the horse and craft fayres which stretched back to the Middle Ages. The first festival attracted around 3,000 people, the second in 1973 around 10,000. The third Windsor Free, following strenuous leafletting, attracted 20,000 souls of all persuasions and was invaded and dispersed, in a harbinger of future developements, by Thames Valley police. That year, 1974, also brought the first happening at what would become the focal point of this movement, Stonehenge, the most symbolic monument to a pagan past in Britain, indeed Europe. Occuring right round the megalitich stones, these huge gatherings continued for a decade, attracting up to 100,000 people at the peak of 1983/4.
Simultaneously, in 1976 Punk rock detonated itself into the public sphere, locked into the paradoxically destructive yet positive wake of the Sex Pistols. Hippies were now to be sneered at, speed replaced pot and acid as the drug of choice. The hippy movement was marginalised for years, the free festivals shrank, the idealism of the early seventies replaced by a scathing anger. Punk birthed many new things, fiery independence, the freedom to express through xerox fanzines, the active rather than the passive. And yet, in yet another of the cultural convolutions which so characterise this story, in the early eighties a strand of punk allied itself with the hippy ideals of the past. In bands such as Crass, Poison Girls and Flux of Pink Indians, a new sensibility emerged, set in stark, furious monochrome against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher's ascendancy, bringing as it did mass unemployment, the government sponsered brutality of the Miner's Strike and the xenophonic media onslaught of the Falkland's War. Now the apparently irreverent playful abuse of the Union Jack in 1977 seemed startlingly tame. This ultra-oppostional blast of anger, declaring "There is no Authority but Yourself " and "Fuck Authority ", with stencilled record sleeves (introducing the "Pay No More Than" idea), stark backdrops, brutal cacaphonic anti-melodies caught a nerve of the times, and Crass in particular sold hundreds of thousands of records and became heroes despite their best intentions.
Those still carrying the torch for the attempted idyllism of the early 70's retreated in the face of urban decay, and it's voice of despair, punk. Some set up utopian communities such as Tipi Valley in Wales. Some, crucially; bought old buses, coaches and caravans and began to travel from festival to festival, always centred on Stonehenge at the Summer Solstice (June 21st, the begining of summer, the axis of the seasons, and the twin of December 21st's Winter Solstice). A seasonal summer calender had established itself by 1979, beginning in May via Horseshoe Pass, Stonehenge, Ashton Court, Ingleston Common, via various other sites to Wales in mid -September.
Those that spent the summer months in vehicles began to call themselves travellers, and the more cosmic, New Age travellers ( a term which most travellers detest ). By 1982, this itinerent mass had christened themselves "the Peace Convoy" when they began to move en masse, extending the season to the Peace camps of Molesworth and Greenham Common over the winter, thus becoming permenantly on the move.This entourage, inevitably, began to attract elements unversed in the ways of the road, and here began a tension which was to reach a head many years later. Meanwhile, up until 1984, that most totemic of all years, Stonehenge Free Festival remained the centre of attraction, and here, if anywhere, the barriers separating hippies, travellers, punks, bikers and hell's angels began to disappear, at least in appearance. It became an act of sartorial skill to know the difference.
The convoy began to attract the ire of the authorities, the blatant anarchy of Stonehenge had become too vast, too blatant for this most power crazed of governments. In a famous aside to the Tory faithful, Margaret Thatcher declared " I am only too delighted to make life difficult for such things as hippy convoys. And we naively thought that the government was supposed to care for all it's citizens. Behind this rabble-rhetoric lay the real intentions of the state, to crush this way of life, more specifically it's spearhead, Stonehenge. And so early in 1985 the government and the police, behind the veneer of the National Trust who in effect own Stonehenge, acted to proscribe the festival. During June 1985, using tactics learned during the militarised Miner's Strike, Stonehenge became an occupied zone. For a radius of five miles aroud the stones, fortified barriers were erected by the police and quite possibly the army. Thousands of officers from up to eight forces were drafted in. Blocked from the stones by the full weight of the establishment, the Convoy attempted to push through and were infamously shunted into a beanfield and attacked without mercy by police officers in full riot gear. The majority of the vehicles were smashed to pieces. People, including pregnant women and children were dragged through broken windows and beaten sensless. Dozens of severe injuries were inflicted in an official orgy of destruction which veteran TV reporter Kim Sabido described as the worst police riot he had ever witnessed in years of globe trotting. This festival, begun innocently as a celebration of ancient culture, had becomethe focus of the state's vicious hatred of all but the rigid, passive way of new Tory conformism. From this point onwards, the momentum which had propelled the travelling community was shattered. Bereft of focus, the next four years saw ever more futile attempts to reach Stonehenge, with no respite from the authorities.
The razor wire stayed. The other festivals continued, Avon Free Festival over the May bank holiday, Torpedo Town, Ribblehead, away from the state's eager eye. The blatant disregard for conventional life of the travellers provoked a now annual media hysteria, often fuelled by TV pictures of mobile social security units visiting sites containing people who clearly had zero intention of looking for work. During these years 85-89 the festival circuit attracted huge numbers of the new urban dispossed, creating yet more disparate sub strata; the crusties and the brew crew bent on self annhilation and total nihilsm, the weekenders who drove out from the city for a spot of camping and drug taking and, lo and behold, the new urban revellers, charged by the new irresistible beat of house but dissatisfied with the bankrupcy of the commercial raves and the two o'clock curfew of the clubs. Ravers.
And here, born of a tortuous cycle of youth cross-fertilisation spanning two decades, the twin legacies of Chicago and Mr Smiley and Woostock and Stonehenge finally met. And exploded. Perhaps some radical souls had thrown free parties during the Summer of Love, but not like this. There was no real demand, the euphoria of those early pay parties was enough, the entry price was no object to the often affluent attendees. At this point the travelling community knew little of house, it was a world away from the band setup still dominating festivals. Regarded at best as irrelevant disco and more likely as an affront to the legacy of Hawkwind, the alliance of acid house and travellers was a very uneasy one until 1991. The popular festival bands of the time, Culture Shock, Osric Tentacles, 2000 DS, and more particularly their sound crews would recoil in horror at the idea of twin Technics and a box a records replacing their live efforts. Remember the 'Keep Music Live' campaign ? But how could these bands, on shoddy equipment and often marginal skill, compete with this four/four hypnotic beat slowly replacing it ? The first signs of this new hybrid possibly appeared at the Glastonbury festival of 1989, and the dust-battered chaos of Treeworgy Tree Fayre of the same year (both pay events).
London crews arrived with pumping systems, reflated the dayglo frenzy of Shoom (itself, ironically a legacy of hippiedom), and blew the bands into oblivion. What four individuals can compete with twelve hours, twenty four hours, three days, of crafted tracks, composed on computers and relentlessly binding a crowd in abandoned unity.
Combine this with another key element, and the new lighting technology available, and you have a truly transcendental situation. That other key element, inevitably, was chemical. Ecstacy. MDMA, or what approximated for it, was the binding spirit of this new community.
The story of E is well documented, invented in 1912 by the German pharmacuetical giant Merck, it's properties lay undiscovered until the early sixties when certain psychologists retreived it from history's medicine chest and began to use it as a tool for personal and relational discovery. Noted for it's properties of empathy, of dream like clarity, it became what speed was to the Mods and Punks, acid to the hippies, heroin to the decadence of Warhol's New York. It may have taken the more old school travellers years to be seduced by this revolutionaty new music, drug and outlook, but, one by one, seduced they were.
By Castlemorton, three short years later, there were at least eight massive house sound systems. To find a band would have required considerable dedication. In that short frenetic time span, house became the soudtrack of the festival. Glastonbury 1990 was, for many, a turning point. Tonka, probably the first house sound system in England, originating in Cambridge in the very early acid days, played in the free section of the commercial festival which existed until 1991 ( when dance music and travellers were effectively banned ), with DiYfurther down the drag. For the first time at a major festival, travellers united with their urban counterparts, utilising their generators, buses, marquees and knowledge with the systems, decks, Dj's and music of the dance possees. For the rest of 1990 this experiment took root and blossomed.
Across the South of England (always the stronghold of the travelling community), innumerable free parties occurred, with systems such a Sweat, CircusWarp, DiY, Circus Normal and many others defining the genre. Away from the major festivals where much hostility still ensued from the old school, fields, warehouses, barns and plain old fields were utilised.
NO MONEY WAS CHARGED, an idea the authorites could never come to terms with. Maybe a bucket was passed round, but this rarely covered the expenses incurred. Locations were spread by word of mouth or by the use of meeting points. The sound sytems, the decks, the DJ's would somehow arrive in the same place, often there would be no cover, often no lights. That was irrelevant. What mattered was the music, and more importantly, the people. At those early parties, suffused with energy and idealism, something happened which is probably unique. Hippy and punk, and mod and even teddy boys had consisted of tribal elements, the defining point had been exclusivity. If you didn't dress like this, you were the enemy (or with hippies, straight) and therefore by definition excluded.
In this scene, under the stars, in some far-flung corner of some county, the dancefloor partners came from every social strata. Young hipsters, fresh from the local club, and wearing hundreds of pounds worth of clobber could sit on a traveller's bus whose total possesions were probably worth less than the raver's footwear. Strange, forty-odd year old hippy veterans could dance next to ravishing young things clad in designer wear. The barriers came down; the dancefloor and the music the great leveller. And what feeling, when all is said and done, can match being in a field at sunrise with several hundred, or thousand, like minded souls ? And so this continued throughout the winter of 1990, into the summer of 1991.
For the first time the major festivals appeared not so much as hippy events but akin to the great orbital raves of 1988. Here, indeed, was the true spiritual heir to the Summer of Love. The commercial rave scene could no longer genuinely claim to represent love, unity or spiritual celebration. Chipping Sodbury, the eventual site of the Avon Free Festival of 1991, featured various house systems and was really the first free festival so explicit in it's reveration of dance music. The antagonisms many travellers felt towards these foreign new sounds, also began to become apparent. Fair point, if you have to live on a site with a baby, five days of hugely amplified house is probably not ideal. However, it is undeniable that the influx of this culture breathed new life into an atrophying festival scene. The Avon Free in 1987, for example, had been without joy, a paean to negativity.
At least the excitement was back, and weren't festivals always about tolerence and freedom anyway ? During the winter of 1991, increasing numbers of youth were affected by this new idea. Dozens of new sound systems formed that year, including Spiral Tribe, some very different in their approach to others. There were, maybe, two main models. There were the out and out techno systems who would play for days on end, attempt entry to all the big festivals, uncomprimising in their music and attitude. This is most clearly exemplified by Spiral Tribe, who were to achieve the highest profile of all the free party systems with their rallying cry of " Make Some Fuckin Noise".
Originating in London, and adopting an Crass-style quasi-military approach, the Spirals would brook no surrender, attempting to attack the beast at it's heart a year later by staging a rave at Canary Wharf. The second model were those for whom the party, and the system, came first, and when berated by travellers or police would sometimes shut down their systems, disappear in the night and crop up intact the next week. For these systems the big festivals changed from celebrations to embittered zones, and so began to throw smaller parties in the fields and quarries of obscure counties.
A party is not necessarily bigger the better. Some legendary parties have been attended by only a hundred or two people, it is the atmosphere which is important, not the size, quality not quantity. Outdoor parties are clearly in direct opposition to that great British institution, the weather. Yet even in the severest conditions, the party continued. Rain, sub zero temperatures, even snow did not halt the fun.
By the spring of 1992, all the elements were in place for some major action. Huge free parties had taken place across the South, especially centred around Oxford and the Wiltshire area. In Luton Exodus had brought true ethical substance to the rave machine, setting up a real self-supporting community and a farm, genuine mutual aid, in addition to the parties. Police seizure brought a spontaneous demonstration by the supposedly apolitical ravers; 4000 of them. The whole of radical culture was slowly becoming locked into an wave of positivity and action, which would lead to the dedication of the eco-protesters and the anti-road activists. And the driving force of this movement were the parties and festivals which managed to combine ethics and priciples with sheer unbridled hedonism.
Much of mainstream British culture was shifting. Madchseter, exemplified by the Happy Mondays, typified the new attitude, fuelled by massive increases in drug use, and the new notion of the 24 hour party people. The subversive nature of this new hedonism is clear. Work, marriage, authority becomes irrelevant in the face of such behaviour. And so we arrive in May 1992. D-Day. Over the first weekend of May of that year, a party took place at Lechlade, Glocestershire. It made page three of some of the quality papers, but generally escaped unnoticed by the media. Not so the tens of thousands of people who could sniff something in the air. Word spread like wildfire. Avon Free Festival, last weekend of the month. Be there.
A member of DiY relates how the phone started ringing on Tuesday and until departure Friday morning, would ring every single time it was replaced. People spent two days trying to get through. News of a site arrived Thursday night; Castlemorton Common, Gloucestershire. Be there.
The turning point in free party history, 50,000 people turned up to occupy that common for a week. Although Chipping Sodbury exactly a year earlier had attracted 15,000 people, this was different. It made the front pages of every paper (see press) terrified the authorities and lead to the Criminal Justice Act. From that point onwards the festival circuit became militarised zones, with thousands of police often throwing roadblocks around large areas of the countryside.
At Laxton, Leicestershire over the solstice, access and departure from a very large festival was denied. The atmosphere there had changed, as it had at Torpedo Town, Hampshire, later in the summer, where a waste disposal factory was gutted by fire. The halcyon days of the free party possees were, unbeknown at the time, over. Although hundreds of parties continued apace, and sound systems began to appear everywhere, they were in effect, in isolation.
Never again did all the participants in this synergetic revolution come together. Blamed for Castlemoreton Spiral Tribe faced a huge legal battle costing five million pounds and resulting a year later in total aquittal. Several allies of DiY wrere arrested and tried following Laxton, again dragged out for maximum effect, and resulting in part aquittal and part prison. Charges: conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, surely one of the most nebulous charges in English law.Since 1992, there has been no let up. Here and now, in 1996, there are probably more parties than ever before. The legacy of the dream lives on. Many of the highest profile systems have been forced abroad, mobile, still out there in Prague, or Rimini or Berlin, so endemic has the stranglehold of intolerance in Britain become. Desert Storm and Smokescreen have risked Bosnia and civil war for the sake of parties and exporting some amelioration.
The concept of the truly free party has been exported further on a global scale. Goa, San Francisco, Dallas,Thailand, Sydney: in all these places the seeds of this peculiarly British freedom have taken root. Despite the strenuous intentions of the press, the courts, the police, the government; the parties continue. Even as the screw is turned and raving, amongst many other things, has been made a crime, so the ingenious nature of youth and it's inexhaustable ability to regenerate, redefine and renew will find new ways of expression and unification. In the words of one of the Blackburn parties, "Live the Dream "
where did ya come across it ? Or was it penned by yr fair hands ?
