by Andy Roberts
During that period, the music scene in the Beatles’ hometown had centred round a club called Eric’s. The club was notorious, as much for the drugs which could be obtained there as it was for the new music emanating from its tiny stage. Journalist, Andrew Hussey remembered Eric’s and the role LSD played as: “The atmosphere was exciting, often drenched in LSD (then the most unfashionable drug in the UK).”3
Unfashionable or not LSD, as it had done with so many other musicians, provided Cope with a muse. As the single “Reward” inched its way up the pop charts Cope was rehearsing his band for a tour of America’s East Coast. In the studios, “rehearsals came to a stop, as Gary and I would be overcome by the power of the acid that we constantly ingested.” During these sessions the Teardrop Explodes were summoned to appear on Top of the Pops, Britain’s most prestigious music showcase. On the way to the show Cope took LSD: “The acid made us happy and nice. We gushed around the place like inbreds at a New England dinner party.” Cope repeated the Pops-on-acid routine with his next single, “Passionate Friend”, once again managing to perform live magnificently whilst tripping heavily.4
In January 1982, Cope met a young American teenager called Courtney Love, the daughter of Hank Harrison, one of the Grateful Dead’s inner circle, and future wife of doomed Nirvana front man, Kurt Cobain. Love was no stranger to LSD, having taken it when she was four years old. Knowing Cope’s liking for acid, she had her father send large quantities of the drug through the post from America. “About six packages of acid and MDA, each package containing 200 tablets had arrived at my home with my name on the envelopes ...”5
The form in which LSD appeared was also changing. Although LSD soaked on blotting paper had been available since the Fifties, by the Seventies the preferred form of the drug tended to be microdot. Operation Julie chemists Richard Kemp and Andy Munro had refined the production of potent microdot LSD to a fine art and other chemists followed in their wake. Microdot LSD had many advantages. It was easy to store and transport, in bottles, bags or between layers of sellotape and it did not easily degrade by repeated handling. But changes in manufacturing techniques and the 1986 American law, which linked sentences for LSD to the weight of the carrying agent, meant that LSD on blotting paper – much lighter than microdots – became the most widely available form of the drug.
Blotter LSD was initially available on plain or coloured sheets, hand ripped into doses. Enterprising LSD manufacturers developed the process, each production run of LSD soaked on to sheets of perforated blotter printed with a different design. A full sheet of blotter contained approximately a thousand doses. However, blotter LSD was difficult to store and transport and constant handling and exposure to sunlight could easily degrade the LSD content.
The free festival movement, building on its success in the Seventies was, in the early Eighties, massive and going from strength to strength. There was now an established circuit of annual events and it was possible for the committed traveller to start in late spring with the May Hill festival and spend the entire summer at festivals or parties, culminating in September with the Psilocybin Fair in mid-Wales. If the much-vaunted LSD revolution was anywhere it lay at the heart of free festival culture whose anarchy, acceptance and desire to live a life not defined by laws or materialism seemed to be the living embodiment of the psychedelic experience.
LSD was widely available at all these events and was becoming more widespread. People were now going to free festivals as much to stock up on LSD as to take it for pleasure. Many of the free festival veterans were living permanently on the road and for some, selling drugs defrayed the costs of their itinerant lifestyles. Small groups and bands who formed the core of the festivals, such as the Tibetan Ukranian Mountain Troupe (TUMT), a Prankster-like surreal hippie travelling circus, were certainly involved in the distribution of LSD at festivals. Arriving at Stonehenge in 1981 their Book of the Road notes: “I’ve just gone for a little walk round the site and sold out of lysergic gasket paper.” 6 The term “lysergic gasket paper” referred to the fact that “the acid would arrive on site as plain A4 sheets of impregnated dark green cartridge paper that looked a bit like gasket paper so were stashed in the tool box with the spanners and such, the printed fascia sheets would come in with somebody else and the two would be stuck together on site.”7 Groups like the TUMT practiced what they preached and put enormous amounts of energy and effort into ensuring free festivals were places where the psychedelic lifestyle could be lived to the full.
But the halcyon days of taking acid at festivals were coming under threat and with it the original ethos of free festivals. These events, particularly the Stonehenge festivals, had represented a kind of hippie pilgrimage, with the taking of LSD a crucial part of the psychedelic quest. Now heroin, cocaine, amphetamines and barbiturates were becoming increasingly prevalent at festivals. The rapid spread of hard drugs within the free festival culture, 1982–84, gave the police a reason to prevent or to disrupt them. Older travellers did what they could to maintain the vision of the early festivals. But more and more unemployed young people, driven out of squats or bored with low paid jobs, were becoming attracted to the travelling life, squatting in the winter, going to festivals in the summer. Many of these new travellers were only interested in getting as stoned as possible in what they saw was an accepting environment. Free festival veterans did their best to be inclusive of these newcomers, many of whom were LSD users keen to become part of the traveller’s subculture. But many others failed to understand the history and culture that the original hippie travelling community were rooted in and frictions inevitably arose.
The Operation Julie trial had alerted criminal elements to the potential for huge profits, with minimal risk, to be made from drug trafficking. They saw the free festivals as a ready-made unregulated market place in which to ply their trade. Don Aitken of Release reflected on the beginning of the end when he commented: “I think I first realised Stonehenge was doomed when (I think it was 1982) signs began to appear on the main drag advertising drugs in weight quantities. People weren’t buying drugs to take to the festival – they were coming specifically to buy drugs to take back home to distribute.”8
Although harder drugs were increasingly available, the ethos of producing high quality LSD continued. In some cases the attention to quality and detail extended even to the packaging the LSD arrived in. At the Stonehenge free festival in the mid-Eighties Glenda Pescado remembers, “the most beautifully packaged acid I’d ever seen turned up. Samurai acid, each 100 or so blotters came in its own matt black wallet with an embossed logo on it. Each blotter was different white print on black paper with a gold lining, wonderful stuff.”9
Increasing numbers of people living on the road and moving between festivals, coupled with the constant harrying by the police led to hundreds of travellers’ vehicles forming a convoy. This quickly became known as the Peace Convoy or the Hippie Convoy and attracted considerable media coverage and the opprobrium of local and national politicians. The British government invested considerable time and money in tracking and infiltrating the free festival movement with the intent of bringing it to a halt at any cost.
The 1984 Stonehenge festival represented the peak of the free festival movement and was the last major event before the police destroyed the Convoy. Over 100,000 people attended the month long happening, and signs advertising the price of different types of LSD were openly displayed on tents, caravans and buses. That Stonehenge and the free festivals were predicated on LSD use is reflected in a survey conducted among 500 festival attendees. Seventy per cent of respondents claimed to have regularly taken LSD and or magic mushrooms, and those who also described themselves as holding pagan beliefs had taken psychedelics most often. Half of those surveyed stated they intended to take LSD while at the festival.
The final, carefully planned, confrontation between state and travellers came on 1 June 1985. A large convoy attempting to establish camp at Stonehenge well in advance of the festival’s start were
shepherded by police, in paramilitary riot outfits, into a field about 11 km from the ancient monument. There they systematically attacked and beat the would-be festivalgoers, including pregnant women, and destroyed their vehicles. Independent Television Network journalist, Kim Sabido was present and was horrified at what he saw: “What we – the ITN camera crew and myself as a reporter – have seen in the last thirty minutes here in this field has been some of the most brutal police treatment of people that I’ve witnessed in my entire career as a journalist. The number of people who have been hit by policemen, who have been clubbed whilst holding babies in their arms, in coaches around this field, is yet to be counted ... There must surely be an enquiry after what has happened today.”10
Veteran traveller, Sid Rawle believes the debacle could have been avoided if certain elements within the Peace Convoy had not been desperate to get the festival site, regardless of the consequences: “They all had to get the drugs in and buried.”11
The event, known as the Battle of the Beanfield, caused the convoy to scatter. Many travellers moved abroad. Others, now deprived of their income, vehicles and community came off the road or became mired in filthy camps where hard drugs slowly corroded the last vestiges of the free festival vision Bill Dwyer, Wally Hope and Sid Rawle had worked so hard to bring to fruition.
A year later, on 3 June 1986, Home Secretary Douglas Hurd described the hippie Peace Convoy as: “A band of medieval brigands who have no respect for law and order and the rights of others.”12 A few days later Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher announced the Conservative government would be “only too delighted to do anything we can to make life difficult for such things as ‘hippie convoys.’”13 The glory days of the free festivals were over.
But the smashing of the hippie convoy did little to upset the manufacture and distribution of LSD. There was still a huge demand for the drug and it was working its unique magic on a new influx of young people who were fresh to the free festival scene. These individuals started off in the traditional counter culture but went on to develop their own alternative lifestyle, eventually assisting in bringing new and old LSD cultures together through new music and new drugs. The story of Monkey, from south London, illustrates perfectly how the new generation took to acid.
While at the Glastonbury festival in 1981, the teenaged Monkey paid £1.50 for his first LSD trip. It was on a small square of blotting paper depicting a black star on a red background. The low price, only five years after the events of Operation Julie, demonstrates how quickly new LSD manufacturers filled the gap left by Kemp and Munro. The authorities’ claim they had smashed LSD distribution in Britain had proved to be a hollow boast. LSD appealed to Monkey and he continued to use it as his involvement with free festivals intensified. He began to buy larger quantities of LSD, mainly from one of the regular free festival bands who sold LSD to help finance their lifestyle: “Most of the travellers on the convoy financed their travelling by selling cannabis, speed and acid at the free festivals or from their squats during winter.”14
Eventually, Monkey’s personal use of LSD morphed into dealing. Through his contacts, Monkey was able to buy LSD in quantity, a thousand doses costing in the region of £600. He would occasionally sell trips single or in small numbers for £2–£5 each but mainly sold the LSD wholesale at £700 for 1000 doses of blotter LSD. This represented a 16 per cent mark up, hardly the sort of huge profits the media and police suggest is made by LSD dealers.
Selling LSD to others, whether in single doses or large quantities, carries with it a degree of moral responsibility. The LSD dealer knows he or she is selling a substance that can instantly change the course of someone’s existence. Being aware of this, Monkey “... only sold to good friends who I knew could handle it. I never sold to strangers I did not know. If I sold in bulk, I did not feel any guilt. I thought I was doing a good service for all the people wanting acid. I had had bad trips and was still taking them.” Monkey’s personal belief about LSD is clear, his reason for making the drug widely available was motivated by more than just profit: “Acid is something everyone should experience at least once in their life.”15
Monkey’s firsthand experience of how LSD was used and distributed at free festivals underscored the significance and centrality of the drug to that movement: “Acid was for sale at every free festival I went to, the music was very acid orientated. Most of the free festivals were probably financed through acid sales the bands and people involved made. The bands who I knew played for nothing but made their money from selling acid. Acidheads like me knew which bands to approach for acid at the free festivals.”16
With free festivals almost driven out of existence and many hippie travellers having now relocated to the more liberal countries of France and Spain, the media and government needed a new moral panic to replace LSD. They soon found it, but so did tens of thousands of Britain’s young people. The “new” drug, Ecstasy, was actually older than LSD, having been first synthesised in 1912. It was used initially as a slimming drug, and eventually found favour, as did LSD, as an effective tool in psychotherapy. From the early Eighties it had been widely used as a recreational drug in America, with increasing amounts being brought back to Britain.
Ecstasy made its appearance on the free festival scene long before it became a favourite with young people in clubs and raves. The Tibetan Ukranian Mountain Troupe’s Glenda Pescado recalls: “In 1982 someone turned up at Stonehenge festival with an A4 sheet of pink blotters with little flying saucers on them, saying this is synthetic mescaline, MDMA, of course the term Ecstasy hadn’t been coined at that point.” 17
Ecstasy, also known as E and MDMA, the initials of its chemical formula (3, 4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine hydrochloride) is a mild psychedelic. Characteristically Ecstasy causes feelings of empathy, love and compassion in those who use it. However, Ecstasy lacked the spiritual, numinous dimension that LSD often engendered, and adherents of Ecstasy were much more interested in dancing all night than probing the mysteries of the universe. Ecstasy also had many advantages over LSD for those who wanted a taste of psychedelia but did not want to go all the way. Ecstasy was much less intense and bad trips were almost unknown. Where LSD often caused people to become quiet as they journeyed deep into their mind, Ecstasy invariably made its users garrulous, happy to talk, socialise and above all, dance. Additionally, Ecstasy appealed to women in a way that LSD had not. The result was that the emergent Acid House culture was a much more sexually equitable one than had been the Sixties psychedelic explosion.18
The media hysteria surrounding Ecstasy culture and Acid House music was even more lurid than that which had attended the emergence of LSD in the Sixties. Tabloid newspapers ran with headlines such as: “Shoot these evil acid barons” “Ban acid cult that killed our girl” and “Hell of acid kids”. In their rush to judgement, the tabloids had ignored one crucial fact; the term “acid house” was not derived from the slang term for LSD, but referred to the style of music preferred by Ecstasy users. Its etymology in that context is vague but all commentators agreed that the acid in Acid House was not LSD.
Gradually Ecstasy and Acid House music took over the remnants of the free festival scene. Monkey recalls the transition: “I took a mini sound system to Glastonbury in 1989 and played acid house music. We got a lot of complaints from the Gong, Hawkwind fans etc. A few people liked it and some had heard it before. We were on Es all that weekend. By 1989 several larger sound systems had taken to house music and were playing at free festivals. Also the acid house parties had moved outside and took over the free festivals.”19
Free festival and rave cultures, despite their differences, merged. This was a marriage of convenience, two tribes flung together by the outlaw status imposed on them by society and a shared liking for music, dance and drugs, especially LSD and Ecstasy. Most Ecstasy users were perfectly happy with the drug’s effects and didn’t want more. It was an easy drug to take at the weekend, have a fantastic time and be back at work on Monday no worse for
wear. Nevertheless, suggesting that individuals seek out the drugs that provide the experience they need, some people quickly tired of Ecstasy and wanted something more meaningful.
Mark Harrison, one of the prime movers behind the radical dance music collective Spiral Tribe, summed up this sense of dissatisfaction, saying: “MDMA has its place, but once you’ve taken it a couple of times, its lessons are learned very quickly and it becomes unnecessary ... From what I’ve seen, I don’t think it has very much to show you, whereas I don’t think you can go wrong with LSD and magic mushrooms. They are much more important ... LSD and magic mushrooms have a much more creative influence, not just on raves, but on life, on one’s understanding of oneself and the world around.”20
Harrison’s shift in perspective from Ecstasy to LSD took place at the 1991 Longstock free festival. Harrison continues: “Up until that point I thought ley lines, solstices and all that mumbo-jumbo was just hot air, I had no belief in it. Suddenly all that changed.” Spiral Tribe had rediscovered the native British spirituality, the impetus behind the free festival movement that LSD had once revealed to the earlier hippie travellers.21
Spiral Tribe went on the road, a techno version of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, providing relentless hard core techno for raves in woods, quarries and empty buildings. Now dance and drug evangelists they turned people on to their wavelength using the Spiral method, defined as the “rewiring of neural circuits through the use of LSD-25, a reconditioning of consciousness as old notions dissolve in the acid surge”.22 LSD, now having an effect on the organisers of raves, also still exerted its influence over musicians. Bands such as Psychic TV and Coil had always hinted acid was their drug of choice and in 1991, Coil released their Love’s Secret Domain CD. The initials of the CD were, perhaps, a clue. One of the singles from the CD, “Windowpane”, was named after a powerful form of LSD that came on small gelatin squares.