Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  In the event, the subcultural energies fermented by the Tribe slip out of their control: the ‘maddest summer’ peaks too early, at Castlemorton. And Spiral Tribe take all the credit and all the blame. On one hand, thirteen members are charged with a variety of offences including causing a public nuisance contrary to common law. (Skilled propagandists, the Spirals twist the phrase into ‘public new-sense’.) But on the other hand, all the music rags and national newspapers want to talk to them, and they get signed to dance label Big Life, whose owner Jaz Summers is convinced that this crusty-raver malarkey is the next punk rock, with Spiral Tribe as its Sex Pistols.

  With corporate money at their disposal, the Tribe hire a massive articulated lorry and a 23 K sound-system for their next and most daring confrontation with the authorities. Given the exclusion zone around Stonehenge, they decide to up the stakes and hold the Summer Solstice mega-rave right in the heart of the capital. Sound System City will be built at Mudchute Farm – a public park, in the East London area known as the Isle of Dogs, that’s rumoured to be situated above a ley-line. The rave will be illluminated by the flashing light on top of the ill-fated Canary Wharf tower. Part of the unsuccessful Docklands development scheme, and built to be Britain’s new financial centre, Canary Wharf is a symbol of Tory hubris, of late eighties ‘boom’ economics gone bust. But Sound System City itself becomes a symbol of Spiral Tribe’s own hubris: it’s the first and biggest in a series of defeats that results in the ‘maddest summer’ petering out ignominiously.

  11.45 p.m., Saturday, 21 June: my posse arrive too early. There’s only one other car in the vicinity, its back seat crammed to the roof with bottles of Evian: obviously the owners are budding entrepreneurs looking to slake ravers’ thirst. We drift across the eerily calm and deserted field, and run into a reconnaisance team from the Tribe on the other side, busy working out how to break the lock on the gate and drive their monstertruck on to Mudchute Farm. Brusquely, they order us to disappear, lest local residents get suspicious. We retreat to a friend’s house for an hour, then set out again. By this point, the major access roads into the Isle of Dogs are blocked by police, who are turning back anybody who doesn’t live in the area. Hundreds of frustrated ravers mill about on the pavement, trying to muster enough courage to rush the barricades. The rave has kicked off, we learn; over a thousand people are already in the area, partying their socks off, but nobody else can get through to Mudchute.

  There’s one faint hope: the two main roads are sealed, but there’s a pedestrian-only tunnel under the Thames that connects the Docklands area to Greenwich and the rest of South East London. We hightail it across the river, but we’re too late: the boys in blue have cordoned off the entrance. ‘Rush ’em,’ says a crustie, sniggering at the druggy double-entendre, but nobody does. The muffled thud-thud-boom of the Spiral’s distant sound-system taunts and tantalizes us. Spirits flagging, we cross the Thames again and navigate a circuitous route through the backstreets of North East London in an attempt to work our way down to the Isle of Dogs, all the while cursing the poor strategic aforethought of the Spirals in choosing a site accessible via only two main roads, both of which are easily blocked. Around daybreak, we get within a half-mile of Mudchute. Looking at the map, we realize it might be possible to cross the Docklands Light Railway and get to the rave. Just as we’re looking for an egress, a private security firm van drives up. Defeated, we beat a retreat. Later, we learn that the police easily dispersed the rave around 3.30 a.m., with no arrests; some hardcore Spiral-types have headed north to a free party in Leicestershire.

  Other abortive raves follow throughout the summer of 1992; the police intelligence network is too efficient, local farmers spread manure on their fields, and the desperately unhappy travellers are shunted back and forth across county lines. One Spiral rave in Surrey, supposedly on private land and at the owner’s invitation, sounds like a good bet, but the local police quash it anyway. The result is a glum convoy of some fifty cars, which – prevented from reaching any of the back-up sites – winds up on a picturesque stone quay facing the English Channel. The sense of anti-climax is crushing, and as we drive back to London, I resolve never to go on another Spiral rave. Amazingly, my friend sets out again at 8 a.m. when she learns that the Spirals have finally pulled off a free party after all, only to find a gaggle of red-eyed crusties crashed out on a beach around a pathetic Tandy hi-fi system.

  Actually, I do attend one more Spiral party, in the winter of 1992. The location is a derelict Inland Revenue depot in a grim area of North West London. This is the anti-Castlemorton, totally devoid of midsummer-night’s-dreaminess. The dancehall is basically an industrial hangar, just like at a big commercial rave, but with no facilities whatsoever: nowhere to sit, nothing to drink, no toilet (people piss on the wooden floorboards in an adjoining room), barely any lights. Five months after Castlemorton, the music seems to have gotten harsher and more punitive; one Spiral-affiliated outfit plays a set of undanceably fast, stiffly regimented, metallic beats, which sounds like ball-bearings rattling around in a concrete pipe. As the matt-grey mid-winter dawn filters weak and sickly through the skylight, exposing some seriously haggard E-casualties around us, the consensus is: this is the end of an era.

  Criminal Injustice

  With the Castlemorton trial looming over their heads, Spiral Tribe maintained a high media profile for a while, putting out a series of EPs like ‘Breach The Peace’ and ‘Forward The Revolution’. Stymied in Britain on the free-party front, another faction of the Tribe – who bitterly disapproved of the record deal with Big Life – moved to the Continent, where the police tended to be more tolerant. Like other traveller sound-systems, the Spirals roamed throughout the EC, bringing the ‘teknival’ – as they now called it – to Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and France. Here, the Tribe catalysed a Gallic free-party scene into being, and scored their greatest triumph in August 1995 when they instigated a twelve day rave gratuite on an Atlantic beach near Bayonne; because the site was owned by the military, the local police were powerless to intervene. In Bologna, where squat-culture and anarchism have deep roots, the Spirals hooked up with fellow exiles the Mutoid Waste Company to throw techno fiestas. And in Berlin, they acquired a Mig fighter plane and other ex-Soviet military hardware – heavy (literally) symbols of the Spirals’ ‘nomadic war machine’ approach to throwing raves, but also useful ammunition in their long term strategy of making the parties more visually ‘competitive’.

  Seb and other music-making Spirals eventually settled in Paris, where they founded the Network 23 label and churned out trippy, high-velocity tracks somewhere between gabba and acid house. After struggling to operate their own totally independent pan-European distribution network, Network 23 eventually signed a distribution deal – an ideological lapse which incensed Mark. By this point, the guru had officially left the Tribe and was running his own Stormcore company, selling clothes and records. Unwilling to go on the road in Europe, others in the Spiral milieu succumbed to drug abuse, becoming serious psychonauts (in the Tribal worldview, LSD and ketamine had long been regarded as altogether more hardcore than ‘fluffy’ Ecstasy), junkies, crackheads, or just members of ‘the Brew Crew’.

  After spending nearly two years and several million pounds on the trial, the Malvern authorities had failed to convict any of the Spirals. Meanwhile, the Conservative government had devised a whole bunch of new laws to ensure that an event of Castlemorton’s scale would never be repeated. These were presented to Parliament in the summer of 1994 as Part 5 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill. Alongside a host of pernicious extensions of police powers (the removal of the right to silence, arbitrary stop-and-search powers), Part 5 targeted squatters, travellers, illegal raves and free festivals.

  Defining a rave as a mere one hundred people playing amplified music ‘characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’, the Bill gave local police forces the discretionary power to harass gatherings as small as ten. If an
officer ‘reasonably believes’ the ten are setting up a rave, or merely waiting for one to start, he can order them to disperse; failure to comply is a crime punishable by a three month prison sentence or a £2,500 fine. Moreover, the police are granted the power to stop anyone who comes within a one mile radius of this potential rave and order them to proceed no further. Other provisions practically illegalize squatting, travelling, and ‘aggravated trespass’, a new offence aimed to thwart fox-hunt saboteurs and ‘eco-warrior’ activists (crustie types who defend nature spots from motorway construction, by living in the trees or even tunnels they dig under the site).

  A desperate attempt by a decrepit government to toughen up its image, the Criminal Justice Bill appealed to the most mean-spirited, intolerant side of the British mentality, a sort of internal xenophobia towards those who look and live differently. Underneath the bigotry lurked an undercurrent of resentment felt by many law-abiding, norm-obeying types vis-à-vis those who repudiate suburban slow-death and choose instead the open road. The fact that these anarcho-mystic dropouts had chosen to reject society, rather than simply been ejected from it like your regular ne’er do well, simply added insult to injury.

  Few people sympathized with the squatters and travellers, and fewer were prepared to defend them. With the Labour opposition in the House of Commons avoiding the issue for fear of appearing soft on crime, it fell to civil-liberties pressure-groups like Liberty, and to the ravers, travellers and squatters themselves to fight back with counter-propaganda and protest marches. On 1 May 1994, a fifteen thousand strong march, organized by SQUASH (Squatters Action for Secure Homes) and the Advance Party (a nationwide alliance of sound-systems), converged on Trafalgar Square. Despite chants like ‘Kill the Bill’ (a provocative pun linking the proposed laws and the Metropolitan Police, popularly known as ‘the Old Bill’) and the odd scuffle between coppers and drunken crusties, the event passed without incident. Bigger protests in July and October that year did result in some minor public disorder – clashes in Hyde Park and Park Lane, vandalism in Oxford Street – but nothing on the scale of the anti-Poll Tax riots of 1990.

  There were protest records, too: an EP called ‘Repetitive Beats’ by Retribution (a gaggle of dancefloor luminaries including members of The Drum Club, System 7 and Fun-Da-Mental), and Autechre’s ‘Anti’ EP, whose lead track ‘Flutter’ was programmed to have deliberately fitful rhythms, in order to bypass the CJB’s clause about ‘the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. (The record label advised DJs, however, to have ‘a lawyer and a musicologist present at all times to confirm the non-repetitive nature of the music in the event of police harassment’.) Both records testified to a widespread misapprehension amongst ravers that techno itself was about to be made illegal in all circumstances, not just at unlicensed parties. In a similar vein of pot-addled paranoia and delusory self-aggrandizement (‘Our music is a threat to the powers-that-be!!’), conspiracy-theorists alleged that Part 5 of the CJB was the government’s payback to the major brewers for their handsome contributions to the Conservative Party coffers; it was an attempt to kill Ecstasy culture (where alcohol is deemed passé) and to arrest the decline in pub profits by literally driving the youth back to drink.

  But all the campaigning, protest records, consciousness-raising and Big-Brother-Is-Coming scaremongering was to no avail. On 3 November 1994, The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was passed into law, and the crusty-raver ‘teknival’ scene quailed in anticipation of the clampdown.

  Part-Time Crusties

  And yet the scene didn’t die. One segment went further underground, throwing smaller, less spectacularly annoying parties, with the tacit tolerance of the police. And another faction of the scene went overground, in the form of licensed ‘festi-clubs’ like Whirl-Y-Gig, Club Dog and Sativa. Of these, Club Dog was the most significant, creating a milieu in which the original free-party revellers mingled with part-time crusties, non-aligned trance fans and recent converts from rock to techno. Taking place every Friday at the Sir George Robey in Finsbury Park, Club Dog had actually been a focus for London’s hippy/ punk proto-crustie scene (what organizer Bob Dog called ‘Warriors of the New Age’) as far back as 1988. For the first four years of its existence, the staples of the Dog’s soundtrack were acid rock, world music and dub reggae of the On U Sound stripe (Dub Syndicate, Suns of Arqua). Reflecting the impact of electronic music on the free festival scene, Club Dog gradually began to incorporate ‘live techno’ sets from bands like Orbital, Eat Static (the trance alter-ego of fusionoid festival faves Ozric Tentacles), Banco de Gaia, System 7 (featuring kosmik-rock guitar virtuoso Steve Hillage) and Psykick Warriors ov Gaia.

  Next came the massively successful monthly Megadog events, whose rock gig meets rave meets festival vibe offered punters a paying-but-cheap legal alternative to the outlawed free parties, and a haven for the embattled crusty counter-culture. Megadog then went on tour in the form of Midi Circus (named after the MIDI technology that allows samplers and sequencers to be synched up with live playing and non-digital instruments). The Planet Dog label followed, catering to a distinct crusty-techno sound that had emerged: bands like Optic Eye, Children of the Bong, Wizards of Twiddly, Tribal Drift, Zuvuya, Loop Guru and Transglobal Underground. Despite the use of ‘ethnodelic’ flavourings (didgeridoo-pulsations, world-music samples), crusty-tekno is ultra-Caucasian, often recalling those original trance-rock-turned-synth-pioneers Tangerine Dream.

  Coalescing at roughly the same time as the Megadog scene, Goa Trance was another compromised consolation for the utopian longings blocked by the Criminal Justice Act. The scene is named after a style of techno associated with Goa, an area on the South West Coast of India that’s about twice the size of London. Goa was a Portuguese colony right up until 1961, but almost as soon as India seized the territory back, another wave of European invaders arrived: hippies in search of a drug paradise, where you could live like a king for a few dollars a day and hashish was cheaper than cornflakes.

  By the late eighties, Goa had evolved into a dance-and-drug paradise. I first heard about Goa’s all-night freak-outs in the jungle and on the beaches from a friend’s brother in 1988. He told me that while the drug-in-vogue was LSD, the music wasn’t acid house yet but Euro-beat, electro-pop and gay Hi-NRG – Front 242, Skinny Puppy, Yello, the vocal-free dub mixes of tracks by New Order and Pet Shop Boys. With a glazed, flashback-look in his eyes, he told me of going to an ‘anti-rave’ thrown by some acid-fried psycho on a sloping promontory of granite, where the beats were hard as hell and a huge crack running down the middle of the rock made utterly real the possibility that you might ‘lose it’ on the dancefloor, forever. He told me of drug lords flying in from their offshore island havens, disembarking the helicopter with their coked-out supermodel-skinny girlfriends, haughty in the haute-est Euro couture. ‘You gotta go there,’ he urged breathlessly. ‘It’s the end of the journey, man. Apocalypse Now.’

  In the nineties, acid house and trance techno conquered Goa’s party scene, and the region quickly became commercialized and swamped by raver-tourists looking not for transcendental experience but for another Ibiza. Aghast, the serious ‘heads’ and spiritual seekers moved on, abandoning Goa’s most famous beaches – Anjuna, Vagator and Arambol – for more remote locations in India, or fleeing to Thailand (where the raves are called ‘frenzies’). At the same time, the Goa ‘vibe’ was filtering back to Europe (literally, when DJ – producer Sven Vath used a portable DAT-recorder to sample jungle atmospheres for his Accident in Paradise album) as a specific post-rave sound.

  Just as the Balearic craze during the first explosion of UK rave was an attempt to continue the fun had by British ravers in Ibiza after the holiday’s end, Goa Trance is a homage to a place that seems like heaven-on-earth, even to those who’ve never been. Goa has become a floating signifier for taking a permanent vacation from ordinary life. Non-coincidentally, Ibiza and Goa were both havens for hippies in the sixties. Even as Goa was being despoiled by tourism
, it was circulating – as a viral, ‘virtual’ presence – across the Western world. From London to Tel Aviv, Goa trance clubs offer a microcosmic version of the real thing.

  In 1996, Goa Trance exploded into media consciousness, with the rise of parties like Return to the Source, Spacehopper, Herbal Tea Party, labels like Dragonfly, Flying Rhino, TIP, Blue Room Released, and bands like Man With No Name, Mandra Gora, Earth Nation, Hallucinogen, Green Nuns of the Revolution, Moonweed, Prana. As with the real Goa, the scene’s drug of choice is acid far more than Ecstasy, and the LSD is supposed to be unusually pure and strong. Appropriately, the decor at Goa Trance events is psychotropic (lots of fluorescent, reflective and phosphorescent material), and the music is ornate and cinematic, full of arpeggiated synth-refrains and mandala-swirls of sound. Imagine New Age music with a metronomic pulse-beat; Giorgio Moroder’s Eurodisco infused with Eastern-promise and oriented around transcendental surge rather than Donna Summer-style pornotopian rapture. Speaking to DJ magazine, trance decktician Goa Gil talked of giving ‘youth in Babylon’ (the capitalist, consumerist West) ‘a higher transmission’; of dance as ‘an active meditation’. For all its cult of the mystic Orient, Goa Trance is sonically whiter-than-white. All the creativity is in the top level (melody and filigree), with not a lot going on in the rhythm section.

  The Goa Trance scene is a sort of deodorized, upmarket version of crusty-tekno, without the ragged-trousered poverty-chic. But both Megadog teknival culture and Goa Trance have a similar function. They are an inner-city surrogate for the pre-Criminal Justice Act festivals and free parties, attempts to resurrect a lost golden age on much reduced premises.

  Guerrilla Parties

  The golden age may be long gone, but free parties continue to take place on a much smaller scale, often in desolate, unlovely inner-city locations as opposed to the pastoral heart of England. Sound-systems like Disorganization, Liberator, Chiba City Sound, Silverfish, Jiba, Immersion, Virus, Desert Storm, UNSound-systems, Vox Populi and Turbo Unit persevere despite police harassment.