One of the People
Written by
One of the people
This is a re-write of a set of blogs I published in 2011-12, detailing my experiences attending and organising illegal raves in the early 2000s (This is the second such blog, the first is available here: Hunter Thompson analogy ). Whilst the first one I left nearly unchanged, this one has been expanded significantly and built upon. During the release of those original blogs it was suggested to me by numerous people that I should be writing a book on my experiences. Whilst I don’t realistically think that I could write a coherent, structured book on the subject, I am going to be cataloguing some of my memories and feelings from those times. More a rambled collection of nostalgia, predominantly for my own records than any kind of attempt at an actual book. Since receiving the responses from that original piece and thinking over all the crazy experiences that I’ve undergone as a result of those whirlwind years, I’ve realised just how fascinating some of those stories are. It would be a shame to lose them to the ravages of time without proper documentation. Personally I’m not sure if a book is the right format anyway, I like the way that I can include photos/ videos/ news reports much more easily in a blog such as this.
I also began, and eventually ended, my last iteration of this blog with an impassioned plea for other people to share their stories, memories and feelings from this time. Although this didn’t gain any traction at the time, I am delighted that there is a much wider push now to catalogue this era further. I am also similarly delighted that my video footage was a part of the catalyst which spurred Louise to begin the time consuming project of collating all this memorabilia, and that I can help play whatever part I can in making it happen. For those that have somehow missed it, this is Louises post about the project. If anyone out there has something to contribute, either photos/ footage/ news reports/ written accounts etc it would be great to hear from you:
I have titled this story “One of the People written by - “One of the People”. I decided early on that if I ever was to write a book, this is what its title would be; “One of the People”. The rational being that I wanted to make it abundantly clear that I was just one of the many, many people who came together and contributed their time and energy to these parties. I didn’t want it to come across that I was painting myself as the main figure in this world. It is hard to do this when talking about your own experiences as we are all the central character in our own reality. We all experience only our own consciousness and the only story we can accurately tell is our own (although if you’ve ever read any research on the unreliability of eye-witness statements then it seems even our own memories are a crock of shit and cannot be trusted in the slightest). But the point is, we are all One of the People. We all have our own memories, feelings and stories to tell on this period. I may have been more involved than a lot of you, but I know there are countless more out there who were more passionate and more involved in this life than I was. It would be a shame to just document my experiences and memories on it. I’m sure if you all think hard enough; you each have a unique and interesting story to tell, so get them across to Louise or myself for the time machine project.
I also want to make it unequivocally clear that at no point here am I speaking on behalf of any soundsystems/ organisations. All views and opinions here are entirely my own. In my last blog I wrote a reassuring disclaimer that I was not going to be mentioning anybody by name, and not even naming the soundsytems involved in the various parties I talk about. I am going to go back on this original disclaimer slightly now however. It goes without saying that I am not going to be mentioning anybody by name (unless their explicit permission has been given). Everybody is entitled to their privacy and I realise that a lot of people from these times now have families, responsible jobs, and a life that they would rather not have linked to times of such debauchery and criminality. Although I do have all of the aforementioned things, my desire to document these times is overriding such moderation at the moment. In fact, those of you in Australia who end up reading this will probably be highly surprised by some of the admissions and stories in here, as this chapter of my life is not something I've discussed with anybody in great detail over here. It feels like some kind of past life I once led, although it definitely was my current life, just 20 years prior to today. I will however be much clearer this time around with regards to exactly which soundsystems I was associated with and my level of involvement within them.
The Beginning (for me at least)
My first ever illegal rave was a Brains Kan party in Rushford quarry in early summer 2001. Before Brains Kan I largely spent my weekends smoking copious amounts of weed, driving my Vauxhall Nova SR incredibly erratically and dangerously around various Norfolk country towns, and listening to the likes of Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg whilst highly stoned. I certainly had no interest in dance music or underground rave scenes. Brains Kan was the start of this world for me. I had just finished my last A-level exam that week and as a way of celebration decided to go with a group of friends to this free party phenomenon we had recently heard about.
There were maybe 100-150 people at this introductory party, it was very much in its infancy. From this very first party I attended in 2001 right up until its end in 2007, I only missed one Brains Kan, in 2003 when I was on holiday in America. Other than that I was there every single weekend they happened for over 6 years. I have here a handful of photos which were taken at my very first Brains Kan party (not taken by myself). I find it amusing now looking back at how small it was, both in terms of people attending and also the sound system. It is worth noting that in this first photo, those W bins in the middle, and also the boxes on the bottom, are all spacer boxes. There were no speaker cones in there. They were just put there to bulk the rig out and raise the mids/ tops over head height. So this soundsystem only had 4 bass speakers, 2 full range, and 2 mids and tops. I’m sure it seemed big and imposing at the time, but its funny how much larger sound systems are in every set of free party photos I see these days. Proof that you don’t need a rig thats going to make your ears bleed to have a legendary vibe:
Photo credit: Holly Mabee
The soundsystem didn't stay quite this small for long however, and a pair of actual working W-bins in the middle was added, I've even got a picture of them during construction, in 2001. This was probably my third or fourth party:
photo credit: Holly Mabee
I have here a few more photos from 2001, all from the collection of Holly Mabee. I haven't come across anyone else who has photos from as far back as 2001. If anyone else out there has photos from this far back (or even 2002, these are pretty hard to find also) I would be interested to get a hold of them, please get in touch:
I forget the exact timing, but probably some time in 2003, I became actively involved with the organisation of Brains Kan. I was around the various squats 2-3 times per week in clandestine meetings organising and planning these parties. Whilst I couldn’t be any more honoured and proud to have played whatever role I did within Brains Kan, this was not my “baby” so to speak. I was not there at the start, Brains Kan was already fully up and running long before I got involved. It is fair to say that whatever role I played, it was a minor one. The original Brains Kan crew and the parties they threw were a constant source of inspiration and respect for me however, which spurred myself and various groups of friends to start our own raves.
Equality however (which later became Equality Cohesion, and eventually EqCoExDef (equality, cohesion, existential, defiance) as more and more people and sound systems became involved), this was my baby. (Again, not mine; many, many hearts and minds went into these parties). I was involved with Equality from the offset, when it was just an unnamed concept. The result of numerous highly enthusiastic, emotive, and thoroughly pilled up conversations in the backs of various cars at Brains Kan parties. I was so ingrained with the genesis of Equality that it lends itself to a rather amusing story.
When going over this particular memory in my mind it occurred to me that quite likely not even the “Cohesion” side of Equality Cohesion would be aware of this particular story. And certainly none of the boys from existential or defiance would have been aware of this. It seems ludicrous to think of now in 2024, and to be fair it would have been pretty fucking out there to suggest it even in 2004. But in 2002 there was a very real and genuine suggestion to call “Equality” by the name; “Don’t Tell Bob”.
It goes without saying that the origin of this back story is a little more endearing than “nobody likes Bob so keep the parties a secret from him”. Kind of akin to the “No Homers” club on the Simpsons (bit of an obscure 90s TV reference there, hopefully it means something to some of you). At least I’d like to think this wasn’t the case anyway.
As previously mentioned, I went to my first Brains Kan in the days after my last A-level exam. I had elected to take a gap year, but had already signed up for and been accepted to undertake a degree in Mathematical Engineering at Loughborough university long before I had ever set foot in my first rave (looking back on it this would have been a WAY more useful degree to me than the one I ended up with). I’m sure I had some kind of loose plans to go travelling in that gap year, but after I went to that first Brains Kan it was largely spent taking ecstasy and going out to illegal raves every weekend throughout 2001 and 2002. During this time the numerous enthusiastic, emotive and pilled up conversations mentioned in the previous paragraph were had with regards to starting a soundsystem; we had formulated a plan and a crew of people together, and had our first 2 full range PA speakers, but as yet did not have a name. There were a number of weeks, which led into months, where we were stumped with this conundrum.
My placement at Loughborough university was rapidly approaching with a great deal of Existential dread. I was really not ready to just up and move 3 hours across the country and give up this life I had been living for the past 16 months. It got to my final week before I had to leave for Loughborough, on the Tuesday night before I had to leave on the Thursday morning. I went out to a mates house in Wymondham, much the same as I did most nights. There were a small crew of about 5 or 6 people there. I was feeling pretty down about having to leave the day after tomorrow when another of our mates turned up and said to me:
“Right, when are we going then Bob?”
To which I gave a look of confusion and the reply “Going? I don’t think we’re going anywhere are we?”.
“It’s your party isn’t it?”
“You idiot! He doesn’t know.”
“He still doesn’t know?? Shit, sorry.” Came the replies.
Still fairly perplexed by the exchange I asked what the hell was going on. After a brief sheepish explanation it seemed that the rest of my mates had met up in secret and planned to throw a going away party for me. Our first actual rave, some time in September 2002. The plan would have worked perfectly to be fair had it not been given away right before they were going to get me in a car and drive us to the venue.
We drove down a track near the bypass on the outskirts of Wymondham. Despite having spent the last couple of years smoking weed in cars down dodgy dirt tracks all around Wymondham, this was a place that I had never been before. The track opened up into a larger grass area and there was an old abandoned bridge going over the top of the track at the far end, penned in by a gate on the other side of the bridge. Under the bridge they had set up our two full range Yorkevilles stacked on top of each other and hired a small generator. There were already a few cars down there, and more arriving as we did. It being a Tuesday it wasn’t exactly heaving, maybe 50 or 60 of us, but we had a good dance in front of our own speakers, at an outdoor rave that we (or everyone other than me) had organised. It was a pretty emotional moment for me. Thank you if you were one of the people there at that party, it meant a lot.
Despite it being a Tuesday, we still played tunes until 4am. I remember being there at the end with just one car left, and 5 of us, standing around trying to work out how we were going to get these speakers and also the generator into the back of the car and also get all of us home. I think someone even had to have the generator on their lap in the back seat in the end.
The day after this initial party I left for university to start my degree in Mathematical Engineering. I’ve read a number of peoples responses and views on these parties and some have echoed sentiments along the lines of; “Raves saved my life! I probably would have ended up in prison or dead if it wasn’t for these parties!” Clearly this wasn’t the case for myself. If I hadn’t attended these parties it’s reasonably likely that I would have achieved a degree in mathematical engineering and led a mildly successful and prosperous career as an engineer in some nondescript city in the midlands somewhere. On paper I would have undoubtably “achieved” more with my life, certainly over the next decade. I’m sure that by the end of the 2000s I would have ended up with a mortgage on a nice house, possibly even an investment property, and be in a pretty well paid position as some kind of professional.
But would I swap this life of stability and prosperity for the path I took? Shit no. Theres no substitute for those crazy, frenetic times we all had together. I feel like it enriched my life with such a sense of adventure, camaraderie and vibrancy. I wouldn’t change those times for anything. You only get to be young, irresponsible and reckless early in your life. It would be a shame to spend it being wholly responsible and measured.
To be fair, my life turned out alright in any case. But certainly at this stage a degree in mathematical engineering in Loughborough was not the path for me, and I dropped out of that course after only one term. A number of things contributed to this, but ultimately I think the pull of these parties was just too strong. It wasn’t something I was willing to give up on at that stage. It felt like a huge amount of progress had already been made in them and it was exciting to see the evolution taking place week after week. During that university term from September to December 2002, I didn’t miss a single Brains Kan party. I didn’t even have a car to begin with and I remember trying to get back from that first party by catching some incongruous selection of trains and busses; first being dropped at Thetford train station straight from a rave in Thetford forest on a Sunday afternoon, having to get the train all the way into London, the tube to a different train station in London, then another train up to Leicester, a bus from Leicester to Loughborough, followed by a 2 mile walk from the bus station back to my accomodation near the university, getting into bed around midnight on the Sunday after travelling for over 6 hours on public transport straight after a rave. It was after this journey that I made the wise decision to spend a portion of my student loan on a clapped out VW golf (I had written off my Nova by this point) to make travelling back and forth that little bit more user friendly.
On one of my weekends back in Norfolk during this time I met up with all my mates who were part of what would become Equality, but still as yet had no name. I cant remember who broached the subject, but it was suggested that as we still didn’t have a name and our first party came about entirely as a secret and surprise from myself, that it would be amusing to call the whole thing “Don’t Tell Bob.” I’m not 100% sure how serious this suggestion was, but it seemed as if several people were in agreement with this point and were waiting to see my reaction to this idea. It had clearly been discussed in my absence in any case.
Personally, I wasn’t up for this idea in the slightest. Aside from it being a completely ridiculous name for an illegal rave organisation, I definitely didn’t want my name so closely associated with said organisation. I get that it would have been an amusing play on the starting of it, but I don’t think anyone would have taken us seriously. It was a hard no from me, and that was the end of the conversation. And besides “Don’t tell Bob Cohesion” just wouldn’t have had the same ring to it a year later.
So although this conversation was as far as the naming of the soundsytem went, the venue we used became known as “Don’t Tell Bob” for years to come. It became quite a popular hang out spot for the stoners and party folk of Wymondham. We personally did another 2 or 3 small scale parties down there, often just with a large car stereo system. And through the power of the internet and this wider drive to collate photos/ footage/ memories from this era I actually have a photo of the “Don’t Tell Bob” venue. I’m guessing this would have been taken some time in 2003. It wasn’t the original party, one of the later ones with the car stereo mentioned later on in this blog, but its a photo of the venue none the less. (If anyone reading this does happen to have a photo of that initial Don’t Tell Bob party I would really appreciate getting hold of a copy. Please get in touch) Pretty humble beginnings really, some mouldy old bridge, but we had some good times down there:
Photo credit: Danielle Breeze
This whole naming of the venue Don’t Tell Bob led to one of the more surreal conversations of my life. After I left the UK at the end of 2010 I flew to New Zealand, brought a bicycle and rode around the South Island of New Zealand. I eventually settled in a small ski-town in the south island of New Zealand, named Queenstown. I had been living there for a good 10 months when a few people I knew from back in Wymondham also came to town. These were at the time “the younger Wymondham lot” (known as the C.D.S crew, who themselves are probably well into their 30s by now). I became good friends with these guys in the years following the free party years, from 2007 onwards. Whilst a few of my mates from those years had somewhat settled down, during this period I was still fully up for hitting it pretty hard every weekend and this younger crew was definitely on that wavelength. I had some great times with them in the years from 2007-10. Anyhow, as they were still young and adventurous at this stage and there wasn’t a great deal keeping them in Norfolk, a lot of them had decided on travelling through Asia and down to Australia and New Zealand. 2 or 3 of them moved down to Queenstown in my last couple of months there.
At one point one of their Mums came out to visit them. We all went out to the pub together. This lady was as Norfolk as they come. Broad Norfolk accent, so my name Bob, kind of became “Barb”, almost like a southern accent in the US. And the word “didn’t” became “dint”, and “I” is more like “Oi”. Upon being introduced to myself she says “Nice to meet you Barb, Oi say, are you the Barb as in “Don’t Tell Barb?”” The other guys laughed at this and told her this was in fact the case. “Oi say, I dint know there was an actual Barb. Tell me Barb, why is that place called “Don’t Tell Barb?”
So I found myself engaged in conversation with a 50(ish) year old, broad Norfolk woman, on the complete opposite corner of the world, telling her about the origins of an illegal rave soundsystem I started 10 years prior and the story behind it. A party which happened when her own son was probably not much more than 10 years old, but had still referred to the place as Don’t Tell Bob enough for her to recognise the name. I find it pretty amusing that a son would tell his mum “I’m just going down Don’t Tell Bob, mum”, but for it to be happening almost 10 years after the party took place is pretty hilarious to me.
It just occurred to me, does anybody still have contacts in Wymondham? I feel like it would absolutely make my day if the current generation of Wymondham dope smokers were still going for a smoke down “Don’t Tell Bob”. Seems unlikely, it’s probably a housing estate by now, but just on the off-chance, can anyone fill me in on this?
Just on a complete side tangent, the town I mentioned where this conversation took place, Queenstown in New Zealand. I could not recommend going to this place enough. Of all the places I’ve found myself on this earth, this is quite likely my favourite. Certainly my favourite place I’ve lived in for any extended period of time in any case. If you ever get the chance I’d definitely check it out. I feel like these photos of the town give you a pretty good idea of the kind of vibe of the place. This wasn’t taken by a drone by the way, there is a mountain rising pretty much vertically up at the edge of town. This is taken from a view point and restaurant part of the way up overlooking the town:
It goes without saying that this is a nature lovers and adrenalin junkies paradise, but also the nightlife is surprisingly epic for a town so small (the population is around 30,000). The week I arrived there Carl Cox was playing. This is a surprisingly big name to come to town considering the population and the fact it is in the middle of the mountains with no other large cities anywhere within 3 hours of it. Whats even more surprising is that he played in a pub/ restaurant with a capacity of about 150 people. As is the style of a lot of ski towns throughout the world; venues are generally family friendly restaurants/ pubs in the day time, but as soon as night comes all the tables are pushed to the edge of the building and they become small scale nightclubs. Carl Cox was mixing on the kind of rickety wooden deck table you might have had in your room as an 18 year old, which had the dance floor just on the other side of it. Carl was reaching over the table and high-fiving people on the dance floor, giving them his classic toothy grin while he was mixing. It was pretty amusing.
Im not the biggest fan of Carl Cox’s style of tunes, but his technique was highly impressive. He had a guy behind him with a selection of instruments who would blast some rifts with a saxophone, which Carl would record snippets of and loop back over the track. Then the guy behind would pick up a clarinet or something different and play more rifts over the top, which again carl would record and cut snippets of, bringing them in and out of the tunes, layered over the original saxophone, as he was also mixing tunes together. This was especially effective as you could just peer over the deck table and watch him doing it all live in front of you. I have here a few photos of the night. You can see how small that dance floor was , and some good photos of Carl and his mate with the instruments behind the decks:
Saying that the nightlife is good out here, its not exactly “free party mashup” style of nightlife, as evidenced by the extortionate price of drugs in this part of the world. I had a mate from the UK already living in Queenstown leading up to the Carl Cox gig and he excitedly messaged me in the lead up “I can get us some pills! Do you want me to get you one?”
“One?? Get me 4 or 5, lets make a sesh out of it” was my enthusiastic reply
“Yeah, they’re $70 each” (about 30 quid at the time)
“Oh right, yeah best just get the one then.”
I guess in a way this is kind of a good thing; it stops the horrific levels of abuse we used to put ourselves through on a weekly/ daily basis and reserves it for special occasions. Certainly none of the other drugs are any cheaper over this side of the world either. A single gram of ketamine in Australia will set you back almost $250 (£130), whereas cocaine is about $350-400 per gram (between £180-220). This doesn’t stop people from taking drugs, particularly in Australia where everyday wages are very high, but certainly you are unlikely to meet many jobless squatters with 3 gram-a-day ketamine habits.
So drugs like this are somewhat of a rarity, especially in New Zealand. Or at least they usually are. There was a good couple of months however where they became reasonably plentiful for me. A few months after I got to town a mate I used to know from high school came over. I had not seen this guy in at least 10 years, since we were about 16. He didn’t go to any of the raves I used to go, and I had no idea if he took drugs or not. We used to smoke a bit of weed together every now and then in high school but that was about as far as I knew.
We went to a local pub in the early afternoon and were filling each other in on what we had been up to over the last decade since we last saw each other over a couple of pints. We got on to the topic of times spent together smoking weed and the ridiculous price of drugs over this side of the world came up;
“Yeah I’d heard about the price of stuff before I came over, so I brought a couple of ounces over with me”
“You brought two ounces of weed over with you on the plane??” Came my surprised reply
“No, no. Two ounces of coke.” I was gobsmacked by this.
“Do you want some?” He carried on, as he reached into his pocket and chucked me a gram of cocaine across the table. “Call it a gesture of good will” were his exact words.
“You realise thats like 20 grands worth of coke out here?” I replied once I had finally taken my jaw off the floor.
“Yeah of course, I was hoping it was going to fund my travels for a bit.”
“How the hell did you get it over here?”
“Just packed really well in smell proof bags in the bottom of my hold luggage inside a big ball of socks.”
I was in utter disbelief over this exchange, the size of the cahonas on this guy. The stress and anxiety getting off the plane in New Zealand must have been intense. In any case, his plan worked and he successfully smuggled a largish quantity of cocaine into New Zealand. As it so happened I was living with a crazy drunken irishman at the time who played for the Queenstown football team, where half the squad were also crazy drunken Irishmen. He was able to shift most of this coke to the football squad, and we had a pretty entertaining month or two with a plentiful supply of cocaine. This was at the beginning of the winter snowboarding season. Theres something fantastically freeing about taking the chair lift to the highest point on the ski field and sitting down in the snow to rail a line of cocaine before getting straight on your snowboard and carving your way down the side of a mountain. Especially in a country where a gram of coke is almost an average weekly wage.
But in any case, drug experiences like this are few and far between. It’s a bit more of a wholesome outdoorsy vibe out there. A good time was had at Carl Cox in New Zealand. The pills were pretty shite unfortunately, despite their astronomical price, but it was still an entertaining night. I’ve just got one more absolute gem of a photo from this night of an old mate of mine who I’m sure a lot of you Norfolk folk will recognise, with Carl Cox in the background. Clearly the pills weren’t that shit:
As it transpires, its not too rare a sight to see Carl Cox on this side of the world. Apparently he owns a holiday house in the far north of the south island of New Zealand and keeps a range of Ducatti superbikes there. Him and his mates fly out every year or so and blast Ducattis around the south island for a week or two. Rumour has it he had stopped over in Queenstown one year and was eating lunch in the bar in question when the owner jokingly said “Fancy playing a set next time you’re over?” To which Carl thought for a moment before replying “Yeah ok then, same time next year?” The rather bamboozled owner, not at all expecting him to actually say yes stammered a reply, got his contact details and said he would make it happen. I’m not sure how true this story is, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Carl Cox does quite a few events on this side of the world which certainly aren’t going to be paying him the same kind of fees that space in Ibiza or Glastonbury are going to be paying him. This is partly due to the fact that he actually lives out here.
Which brings me to a rather unique claim to fame - I live in the same town as Carl Cox. Those of you who know me may vaguely know that I live in “Melbourne” these days. But the thing is I’m not talking about Melbourne. In much the same way that most people who tell you that they live in “London” don’t either, the cities of Melbourne and London are in fact only a 2km square block right in the centre of the city which is full of skyscrapers. I (and also Carl Cox) live in a town called “Frankston”, which is an outer, outer suburb of Melbourne. The last stop on the metropolitan train line before you leave the city limits and enter the rolling hills and vineyards and touristy beachside towns of the Mornington Peninsula.
The people that are most surprised that Carl cox lives out here are the people of Melbourne itself. Frankston has a terrible reputation. Although it has vastly improved in the last 10 years, it was incredibly rough in the 90s and early 2000s. There was a notorious serial killer operating here for quite a few years in the 90s. And a lot of bikie gang related violence. The leader of a notorious bikie gang was killed in a driveby shooting 10 years or so ago (It turns out he actually grew up in the house next door to us and his parents, sister and niece still live there.) I knew of Frankston’s reputation long before we brought a house here, but it was cheap and near the beach. And to be honest a damn sight better than its reputation would have you believe these days. Having spent a fair amount of time in London growing up, Frankston definitely feels a lot nicer and less rundown than a good deal of the suburbs in London. Plus it must be noted that there is most definitely a “nice side” of Frankston, with multi-million dollar properties on hillsides overlooking the Bay. I’m sure that Carl Cox lives up here rather than in the more ghetto parts.
But in any case, the fact that Carl cox lives here is a fact that bemuses most Melbournians. There are numerous interviews with Dj magazines where the interviewer has said “I hear you have a holiday home in Frankston of all places, why is that?” To which Carl often replies “No, no, no, I don’t have a holiday home in Frankston, I live in Frankston. Its my home. When all the madness of the summer Uk festival scene and the residencies in Ibiza come to an end, Frankston is where I come back to to chill.” He usually goes on to elaborate that he also owns an old orchard just out of town which he has converted the storage sheds to his studio and a workshop for his various bikes and cars. He is just as passionate about motorsport as he is about music and he runs his own motorsport company here. He is often seen at various superbike races in the area. I’ve met numerous people who have grinning selfies taken with Carl Cox, and its almost always at some kind of superbike event. He has pretty strong ties to the music scene in Australia also and runs a one day warehouse event called “Pure” in various cities, as well as a multi-day festival out in the bush a few hours from Melbourne called “Babylon”. My favourite event that he does out here however is “Carl and Erics mobile disco”. This essentially consisted of him and his mate Eric just touring around various seaside towns and mixing funk, soul, disco and house records in parks on beachfronts. Its become a lot bigger than that now though and is usually held in different stadiums and at other large festivals around Australia. They even took it to Glastonbury and played on the Glade stage a couple of years back. But its origins were in small seaside towns on the Mornington Peninsula. I get the impression that most of the events he does over here are just for a bit of a laugh really as most of his income comes in the winter months here when he heads back to Europe. Hence why he’s happy to mix in front of a crowd of 100 people in a small restaurant in New Zealand, probably getting paid a twentieth as much as Glastonbury might be paying him. Not a bad life really. Like I say, he’s not really my cup of tea music wise but I’ve got to respect the guy, especially as he’s now some kind of neighbour.
Article in a local paper interviewing carl cox: Carl cox article
Ramsholt, August bank holiday 2005
Back to the telling of UK free party rave stories; the first such story I’m going to attempt to illustrate is the August bank holiday festival of 2005 held in Ramsholt, Suffolk. This may surprise those of you who were at the various festivals of the early 2000’s as it was not widely regarded as the best of the festivals, but it is one that resonates particularly vividly in my mind for reasons that will become apparent as the story develops.
The term “festival” in this sense is not what your average festival goer would class as a festival. There are no multi-stage arenas, big name djs, or row upon row of tacky food stalls and burger vans. In fact, they were simply large raves which went on for more than one night which everyone camped at and, if we were feeling really adventurous, had a marque set up selling baked potatoes. The term festival was only ever applied to the august bank holiday weekend, rather than any other multi-day raves from bank holidays throughout the year. It was also an open invitation for anyone who had speakers to bring them along and we would attempt to construct it all together in one giant wall of sound. These were always much more impressive to look at than they ultimately sounded, but provided a pretty good backdrop for the parties. Here are photos of the festival sound system from the years 2003, 2004 and 2005:
2003:
2004:
The August bank holiday party was always referred to in Norfolk as the festival. It was the highlight of the raving calendar, in much the same way that it was the highlight to sun-worshipers and holiday makers the country over. The August bank holiday was always the summer bank holiday. The chance for everyone to get away from the daily grind for an extended weekend of relaxation in the sun. It’s an event the whole country eagerly anticipates throughout the preceding summer months.
Expectations were especially high for this particular festival as well. For the last 2 years the festival had been held in Norfolk, but this year there were rampant rumours that “The Teknival” was returning to the UK. The Teknival is a travelling conglomerate of techno soundsystems who tour Europe, putting on truly monstrous free parties for tens of thousands of people from all over the world. The first notable one these parties was the infamous “Castlemorton” rave of 1992 where 40,000 people converged for a week long free festival on Castlemorton common in Worcestershire after the police shut down the long running “Avon free festival” just outside Bristol. This was seen as a somewhat iconic moment in the history of free parties, the biggest of its kind, which ultimately lead to the introduction of the “criminal justice bill” in 1994; a much more stringent set of laws governing raves. The party would have probably only been a quarter of its size were it not for the TV news reports from it on the first night. Bored youngsters from all over the country suddenly jumped in their cars and headed straight down there upon seeing it on the news.
One of the main systems involved with this legendary rave was “spiral tribe”. After this party the state and government implemented brutal and repressive policing on such parties and most of the soundsystems took flight to Europe. Spiral tribe settled mainly in France, where the government were a lot more tolerant and accepting of their way of life. Even now they hold a handful of government sanctioned teknivals each year (known as “french-tek”) where the government will allocate them a piece of land and leave them to do their thing. I’ve been to a couple of these, both times there must have been 20-30,000 people in attendance and I’ve heard reports that some of them push the 100,000 mark. The music stops at mid-day every day for an hour and everyone must clear up the site. It’s a fairly surreal spectacle to witness a convoy of dumper trucks driving onto a rave site with a police escort to clear up rubbish. It seems to work though.
In any case, the rumour that the teknival is returning to England was one that seemed to crop up every single bank holiday weekend. A rumour that panned out to be almost as real as Father Christmas or the tooth fairy. These legendary parties were just that, legends. In our country at least. The only event in my memorable history that could almost be classified as the return of the teknival was in 2002, on the 10th anniversary of Castlemorton. Held on a headland of the Bristol Channel near Hinckley point nuclear power station in Somerset. There were maybe 10,000 at this particular party, the largest that I myself have been to in this country, but still nowhere near the enormity of those monolithic, sprawling cities of rave on the continent.
But the rumour of the teknival had been well and truly planted this time around. And everyone had made the decision that we would take our soundsystem and join them. Again, this was a particularly exciting concept as one of the only other times that we had ventured out of the confines of Norfolk with our soundsytem in tow was way back in 2002.
Back in the very early days of Norfolk free parties there was a general structure to the parties; one was held every other weekend from May until New Year’s Eve. There was only really Brains Kan putting on illegal raves in the Norfolk countryside at the time. So this left at least every other weekend in the summer months where there were no raves. (This is a passage that I wrote back in 2012 and I’m going to slightly amend this now; there were in fact other illegal raves happening in Norfolk at the time. Planet Yes, Mr Pitts and a few others were also throwing raves in Norfolk. However, we had a rather extreme ethos on the definition of raves and “free parties”. Although still unlicensed and playing dance music in the countryside, the likes of Planet Yes and Mr Pitts did have an entry fee of around 5 pounds. At the time we absolutely did not go to parties which charged an entry fee. I can remember at least a couple of parties were a large convoy of us had turned up to a rave and upon finding out that a 5 pound entry fee for every person was asked for we created a minor scene at the gate, and then turned around and drove off to some other party, often hours away in other parts of the country, probably spending more on petrol than it would have cost us just to pay the entry fee. I feel pretty bad about this now, as we didn’t support other parties in our area who did things a little differently and charged a small entry fee in return for higher production values. But at the time we were very principled (and possibly a little fanatical), and would only go to “free” parties that asked for a donation. This likely created unnecessary division in the illegal rave scenes in Norfolk at the time, and I’m sorry to say that I never went to a Planet Yes or Mr Pitts party.)
In any case, on the weekends when there wasn’t a Brains Kan party happening, there used to be a small travelling contingent of us who used to roam the country in the search of the best party we could find. Our journey frequently took us to Oxfordshire, the home of the “ridgeway”. The ridgeway is an ancient trail that runs for 100 miles or so along the border of Berkshire and Oxfordshire. It is an outstandingly beautiful part of the country, characterised by long, rolling hills, secluded valleys and ancient woodlands. It has been used since prehistoric times by travellers, tradesmen, shepherds and soldiers, originally linking the Dorset coast to the wash in East Anglia. But in our time and particular scene, it was the home of “ridgeway parties”: Reasonably large, multi-system parties of maybe 2 or 3 thousand, they were something completely different to the scene as we knew it in Norfolk. They had hills for one thing.
I used to love the alternate weekends touring the country. It had that whole feeling of a voyage into the unknown. We never knew where we were going or what we were doing until around 11pm on a Saturday night, when we would all converge on a petrol station somewhere and start frantically ringing party line numbers and people we knew to try and find out what was on. We never knew where the night would take us, could be an hour away just the other side of Cambridge, or it could be a 5 hour slog to the other side of Bristol. There’s something so fantastically spontaneous and exhilaratingly impulsive about never knowing what you are doing or where you are going until it’s happening. As soon as our party was located we were off in convoy, sometimes as many as 15 or 20 cars strong, roaring down the A11 and out of Norfolk into the darkness of the unknown.
One of my favourite bits of these journeys was turning up at some late night service station in the arse-end middle of nowhere to terrorise the poor service station attendant. I’ve got to explain at this point that a very good friend of mine used to drive what was fundamentally a mobile soundsystem. This was the same soundsystem that we used for the subsequent parties at the Don’t Tell Bob venue, although by that point the friend of mine had lost his license for drink driving and the soundsytem had been transferred into my clapped out old VW golf. A £3000 stereo system in a £200 car.
When you opened the boot, there was just about enough room for a map book in there. (This sentence makes me laugh now looking back on it in 2024. I think people in this day and age of google maps on every phone probably look back on “map books” as some arcane invention of the past, like we were some kind of mental “land pirates” navigating our way around the country with a compass, telescope and a stained book of treasure maps. Certainly back then the thought that we would have a device in our pockets that had every road and track intricately mapped on it with a little blue dot indicating our exact location was pure Sci-fi fantasy. The map book was the only tool we had to navigate our way across the country. Many a time was spent in service stations and on the roadside, likely high on some substance or other, arguing over where exactly we were in this wondrous book of paper maps.)
In the space where regular people tend to have a boot, he had two 15” subs in a ginormous boot-sized box starring back at you. He had also modified the parcel shelf, which now accommodated 4 speakers, so you could stand it up and secure it in the gap above the subs, making pretty much a wall of speakers just on the inside of his boot. So when this convoy of maybe 40 or 50 ravers rocks up on the forecourt of some 24 hour petrol station to re-fuel and buy snacks, the boot opens, the music is cranked and people start dancing in the middle of the petrol station. I used to think “what on earth must that late night cashier think?” One minute he’s struggling to stay conscious through the drudgery of a night shift in a remote motorway service station; and the next minute 40 or 50 lunatics turn up and start dancing on the forecourt to music that’s loud enough to make all the widows in the petrol station vibrate. It didn’t always happen like this to be honest, but I’m sure that just the sight of us lot pulling in en-mass, and gouging out on late night munchies food was enough to terrify even the most hardy of petrol station workers.
We had been attending the ridgeway parties throughout 2001 and 2002, but in august 2002 we finally got our act together enough to take a soundsystem with us. Aside from the hills, there are a number of fundamental differences between raves in Oxfordshire and raves in Norfolk: Ridgeway parties had a following of around 2 or 3 thousand people and sometimes as many as 20 soundsystems would scatter the hillsides. Parties in Norfolk on the other hand only ever had around 2 or 3 hundred at the most. And there was only ever the one soundsystem. But this meant that all the people who were there were dancing in front of that one sound. Personally I’ve always been much more of a fan of the “smash everyone in front of one soundsystem and have it hard till the sun goes down on Sunday” rather than the “stagger around in a dazed state of confusion as every one of your senses is pounded by 20 different genres of brutal techno.” This is the other thing I always preferred about our parties; you would have thought that with 20 different soundsytems playing music, at least someone would be playing something other than techno. (From what I gather, hard trance is now the most prevalent style of music played at such parties, although back then it was definitely more techno orientated). Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a bit of hard techno, but after 10 straight hours of nothing but techno I would have loved to hear some breakbeats, or some pianos and vocals as the sun shone. It seems a ridiculous prospect that you get a much bigger music variety at a rave with one soundsytem than you do at a rave with thirty, but this seemed to be the case.
When you took a step back from it all the music from every one of those soundsystems seemed to amalgamate through the airwaves into a horrible, distorted mess of a noise that had all the harmonic qualities of sticking your head in a washing machine with a couple of house bricks in there. At our parties on the other hand, you could hear exactly what was playing over that soundsystem wherever you were standing. This meant that if a really epic tune came on, everyone could hear it. There’s many a tune that used to create a small stampede to get the stack, people would be running and jumping over car bonnets across the car park in sheer panicked determination to get there before the tune dropped.
The main difference between our parties though, was the stack. At this point in time moshing to Dance music was a uniquely Norfolk thing (technically this style of dancing came from Exodus in Luton, but they no longer did parties at this point). I’ve tried to put it into words before but it’s a very hard thing to describe. The fact that our parties had it and others didn’t was the defining difference. Often at other parties of the time in front of each of those 20 rigs were about 5 or 10 people, gently swaying from side to side in time to heavy techno. At ours you had this huge, pulsating, rolling, seething mass of people and raw energy in front of those speakers that jumped half a foot off the ground with each beat. Everyone smiling, cheering, shouting and giving it everything to each tune. The vibe and energy between the two styles of party was as similar as chalk and cheese. It was safe to say, that as much as I did enjoy journeying cross country to distant parties, I was so glad that we had our style of party on our doorstep.
I dont want to sound like I’m being overly critical of ridgeway parties (or any other parties) here, as I said we spent many years touring the country and going to them regularly. I enjoyed the spectacle and have respect for anyone who is out there taking the time to put these events together, I just wanted to highlight the differences between the styles of parties.
But when these two alternate styles of parties collided that day we took our sound to the ridgeway, the outcome was inevitable. I have here a collection of photos from that exact party in 2002 which shows the scene pretty well; several large soundsystems, all of them playing heavy techno with about 5 people in front of them. Then there’s pictures taken in front of ours, completely crowded with 100 or so people, hands raised, mid stack, quite blatantly by far the best vibes going down. There was a real collective sense of “what the fuck is this? So this is what they’ve been up to in that sleepy corner of Norfolk all this time.” People who had never seen or experienced it before were blown away by it. We completely took over the ridgeway that day. It was a glorious feeling. After that day at the ridgeway parties in Norfolk exploded, they pretty much doubled in size over night. We now had people from all over the country journeying into the deepest, darkest depths of Norfolk for our events. Before this event there were maybe 2 or 3 hundred at the most, and just one year later, at the first August bank holiday festival of 2003, we pushed 1500.
Photo credit: Holly Mabee, Ben Lawrence
Although I may bemoan the idea of non-stop techno at other such parties, I believe through the 2000s we were quite widely derided for our cheesy and commercial music tastes amongst other raves crews elsewhere in the country. There was a prevailing consensus that underground raves should be playing hard and underground music I. A lot of the trance and Oldskool that we played was surprisingly commercial and big in the club scene, or at least it was in the early-mid 90s just before our era of parties. Some of it was literally top 40 chart topping stuff. That doesn’t mean they were bad tunes (I'm a big believer that every genre of music has good and bad tunes), but for someone who was involved in the illegal rave scene of the early 90s it must have seemed a little odd some of the music we played. We certainly played a lot of tunes that other illegal rave crews wouldn't dream of playing. This for instance was a huge commercial trance track, played by the likes of Tiesto and Armin van Buuren in the club scene in the mid 90s, but the response it had at our parties was euphoric:
And this one, again an absolute classic at our raves, and would have people running to the dance floor for it. Back in 1992 this reached number 4 in the UK singles chart, and number 7 in the US. It was also used by the BBC during their coverage of the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona:
Footage credit: Louise Render (all of the footage on my youtube page with the lines in the bottom right corner was shot with Louises camera, the rest of it is from my camera)
But if you take a trip back a few more years, to the late 80s when acid house was at its height, there was no such stigma to playing “commercial” music. In fact the highest selling UK chart topping record of the whole of 1989, (a year which is often referred to as the “second summer of love” after the summer of love in 1969 due to the enormous illegal raves and high strength ecstasy which permeated society at the time) was also an absolute anthem of the illegal raves at the time. I have a clip here of it being played at a massive acid house party on the outskirts of London back in 1989. Coincidentally this is also the tune we played as the last tune at the “Don’t tell Bob” party. That tune is “Black Box - Ride on time”:
I went to an event here in Australia a couple of months back and heard a set which made me think about the whole concept of “commercial music” and what got played at our parties, and what was frowned upon. I’ve made a snippet of clips from that set posted below. The opening warm up set at this particular festival was 90-00s classic trance. The first three tunes on this clip were all classics of our underground raves and got played heavily (although the third one was a slower remix than the one which used to get played at our parties). The next two however would most definitely be seen as too “commercial” to play at our parties. But in terms of which one was the biggest world wide commercial success and sold the most copies, it was the first tune on this clip (although the 4th one sold the most within the UK). It got me thinking that likely the only reason we saw the last couple as too commercial to play was because they were in the charts at the same time that we were into underground parties. Once that time of being in the charts is over and people look back on such tunes years afterwards they don’t have such a stigma attached to them. All of these tunes were huge tracks in the club scene at one point or another in any case:
The festival that these clips were taken from is called “Esoteric festival”. If you’re ever going to go to an underground dance event in Australia, this is the one to go for. It happens on the first weekend of March every year and lasts for 5 days. More of a Psytrance festival, but the first day and night on the main stage is all hard trance, 15 hours of it. Plus there is a breaks stage which plays DnB, breakbeat, dub etc all weekend long. This is up there with the best event I’ve ever been to, I could not recommend it enough. The reason you are reading this now, and the reason that I ended up uploading all that old rave footage to YouTube, was due to the events of Esoteric 2023. I went to Esoteric for my honeymoon and wrote a long and detailed blog about the experience, published here: Esoteric honeymoon blog. This is my favourite thing I’ve ever written, and if you are at all remotely interested in underground dance scenes in other countries I’d recommend giving it a read. This event brought back my love of underground dance parties and inspired me to revisit my stories on the Norfolk rave scene and rewrite my original blogs to make them more like the Esoteric one. I was happy with the way it turned out, and it gives you a pretty good insight into what the festival is all about.
This is a second set of small snippets of footage taken of that main stage at Esoteric, but during the night time this time. Yes it’s all various styles of psytrance (which seems to be a surprisingly dirty word in the free party scene in England. I must admit that its never something I liked before leaving the UK but it has grown on me since coming to Asia and Australia. It sounds good over a well set up Martin Audio sound system like the one at Esoteric in any case.) The thing I wanted to get across was the impressive production values of this set up, it’s a hell of a production considering it is a 3.5 hour drive into the bush from Melbourne. Certainly beats the couple of strobes and few lights we used to put out at our free parties. Standing in the middle of that dancefloor under the influence of some strong LSD is quite an experience:
One more bit of Esoteric footage, this time it it is their after movie from the 2023 festival. Most festivals when they put out these videos just have snippets of footage of the actual festival. This one is by far the most hallucinatory/ psychedelic festival video I’ve ever seen. Great use of animation layered over the video footage, and some kind of weird mad max-esque storyline going on. Its worth a watch, and the festival is definitely worth going to if you ever find yourself in Australia around the start of March:
Much like the hippies of the 60s, the acid house and rave movement of the late 80s/ early 90s is another era which fascinates me and I have watched numerous documentaries and read various books on the subject. This is the era that directly lead to our own free party movement, and the story of how “free parties” came to be is an interesting one.
There have been various free parties and festivals around the UK dating back to the hippies of the 60s, but the meteoric rise of dance music in the late 80s lead to huge illegal raves (or acid house parties) in aircraft hangers and isolated farm buildings throughout the country, particularly on the outskirts of London. Although illegal and unlicensed, these parties were certainly not free. A ticket would cost between 20 and 50 pounds, which was quite a bit in the 80s. Coupled with the relatively low costs of running an unlicensed and unrestricted party and the fact that they could often draw a crowd of 30-40,000, there is no denying that the organisers of these events were making hundreds of thousands of pounds from them.
This was a real scourge in Maggie Thatchers England and there was an aggressive attempt to stamp them out. The issue they had at the time however was that as this was such a new phenomenon there wasn’t really an official set of laws by which organisers could be arrested and prosecuted. The government, realising that organisers were making bucket loads of cash from them, hastily adapted existing laws to introduce the “pay party” bill, which essentially classed the organisers under the same category as organised crime and money laundering, making the act of charging money to put these events on illegal.
This lead to a break in the scene at the time where some went down the legal and licensed route and set up large scale dance festivals and parties such as Fantasia and Dreamscape, eventually leading to the likes of cream fields and more commercial dance music festivals. There however remained a significant portion of the rave scene at the time which didn’t want to be contained and beholden to regulations and government interventions and their response was to just simply not charge for their parties and have them as “donation only”, kind of like a charity event, or a “free party”. This found a certain loophole within the legal framework at the time and organisers couldn’t be prosecuted with the existing laws again. This is the route that parties such as Spiral tribe, Bedlam and Circus Warp went. They provided a more DIY underground event without the funfairs, laser displays and high entry costs of what became legal raves.
This however put them more at odds with landowners as previously in the 80s farmers and landowners holding raves were paid off with a bag full of cash at the end of the event for loaning out the building. With the new legal framework these farmers themselves could be held liable and prosecuted and so understandably were apprehensive about renting out their buildings anymore. This lead the organisers of free parties to take the more nefarious option of breaking in to warehouses and buildings and occupying them as squatters to put on their parties.
This split in the rave scene around the early 90s led to this split in music tastes, with underground DIY free parties playing more underground music and the legal events playing stuff which was more likely to be in the charts or clubs. Although our parties in the 2000s were really a direct descendant of the free party ethos of the likes of spiral tribe, we played quite a lot of the more uplifting music which was big at legal raves of the 90s, such as happy hardcore, piano house and classic trance, which wasn’t really the done thing of the illegal free party raves through the 90s. The likes of ridgeway parties and other raves throughout the country stayed I guess truer to the underground sound of spiral tribe and kept a harder style of techno and hard trance. This is likely due to the fact that most of the originators of Brains Kan met at and used to go a lot of the legal events such as Dreamscape and United dance, as well as more underground stuff. This isn’t my story to tell however, but I would be highly interested to hear from a few of them about their inspirations and experiences which led them to starting the movement that they did.
The closest events in terms of style and energy to our own parties were that of Exodus, based around Luton from 1992-2000. Luton is an extremely rough part of the UK, a very deprived area with a highly multicultural population and a really big issue of ethnic gang related violence. Around the time of Exodus parties Luton (and particularly the Marsh farm housing estate where a lot of them grew up) had the highest murder rate in the country. Exodus brought people together in a way that nothing else in the area could. You had gangs of Asians/ Turks/ Lebanese/ Africans who normally wouldn’t go within 20 metres of each other without pulling out weapons on the streets, and yet they all went to exodus and were happy to be pressed up against each other in the mosh at these illegal parties. It was because of this ability to bring people peacefully together that they had quite large ranging support from the community in Luton, not just from ravers, but from elderly people and parents who never went to them, but saw that they were bringing together all these ethnic groups in a way that no other community outreach program could. (They did not have the support of the police however, and were regularly harassed to the point that bedfordshire council opened an investigation into the polices handling of Exodus.) They provided a free party to the bored and poverty stricken youths who didn’t have anything else to look forward to and wouldn’t have the money for a dance club. These parties, as the name suggests, were “free parties”, both in terms of free from regulation, and as in they didn’t cost anything. A donation was asked, “pound for the sound” was the moto on the gate (at both Exodus and our own parties), which is nothing for a 14 hour dance party. A similar event inside a club that only lasted for 6 hours would be 15-20 pounds.
There’s an amusing story of a three day riot on the Marsh farm housing estate, which is a large council estate on the edge of Luton. In 1995 Marsh farm saw three days of rioting, looting and setting cars and buildings on fire whilst van fulls of riot police tried and failed to aggressively quell the disturbances. Saturday night came around and Exodus made it very publicly known that they were going to be throwing a party a couple of miles out of town, and the whole estate cleared of rioters as they all went to the local Exodus party and took out all their frustrations there in the stack. I can imagine the mosh that night would have been brutal. When they returned to town the next afternoon they’d calmed down and forgotten all about the rioting and went home.
Exodus used to attract around 3-4000 people every second Saturday, which even if everyone is only paying a pound is a reasonable about of money. Exodus used to put money from their parties into community regeneration projects and help for the disaffected and homeless in the area. They squatted a large derelict farm on the edge of town and lots of the regions youngsters who would have been hanging around on the street used to go there and help renovate barns and plant veggies instead of smashing up bus shelters and getting into fights in the town. They also squatted a large manor house, called HAZ manor back in the early 90s where most of them lived.
I’ve included links here to a couple of documentaries made about exodus. Theres a couple of hours of material here, so if you think it might interest you then give them a watch later:
exodus from babylon (this is just a trailer, I couldn't find a free web version anywhere)
I never went to an actual exodus myself, they stopped doing parties in 2000, which is the year before I went to my first rave. I managed to go to a dance event at HAZ manor in the early 2000s however. They had a large barn out the back which they kept their sound system in and threw small scale parties in there. Most of the original Brains kan crew however did attend Exodus parties, and brought that high energy style of dancing back to the fields, forests and farm barns of Norfolk.
So although our tastes in music were a little further at points from the free party ethos of the 90s and current time, we had such a huge passion for it. It was still a very new thing for us. Norfolk has always been a little behind the times to say the least. We never had the original free party rave-revolution of the 90s that the rest of the country went through. Whilst the rest of the country was either dancing away to the sounds of acid house at M25 orbital raves, or grooving to the sounds of the Happy Mondays at the Hacienda; I’m sure that if you were to track down the corresponding alternate, underground scene in Norfolk, they would have all had skin heads, been wearing black skin tight jeans and black boots and be thrashing wildly around to the sounds of the sex pistols. As the whole free party rave thing managed to by-pass this distant little corner of England all those years ago, it held so much more meaning and excitement for those of us involved in it at this point in time. We most definitely had that fresh, new and excited hunger for it, which showed in the energy we projected and radiated as a collective. As our parties were smaller, they also had a really close knit, family vibe to them.
By 2002 the soundsystem had expanded somewhat from the baby shown in 2001. The rig that Brainskan put out in 2002 at the Ridgeway party was this one. It has the addition of two double 18's in the centre on top of each other and one more mid and tweeter on the top. I liked the look and sound of this one. I know that rear loaded, folded horn type speakers are more efficient, but I just really liked seeing all those bass speakers reverberating at the front of those boxes. The W-bins definitely had more of a punch to them though:
I've got a few more photos here from the rest of 2002. This was my favourite year going to parties. There weren't as many Norfolk parties this year so there was still a large group of us travelling to raves elsewhere in the country. Brainskan was still pretty small and in its early days, but there was a definite feeling of momentum and every party getting bigger and better. Plus I was very much in my "Ecstacy honeymoon" during 2002 and was taking Ecstacy every weekend. Its a year I look back upon very fondly in any case.
Photo credit: Again mainly from Holly Mabee, but other contributors include Jodie Marvill, Danielle Breeze and Rob Thomas. If anyone out there has more photos from 2002 please get in touch:
.jpeg)
The other thing that sticks out in my mind from the 2002 Ridgeway party, from my perspective at least, was the drive home. This was up there with the worst drive I have ever endured. As we had our soundsytem there it wasn’t just a case of drive home when you feel like it, we had to pack it all back down and load it up and clear up before we could leave. By the time we did this it was well into Sunday night, maybe 10pm. All the people I took to that party had already got lifts back earlier on and I had a whole different group of people I didn’t know as well in my car. I had even lent my map book to someone going home earlier because I intended driving back in convoy with the soundsytem. As we all began to slowly make our way back down the very bumpy gravel track onto the main road, every person in my car fell asleep before we even hit a road. Eventually we made it onto the M40 and it began to rain. I put my windscreen wipers on, and nothing happened. It started raining harder, to the point that it was becoming very difficult to see, I had to pull over and, as I was the last car in the convoy, watched as the lights of the rest of the convoy slowly pulled out of sight into the rain. So here I was on the hard shoulder of the Oxford ring road, in the dark, no map book, a car full of sleeping people, standing in the rain with no windscreen wipers and checked my phone to find the battery was dead. Not the best situation to be in when starring at a 4 hour journey home after having not slept the night before. The rain started easing and I started driving again. It was very slow driving as it was still raining and my wipers still weren’t working but I managed to navigate us home, getting in at 3am and yet still managing to get up for a day’s work at Norwich Union the next day. It was a traumatic experience, and one I felt was worth documenting.
This isn’t the worst time I’ve ever had to drive a vehicle however, certainly not the most stressful in any case. That time came a few years later in Wales. Like the ridgeway parties there were also large multi-rig parties happening in the welsh mountains. We used to try to make it over to one or two of these a year. Again the scenery was stunning, and it was always a bit of an adventure going there. This particular party in question happened in around 2009 or 2010, so after the main era of free parties in Norfolk.
There was a reasonable number of us making the journey to Wales on this occasion, at least 10 or 12 car loads, plus 12 or so people had hired a minibus to drive over there. We drove into the night and got there in the very early morning, took some MDMA and went down into the party for a few hours. At around dawn a group of about 15 of us all met up back at the cars and took some LSD and went for a walk into the woods. I don’t know how long we were walking through the woods for, but we had fully come up on the acid for quite some time and became aware that it was getting pretty hot and none of us had taken any water with us. We walked back to the party and arrived at what must have been late morning/ early afternoon, to find that the music had been turned off.
Our vehicles were parked up a long fire track sloping down a hill through the trees down to the valley floor where the soundsystems were located. There were a large number of police down the bottom, who had shut down the various sound systems on the valley floor. This was nothing unusual, we’d seen this before, and just assumed we’d hang around until the acid had worn off and then drive out somewhere else. What was highly unusual however, is that after a while the police began to form a line of riot police, two or three police thick, across the length of the track right down the bottom. They started doing this weird tribal style chanting whilst banging slowly on their shields, getting quicker and quicker, until all of a sudden they just started yelling and charging up the hill, like some kind of scene from a modern day Braveheart. They stopped after only about 15-20 metres to regroup, but anyone who was in their path during that 15-20 metre charge copped a shield to the face or a baton to the legs and was then carted off by the row of police behind. This was a long way off at this point, the track down to the valley floor must have been 400 metres or more, but it was clear that they were slowly working this way towards us. After watching this spectacle a few more times it became apparent that we needed to get our shit together and get the hell out of there. It was at this point that we realised that the driver of the minibus which brought 12 or so people to the party was nowhere to be found. A frantic search began. As we were up in the Welsh mountains nobody had any reception to call. The driver of the car I came in was also missing. The police were slowly getting closer and closer, one battle charge at a time. I’m pretty sure that anyone else with any sense had just carried on walking up the hill, in the opposite direction from the police, but us LSD trippers just stayed put near our vehicles, unsure of what to do.
I’ve got here a selection of photos from this party when the police came to shut it down. I’m unsure of who took these photos now, they’ve been on my hard drive a long time. I wasn’t there when they were taken as I was still wandering in the woods somewhere. But theres a great photo at the end of this section with the police in “mid-charge” up the hill:
Photo credit: Source unknown, possibly Thomas Remfry
The driver of the minibus was still missing, and by this point the wall of police was no more than 20 metres away from us, just one more “charge” away. There were about 12 of us milling around the minibus when the police started their tribal drumming on their shields. The drumming got quicker, the chanting started increasing, quite a disconcerting thing to see whilst tripping on acid, and eventually the charge began. Unsure of what else to do, we all jumped into the minibus and closed and locked all the doors.
In an incredibly foolish move, the nearest door to me when the charge began was the drivers door, and I jumped into the drivers seat. A police officer came straight up to my closed window and started banging aggressively and motioning me to undo the window. I put it down a couple of inches and garbled some kind of panicked reasoning for us being there; “Our driver is missing, we don’t want to be here, honestly we don’t, but we need to find him before we can go home. We really want to leave, honest.” Or something along those lines.
He thought for a minute before responding in his thick Welsh accent; “are the keys in the vehicle?” I looked down to see that the keys were in fact in the ignition of the vehicle. I’m not sure if anyone had thought to check here or not up until this point. “Yes?” I tentatively replied. His surprisingly calm response was; “If you don’t start this vehicle up right now and drive it out of here, I’m going to smash this window, drag you out here and arrest everybody in there.”
The thought which went through my head, and as I opened my mouth it was on the tip of my tongue to explain to this police officer was; “I’m really tripping on acid right now, I don’t think thats a very good idea”. I thought better of this explanation however, and simply said “righto”, and started up the minibus.
At this point I gripped the steering wheel and looked down at the dash to see the fake leather patterning on the centre of the steering wheel still moving, writhing and shimmering with kaleidoscopic colour, I then looked across the dash and over to the passenger side to see the dash also moving and breathing in my vision from the hallucinogenic drugs. The trip was on the tail end by this point, I’d definitely got well over the peak of it, but was still visually tripping. I should explain at this point to anyone who may be unaware; driving on hallucinogenic drugs is a terrible idea. Stimulants however, not nearly as problematic. I was often under the impression that the likes of ecstasy, cocaine and speed actually made me a “better” driver. Although this may seem a highly outlandish statement, theres a certain amount of credence to this claim. During the 70s and 80s the long-haul trucking industry, particularly in America, was pretty much over ran with drivers taking speed to stay awake and drive non stop for 22 hours at a time across the country. Whilst I have no doubt that the roads are a much safer place now that HGV drivers are forced to take regular rest breaks and aren’t frequently driving for days at a time on a diet of amphetamines, there is clearly a reason and benefits for the drivers to be taking powerful stimulant party drugs. They certainly make you feel much more awake and alert (much more than any triple shot espresso or super strength energy drink ever could), and definitely help with concentration. I can 100% guarantee however that one thing these drivers would not have been taking, is LSD. There is something very debilitating about the feeling of these kinds of drugs. They certainly don’t lend themselves well to the operating of heavy machinery. I’m not sure that I’d ever attempted to drive a vehicle on hallucinogenics until this point, let alone a minibus full of people that I had never driven before.
As we had all driven in the night before over the hill behind us the minibus was pulled over to the side of the track looking down the hill. The scene directly out the front window was that of two lines of riot police across the width of the track no more than 3m away from the front of the bus. Clearly I wasn’t driving out forwards. I looked in the rearview mirror to see 12 sets of saucer-eyed trippers in the back of the minibus, all sporting the same startled look of terror that I’m sure I was exhibiting myself. But beyond that the track behind me was full of cars turning, people hurriedly cramming tents into bags and taking down gazebos. Reversing out was not going to be achievable either. I was going to have to turn around.
This was a steep gravel fire track in the welsh mountains, not much wider than the minibus I was driving, with drainage ditches either side. A minibus I had never started or driven before, with a manual gearbox, and I had to attempt to turn it around, whilst tripping on acid. Needless to say this was a pretty taxing manoeuvre.
As I started the 3 point turn (which became more like a 15 point turn), the police in front created slightly more space, but still stayed close enough to the vehicle to see the whites of their eyes. Having never driven this vehicle before and it being a manual, and also being under the influence of highly debilitating hallucinogenic drugs, I was making a right fuck up of it; stalling the engine, bunny hopping, using way more revs than necessary and spinning the wheels on the gravel and nearly rolling into drainage ditches on either side, all whilst 30 riot police glared at me through the windows. Even though it was taking place at less than 3mph, this was the most intense, white knuckle driving experience of my life. My hands were gripping the wheel so tightly that I was probably close to snapping it off. The sweat was pouring off my head and down my face.
I had completed just over half the manoeuvre, so the police were lined up out the passenger side window to my left and I was beginning to get the front of the vehicle pointing slightly up the hill when my mate in the passenger seat (who was almost as traumatised by these events as I was) said something along the lines of “fuck me, this is intense, we need something to lighten the mood.” And he turned the radio on and pressed the search button. I should probably add at this juncture for the benefit of people who may not have ever been there; Wales is like, its whole own country. All of the road signs in Wales have both English and Welsh translations, there exist welsh TV stations with shows entirely in the Welsh language, although its very rare to actually hear it spoken. In several trips to Wales I can only recall a couple of occasions of briefly overhearing the odd conversation in the street. But when my mate turned on this radio it settled onto a Welsh talk show.
If this had of been a French or a German talk show, we would have instantly recognised the voices as being French or German, thought it was a bit odd, and then likely turned it back off again. But to hear Welsh coming through those speakers, when none of us had ever really heard a Welsh conversation before and were all still tripping, well it was all just too much. To be fair, it did exactly what my mate wanted, to “lighten the mood”. Every person in that minibus went from abject terror, to absolute hysterics in 5 seconds flat. Nobody twigged that what we were hearing was the Welsh language. “Have we all finally cracked and lost our fucking minds here, what the hell is this gibberish!” Was my principle thought. Not to offend the welsh at all, its actually quite a beautiful, rolling language, but at that exact point in time it was one of the funniest things I’d ever heard in my life coming through those speakers. The tears were rolling down my face, my sides were aching and I was finding it hard to breath from the belly laughter. I was hunched over the steering wheel in hysterics, but still trying to wrestle with the wheel and complete this bloody manoeuvre. God knows what the police stood just outside the vehicle must have thought. This was a sunny afternoon by this point and the windows of the minibus were open, and inside were 12 guys falling about themselves laughing at a Welsh talk show, whilst the driver was making an absolute fuck up of turning the thing around whilst also laughing uncontrollably at the wheel.
It occurred to me upon writing this that I likely haven't heard Welsh spoken since that day, and I was curious to see how it sounded. So I dug up this clip from youtube. As I say, its quite a beautiful language really, but man it seriously fried my brain hearing it that day in that minibus:
Eventually I managed to get the nose headed up the hill just enough to make it in one final full lock turn, gave it way more revs than I needed to, riding the clutch hard, and lurching up the hill in a shower of gravel and cheers from inside the minibus. The relief I felt at that moment was immense. We slowly worked our way back up the track, weaving in and out of the other people still frantically packing up their stuff to escape the oncoming wall of riot police, all laughing wildly at the Welsh talk show which was still playing on the stereo.
We came to a slow moving queue of cars at the end of the track, still very much relieved and elated from our close brush with the police. As the cars slowly moved on we came to the end of the dirt track, which opened out onto a main road. Still tripping, it suddenly dawned on me that although I had escaped the hazard of the police riot squad, I was now faced with the ultimate hazard of a 60mph (100kmph) public road in the Welsh mountains on a beautifully sunny Sunday afternoon. This road was teeming with traffic; cars, caravans, lorries, motorhomes, all whizzing past me at 60mph in both directions just beyond the front bumper. “I’m WAAAY too fucked for this.” I thought to myself. I looked back in the rear view mirror to the 12 sets of saucer eyes behind me, knowing that nobody in that vehicle was in any better state to drive it. I already had a long queue of traffic banked up behind me so just waited for a break in the traffic before accelerating off into the public realm.
Once I’d gotten up to speed the driving wasn’t as difficult as I had imagined. As explained before, driving on hallucinogenics is something I had always staunchly avoided, but once I’d started it became fairly instinctual. I feel like LSD feels like it should be fairly debilitating in terms of fine motor control and body awareness, but once you start applying yourself to something it seems to come quite easily. I have a story which involves a cracking example of this. Undoubtably the best story I’ve ever heard of someones first ever LSD trip;
I work in an industry known as “rope access”, essentially we abseil off really high things and carry out a variety of construction related jobs on them. Can be 80 story skyscrapers in the centres of cities, but most recently for me it has been wind turbines. Just as an example, here is short clip of one of my standard views at work:
The thing I like most about this industry, other than the views (and the money to be fair), is the people you meet. The industry is full of adrenalin junkies of every sort; base jumpers, paragliders, down hill mountain bikers, kite surfers, rock climbers, etc. You can also be almost 100% sure that every person you work with has at least spent some portion of their younger days taking various party drugs. Its pretty much a given. (Perhaps you need to have killed off the “fear” portion of your brain with class A drugs to want to do this for a living?).
This particular story centres around a guy I met working on wind turbines in Australia who grew up in Russia. He is a highly regarded slackliner/ highliner. I’ve got a cracking shot of him here, relaxing after work in the Grampians mountains in Victoria. Have a zoom in on that figure in the bottom of the below photo: No helmet, no harness, no shoes even. Just living his best life, one small slip away from rapid death at any moment.
This guy attends (and organises) various slacklining festivals in Australia. One of the biggest of these festivals happens in the blue mountains, a couple of hours west of Sydney. The blue mountains is a really beautiful area of Australia, characterised by sheer limestone cliffs above dense bushland forests, with a blue haze (hence the blue mountains) given off by all the eucalyptus trees. Typical blue mountains scene:
There is a large slacklining festival that happens deep into the blue Mountains where they set up a number of slacklines, some only 10 metres or so across, but others up to 250m long over 100m deep canyons. There is a small sound system set up there and people camp there for the weekend and go rock climbing and slacklining. It was at this festival a few years back that this guy was first offered LSD. He took it not fully understanding what it was and went about his day. He first started coming up from it mid way through one of the larger slacklines over a canyon floor. It should be added that some of those larger slack lines, the ones 200m and above, can take upwards of an hour to complete, and the sag once the weight of a human is applied in the middle can be as much as 30m, roughly the height of a 10 story building, which you have to slowly walk uphill to get out of. To have your first experience of coming up on acid mid way through something like that, staring at the valley floor 100m beneath you, watching the trees rippling faster and faster as you come up more and more. Knowing that you’ve got like another 20 minutes of pure, focused concentration needed to get you to the safety of other side. Man, what a hell of a thing to go through.
I asked him if he was completely traumatised when he got to the other side and just lay down hugging the ground. But he told me that in fact it did the opposite, it filled him with confidence that he could do even the hardest slack lines and was absolutely sure he wouldn’t fall off. He went and knocked off all the longest, hardest slack lines which he hadn't already completed deep in his trip. To get between the slack lines there are often long hikes around canyon edges and through dense bushland to get to the other side. He said that he thought he was a hobbit in lord of the rings, on some kind of quest through middle earth, only stopping to walk across massive slack lines spanning between the canyons. Imagine being one of those other people as well; strolling peacefully through the woods and suddenly coming face to face with a 6ft 4 (he’s pretty tall), long haired Russian, sweating profusely in the Australian heat, wild eyed, high as fuck on acid, talking to you as if you are some kind of Goblin, and then watching him step off onto some narrow walk of death between 200m wide canyons. Jesus, what a wild ride.
This story makes my experience of turning a minibus around in front of a group of riot police seem entirely tame in comparison, but it was definitely intense at the time. Once I had the minibus up to speed and joined in the regular traffic I said to my passengers “right, where are we going then?” I got a lot of blank expressions and shrugs. Just 12 acid trippers in a minibus driving through peak holiday traffic in the Welsh mountains with no destination in mind, what could possibly go wrong? Gradually phones were brought out and calls were made and we found that most of our crew were re-grouping at Tal-y-bont reservoir and waterfall walk. This was often an after party hang out location when we were away in Wales, especially on a hot summers afternoon. Beautiful little spot with lots of waterfalls and rock pools to swim in. We all gathered here and took a walk up the river into the mountains to wait for the acid to wear off before making our drive back across the country. I have here a number of photos, which I’m pretty sure are from that very occasion:
Photo credit: Source unknown, possibly Thomas Remfry
Looking back on it now, it seems a shame that we didn’t make the journey out of Norfolk with our sound system in tow more often. It was such a good feeling taking that rig to the ridgeway in 2002 and receiving the response we did. But yet over the next 3 years I think we only ever journeyed out to one other large multi-rigger with our rig in tow. That one being the “Blue Moon Moot” in Petersfield in 2004. Whilst the party itself was large, we got there well into the night and couldn’t get our large truck down the track to the location where most of the sound systems were. There was a substantial cross-over between Brainskan and Equality Cohesion and we often leant each other amplifiers and speakers and generally helped out with each others parties. The sound system we took to the Blue moon moot was possibly the largest soundsystem we put out other than the festival soundsystems. I remember there being a bit of a debate about what to do as we needed a large area to set up in but the track all around us was pretty narrow with dense undergrowth under large trees either side and was blocked off ahead of us to a truck our size. Somebody suggested that we just plow into the tree area and flatten down the undergrowth. This seemed a bit of an outlandish suggestion at the time as it was full of ferns, brambles and bracken well over waist height. But in a show of people power we got about 30 of us pushing our way in there and jumping up and down to flatten the whole area, creating a good dancefloor under the large trees. It was pretty far away from the rest of the party but was the best we could do as we couldn’t get down the track any further. Here are some photos of the general area we set our soundsystem up in. The whole area was waist height undergrowth before we flattened it down:
Photo credit: Rob Thomas and Holly Mabee:
As we were somewhat isolated from the rest of the party it didn’t receive quite the same response as that Ridgeway party in 2002. Project storm were in a much better location nearer the main cluster of sound systems. Project storm were a sound system from the home counties. They threw great parties also, similar vibe to our own, and we would always go down to them if we were not doing our own at the time. Its a shame we never linked up with them, a Brainskan/ project storm sound system would have been a pumping party. This is a pic of the project storm setup at the Moot:
I also have this footage of the Blue moon moot around our rig. Its not exactly the best footage, but shows the area and sound system pretty well. Plus there is quite a lot of Jungle/ Ragga Oldskool being played, which the rest of my footage on YouTube is lacking somewhat. Fantastic prodigy tune for the first tune as well, this always got a good dance going to it:
Footage credit: Louise Render. She seems to be in most of this footage so I'm not sure who shot it:
This Moot was the only other time we took a rig out to another multi rigger. I guess we just got carried away and wrapped up in the extra size and support of the Norfolk parties. But in any case, we were fully prepared for the August 2005 bank holiday. The thought of taking our sound to an actual Teknival was one that we all held with infinite possibility. After seeing the response at a party with 2 or 3 thousand, imagine what could happen at a party with 20 or 30 thousand. Especially on the bank holiday of the year that held such happy memories of the years before. It was fair to say that the level of anticipation was as high as it could have been.
I think early reports we received on it were that it was going to be in the Devon/ Cornwall area. We were on the road early Saturday day to try and get nearer the area before more information became available. I was 5s up in the back of a Vauxhall Astra, not the best situation for a drive across the country, especially as all 5 people had everything they needed for an extended weekend away; food, tents, sleeping bags, gas stoves. It wasn’t the most spacious or comfortable of rides. Then a mate who happened to be driving one of the rig vans rang someone in the car saying his passenger had pulled out at the last minute and he didn’t have anyone to drive down there with. Not only was he driving a nice spacious van, but it was a new hire van. Not one of the old, filthy, clapped out thousand pound pieces of shit we always used to pick up. Well, you couldn’t get me out of that car quick enough. We swapped over at the next services and I stretched my legs out in a nice new van.
All was going fine and according to plan until we got to the Bedford area where we got a call telling us to pull over in the next Tesco’s. We met with a few people already there who were sporting the same look of confusion as we did. As we waited for the next hour or so, many more cars and rig vans from all around Norfolk and Suffolk pulled in. By this point a substantial corner of Tesco’s car park had been claimed by ravers and we had begun attracting the unwanted attention of the Tesco’s staff. We were hearing reports that the Teknival had been cancelled and wasn’t going to be happening in England after all. This was one hell of a blow, not only would we not be getting to carry our rig and our vibe to a party of international proportions, but we hadn’t planned for this eventuality. We didn’t have a venue for a party of this size more than anything else. We were so adamant about going to this party that we had made no effort to arrange a back-up if it all went wrong. No one really knew what to do; we stood in Tesco’s car park in heated debate over where to go. We had now been faffing around for 2 hours and there must have been over 150 of us crowded into that car park. Eventually the manager came out, informing us that we had been asked repeatedly to move and hadn’t and he had now called the police who were on their way. Considering we were now in possession of tens of thousands of pounds worth of sound equipment in several vans, on its way to an illegal rave somewhere (although even we didn’t know where), and no doubt thousands of pounds worth of various illicit, mind altering substances spread over a wide range of cars, the thought of police attention at this very early stage in the game was not a thought that anyone greeted with much enthusiasm. A decision had to be made and quick. A couple of people from Suffolk claimed to know of a usable venue somewhere towards the south east coast. So on the strength of this rather vague plan, we all turned around and headed back up the road we had just driven down and drove into Suffolk.
I have one stand out memory of this particular journey. And that is re-discovering a tune that I had not heard in a couple of years. There’s so many tunes out there that bring back floods of memories from those very early days of parties but I’m sure that a lot of them have been lost to the course of time and been swallowed into the back of some dust covered record box sitting in someone’s bedroom somewhere. This particular tune is one of my all-time favourites and one that used to get played at Brainskan in the early days which I had not heard in at least 2 years before it began playing through the rather shabby speakers of that hire van. Even so it still made all the hairs down the back of my neck stand on end and sent my stomach churning and heart racing with the memory of it. To hear it again after all that time, especially on the way to a party as epic as the festival was a beautiful moment. I instantly hassled the name of it from my mate driving the van and think I went straight out after this party and scoured the internet for it. I have to claim responsibility for re-introducing this particular one back into parties as it did kind of get rinsed out by everyone in the years that follow, and no-body likes it when a good tune is played to death, but I’m glad that so many more people got to enjoy it. Like I say, it’s one of my favourites. And I actually have a piece of footage of it being played the following year. I’m certainly the one who took the footage but cannot remember whether I was the one who put it on the decks or not. But anyway, here is the footage I have of it, a suitably epic response to a tune of truly epic proportions.
This is one of the only pieces of footage that has been floating around the internet of these parties for the last 10 years. This is footage that I shot, and was the only piece of footage that I included in the original version of this blog in 2011. I was in New Zealand at the time and got someone else to upload this to my blog site for me (my footage was all back in England). The footage was then downloaded from my blog and put up on YouTube. My original cassette of this party has unfortunately been lost, so this copy of this tune is the only one left in existence. My original copy was about 30 seconds longer at the beginning and showed me panning around the barn in the build up of the tune. If anyone knows this Joe Venny who uploaded it, could they put me in touch with him, as I would like to see if he still has the file he downloaded. I have since found footage of this exact tune at this party taken from a different angle on top of the rig and I would love to splice the two together, swapping between the views. So if anyone knows Joe Venny could they please ask him if he has this footage on a hard drive somewhere please. I know I can download it from YouTube and reupload it, but the quality is substantially reduced each time you do that. This copy is already significantly more blocky and blurry than my original copy. Alternatively, if any of my old lot happen to have seen a mini dv tape with “Equality cohesion halloween 2006” written on it kicking around a draw in their house, then please let me know as this is the tape I have been looking for. This was one of the best parties Equality ever did and I had a good hours worth of footage of it. I live in hope that it will turn up one day.
This footage also shows the dramatic increase in support for these parties. This was taken at an Equality party in 2006, which usually had slightly lower numbers than Brainskan, but when you compare it to the photos from 2001 and 2002 it is substantially bigger. Like I say, my original footage had me panning around the barn at the beginning to show how many people were in there, so I would really like this back if I can get it:
As we pulled into the gravel track leading up to this venue we drove past a house. This is never a good omen. Someone’s obviously going to twig something is up when hundreds upon hundreds of cars start driving past their front door at all hours of the night, up a usually unused track.
The venue itself was nice; it was definitely large enough to accommodate a party of our size and had a nice reservoir at the top end of it, always a bonus on a hot weekend. But it was without any shadow of a doubt far too close to the house at the bottom of the track. We might hold illegal raves, but at the same time don’t want to piss anyone off. The upmost care is usually taken to make sure we are far enough away from houses to not bother anyone, but this was a last minute rash decision that didn’t have time to be given serious thought or planning. It was this or nothing, we had no other option.
As with all the festivals the soundsystem was immensely impressive to look at, a whole rag-tag mish-mash wall of sound comprising speakers from anyone who had them and was willing to chuck them in. But ultimately, didn’t sound as impressive as it looked. It also wasn't nearly as large as it could have been either as Brainskan had their soundsystem seized again at the party in South creek quarry in 2005 just before this festival (I'm sure I will write about this in a future blog). In a bit of a departure from the one huge sound system at the last two festivals, there were actually two other sound systems set up as well. The party itself was good enough, the weather was scorching all weekend but the party was not as good as the last 2 festivals in my mind. I have here a few pictures from that festival:
Photo credit: Holly Mabee, Kate Ames, Damo Shaw
.png)
Things started to take a sour turn early Sunday evening as several vans of gate crashers, sometimes known as the police, turned up uninvited. Whenever this happens it turns into a case of “batten down the hatches.” As this party was held in a large empty field with the rig up against a fence at the bottom, we hurriedly surrounded the soundsytem, decks and dance floor with an arc of bumper to bumper cars and vans, 2 or 3 vehicles thick and everyone piled into the dance floor. This was always a bonus of police turning up; it didn’t half get everyone in that stack. I seem to remember the police trying to get their way to the decks for a good hour before eventually giving up and going home. We weren’t violent or hostile towards the police, just danced in front of them. This was the only real weapon we had, dancing. But it proved to be one hell of a formidable weapon throughout the years. Many a cohort of fully armed riot police has been fended back simply by dancing in front of them. It’s one of the most satisfying feelings knowing that the police have tried to muscle their way into a rave with the intentions of shutting it down and then eventual turn round to go home in defeat. But I think that everyone there knew that this wouldn’t be the last we would see of the police that weekend.
One of the most effective times the stack was used to stop police gaining entrance to shut down one of our parties is also undoubtably the most iconic date in the history of these parties:
March 28th, 2004
I don’t think there is a date more enshrined into the collective memories who were at these parties at this time than March 28th. Not only is this the event that the news report footage was taken from for the infamous “Propaganda” music video by Fudalwokit, but an entire album of homemade tunes was created after the event, simply entitled “March 28th”. The cover of this CD gives a bit of an insight into what was so memorable about it:
Up until this point one of our parties had never been stopped by the police. I don’t think we’d ever encountered a full riot squad until this point. They had tried to gain access a couple of times at past parties but failed. This event was the first time we had witnessed a police response such as this, and it became quite an extreme response. When I wrote these stories the first time around I never mentioned March 28th. I felt that my own personal story from this rave was not as engaging or interesting as some of the other stories I had. But thinking back over it all again, just the very fact that I was at March 28th is a story worth telling of itself.
March 28th 2004 was the date of a warehouse party thrown in the airport industrial estate on the outskirts of Norwich. There had been several raves thrown in warehouses around Norwich leading up to this one, although it was still relatively new terrain. Personally I was never a fan of warehouse parties around Norfolk, I felt we didn’t really have industrial areas big enough to for a rave to go largely unnoticed like in London or Luton, plus we had a wealth of remote countryside locations we could use. It was always argued that we were reaching out to new people by doing parties in the city, but I often felt as if it was just the same people attending but we were taking them away from where they would really have rather been going to parties.
Edit: the above paragraph is one I wrote 10 years ago. I recently found out some information which certainly contradicts what I wrote above, if the information is correct. First I would like to discuss a crew which is the closest modern day equivalent of these parties: Odessey soundsystem. Just for complete disclosure; having been in Australia and New Zealand for the best part of 14 years I have never been to an Odyssey party and am only going on second hand advice. But a lot of the people I know and whose opinion I respect who were around during the early 2000s speak very highly of Odyssey and say that it is the closest thing to that old vibe that you are likely to get in this day and age. These parties are top notch, and the production values are significantly higher than we used to put out. They do a mixture of free-parties and legal events/ festivals. If you are reading this and are interested in the old style parties of the early 2000s then I recommend checking out Odyssey. Link to their Facebook event page is here:
Short aftermovie from Odyssey Spring party 2024:
And this mix from Fudalwokit is well worth a listen. This was the last set from an Odyssey day rave in 2023. Great selection of different genres of Norfolk free-party tunes:
Fudalwokit history of rave set
Anyway, the point of mentioning Odyssey is that the story I have heard is that a few (or maybe just one?) of the Odyssey crew grew up in a housing estate on the outskirts of Norwich and were young scalies as kids; breaking into cars etc. This housing estate happens to border one of the industrial estates where we threw some of the city raves. One of the nights we put on a rave in there they were out on the streets and could hear faint music off in the distance and managed to track down the warehouse in question. Seeing this illegal rave in the warehouse completely changed their outlook and direction and they began coming to the parties every week, eventually starting up Odyssey.
I’m not 100% sure on the accuracy of this story as it was told to me second hand, but if this is the case and the crew which is largely carrying the flame of that vibe into modern times just stumbled across it from one of the city parties then I guess it was worth it all along, and I happily take back everything I said previously about parties in the city. Well, I take back the fact that it didn’t introduce new people to parties. I still stand by the fact that I didn’t enjoy the vibe of them and would have much rather been out in the countryside. There is however one city party which I am really gutted never happened.
Most of the parties we did in the city were in industrial areas on the outskirts, with one notable exception; Fat Pauly’s nightclub. Fat Pauly’s used to be a nightclub in the Anglia Square region of the city, just around the corner from the Anglia TV studios. It was located on an industrial looking car park, with the ugly monstrosity that is anglia square lurking in the background (surely they’ve torn this down or rebuilt it by now? It was a decrepit, aging blight on the landscape even 20 years ago). Fat Pauly’s closed down a number of years before and had been sitting there empty for some time. The decision was made to throw a rave in there. Not with the full sound system as this was seen as a high risk party as it was so close to the city, but it went off without a hitch and with the soundsytem still intact. It wasn’t the most remarkable party, but was fairly unique in its proximity to the centre of the city. (If anyone happens to have a photo of this party from the outside, with a picture of the nightclub and anglia square in the background I would appreciate a copy of it).
After the success of Fat Pauly’s nightclub an even more audacious party was planned. I’ll explain a little about the general layout of Norwich first for people who may not have been there. The main high street in Norwich is called St Stephens street. This has a lot of the main department stores/ shops on it, as well as the cities two shopping malls; Chaplefield and the Castle Mall branching off it. I’ve got a picture from google maps here to better describe the layout. It was only at the moment that I searched for this map that I realised that St Stephens street (highlighted in blue below) doesn’t actually extend all the way to the castle and castle mall. It changes into red lion street half way down. In any case, this street carries on to the castle in Norwich, at the top of the picture below, which has a large shopping mall beneath it. Chaplefield shopping mall is located just off St Stephens street, where the highlighted green path goes off to the left:
The building I wanted to bring everyones attention runs parallel to St Stephens street and has a large red ring around it in the picture above. This is Norwich bus station, the main bus terminal in Norwich. These days its a reasonably modern, glass fronted waiting area with a large fancy shaped roof which the busses all pull in under into multiple bus bays. But back in our day Norwich bus station was a much less glamorous affair. It was essentially a large, concrete runway style strip running from the entrance of the bus station, where the dotted green line is, to the exit of the bus station, which now has a travel lodge built on it. Along the right hand side as you look at this picture was simply a long asbestos awning to provide a bit of shelter which had all the various bus stops located along it. Along the left had side were a series of large shed style buildings, one of which had a skate park with skateboard ramps and stuff inside.
The upgrade to Norwich bus station had been announced and busses had been rerouted to some other street. The bus station entrances were fenced off with construction fence and the skate park had all of the ramps stripped out of it. It sat like this for a number of weeks, and eventually drew our attention. The now cleared out skate park shed would have been a perfect size for one of our parties, and there was a huge concrete strip running the length of the bus station which could easily accomodate 100 cars or more. The place was scoped out and it was agreed we would throw a party in Norwich bus station, right in the centre of the city. This was the only city party that I was highly excited about.
The party was organised and this was the plan right the way up to the Wednesday or Thursday before the party on the Saturday night. One of the squatters happened to meet up with some people a few days before the event who had nothing whatsoever to do with the organisation of these parties. They excitedly exclaimed “I hear the parties going to be on St Stephens street or something this weekend! I cant wait!” This news quickly got back to the rest of us and set a large panic behind the scenes. I should probably elaborate a bit more about Fat Pauly’s and the set up of city parties in general at this point:
Normally with parties out in the country we used to all meet up at an isolated track, a “meeting point”, the location of which would be put as a pre-recorded message on a party line number to meet at midnight. Everyone would ring this number, get to the correct meeting point, and once there were 100 or so cars and the vans containing the sound systems there we would drive in a large slow convoy to the venue where the party was going to be. The purpose of this was so that everyone arrived at the venue all at once and provide a “strength in numbers” scenario so that it would be much harder for the police to stop it. If we just put the venue on the party line (it had to be assumed that the police also had access to the number) then there was nothing stopping the police from blue lighting it there before all the people got there and arresting the people setting up the sound system. This tactic of meeting points and convoys seemed to work very well, Plus the convoy itself was always a little exciting in itself. The sight of hundreds of car headlights snaking along country roads was always one that sent the stomach churning with the anticipation of what was to come. Every now and again you’d come across a random car at a junction in the middle of nowhere at 1am, waiting for all these cars to pass on a usually unused road. What they must have thought to see that many cars heading somewhere. I wonder if any ever just tagged on the end to see where we were all going.
For parties in the city however, the convoy tactic was not possible as you couldn’t run a convoy through city streets, so the actual party location had to be disclosed on the party line. To combat the fact that there would only be a small amount of people there to protect the sound systems at the very beginning, the location of the party was told to small groups of people beforehand, who would turn up with the sound system before the location had officially been announced on the party line. With the Fat Pauly’s party however it seemed that the word got out too far to too many people who didn’t really understand what to do, and car loads of people turned up well before the right time, and before the soundsystem. When the guys turned up to break into the building there were 20 or 30 cars full of people sat outside waiting for them.
Im not sure if this comes as any kind of surprise to anyone (surely not?), but it wasn’t all just peace, love and trance during these years. Serious criminal activity took place; locks were cut, windows were pried open, security alarms were disabled. These buildings weren’t just open for us to use and a certain amount of breaking and entering definitely happened. There’s no sugar coating that fact. There were a number of the old farm barns in the countryside which tended to just be left open, and a range of woodland venues you could just drive into, but certainly anything in the city was always going to involve a bit of good old fashioned crime to get in to.
Even though people who went to these parties were likely under no disillusion that this happened, its never a good look when 100 odd people are watching you break into a building. Not to mention the fact that many people and vehicles gathered on a normally unused piece of industrial wasteland only a 1km or so from the city centre could easily attract the attention of police before access to the building was even gained. So for the Norwich bus station party it was supposed to have been kept a bit more under wraps. Even though this report from some random in the street didn’t detail the actual venue, it was close enough to send everyone into panic stations and a hasty meeting was organised. We really didn’t want a repeat of Fat Pauly’s where a load of people were hanging around outside the construction fencing waiting to be let in, it was much too a high profile venue for that. Personally, I was still up for hitting the bus station, it would have been an epic party to pull off. But I think really the sensible option prevailed and that was when we went back to the bedlam warehouse for the second time. Shortly after this major construction works began on the bus station and a party there wasn’t possible anymore. Major missed opportunity, but oh well.
Back to the story at hand, March 28th; a rave had been planned in said warehouse in the airport industrial estate. The police seemed to be present very near the beginning. I’m not sure when they initially turned up, but there was quite a number of them there within the first hour, not long after the tunes were first turned on. The warehouse had a big steel roller shutter on the front, a small office in the front right corner as you entered, and the rest of the space was just an empty warehouse with a large stack of pallets and some old office furniture in there. The sound system was set up along the back wall, facing the steel shutter at the front, with a fire exit door to the right of it along the back wall. As the police moved toward the large roller shutter we all ran to the front of the building and started a huge mosh in the front doorway, about 50 of us. The police couldn’t push their way in as we took up the entire doorway. Whilst I don’t have footage of this (the footage wouldn’t have come out in the dark on those old cameras in any case), I do have a few photos of the occasion. You can see the group of people at the bottom of the bottom of the picture, and the police at the top. Obviously you have to imagine that in this scene there is a soundsystem banging out hard trance in the background at the other end of the warehouse and those people in the foreground are part of a huge/ writhing mosh of people.
Photo credit: Holly Mabee
The picture I would really like to highlight at this point however is this one:
Its a very interesting picture this one as it has the girl in the centre of the picture at the front (Jodi), the one person who is looking at the camera, with a beaming smile on her face. The interesting thing about this scene is that quite likely moments after this picture was taken, Jodi’s head was split open by a police baton. Theres a somewhat controversial theory that if a large crowd is being obstructive to the police, but aren’t necessarily becoming violent, that the police will lash out at one of the women to try to get the rest of the men to react angrily and violently. Once violence is being used towards the police, they are within rights to go in heavy handed, it plays into their hands to be able to violently quell some kind of disturbance. I’m not sure how true this theory is, but it is a little strange that of all those guys in the front row, the policeman in question felt so threatened by this young girl that she needed a baton to the head (its worth noting that nobody else was hit).
Jodi was only 16 at the time, and still in high school. She was bleeding profusely and was rushed to hospital by her boyfriend of the time. By the time she got to the hospital her top and jeans were covered in blood. It being a Saturday night there was quite a wait and they were told to sit in the waiting room. When questioning her about the nature of her injury none of the staff would believe that she was hit in the head by a police officer.
As they were in for a wait anyway they went to the toilet themselves and cleaned her head up. She had been hit in the left temple, and coupled with the fact she was dancing exuberantly at the time, the wound had pumped out a lot of blood. When they cleaned up the wound in the bathroom they realised that the actual cut to her head was not as bad as it had previously looked, and they made the decision to check themselves out of A&E and drive back to the party. The police had already blocked the entrance by this point and Jodie and her boyfriend managed to climb over a wall at the back to get back in.
I’m not entirely sure if it was in the immediate aftermath to this incident or some time later, but CS gas was also deployed by multiple police officers into the crowd of people. Unknown to us at the time, this is a major operational no-no for the police, and it was questioned by newspaper reports in the days that followed. CS gas should never be deployed into a group of people, and never in an enclosed space such as a warehouse. To counter this point however a police spokesman was quoted in the newspaper as saying to the press that “100 people were throwing glass bottles” at the police, which was absolute crap. All we were doing was dancing in front of them. The roller door was hurriedly closed, sealing the warehouse off from the police, but sealing the CS gas in. The burning stench in that warehouse was stifling, plus there were several people in there who had copped a face full of pepper spray and were having water poured onto their faces by concerned ravers. This early exchange set the atmosphere for things to come. The floor to the warehouse was painted in a heavy duty red flooring paint. Whatever was in that gas started to react with and dissolve the paint on the floor! We all ended up with red paint all over our shoes from dancing in there all night. Must be some kind of pretty strong solvent in there to do that. I have here the newspaper report from the follow days mentioning the use of CS gas:
My own memory is a little hazy now, but I believe that the police backed off and the warehouse door was opened again and remained open for some time during the night and the party went on. At some time in the early hours of the morning however the police reappeared in much larger numbers. I remember there being a lot of people calling out around the door and in the car park outside as the police were approaching “Are you in or out? The door is closing, either stay outside now, or get in and stay in.” The steel roller door came down for the last time in many, many hours; sealing everyone in for the long haul.
The warehouse had a large number of pallets inside it. People began taking these apart and screwing them into doorframes and doors to seal off the doors, and piling up the office furniture behind that. The next few hours, going right into the day and early afternoon became what could best be described as a siege. You still had the standard Brains kan soundsystem pounding out hard trance/ oldskool hardcore with 200-300 people dancing in front of it at all times, but at each doorway there was a group of 20-30 people piling up furniture and barricading doorways whilst police on the other side were attempting to smash their way in with battering rams/ axe’s. It’s like we all took it in shifts; have a dance for half hour, then back to manning the barricades, stacking up furniture, power drilling stuff into doorframes, keeping the police at bay. I have no idea how long this went on for, but even by conservative estimates it was hours, and hours. 2 hours? 4 hours? 6? I really have no idea, but it was a looong time this was unfolding. It really was like an active medieval siege, just with a lot more trance.
One of my most vivid memories from this party was hearing a tune in the early afternoon. Obviously the CS gas, the siege, and eventually being physically ripped and beaten from the group of people laying on the speakers (which is yet to come) were all pretty memorable events by themselves. But this tune, no tune has ever made me so emotional before or since. By the end of it I had tears streaming down my face. It was an absolutely genius choice of tune, not a rave tune at all really, and probably the kind of tune that older free party ravers from the 90s would think is pretty strange to be playing at an underground illegal rave. I’m amazed that someone had it in their record box, almost like they were foreseeing such a situation. Again, like the map books, are record boxes becoming some kind of relic of the past? Seems funny we all used to lug around huge great 20kg metal suitcases full of vinyls. Surely its all just memory sticks with 10,000 tunes on these days isn’t it? Back in these times nobody mixed with digital, everything was purely on vinyl. If you wanted to bring a specific tune along, it needed to be brought on vinyl. So you have to be quite selective with what you were bringing. I had never heard this particular tune before, at a rave or otherwise. It’s an odd one to bring really, but suited this situation so perfectly. The tune itself is a story about trench warfare in the first world war. Not wanting to even remotely compare the plight of a load of fucked ravers in a warehouse to the horrors of trench warfare, but there were certain parallels that could be drawn. The bit that really got to me was around two thirds the way through (from around 3mins 45 onwards) theres an extended chorus with the “altogether now” vocals played alongside a second vocal of “lets go, lets go, lets go home”. By this point it was fully into the afternoon and it was incredibly clear that the police at the doors were not going to be stopping until they gained access to that warehouse. I swear I could even hear doorframes splintering from police axes and ravers yelling in the background as this was playing, thinking “there’s no going home for us now, this is it, we’re all in this to the end all together now as the song says.” Like I say, it brought tears to my eyes and rolling down my cheeks, something that no other tune has done to me. Incredible selection of tune for the situation:
This tune was played by Nick. I always liked Nicks sets, you never knew what you were going to get. It wasn’t all just banging hard trance from start to finish, usually some kind of mix of techno, breakbeat, trance and oldskool. There was always a good ebb and flow, a definite build up and wind down/ chill out parts, with some pretty weird and offbeat tunes nestled in there. I’ve got a two tune segment here from one of his sets which always makes me laugh when I hear it. The first tune is an absolute corker, one of the best euphoric vocal trance tunes of those times, and the next; well, its certainly not something you would be expecting to hear at a rave normally. Its worth listening to just for that first tune to be honest, what a belter. I have a great memory of him playing this tune at the Blue moon moot mentioned earlier in this blog. Just as the police came in to try to shut it down he put this tune on and we were all dancing around the decks to stop the police getting to him and they eventually just gave up and went off to hassle the other sound systems. I’ve also included a slide show of pictures playing in the background from these parties. I do have a plan to release a set at some point which does a similar thing. I’ve recorded a 4 hour mega-mix of all my favourite trance/ techno/ hard house tunes from these years and I was planning to stick it up on YouTube with a slideshow of pictures playing in the background, starting at 2001 and going up the years to 2007 and beyond to show the progression of the parties. I don’t have enough pictures for this yet though, so if anyone out there has some old photos please send them over.
There were a number of random non-dance music but still upbeat tunes which used to get played in the early days of these parties. I used to really like them, they were always fun to get in the stack to. Always used to put a smile on peoples faces in there. This is a selection of my favourite such tunes:
The March 28th party went on well into the afternoon with handfuls of us keeping the police at the doors at bay, but eventually we had to face the fact that the police were going to be getting in at some point, and that there was no way we were leaving here with our sound system. This was new terrain for us to be in; we’d never had a sound system seized before. These soundsystems were very much DIY affairs; all hand built by ourselves. A lot of love and passion went into those speakers, and people had an enormous respect them. We certainly weren’t intending to give up easily, and clearly hadn’t up until this point.
As one last defiant stand, more symbolic really than any hope of actually saving the soundsystem, the music was turned off and the speakers were dismantled and laid down together on the floor, all next to and touching one another up against the back wall. We all then climbed on top of the speakers and sat and lay down, linking arms together, then told the people at the door to clear the barricades and open the steel roller door. Police slowly poured in, a little surprised at this passive scene of 100 or so people simply sitting down. Anyone who couldn’t fit on the speakers left the warehouse as the police came in. The police entered the warehouse and surrounded those of us sitting on the speakers. We were still most upset about the way Jodie had been treated however, and we were all chanting the identification number of the police officer who hit Jodie in the head "2-8-6! 2-8-6! 2-8-6!" or something along those lines.
Some kind of dialogue took place, recorded on camera by the police, where they gave us the option of leaving now. We told them we weren’t going without our sound system. It goes without saying this wasn’t part of the polices deal. I remember them giving us a couple more opportunities to leave, which nobody took them up on, then the order was given to remove us. I remember this unnerving click as all the riot police slammed the visors on their helmets shut in unison and advanced towards us.
I was right on the front row, linking arms with people either side. The first policeman to get up to me simply looped his arm up into my armpit and yanked me violently forwards from behind the shoulder blade. I didn’t offer a huge amount of resistance and broke from the other people and stumbled forward and off the speakers toward the floor. Another police officer behind the first grabbed me by the arm and marched me out of the warehouse, pushing me out the door. I was relatively lucky really, other people copped batons to the arms and legs as they became harder to reach further towards the back of the pile of speakers.
Eventually however we were all dragged and beaten off the speakers and ejected from the warehouse. I might take this opportunity to show Fudalwokits propaganda music video. The snippets of people being carried and dragged out are immediately following this last futile stand on top of the speakers. A line of riot police, complete with barking attack dogs, then herded us up the road and out of the industrial estate on the sunny Sunday afternoon, leaving our sound system inside the warehouse. If anyone has the original news report that was used in this video I would appreciate a copy. I've reached out to Gav for this but he is a hard man to track down. If anyone else has the original TV news report could they send it over please:
We had never been in this situation previously, losing the sound system in this way, and were a little unsure how to proceed. I’m not sure who researched it, if other older rave crews from around the country were contacted for advice, but it seemed that there was some kind of loophole within the law. If nobody was prosecuted for organising the rave, then the seized equipment was essentially logged under some kind of “lost property”. This allowed for the fact that if the equipment was hired then the hire company could go and claim their equipment back. Obviously all of this equipment was our own, and if one of us were to turn up and try to claim it back then some pretty strong questions were going to be asked and that person was likely going to end up arrested and charged with organising the party.
The idea was hatched that maybe we just ALL go down to claim this equipment back. Surely they couldn’t be bothered with the paperwork to arrest everyone. Everyone was kind of part of the party scene anyway and their donations at the parties were all funnelled into new equipment. Technically everyone who went to those parties and donated money to it owned a small portion of it. So the word was put out that we were going to all meet up and go to the Norfolk police headquarters in Norwich to claim our property back. There is a large park (Chaplefield gardens) not far from the police station in Norwich. We arranged a date on a Saturday and put the word out to everyone who could to be there.
I’m unsure how many people turned up, maybe 100? Possibly more? In any case it was a jovial but rather nervous atmosphere in the park beforehand, wondering what the response was going to be. We waited around for half an hour after the time we had set, then crossed the road, walked into the police station, and all sat down on the floor. Norwich police station is not a big place, and we took up every bit of floor space, with a good 10 or 20 people still outside the front doors on the street. The office staff manning the front desk looked highly confused. We briefly explained our position, that we had come to claim some lost equipment, and that we would like to speak to someone who could help. Eventually someone came out, the first question that was asked was “who is in charge here?” To which we all replied in unison “WE ALL ARE”. This was a regular occurrence, and throughout the day more and more senior police officers (with a succession of fancier looking symbols on their shoulders) came out, first asking “who is in charge?”. They seemed to be unable to comprehend the fact that there wasn’t one ringleader or organiser calling the shots. Obviously there weren’t exactly over 100 people who were intricately involved with the organisation either. In the words of all good pyramid sellers - Ours is more of a trapezoid model.
This idea of the organisational pyramid became a bit of an ongoing joke between myself and my mate Joe, who lived in the same sleepy village as me, and was there every step of the way with me through these years. A newspaper article was released, I think at some point in 2006. I cant remember the exact event it was about, but it was one where a couple of people were arrested. There was some police officer quoted in the article saying that they were “looking for the tip of the pyramid of the organisation known as “Brainstorm””. I’m not entirely sure if they really were this clueless that they didn’t even know the correct name by this point, or it was intentional, or maybe the newspaper misquoted them. Either way we found it hilarious. Not so much the mispronunciation of the name, more the idea of this pyramidal structure. For many months and years after we used to joke with each other about being tip of the pyramid:
“You wanna watch yourself mate, I recon they’re on to you, I’ve heard you’re the tip of the pyramid.”
“Nah man, if ever there was a tip of project brainstorm, you’d be the tip of the pyramid.”
And other such comments. It amused us anyway. Does anyone out there happen to have that newspaper article I am on about? Its not one I’ve come across again since and I’d like another copy of it.
But I guess despite mine and Joes joking with each other about such matters, we were the “tip of the pyramid’, as much as there was a tip. We were most definitely the young rapscallions that the police were after. Us and maybe 40 others. As I said, ours is more of a trapezoid model. There wasn’t a “Mr Big” at the top calling the shots, which seemed to be something the police could never grasp.
This scenario of increasingly more important police officers coming out into Norwich police station and asking us who our leader was happened several times over the next couple of hours or so and we all happily stayed sitting down on the police station floor, taking it turns to go out for spliffs in the park over the road while the majority of people stayed in the police station. Eventually a police officer with a fancy hat and some seriously elaborately decorated shoulders came in looking totally pissed off with all of us hippies lounging around on his police station floor for the last couple of hours. This guy was obviously near or at the top of the chain in Norfolk. He asked the same few questions that all of the last police officers had asked, then took out a coloured form, signed a few things and told us to go and retrieve our stuff from a police lock up and get the hell out of his police station. Easy as that.
We used this tactic a number of times over the next few years at a number of different police stations after sound systems were seized and it seemed to work every time. Whilst I don’t have any photos of that occasion at Norwich police station (please send some over if you read this and have some), I do have this photos from Kings Lynn police station, after the sound system was taken at south creek quarry in 2005:
Photo credit: Norfolk free party collective FB group, unsure of original photographer
In any case, it took us a little over 2 months to get our sound system back and put on another party. That party was up there with one of the best that happened through those years, the second party at Swaffham Picnic site (the first was in 2003). Swaffham picnic site was undoubtably the most used meeting point through those years. It had the added bonus that it was remote enough and scenic enough that a party could be thrown in there. I think there were 2 or 3 parties at the picnic site through those years. On at least one occasion this was due to the fact that there were vans full of police waiting at the top of the track for us to leave, so we just drove the van further in and set up the party in there. I’m not sure if this was what happened on this occasion or if it was planned to be in there, but the part of the picnic site that was used this time around was much deeper into the trees and a nicer spot with the soundsystem set up in amongst the tall trees further off the main track.
This was one of the best parties during those years in my opinion. The fact that we had been able to just walk into the police headquarters and retrieve our soundsystem, and this was the first party back definitely added to that euphoric, frenzied vibe. I have here a great snippet of a set from that party. I’ve previously posted cut up clips to YouTube of this set, but not the full thing until now. Not the whole set, but theres almost 20 minutes of continuous footage of Fudalwokit mixing here. The first tune is a real anthem of these parties, definitely has a euphoric uplifting vibe in that dance:
Back to the story in question, August bank holiday 2005: After the initial police confrontation the party went on through Sunday night and most of the rig was packed down under the cover of darkness and ushered out to safety in the backs of cars and small vans, but still a large amount remained there pumping out the tunes. The morning on Monday had a paranoid, edgy vibe to it, just waiting for the inevitable return of our unwanted gate crashers. We should have packed it in on Monday morning, a lot of people wanted to, I was one of them, but a lot of people wanted to push it to the end. It’s hard to be the one to say to several hundred people “sorry folks, shows over, let’s all pack up and go home and get on with our lives.” So it got carried on. I’m not sure if it was the police or a party goer who called them but a TV crew from Anglia news turned up and set a camera up on a tripod at the top of the hill in preparation for the carnage that was about to erupt. When the police came back their numbers had swelled exponentially, gaining reinforcements from the surrounding counties of Norfolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire. I’d never seen so many police in one place. Van after van after van kept pouring in over the hill at the back and parking up alongside the fence running along the bottom of the field. There was no doubt about it, we were fucked. The music was turned off and half of us began hectically throwing speakers into the back of any van we could find, the remaining 2 or 3 hundred people formed a kind of human wall between the police and the speakers. The police advanced and the TV cameras were right there throughout it all, capturing it all for the main headline on Anglia news. It looked just as bad on the police as it did on us, an utterly ugly, brutal confrontation, splashed across the news headlines and into the homes and lives of shocked families from across 5 counties for the next few days. The worst kind of violence I’d ever seen at a rave (up until that point). Not the kind of publicity anyone wanted. This is one of the news reports in question (there were several reports on the news over the next few days):
Footage source: Carl Cobbett
To be fair to this news report, although it was overwhelmingly negative (they always were), they did manage to include snippets of two of the absolute best tunes played at these parties. I couldnt really have chosen them much better myself, although you need a bit of a keen ear to make them out. It just so happens that I have footage of both of these being played at other raves throughout the years so thought I would include them here because fuck it, why not?
The first of such tunes comes in most clearly at around 1:17 on the news report, and is the tune Tim Taylor - The Horn track (Luke slaters remix):
The second tune, which comes in around 2:08 is another one of those commercial trance tunes which most definitely wouldn't have been played at other free parties of the time. It was produced by Paul van Dyk, trance doesnt get much more mainstream than Paul van Dyk, but this was an absolute belter at our raves. It is; members of mayday - 10 in 01 (Paul van Dyk remix)
Whilst the scene of barbaric carnage shown on the news report as the police advanced was unfolding, the vans were rapidly packed with the remaining speakers and we were driving off in the opposite direction over the field and out of an entrance at the other side. No one knew where we were going, least of all the person driving his car at the front of everyone, who turned right out of the field. A right turn that lead us along a very long, winding road, eventually leading to a dead end at a small beach. I remember looking out the window of that van to see a police helicopter following alongside us. You always see this kind of behaviour on police chase programs and think to yourself “why the hell are you still running? You can’t ever hope to lose a police helicopter.” But in the heat of the moment the thought of simply stopping and going quietly is one which doesn’t enter your head for even a second. The tendency is to push these things as far as you can. Make them work for that arrest.
It was during this brief moment of tranquility before the storm travelling along a scenic country road, being closely followed by a police helicopter and several riot vans, that I remembered I had the remains of a wrap of MDMA powder in my pocket. I’ve got to explain at this point that during this period of my life I very rarely took drugs. I smoked weed daily, but was under the delusion that this was “a plant” and therefore didn’t count as a drug. For a good 3 years leading up to this, that’s all I did. I maybe took Ecstasy (MDMA) 2 or 3 times a year on special occasions, maybe the occasional magic mushroom trip, but was largely straight (admittedly stoned) for a great deal of the parties around that time. I even very rarely drank alcohol. But the festival was indeed one of those very specially occasions where drug use was indulged in. I seem to remember getting through a rather obscene amount of MDMA powder, maybe 3 grams or so, and staying awake for the entire weekend into Monday afternoon. I had what probably amounted to a couple of pills worth of MDMA left in the wrap in my pocket. I pulled this out and opened it up. It almost certainly could have been thrown out the window, or at the very least emptied onto the mud and litter covered floor of the van, but this seemed like a waste of perfectly good drugs. I offered some to my driver, but he wisely declined. Building up the courage, I put the wrap to my mouth and licked the rest out of the wrap, closely followed by a large chug of water. It didn’t do anything to hide the acrid taste, something akin to licking a battery mixed with powdered bleach.
After several miles we came to the end of the line, literally. We ended up in a small, beachfront car park. But this being August bank holiday Monday, the car park and adjoining beach were absolutely rammed full of those seeking that relaxing time off in the sun. Families eating picnics, people sunbathing, swimming, there was even an on-going game of beach volleyball right next to the road. We hung a U-turn in the car park and were instantly blocked in by the several vans full of riot police that were in pursuit. The next scene is one that will truly stay with me forever; for god only knows what reason, I have absolutely no idea what was going through his head, the driver of the car in front decided to make a run for it. Straight across the beach and right through the middle and under the net of the on-going volleyball game. He was closely followed by several riot police who promptly tackled him to the ground amongst the startled holiday makers. He was dragged kicking and screaming through the sand back to the road, had the cuffs slapped on and was bundled into the back of a police van. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing from the passenger seat of my van, my mouth was wide open in a state of complete dumb-founded, paralysed shock. And as I scoured the beach I noticed much the same look on the faces of all those previously happy holiday makers. At least I knew that what was happening here was in fact the local illegal rave organisation getting busted hard. But as for the clueless holidaymakers laying on the beach that day; One minute they’re peacefully enjoying a Mr whippy in the sun, the next minute a scene straight out of a Hollywood gangster film has exploded into their previously blissfully unaware lives; a convoy of vehicles has screeched round in the car park followed by half of Suffolk’s police force, and now people are shouting, screaming, swearing, the police are ripping people out of cars and vans and throwing them to the floor and to top it all off some crazy, drugged crazed youth has ran a slalom between the picnic baskets and young children, straight through a volleyball game and been viciously slammed into the sand by the pursuing police. I bet some of those people still wonder what the fuck went down that afternoon to this day.
My fellow driver and I however were in a serene state of reluctant acceptance. You’ve got to expect something like this to happen one day when your leading the lives we did. “Occupational hazard” I think they call it. He simply sparked up a roll up and I noticed a previously un-eaten pastry I had purchased during the 2 hours spent at Tesco’s car park several days earlier and began tucking into that. When the police officer came up to our window with a look of sheer aggression, expecting firm resistance, he was in fact greeted with a scene of comparative tranquillity. I seem to remember his exact words were “oh, it’s a lot more chilled out in this van than it is out there” to which I think our reply was “well, we’re quite chilled out people”. Then followed the unavoidable “I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the vehicle”, followed closely by “that’s fair enough mate”.
I was handcuffed and put in a van on my own with two bench seats in the back facing each other. I was left there on my own for quite some time whilst the police dealt with everyone else in our convey and decided who was worth arresting. As I was sitting in the back on my own I could feel the MDMA I had swallowed 20 minutes earlier beginning to take effect. As I had already been awake for the best part of 3 days the MDMA wasn’t going to have the same wired, buzzing stimulant effect as it might have done at the start of the weekend. Taking large amounts of ecstasy at this stage tends to give a more sloppy set of symptoms, lots of stretching and eye rolling, every position you put yourself in seems to be the most comfortable you’ve ever been.
Eventually the van door opened again, but instead of more arrested ravers being put inside, 2 of the riot police got in and sat on the bench seat in front of me, facing me. The van slowly pulled off and began the long drive back to Ipswich. It was a beautifully sunny afternoon and the sun was streaming through the window on my side. The MDMA was really coming on strong now. The warm sun through the window felt amazing as the chemically induced pleasure surged through my body. I was however highly conscious of the two police officers sitting no more than a metre in front of me and was doing my best to not appear completely off my trolley. My eyes began to close however and I drifted off into what some people refer to as a “blip out”.
Essentially a blip out is where you’ve taken a large amount of ecstasy and as you close your eyes, slip off into some kind of dreamworld. Definitely not a dream as you’re far from being asleep, but you definitely loose sense of reality and where you are. I can think of multiple occasions where I’ve been sat in the back of a car with someone peaking on MDMA who’s suddenly started mumbling out a pizza order, or gone through the motions of trying to pay for shopping at Tesco’s.
“Double pepperoni on that please”
“What you up to mate?”
“Eh? Shit, I thought I was ordering pizza”
“Yeah? You’re not, you’re at a rave, in the back of Jim’s car, fried out of your mind, lets go for a dance.”
Pretty standard conversation really. I have no idea where I was drifting off to, but it certainly wasn’t the back of a police van. My first indication that something was awry was when I went to try and stretch, as said before you get very “stretchy” on MDMA, particularly when taking it later on. I would be zoned out and try to stretch, then become aware of a restriction on the movement of my hands and I would suddenly come back into consciousness, open my eyes and look down, and theres a pair of handcuffs on me. Then I look up and theres two police officers, still in riot gear (just without the helmets), sat on the bench opposite me. Both doing their damndest to look out the window and completely ignore my existence. Probably thinking to themselves “please don’t OD in the back of my police van, you junkie scum.” Not that we were junkies of course, but someone high on MDMA looks pretty damn strange to say the least. On these brief moments when I would come back into consciousness I would be highly aware that my eyes were rolled into the back of my head, my jaw was swinging from side to side and I was rocking backwards and forwards. Not exactly normal behaviour in any case, and I would spend the next minute or so thinking “shit! I’ve got to try and look less fucked” before the lovely warm sun streaming through the window and gentle rocking of the van along the country roads sent me straight back into blip out mode.
This chain of events happened several more times during the journey, brief spells of trying to force myself to appear normal to the nearby police, followed by several minutes of eye rolling and gurning up against the window. Eventually I was carted back to Ipswich police station. It was a rather surreal atmosphere back at the police station, there must have been 10 or 15 people arrested that day and we were all in the process of being checked in in the reception area. Even under such dire circumstances we were all still joking and laughing. Ravers are anything but stern and serious. Bearing in mind that we had all just spent the best part of 3 days at a rave, and clearly more than a few others had the same bright idea I did of eating all their drugs before they were taken off them, we all looked like a right state. I remember getting my mug shot taken, which then appears on a screen beside you for everyone to see. I had a pony tail at this point in my life, which had strands of hair sticking out in all directions, I had mud smeared down the side of my face, and had the unmistakable jutting out jaw line, huge pupils and drooped eyes of someone who had been up for an entire weekend subsiding on a diet of alcohol and ecstasy. I saw that picture and said to the officer booking me in “mate, can I have a copy of that photo?” I got a look of absolute disgust and contempt, not even a worded response. Not even a “no”. Just a look that you would give to a dog that had just pissed on your leg. It’s a little worrying that if I am ever stopped by police in Suffolk again, that is the photo that will appear of me. Any right minded police officer is bound to instantly think “Jesus, look at this clown, he’s got to be guilty of something.”
We were all eventually booked in and ushered off into the cells. Despite the MDMA consumed only a couple of hours before, I fell almost straight to sleep. But was woken up to be given something that vaguely resembled a meal. Put it this way; you won’t ever hear me complaining about airline food now that I’ve sampled prison food. I then fell asleep for the majority of the next 15 hours. As explained before, I had taken a large amount of ecstasy at this festival and stayed awake for the entire weekend. At the previous ones id at least got some sleep but at this one I had none. So when I got into that police cell and my head hit that most uncomfortable plastic pillow, I was out like a light.
Another one of those “shared experiences” of parties that everyone will be able to relate to is the “slam back to reality”. Waking up on Monday morning after having spent the last 24 hours dancing and socialising deep in the depths of Thetford forest, spending the whole day Sunday in the hedonistic bubble of a world that is an illegal rave and missing out on a whole night’s sleep. When that alarm goes off on Monday and you have to drag yourself back to the realities of real life, it’s like the clashing of 2 worlds. I think this is particularly bad if you work in a city. I remember those Mondays that I had to get the park and ride bus into Norwich to work a day in an office block for Norwich Union (now Aviva). Going from the tranquil, bright, luscious greenness of a rave, then being catapulted head first into the grimy, dreary, dull greyness of the city on a Monday morning. The whole world seems to be dulled down to the senses. Ironically enough, I think the film “fight club” puts it better than anything else. If I’m honest, there’s several comparisons I could make between the film fight club and raves. Being part of this secretive, underground organization that takes place at the weekend that you cannot mention to any of the people you work with in the week and cannot wait to get away from your regular life to take part in every weekend. Sitting there on Monday morning it feels like your life has the volume turned down. Have a watch of the film again and pay attention to those Monday morning scenes he spends in the office and think back to how it felt on a Monday morning. I think you’ll see the comparison, even if you didn’t get to punch Brad Pitt in the face.
The point of mentioning this Monday morning slam back to reality is to illustrate that no matter how badly you think you may have felt that slam in your raving life, trust me, NOTHING bitch slaps you across the face and screams “POW!!! Welcome to reality!” quite like being rudely shaken awake after a 15 hour kip, on a 3 day MDMA comedown, frog marched down the hallway of a police station, still rubbing sleep from your eyes and white gacky build up from the corners of your mouth, sat down in a chair in front of 2 police officers and hearing that unnerving “click” as the tape recorder is started and one of the police officers calmly opens with “soo… this illegal rave you’ve been organising, tell us about it” that’s a slam back to reality that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone. That sudden dawning, foreboding sense of the situation you’ve found yourself in. Thinking “how have the last five years of my life culminated into this? This moment. This reality” In a scene and at a time that was very much “lived in the moment,” this was an incredibly ugly and menacing moment to be a part of.
I can’t remember exactly what was said in that interview, but it’s fair to say, it went badly. The fact that I was eventually charged with organising an unlicensed music event and a lot of other people weren’t indicates how badly it went. I vaguely remember saying something along the lines of “it’s not my party, its EVERYBODY'S party, we all help out.” Whilst this is a good defence when the party is in full swing and the police have just turned up and you have several hundred people with you to back you up, when it gets to the nitty-gritty of being sat in an interview room on your own with 2 police officers, looking at a charge of organisation, it’s not a good defence to be using. By saying that “everyone” organises it, you’re classing yourself as part of everyone and therefore are admitting a certain level of guilt. If I’d had some time to prepare what I was going to say I certainly wouldn’t have said this. The defence of “Party? What party? All I know is I drank a bottle of vodka, passed out in this nice warm van and when I woke up there were police everywhere. I don’t know anything about a rave sir.” This defence seems like a much better option looking back on it now. But I wasn’t thinking to my full capacity when I was put into that interview room.
What followed after that was 10 months of bail hearings, solicitor meetings and court dates. In fact, to this day, the only times I have ever set foot in Ipswich I have either just got out of jail, just had a meeting with my solicitor or just appeared in court! Needless to say, I don’t hold a very high opinion or have very happy memories of the place. The thing which made those 10 months even worse was the fact that this was my final year at university. It couldn’t have timed any worse; my very first court appearance (other than the bail hearings) was the day before the first of my final exams. And not just any exam, but an exam in quantum mechanics. The most horrendously technical subject of the most confounding difficulty. If the name “quantum mechanics” sounds like it could be a little perplexing, trust me, you have no idea how mind-bendingly difficult it is to understand at a degree level. So whilst everyone else on my course was cram revising the advanced postulates of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal, I was driving down to Ipswich to discuss court tactics with my solicitor.
That 10 month period towards the end of my degree was without doubt the most highly stressful year of my life. (This is a sentence I look back on and laugh at now. Oh to be a care free, student bum/ illegal rave organiser. I didn’t know what REAL stress was back then). I don’t think there was a day that went by that I didn’t deeply dwell on the situation I was in. It didn’t help that that rave was incredibly high profile, attracting a lot of media attention which didn’t show the police in a good light and also we were the first people ever to get charged with organising a rave in Norfolk or Suffolk. The police were out to make an example of us. I remember one meeting with my solicitor when she informed me that she had some rather bad news; Suffolk police had drafted in the chief head prosecutor for the whole of Suffolk to head the court case. This guy is usually only drafted in for rapes, murders, armed robberies and other such crimes of a heinous nature. She said that she had never seen him head a case that carries as low a possible sentence as this one. Suffolk police must be seriously pissed off. This didn’t do a lot to ease my stress and worries about the situation I was facing.
For one of the penultimate meetings with my solicitor, she recommended that I try to get some decent character references from upstanding members of society. Seeing as I was at university she suggested it would look good if I could get a reference from a professor. It goes without saying that this part of my life had been very much hidden from the academics at the university and I wasn’t too keen on the thought of explaining to one of them all about my secret double life I had been leading out of university hours. I eventually went to see the head of physics and sat him down and told him the whole story. Expecting a rather shocked and appalled response I was exceedingly surprised to hear these words coming from a physics professor: “oh, illegal raves hey… my son goes to those actually… he’s been going for about 3 years, he really likes them.” It turns out that the son of the head of physics had in fact been coming to our parties from near enough the beginning! And to this day I still have no idea who he is (It’s also just as likely that he was going to planet yes or one of the other parties from the city based crews). “Sure, I’ll write you a character reference.” He then proceeded to write me a reference which implied the sun shone out of my rear end. I really wish that I had made a copy of that reference; it was a special thing to read. Not only did he overly sing my praises but completely belittled the charges against me. I seem to remember a sentence something along the lines of “he is a fantastically gifted individual with his whole life ahead of him who does not need his permanent record blotched by such a petty misdemeanour”. I managed to get another glowing character reference from the mum of a very good friend of mine who I had known since I was about 12. I forget his mums exact job title now, but she was some kind of a councillor or therapist that occasionally worked for the council and the police in providing evaluations of a person’s character. She basically provided professional character references to the police as part of her job. Quite a handy person to have written a glowing reference for you.
So a couple of days before the court case was due to commence, my solicitor took these references to the chief head prosecutor of Suffolk. I think it really helped that my solicitor could genuinely tell that we were good people. When you are a free defence solicitor you must see some pretty awful examples of the human race and get fairly adept at distinguishing who is of good character and who isn’t. Three of us had this same solicitor, the three of us are some of the most passive, chilled out people you are ever likely to meet and our solicitor could tell that. We really got on with her. I’m sure this must have also worked in my favour when she went to see the prosecutor that day with my character references in hand. Whatever happened in that meeting, the outcome of it was that my solicitor had somehow managed to convince the head prosecutor, the guy that Suffolk police had drafted in especially to bring me down, she managed to persuade him to go back to the head of Suffolk police and plead my case for me and see to it that I was just given a caution. I would love to have heard that conversation between the head prosecutor and the chief of Suffolk’s police. In my mind it goes something like this:
“So then, what are our tactics for court in a couple of days’ time? How are we going to stitch this guy up as much as we can?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about that. I’m thinking we should just let him off with a caution.”
“What?? You’re joking right? This guy and his mates have been a constant thorn in our sides for the last 4 years. It’s not like we have real criminals to deal with out here in the country. These guys are our top priority, we drafted you in to see to it they got maximum punishment.”
“Yeah but I don’t think this guys that bad, he’s doing a degree for Christ sake, he’s gotta be one of the good guys. I’m sure he’s learnt his lesson. Let’s let him off with a caution.”
“We’ve been waiting 10 months to get this guy in court. And waiting 4 years to get one of them in there! And now 2 days before the trial, you’re honestly telling me that we should let him off with a caution?”
“Yep, that’s my recommendation. I don’t really feel like prosecuting him anyway. I think a cautions fair enough”
However the conversation went down, it’s a very encouraging thing in life to know that you are just that much of a nice guy that the chief head prosecutor of an entire county is willing to go completely against the job he’s been paid to do and turn around and fight your corner for you, just on the strength of your reputation alone. To have escaped prosecution by the skin of my teeth at such a perilously close proximity to the court date on the strength of something as mundane as a character reference is about as cheeky an insult as I could imagine (It should be noted that my co-defendants ended up with £1500 and £2000 fines). That must have left a seriously bitter taste in the mouth of some high ranking police officer somewhere.
Despite being arrested 4 times during these years, this caution is the only criminal record I’ve ever received. Seeing as this is a caution from nearly 20 years ago now it is generally seen as spent and doesn’t form part of a normal criminal record anymore. However, for the last few years I have been going through the process of gaining permanent residency and now citizenship into Australia. Despite being a nation initially founded with English convicts, they are very reluctant to take them in these days. During the kinds of criminal records checks that I have been subjected to on a number of occasions, this offence still comes up. I have been asked to explain it by multiple different people now. “What is this; Organisation of an unlicensed music event? What exactly does that entail?”
Needless to say the one thing that I haven’t done during these frequent questioning sessions, is to post a link to the news report from the Ramsholt festival above, with a comment along the lines of: “This, this here is the organisation of an unlicensed music event. Through my reckless and criminal activities I necessitated hundreds of riot police from 4 different counties being deployed to a remote field on a bank holiday weekend to do battle with a load of drug affected kids. An event so significant that local news channels reported on it for three days after the fact.”
Even though this was only a caution, I figured that the more vague I was with it the better. “Me and some mates put together a little festival on someones land and some of the neighbours complained. We didn’t have a proper license and I got this caution.” Seemed like a much more appropriate response. Not exactly a lie, but pretty far from the whole truth also.
One of the conditions of this caution was that I was issued a 2 year “ban” from raves. This meant that if I was even seen at a rave in the next 2 years I could be taken back to court for the original charges against me. So technically I was not allowed to set foot at any raves throughout the rest of 2006, all of 2007 and half of 2008. Did this stop me going? I think you all know the answer to that question. It was during the 10 months between my arrest and non-trial that I gave some serious consideration to how much it all meant to me and how far I was willing to take it. Organising raves is technically an offence you can be sent to prison for after all (for a maximum of 6 months). After much deliberation I eventually decided that I couldn’t care in the slightest what happened to me. I distinctly remember being in the frame of mind that I would keep ploughing on and keep doing what I was doing until I was eventually sent down for it. I seem to remember that a large part of me was adamant on standing up in court (if it looked like I’d lost) and saying to the judge: “I don’t care what you do to me. Nothing you could possibly do to me will have any effect on the way these parties happen. I will happily go to prison for 6 months safe in the knowledge that when I get out, nothing will have changed. These parties will still be happening and I will still be going to them. Yes I’ve played a part in these parties. I’m proud to have played that part. But my part is by no means a part that won’t be taken up by the hundreds of other people who live this life and put their hearts and souls into it.” I certainly had no fear of the legal ramifications of my actions but something tells me that when it came down to it, there’s no way I would have ever stood in a court room and said this. But I had it set in my mind.
Certainly my arrest did absolutely nothing to curtail my involvement in these parties. If anything I became significantly more embroiled in it after this near court case. At some point in 2006 after a break in at our lockup we moved the entire Equality Cohesion sound system into a large shed out the back of my house. That remained our lockup for a good couple of years. I remember at some point towards the end of 2006 (maybe for new years) someone posting something on Facebook along the lines of “Be careful, police are looking to bust raves before they start this weekend”. I took this with a pinch of salt as it was just someone posting some kind of rumour on Facebook. We weren’t using the Equality system that party anyway, but I was in my bedroom practicing my set and looking out the window towards my front drive when I saw a police car slowly pull into my driveway, look down the track at the side of my house towards where the shed was, and then drive off again. Strange coincidence I thought, and carried on mixing. I saw this happen another couple of times throughout the day. It became apparent that the police were watching my house (Usually on days we were throwing a party my driveway and shed were a hive of activity; speakers being brought out and tested, vans being loaded, 20 or so people milling about and cars parked down the driveway etc) . Whereas the rational thing to do would have been to get that sound system the hell out of there as soon as possible, our solution (we didn’t really have anywhere else to take it at that point in any case) was to just simply bring the rig vans over at like midnight on the Thursday before the party, load all the speakers up using head torches under the cover of darkness, then leave the vans on someone else’s driveway for a couple of days until the party. This went on for several parties over a number of months. My decks used to be set up next to my bedroom window so I got a pretty good view of the driveway as I was mixing, and regularly witnessed police cars pull into my drive on a Saturday, peer down the track towards my shed, then drive off again.
I used to be pretty smug sat there practicing my set for the party, watching the police scoping out my house, knowing that the sound system was already sat in a van ready to go on someone else’s driveway, thinking that we had somehow “outwitted” them (which I guess we kind of had). When I look back on this now however, the recklessness is astounding. Not only did I have some kind of court order against me from even attending these raves during this period, but I had an entire soundsystem kept on my property, whilst the police were watching my house, and we were still throwing raves out of there. Not only that, but we were also having a weekly meeting in my garage during the week to plan Equality parties (known as EqCoExDef by this point). Certainly at the time I would have just kept on doing what we were doing until they carted me off to prison.
I think we all just had this blinkered mentality that we would just keep plowing on at all costs, whatever else happened in life. I had a conversation in the years after with a good mate who was there in the thick of it all for these years. Originally from Oxford, he brought an old converted ambulance to drive himself and van loads of people to parties in. Thing is he never had a driving license, no insurance, nothing like that, just drove around the country to raves anyway, probably high as anything most the time. We were talking about this “zero fucks given” approach we had to pretty much everything back then. We just did whatever we wanted to do with regards to making those parties happen. It was such a high momentum time it was easy to get carried away in it all, it was all systems go, at all times.
I had another conversation about this in the years that followed that really made me realise how unusual the situation we were in in Norfolk was. The scenario for this conversation is amusing in and of itself. This particular conversation took place on the way home from one of the “French-tek” parties mentioned at the start of this blog. This one was near Toulouse, right in the south of France, so a good 6 hour drive before you even get to the ferry back to Dover, followed by the drive back through England. Around a 10 hour journey all in all.
For the return drive I ended up in the back of a large, old Mercedes converted bus with a good friend from those years who was part of the Krisis crew. Krisis were another soundsystem on a very similar wavelength to us. Not from Norfolk or Suffolk, more Hertfordshire/ Bedfordshire, but they were all at our parties every week and we would always go down to theirs. We even linked up to do an Equality/ Krisis party together on a couple of occasions. My own personal favourite bit of footage I have from those years was from a party we did with Krisis.
There is a number of reasons for this; firstly because this was actually me mixing. As I was filming for nearly all of my footage, there aren’t many clips of me playing tunes. This is one that I put on though, and about half way through you can hear me trying to explain the camera buttons to someone else (who instantly takes a photo) so that I can go and mix the next tune in.
The second thing I like about this footage is that I always had a soft spot for piano house. Whilst I loved all the trance and techno, and breakbeat, and happy hardcore, all of it really, it was piano house that first grabbed me when I first started going to parties. Perfect ecstasy fuelled sunshine music. Piano house was always what I used to mix in the early days.
The next thing I like about it is that this tune is the first record I ever brought. The same day that I brought my decks from Cookes in Norwich, I went down the road to Rays CDs (now called beatniks, if its even still there?) to look for some vinyl and picked this up. This didn’t ever get played at Brainskan so that day in Rays CDs was the first time I had ever heard it. I played it at the very first proper rave we did as Equality, which was with Defiance at Seething airfield (not the weekday semi-rave at the Don’t Tell Bob venue. If anyone has any photos of this early equality/ defiance party could they please send them to me). This tune eventually became Defiances last tune, so got played heavily at the parties in the later years, but the first time it was played at a rave in Norfolk was when I put it on at that party.
The last thing I really like about this footage is the fact that theres not many people dancing to it. This might seem a bit counterintuitive, but I used to really prefer the vibe to the stack when it was like this, just a small handful of people who really knew how to dance. When the mosh had like 100 people crammed in it there was no room for movement, but when theres a handful like this you can really bounce and roll off each other, especially with something slower like piano house which has a good bounce to it. This was a 3 day party and this was on the final day, but those 10 or 20 people on that dance floor have an energy better than even the most packed dance floor in any nightclub in my opinion. Especially the bit near the end, from 3:30 onwards, cracking bit of footage. Pure happy, euphoric vibes:
I have one other piece of footage which quite likely would have been me mixing, although I'm not entirely sure. It's certainly a tune I used to play every now and again, particularly early on. Another great bit of cheesy, vocal piano house. Always used to get a good dance going to it:
Where was I? Ah yes, I ended up in the back of this old Mercedes motorhome at the end of French-tek with one of the Krisis guys and we were all gearing up to leave when someone appeared at the window, saying “please take this stuff away from me, I don’t want to see it anymore.” And he chucked a bag of white powder in through the window. That white powder was a drug called mephedrone. Not to be confused with methadone, the opiate given to heroin addicts to ween them off heroin, Mephedrone is an entirely different kettle of fish.
It was a bit of a strange time, the “mephedrone era”, but there was a definite mini-era around the late 2000s when mephedrone seemed to be absolutely everywhere. Quite the opposite from the opiate given to heroin addicts, mephedrone is most chemically similar to methamphetamine, or crystal meth, but just different enough to not be illegal. It was the first big legal high in a long run of drugs which lead to the UK government outlawing every psychoactive chemical aside from alcohol, nicotine and caffeine. Before this there had to be a specific ban or law against a certain chemical before it became illegal. Now absolutely anything that can get you high in any way is automatically illegal in the UK, unless it has specifically been made legal.
Mephedrone was freely available and legal to buy from various websites and legal high shops from as little as 10 pounds per gram, making it quite an attractive substance. As explained before it is chemically very similar to methamphetamine, with likely a very similar set of effects. I wouldn’t entirely know as I have never taken crystal meth. Its an interesting quirk of drug tastes that crystal meth is pretty much non-existent in the UK. Here in Australia, as well was the US, it is a major issue, particularly in regional areas, where whole communities seem to succumb to it. During this mini mephedrone era I heard numerous people (who were usually taking it very regularly) claim “its legal, so it can’t be that bad.” I tried to correct those people as quickly as I could “No. No, no, no, thats not what is happening here. The only reason this is legal is because it hasn’t yet been made illegal. This is almost identical to crystal meth. In fact it could be argued that this is significantly more dangerous than crystal meth, simply because we have no information about it. At least we know that crystal meth is a highly addictive, super strength stimulant. We can assume that mephedrone is going to have a similar set of effects, both positive and negative, but we really don’t know, especially anything about regular or long term use. This is something to be used sparingly and with extreme caution.”
It seems these words of caution went largely unheeded by most people who were taking it. I can see how meth becomes such a problematic substance. I remember every weekend there would be groups of people locked away in various houses in various country towns taking mephedrone for 2 or 3 days at a time. And thats probably the case for a lot of the regional towns in Australia and America. Most of the people taking it are probably no harm to anyone, just sat in various houses taking meth together for days at a time. There weren’t many free parties happening at this point, but still a fair few legal events in clubs/pubs. The main thing I remember about going to events at this time was the smell. Not really of mephedrone itself as it didn’t have much of a smell, but when people take mephedrone they seem to secrete out this acrid, chemical smell in their sweat. Standing next to someone at a crowded bar at a dance event who had been taking mephedrone all weekend was an overpowering sensation. It certainly didn’t smell like this was a pleasant substance to be on. Although it must be said, even though I only ever took it a handful of times, I generally had a positive and pleasant time whenever I did. It was quite a fun substance to take, somewhere between ecstasy and speed. Slightly more euphoric than speed, with conversation coming more easily than on ecstasy. I had a great night every time I took it, but was very cautious about how often I did it.
The interesting thing about mephedrone, and in fact most of the legal highs and party drugs that ended up on the market, was where they originally came from. These substances nearly all came from the work of Alexander Shulguin.
Alexander Shulguin is most widely known as “the godfather of ecstasy”, as it was him who first introduced ecstasy (not his term, he introduced it as MDMA, it was people taking it and the media who dubbed it "ecstacy", a name which he disliked) to therapists and psychologists in the 1970s for clinical use with their patients. Much like LSD a decade or two earlier, which was first also used in clinical and research settings, it eventually escaped the realm of doctors and therapists and became a party drug for the masses. Just as Albert Hoffmans LSD underpinned the Hippie movement of the 60s, Ecstasy became the catalyst that fuelled the fire of electronic dance and rave scenes all over the planet in the mid-late 80s.
His work wasn’t just limited to MDMA however. He was a biochemist and contracted employee of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) in America during the 80s. His job was to research into psychoactive substances and assess them and act as an expert witness for them. This work gave him a license to possess and produce schedule 1 drugs and he built a ramshackle lab in an old shed out the back of his house in the Californian mountains for this purpose.
He worked for the DEA for almost 10 years until 1991 when he released two unauthorised books called Pihkal (short for; Phenethylamines I have known and loved) and Tihkal (Tryptamines I have known and loved). These books contained not only a list of every psychoactive chemical he had been working on, but also a full set of synthesise in order to make each substance. The vast majority of psychoactive drugs fall into the two class of compounds mentioned in the title of Shulguins books; Phenethylamines and Tryptamines.
We're just going to go through a little chemistry lesson here, try to pay attention. Below is the basic chemical structure of phenethylamine. In chemical structure diagrams such as this, all the straight lines signify chemical bonds, and the corners at the end of the lines are carbon atoms (with hydrogen atoms attached to them). You may have heard the phrase that we are "carbon based life forms", pretty much everything you see around you in the natural world (and in fact most of the unnatural plastics, which are just made from carbon containing oil) is composed of chains and rings of carbon atoms joined together, with other groups of atoms branching off the chains at various points. This basic structure of chains and rings of carbon atoms forms the basis of organic chemistry and life on our planet:
Phenethylamine
This on its own would be quite a feat, but the interesting story is how he found out these compounds were psychoactive in the first place. Normally when a new (prescription) drug is brought to market, it undergoes months, years even, of rigorous tests, trials, animal studies etc before it can even get to the stage of human trials, let alone being brought to market. Alexander shulguin bypassed all of that and tested them in the quickest and most direct way that he could; on himself. Straight out of the testube, onto the worktop, racking up lines, away we go.
This is a slight exaggeration, his methods were a little more conservative and professional than that. But this is still an incredibly ballsy thing to do; creating a substance for the very first time that nobody has ever heard of or taken before and ingesting it yourself to see what it does. It should be noted that if you were to take pure LSD in the same kind of dose that you would ordinarily take MDMA, then you would be subjecting yourself to 1000 acid trips at once. Because of this fact he used to estimate what a standard dose should be, then take 1/1000th of that dose and work up from there until he started feeling effects from it.
Once he had a substance that produced affects (he would have taken many, many random chemicals that did absolutely nothing), his next test subject was his wife, Ann Shulguin. Ann was a respected psychotherapist in her own rights, who had used mdma and psychedelics in her practices in the 60s and 70s before they were made illegal. They both wrote the books Pihkal and Tihkal together. Once they had satisfied themselves with the dosages they had a core group of 8-10 friends who they would invite around to their home in the mountains and they would all take the same substance in the same dose together and discuss and write about the experience.
It should also be noted that these people were not crack heads looking for a quick hit, these were all therapists, chemists, scientists and psychologists looking to document these substances. All of their findings and experiences are documented within pihkal and tihkal, the effects of each and every substance, and then the effects under a variety of doses and administered in a variety of ways, including racking up lines (insufflation). Upon the release of Pihkal the DEA raided his lab and took hundreds of different chemicals from his lab with the intention of locking him up. The issue they had was that they had no idea what any of these chemicals were. They knew he was using them to get high, but couldn't pin anything on him because nobody else in the agency could even identify them apart from him. Plus he was one of only a few individuals in the country that actually had a license to produce schedule 1 drugs. They took his license away and gave him a $25,000 fine for his troubles.
Shulguin was the first person to discover the 2C-series, which includes 2C-E, 2C-I and 2C-B.
2C-B is my own personal favourite drug. Incredible substance, I'd highly recommend it if you've never tried it. Somewhere between ecstacy and LSD, with some of the empathy and energy of Ecstacy, but the full visual cornucopia of colours and belly-aching laughter of LSD. It was also one of Shulguins personal favourites. And whilst the only ones I can ever really recall hearing about back in the day were 2C-B, 2C-E and 2C-I, there are actually around 30 different drugs in the 2C-series, all of which Shulguin discovered. Below are chemical structures for a few of the more common ones, you can see that the differences in them are only slight, but that those differences can lead to quite different effects (structure of the basic phenylamine group has been highlighted in the red circle on the first image):
Every one of the above drugs (and many, many more) were produced by shulguin, and then tested multiple times upon himself and his close circle of friends at multiple different dosages. I recon the Shulguins would have had some pretty wild house parties in those years. Imagine getting the call for the invite, you wouldn't have known what you were getting yourself into for the evening.
Most of the content from Pihkal and Tihkal is freely available to view online via the vaults of Erowid, which is a database of information around psychoactive drugs. Links to Pihkal and Tihkal are included below, there are 224 different drug listings in here, with synthesise, experiences written by Shulguin and other such info:
(Just on a side note, please don't attempt to produce any of these drugs. Although there is a full synthesis of each one available, it is far from an idiots guide. Unless you have a degree in chemistry it is going to read like gobbledygook, and it would be incredibly easy to blow yourself up or severely poison someone if you don't know what you are doing)
He was a firm advocate and campaigner for the legalisation of psychoactive compounds, but was dismayed with dodgy manufacturers who profited off selling cheap, poor quality drugs and also the lack of education on substances which lead to deaths. Its worth noting that of the many, many reported ecstasy deaths, a tiny percentage are actually due to the toxicity of ecstasy itself. Most are from people overheating or drinking too much water. (This is in contrast to people who die from Alcohol poisoning, which is most often due to the toxicity of alcohol itself)
For myself as a young chemistry student, Alexander Shulguin was a character who fascinated me, although I haven’t read much into him for the last 20 years until the writing of this blog. It seems since my interest in him 20 years ago, a documentary has been made about him. I watched this for the first time last week. It may interest some of you. Shulguin was well into his 80s when this was made so he's looking pretty frail, but surprisingly sharp of mind considering he has used himself as a human guinea pig for every drug known to man for the last 5 decades (and a lot more which were never known to man until he came along). Its reasonably slow paced but I enjoyed it. This is the trailer, full movie can be found on amazon prime;
I feel like I’ve got a bit sidetracked here (more like 3 sidetracks deep at this point from my original story of August bank holiday 2005, but we’ll get there in the end). So me and matey from Krisis were thrown a large bag of mephedrone just before a 10 hour drive across two countries. Needless to say we were railing lines of that mephedrone like it was going out of fashion (which it kind of was at that point, there was a definite fashion for mephedrone, and this was for sure on the tail end of that). That 6 hour drive up through France went like some kind of beautiful dream. If beautiful dreams were full of manic, amphetamine fuelled conversation that is. It felt like we were solving all the worlds problems, like we were making some kind of progress in life. Likely a load of charged up pish to be honest, but it felt good whatever it was we were talking about. I have no idea what was said for about for 99% of that journey, but at one point my friend from Krisis said something which really stuck with me. It was the only part of the whole conversation I remember, so it must have made an impression.
We started talking about the “good old years” of Norfolk raves (this conversation took place in 2010, well after the peak of these parties). He said something along the lines of “We always used to love coming up to Norfolk to see you guys. You see, for us this was just a part time thing. Obviously we loved the parties and would come to yours every weekend you threw them, but in terms of organising our own parties and crew; we all had full time jobs and lives and this was just something we did on the side. We could go for weeks without seeing most of our own crew outside of a rave, then one of us would phone the other saying “do you fancy doing a party, I know of a venue”, then we might get together the week before to discuss a few things then throw a rave that weekend. But when we came to Norfolk, it didn’t matter if it was a Monday night or a Friday night, every single night of the week there were groups of like 20 or 30 of you guys meeting up in various places planning those parties. Particularly around those squats; there’d be guys re-coning blown speakers in the lounge room, other groups studying OS maps in the kitchen, people skinning up and smoking spliffs all over the place. It was like the illegal rave HQ; it was a completely full time gig for you lot, every day was spent doing something towards it. We loved the energy of it, I used to leave Norfolk feeling dizzy and elated, even just going up in the week.”
It was at this moment that I realised how unusual things were in Norfolk, even to other rave crews from elsewhere. Thinking back, it really was a full time vocation, and it needed to be. Particularly during the peak years (2003-6), for seven months of the year starting in May, Brains Kan would throw a party every second week. Then Equality might throw one party a month on the weeks in between. This means that during the Summer/ Autumn months between the two crews we were throwing 3 all night raves per month, nearly every weekend. During those years roughly one third of all the people who were helping put on brainskan were also going to meetings related to the organisation of Equality Cohesion, and roughly a half to two thirds of everyone from Equality was going to the Brainskan meetings, so there was a substantial cross-over between the crews. Obviously for all of those parties venues need to be found, bars need to be purchased, speakers and amplifiers need to be loaded and unloaded, meetings need to be had to discuss who is doing what, speaker cones need to be repaired and a whole wealth of other things essential to keeping them up and running with that regularity. There wasn’t really any question of having any time off from it, pretty much every night of the week and every weekend was spent doing something towards making those events happen. It was an incredible thing to be part of, there was such an electric energy around, it was chaotic as fuck but strangely productive, constantly keeping that momentum going and rolling from one party to the next week after week. But at the time it just seemed so normal. It just seemed that this was what our lives were all about and this is what was needed to be done. We were all just incased in this charged bubble of a world, singularly focused on making those parties happen. I don’t think we ever really stopped to fully appreciate what we had in those years, it just felt like those days were going to last forever.
The more I think about it, the more I’m absolutely astounded that I even managed to make it through a degree during these years. My degree ran from 2003-2006, pretty much the absolute peak of these events, and not just a degree, a degree in Chemical Physics. I mean honestly; chemical-fucking-physics! How did I get myself into that situation? Jesus, it gives me a headache just thinking about it. It must be said that I didn’t do particularly well in my degree (I got a 2:2, the equivalent of a “C”), but just the fact that I managed to attend all the lecturers and complete all the coursework and exams for the three years needed to make it to the end; whilst simultaneously living on 6 nights sleep per week, spending every evening during the week either smoking weed around the squat in clandestine meetings planning raves, or driving around the countryside looking for venues, and spending the entire weekend going to raves is an achievement that barely seems possible looking back on it now.
It’s a powerful feeling realising that you are that dedicated to, and passionate about something that you are willing to go to prison to protect it. I’m sure it’s a level of dedication that 99% of people who were there at the time will have never even considered. No one’s resolve will have been pushed that far to question it. It’s not until your looking those charges in the face that an almost fanatical level of devotion comes into it. I’m sure that most had this fanatical level of devotion deep within them, but it’s a level of devotion that I don’t think is a good thing. Not so much feeling that passionately about something, but just the fact that it completely absorbed and took over every single aspect of your life. I’m sure that everyone, even those who played no part in organising it will be able to relate to the fact that after you started going to these parties, everything else in life took a distant second place. Any sporting achievement, any interest, any hobby, any friends you used to have before you ever went to them, everything was pushed to one side or forgotten completely to make way for this all-consuming new found interest. I feel quite bad that it distanced and disconnected me from my family so much for several years. And whilst I got myself through university during this time, if I was to go back now, even as a mature student, I would enjoy it so much more. I didn’t want to take any part in it back then. I remember going into uni on a Monday morning and everyone else there would be discussing going down the bars on Price of Wales road on Saturday night and then watching the hollyoaks omnibus all day Sunday. I on the other hand used to turn up, having been in the depths of Thetford forest for the last 24 hours, then spending the night sleeping on the floor of some squat, rolling into uni in the same clothes, no books, no pens, no paper, thinking, “Christ, I couldn’t be any more different to you people.” but the thing is, fundamentally I wasn’t that different. If I was to go back to uni now I would get involved in all kinds of clubs and societies and make so much more of it. But it didn’t even occur to me back then. Nothing else in life mattered. It’s this blinkered level of devotion which I believe to be the most negative aspect of raves. But at the same time it wouldn’t have had quite the momentum, power and feeling behind it if we weren’t all that dedicated to it.
Looking back on it now, I’m not even sure what I was willing to go to prison to protect. Was I some kind of revolutionary, standing up to repression in the name of freedom? Or was I merely a hedonist chasing a buzz? I don’t think I was entirely either of these things. But I think I was far nearer to the latter than the former. I didn’t think I was fighting for a just cause. I was never under any delusions that what we were doing should be legal. In my mind it was always going to be illegal. In the way we did it anyway. I did however think that a compromise could have been reached with regards to Thetford forest. Thetford forest was a man made creation to provide jobs after the First World War and to provide revenue from timber. It didn’t even exist before that. And today it is just one big logging enterprise. The entire place is on a logging rotation, large parts of it are cut down and replanted every year, it’s not a protected ancient area or area containing endangered species, it’s only 100 years old at the most. It is the largest lowland forest in Britain and contains massive areas you could easily hold a rave in without bothering a single soul. I didn’t see any reason why a compromise couldn’t have been reached where we could have been allowed to use small parts of the forest for our means. Like the French government do with the teknival. It certainly would have cost a lot less to implement than the hundreds of riot police needed to brutally shut it down. But I guess our government is not nearly as tolerant. Also, we were never willing to approach the police with such a proposal, we were so adamant on remaining faceless to prevent legal hassles.
But if I was merely a hedonist chasing a buzz, the interesting thought is the buzz I was chasing. It wasn’t the unnatural buzz of any kind of a drug; the parties themselves provided the buzz I needed. It was the whole infectious buzz of that time period. Feeling that alive, that energised, that empowered. Leading a life that exhilarated and thrilled you at every turn, every aspect of it was a buzz in itself: Travelling across the UK to far off and distant parties; the comparatively raw, high energy, physical vibe of parties in Norfolk; the thrill of the chase and the edgy, stomach churning trepidation of police interference; the utterly unpredictable, wildly spontaneous and impossibly impetuous nature of it all, this could be the best night of your life, or it could be the night you end up in a prison cell; the joy and happiness that it provided to every single person who went, there were no ulterior motives, nobody was in it for any other reason than it made them happy to be there; the pre-party butterflies, during party madness and the sense of satisfaction and completion when it’s all over; the added buzz of helping to create it, seeing it all unfold before your eyes, knowing that you played your part in making that party happen and provided that level of enjoyment for everyone involved. I particularly enjoyed the whole “seeing it all unfold” aspect of it. One of my favourite means of assisting with the organisation of these parties was driving for hours on end through the depths of Thetford forest in search of venues. I must have spent hundreds of pounds on fuel and just as many hours driving aimlessly through the countryside. But it was all made worthwhile as you approached a clearing or quarry that looked usable, that early, spine tingling sensation of “yes, this could be the one”. Then as you get out the car and stroll amongst it, planning it all out in your mind; soundsystem between those two trees, lorry parked across there, bar at the back somewhere, cars parked along there and down this track, fucking heaving stack right here. Seeing it all unfold in your imagination, exactly how it’s going to look in a couple of weeks time. The butterflies are already hatching on the ride home, that juddery, yearning sense of anticipation at knowing you have somewhere good to bring that vibe to. More often than not if you have found the venue, you end up leading the convoy to it on the night, driving into the same location in the same forest at 1am on a Sunday morning in the pitch black with a 3 mile queue of 250 pairs of glistening headlights following you in. The butterflies are in overdrive by this point, the stomachs churning itself into knots, you can hardly contain the excitement, squirming and fidgeting uncontrollably in your car seat at the thought of what’s about to unfold. The mad, frantic dash as everyone pulls in and everybody jumps out of their cars to lend a hand in pilling the speakers into a imposing mountain of sound. All just as ecstatic as you, shaking hands, hugging, chatting, cheering, jiggling and shaking on the spot, everybody experiencing and feeling that same collective, giddy state of climatic anticipation, so close to that first tune you can taste it. Then when that first tune kicks, that first stack when all that pent up energy and frenzied excitement collectively explodes onto the dance floor, everyone in a unified state and combined emotive feeling of “Fuck yes! Here we go again. This is the euphoric release we’ve been waiting and pining for all week long.” The hours during the night when the party is packed and heaving. Those first dawning moments of daylight, when you can finally see the happiness on peoples faces and take in the natural serenity of your beautiful and remote surroundings. At some point early in the following afternoon I’ll always end up sitting back, taking stock of the last few hours and think to myself “yes, this is exactly how I pictured it when I was here last week.” Eventually comes the high of the “last few tunes” when everyone gives it everything they have left, holding on, prolonging that last buzz, making the most of those last few minutes (or hours as it was in the early days) of uplifting music and unified elation. The all over body throbbing and tingling that occurs when the last tune ends and everyone cheers, shouts, screams, whistles and applauds.All that energy and momentum finally winding down and coming to rest. Perhaps the thing I used to love the most was standing there at the bitter end, after all the speakers had been packed away, the people had gone and the last few bags of rubbish are being loaded into the van, I used to take great satisfaction simply from standing there, right in the middle of that worn, muddy patch of ground where just an hour or two earlier there stood a pounding soundsystem and hundreds of people stacking in the sun. And now there was no one, no sign we’d even been there other than a heavily worn patch of grass. I’d think back over the mayhem of the previous 24 hours, and then to the week or so earlier when I had been stood in this very spot, and feel overcome with a warm sense of completion and fulfilment at having witnessed the whole thing through in its entirety, from its imaginary start in my mind, right through to this last, penultimate, emotional moment just before getting into a car and driving off into the sunset. It was a feeling no less than incredible. A feeling of awe and respect for the event you’ve had a hand in creating.A feeling of exhaustion but also uplifted, invigorated satisfaction. A feeling of belonging and being a part of something special. A feeling which compounded every effort you put into it and made that risk, that hard work, and that time spent all worthwhile. A feeling that will never leave me and one I will carry with me wherever I go. I used to stand there at the end of it all in contemplative reflection and think to myself “fucking hell, what a weekend… What a party... What a buzz…What a feeling… Bring on the next one.”
I think it’s these feelings that I was willing to go to prison to protect.
This was the end of the second of the three blogs I originally wrote. In the next one I am arrested at gun-point for a crime I did not commit, a crime much more serious than the organising of illegal raves, which could have seen me serving 8-10 years in prison if I had of been convicted of it. You’ll have to wait a while before I revisit that story however. I’m currently driving around Australia in a caravan with my wife and two kids for the next couple of years, whilst also trying to do an online diploma in project management, and still flying all over the country to abseil off wind turbines every couple of weeks. I’m a little time poor at the moment to say the least. Just for shits and giggles, this is a picture of my "home" for the next two years. Living the pikey dream:
The thing I want to get across again is the meaning of the title: “One of the people.” I am, as the song goes, just one of the people. You too, are all one of the people. (For those of you do not know this song, I have posted a clip of it at the end of this post, just because I can. It’s a song that never got played at a rave to my knowledge, which is a shame because I think it would have gone down well in an early afternoon set. I like it anyway. Its quite a fitting song and message to be listening to when you are on the other side of the world from everyone.)
But the point is, we are all one of the people, we all have our own memories, feelings and stories to tell on this period. I may have been more involved than a lot of you, but I know there are a lot out there who were more passionate and more involved in this life than I was. It would be a shame to just document my experiences and memories on it. I’m sure if you all think hard enough; you each have a unique and interesting story to tell. I know that I seem to have developed a certain literary flair and come from a somewhat academic background, but at no point in my life have I ever considered myself a writer. I’m sure a lot of you have it in you to think and write in this way, especially about a period you all hold so much admiration for.
If anyone else out there has any other photos, footage, news reports, or feels like writing some of their own experiences down into a story such as this one then we would love to hear from you. Please get in touch with Louise through the following link:
There are still a number of pieces of media I would like to obtain to fully complete this current blog. If anyone out there has any of the following please get in touch:
- Newspaper report from 2006 which mentions “tip of the pyramid of brainstorm”
- Full anglia news clip of March 28th 2004
- Photos of the original “Don’t tell Bob” party
- photos of first equality/ defiance party at seething airfield
- Photo of fat paulys nightclub party
- Any newspaper articles relating to Ramsholt 2005 festival
- Any photos of any kind from those parties really that I can put into my 4 hour techno/ trance set to post on youtube
And just thinking ahead to what I may write about in the next blog I would really appreciate the following if anyone has them:
- TV News report from the 2003 festival in the salt marshes (it was surprisingly positive and mentioned us having tide times written on a news letter)
- The newsletter from that 2003 festival
- Any photos of the various squats,
- Any photos from our outings with the community collective/ radical roots. Particularly if anyone has photos of the places we took a soundsystem to; the tower block in London and the farm in the Welsh mountains.
- Any TV news report or newspaper article from the 2004 festival on the cliff tops (I cant even remember if this one made the news, but just in case anyone has anything on it)
- Anything that anybody has on legal events we did in the years after or during (bedroom beats, mayhem nights, symmetry festival, unity tribe etc)
Final thought: if there’s a moral here, it’s: “a good character reference goes a long way”. Or maybe it’s simply: “don’t get fucking caught in the first place”.
No comments:
Post a Comment