Forums > Social Chat > Garthy - Ruling the Raves!!

Posted: 30th Aug 2006

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Whos Matt Cardy? Garthy?

There's too many home fires burning and not enough trees

Posted: 30th Aug 2006
the photographer probably. i have my sneaky suspicions that this photo has nothing to do with the article other than the fact it was taken somewehere with dancemusic playing and is in the observer's photo library... garth, any ideas?

it's quite a good article by the way, pretty much sums things up. I hope all the attention and hysteria the writer seems to have picked up on (see other news last weekend) doesn't have a negative affect on the small but healthy party scene which still survives... maybe if it gets bigger though there won't be enough resources to actually stop em? who knows...

It is our fantasies that make us real. Without our fantasies we're just a blank monkey' - Terry Pratchett

Posted: 30th Aug 2006
That picture, according to the Guardian website, was taken at Glasto last year. I knew it was familiar Very cool tho!

Aim high and you'll know your limits, aim low and you'll never know how high you could have climbed.

Posted: 31st Aug 2006
wheres ravehead? he'll enjoy this one...

"This dark place planet Earth, orbits one star,
Come from afar, far away state of mind,
open up your third eye, black helicopters in the sky"

Posted: 31st Aug 2006
where's ravehead i hear you ask.....................finding this

'Raves are making a resurgence'
With Essex police breaking up an illegal rave involving 600 revellers on the August bank holiday weekend, does it mean the rave scene is back in fashion?
It never actually went away according to some music journalists, who believe raves have increased in popularity especially during the summer, but not on the scale of those in the 1990s.

Jonathan Wingate, a freelance journalist who attended raves in the past, believes there has always been a demand for them, but it is only recently that they have attracted any publicity.

He said: "There has definitely been a resurgence in raves, but small gatherings of people, rather than huge ones during the summer of love in the 1980s.

"Just because Franz Ferdinand and Cold Play are topping the charts, it doesn't mean the whole world is into rock 'n' roll.

"There's still a large minority of people who want to listen to dance music and take class-A drugs.

"The bank holiday weekend is the biggest party time of the summer so it's provided a huge demand for raves.

"Also, with no Glastonbury this year, it means people will be looking for gigs with a more subversive element, which aren't available at other festivals.

Alternative night out

Chris Salmon, another music journalist, thinks raves offer people an alternative to the conventional night out.

"People are bored of clubbing.

"Back in the 1990s there was excitement about super clubs like Cream, but their success became their failure, because they became too mainstream and corporate.

"If you're not into binge drinking or getting into fights and are interested in dance music, then raves are appealing because not many places play that type of music.

"It also offers the chance to be part of something different and cutting edge.

"It's exciting getting a text message telling you to go down the next junction of the A40, take a right to find the venue.

"And while festivals are expensive, it's much cheaper to go down to a field with a stereo and a couple of your mates."

New strategies

The increased media interest has made organisers adjust their strategies according to Dave Jenkins, news editor at International DJ Magazine.

"They are now more reluctant to advertise or put on such big events.

"They like the fact that only few people know, as it's an underground community who do not want much publicity.

"Some organisers have tried to pass raves off as a convention, where like-minded businesses get together to network with local promoters and DJs."

Health and safety

The increased popularity of raves has put the police in a difficult situation.

A spokesman for Essex police said: "We are caught between a rock and a hard place in that peace needs to be maintained, the rights of the landowner need to be upheld and the law must be enforced.

"To let illegal raves go ahead would present a significant danger to the public, as there are no provisions for health and safety or public hygiene.

"In the event of serious injury or death, Essex police would be criticised for allowing such events to go ahead."

Posted: 31st Aug 2006
look...................even the governor of california is a raver


https://www.evilchili.com/mediaview/5044/Arnie_Rave

Posted: 31st Aug 2006
also this..................

Oberver artical on RAVES, mentions SECTION 63......
I know it's a little long but in the 9th paragraph they mention Psy Trance legends SECTION 63 - ha ha ha.

Sunday August 27, 2006
The Observer


Is this it? We pass a Little Chef and turn off the A road into a shadowy lay-by. It's the second to last Saturday in August, yet as dark as November with a steady drizzle. Our beams illuminate a chain of parked cars. One flashes in welcome, as if to say, 'Yes, you're here.' We take a slot near the rear of the convoy. A figure in a rain jacket moves along the line, urgently barking: 'The police have blocked the road, we've got to go now.' A 100 or so shapes emerge from steamed-up vehicles, bass blasting from each. The buzz is infectious, everyone primed for action.
This is the culmination of a day's frantic texting and posting on internet forums. I had to find out for myself whether there was any truth behind the headlines declaring a rave revival this summer. Their eyes on the drinking mayhem in our cities, the police appear to have been caught off guard in the past three months by a series of well-organised raves that arrived out of nowhere. In May Cornwall police broke up a party of 2,000 in Davidstow, seizing £3,000 in cash, drugs worth £40,000 and 12 lorries loaded with sound equipment. More raves followed. Was this another summer of love? Or a bunch of old clubbers who never went away, joined by bumper crowds due to July's heat wave? As a veteran of the 80s scene - both as a clubber and dance music journalist - I was curious.

With tomorrow's bank holiday signalling the last blast of the hedonist season, police have been warning of giant illegal parties kicking off. One local paper printed an appeal for anyone who has 'seen large numbers of vehicles gathering near woods or rural car parks, fliers advertising raves, or broken padlocks on access gates' to report it immediately. Hoping to stay one step ahead, the organisers of a gathering in Kent moved it forward to last weekend.

All we know, as we cruise through the Blackwall Tunnel at 10.30pm, is that Kent's 'big one' is to happen in a forest between Canterbury and Dover. Our driver is a Lydd Airport party veteran, our photographer was at World Dance, and I grew up on raves. So we're sceptical about what we'll find. At 11pm a text directs us to the lay-by near Maidstone.

There a voice yells, 'Go, go, go!' as if we're leaping from the trenches into battle. In clusters of five we sprint across the wet Tarmac and jump the central barrier, unnerved by blinding beams of oncoming traffic. Someone's pointing to a gap in the undergrowth, 'Down there, over the barbed wire.' We scramble down a muddy bank and suddenly we're in a cornfield, and I'm excited and laughing. Yeah, this really is something like the old days.

The night has flashbacks to the cat-and-mouse games in pursuit of 'orbital' acid house parties in 1988. Personally, I experienced the dawn of the movement indoors. At the Hacienda in 1989 I danced in a haze of dry ice and lasers to Chicago house tunes and the British music inspired by it (then called 'acid house', the term 'rave' not coined until the Nineties). After closing time at 2am word would spread of warehouse parties in Lancashire industrial estates or in derelict mills on the outskirts of the city (later they'd all become designer apartments).

At 14 I'd fallen for the punk and indie bands my hometown of Manchester was famed for, but my life was transformed by these events. I didn't listen to another rock record for 10 years. I followed the party to London and out to the fields where I would find myself dancing to early trance and techno on wasteland near Dagenham or hillsides in Sussex.

A decade on and it's suddenly like being back there. There's a stile, a hill, more barbed wire and then we're in verdant woodland, emerging into the most perfect party spot I've ever seen: a lush green hollow surrounded by trees.

It's a gem of a location for Kent's biggest illegal outdoor shindig of the summer. Typically parties attract 100 to 300 but this aims for 1,000 ravers. It's to feature five or six sound systems led by local psytrance legends Section 63, Beatz & Freakz and Maidstone's electro-house crew Rebel Beat Faction. A party called Little Green Man at this site two years ago drew 2,000.

But tonight something's wrong. Sound rigs are erected around the clearing but they're all ominously silent. Then we see the police. We've been beaten to it. We're gutted.

'We had an incredible line-up with eight or more name DJs and live visual mixing but it was scuppered by the Old Bill,' says Matt, aka Morebuck$, Rebel Beat Faction's VJ. 'The reason we were doing this party was to take it back to the underground and away from commercial clubs where what you're wearing is more important than the music.'

In the centre of the field a policewoman is besieged by teenagers. 'Don't stop the music,' they beg. 'We're stuck out here till morning.' The crowd is pushing and shoving. I'm bumped from behind and fly into her. She spins round with her pepper spray. The police are tired and irritated. One is overheard saying: 'Right, I'm sick of this - let's nick the dreadlock.' In the end there are no arrests and the crowd disperses peacefully. Later I learn they terminated the rave at the landowner's request. A police spokesman tells me raves are 'not a problem' in mid-Kent.

That contradicts the picture emerging of a low-key but determined revival of rave culture right across the South, pioneered by a new generation. What's different this time is that the kids possess their own 'rigs' - portable sound systems with amplifiers, speakers and turntables. They take them out to woods, quarries, fields and beaches with a small group of friends and dance all night at often nameless events. It's free, anti-corporate and anti-fashion.

The culture's guerrilla nature - remote locations, publicity by word-of-mouth only - has kept its propagation, from Cornwall to Norfolk, fairly invisible. The raves hitting the headlines this summer have been those where these small crews have come together to create giant 'multi-rig' events.

Many of these party organisers were still at primary school when acid house first made 'shock horror' headlines. Some were not even born. 'This is my first rave, and it's not going to happen,' a disappointed 12-year-old tells us. His elder sister, 15, says she's been going to raves for two years but this was going to be the biggest. Most of the crowd are in their late teens or early twenties, an eclectic mix of dreadlocked middle-class sixth-formers, party-crazy university students, twentysomethings with office jobs and teenagers in baseball caps and sneakers.

Tom, a 20-year-old who has hosted parties near Canterbury, says the new rave generation is 'coming out of lots of little towns. In East Kent there's 500 to 600 of us wanting to party every weekend. It's a family, we look after each other.'

The comeback is a triumph for a subculture almost exterminated by the last Conservative government after ravers connected with the hippie/squatter circuit in the early Nineties. If the authorities disliked acid house, this scared them even more. The battle between the state and those wanting freedom to travel and/or dance outdoors finally came to a head at Castlemorton, a traveller camp on common land in May 1992 that became a week-long rave attended by upwards of 25,000. This led to the Criminal Justice Bill's clauses banning gatherings of more than 10 people listening to 'music characterised by a succession of repetitive beats'. Zero-tolerance policing and the new measures drove many of its proponents, such as Spiral Tribe, to the continent.

With the travellers long since driven off the road, the new wave of free raves is being led by ordinary teenagers, students and day-jobbers from small towns who simply want an alternative to commercial entertainment options. It's not (as yet) a political statement but more simply a rejection of the current, bland, drink-dominated pub and club culture.

Kelly, 25, a customer service adviser who's a veteran of the free party scene around Bristol and Plymouth, says: 'Even I feel old at some of the parties. It is the next generation who are coming up and getting into it like my 16-year-old sister and her friends.' The appeal is simple: 'The atmosphere in clubs is bad. People are there to drink and pull but at free parties everyone is there for the music.'

Darragh Poynter, 23, who runs a property maintenance firm and hosts free parties around Exeter, says the partygoers 'range from managers to people running their own businesses to people who are doing monotonous day jobs, who really let go on weekends.'

The secret of holding a party that isn't busted is getting the numbers right - not so many that you attract attention but having enough people at the site before the police arrive. Tom, 19, from Faversham, says: 'If they figure it's organised, peaceful and far away enough from houses, they might as well let it run.'

The official police view is that they are prepared to use all laws available to stop raves going ahead. Sergeant Alan Mobbs of Devon and Cornwall Police tells me they can call on the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, the Anti Social Behaviour Act of 2003 and recent changes in the licensing laws. However, the choice of remote locations is making it harder for the police to stop events. 'There are some raves that we only know about two or three days later because they're in such a remote spot that no one has complained. Action is determined on a case by case basis. If it's small and out of the way, we're not always quick enough to stop other people arriving. Then it's difficult to stop it - but that doesn't stop us arresting the organisers as they leave. That's the time we look at seizing equipment.

'If the landowner has consented and it's not causing a nuisance that's fine, but there are other considerations, like health and safety - things like no fire precautions - that are a danger with parties that suddenly appear from nowhere.'

Back in the Kent lay-by, rumour is spreading that the six sound systems will be setting up in different locations. One is close to the original site. This is not the end of the night but the beginning. We follow the motorcade down a narrow lane until we reach a pub car park with 20 or so cars, people milling around but no music. We're wondering whether to call it a night when ... boom! The beats begin in a nearby field. The DJ is spinning house and techno; they've got disco lights and a little marquee. This suits me fine as one of the older generation who likes tunes with uplifting piano breaks and grooves, music with its roots in black America. The kids aren't impressed. The anthems I danced to - the ones that created those visions of an entire dancefloor thrusting hands skywards and a life-affirming feeling in your chest that stays with you for ever (I'm thinking classics like A Guy Called Gerald's 'Voodoo Ray', 808 State's 'Pacific State', 'Ride on Time' by Black Box) - feel so slow and lightweight to this crowd, they might as well be the Bee Gees. They want their music hard, loud and fast. And then harder and faster and trippier still.

For the new rave generation, hard techno, acid techno and psytrance are where it's at. The unrelenting sound of psytrance evolved in the mid-Nineties on Goa beaches and at Brixton squat parties and has become one of the most global and enduring dance cultures with scenes from Israel to Estonia to Brazil. It's the utilitarian soundtrack for a journey from the dark into the daylight, reaching its menacing peak in the dead of night then becoming lighter as the sun creeps above the horizon. 'You'll never hear this in the mainstream,' says Darragh.

If acid house was a rebellion against Eighties blandness, what's happening now is a reaction to the equally banal corporate chain-pub culture with its bouncers, mainstream music and drunken violence. There are few takers for the budget French beer and alcopops being sold from a car boot. Clearly much Ecstasy has been ingested, and the biggest queue is for an entrepreneurial pair with giant tanks of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) at £1 to £2 a balloon. It's not currently an offence to ingest the dental anaesthetic once likened to the 'air of heaven'. Many have come prepared with their own supply of gas in whipped-cream dispensers and metal propellant pods. If there's a 'new' drug accompanying this chapter of the rave movement, this is it.

'The party's not here,' someone says. 'The party's in Hoo. At a mansion.'

More texts, circling of roundabouts in Thames Estuary suburbia, and at 3.30am we find the Isle of Grain 'mansion'. Down a remote track in a power station's shadow is an abandoned nursing home, now a squatter encampment and regular weekend party venue. In the yard a green laser lights up the dancers while many sprawl on straw bales, skinning up. The DJ, whose soundsystem has also relocated from the first party, plays a slouching funky house that they complain is too 'chill-out'. 'The party's not here either,' people tell us, even as we arrive. We resume the chase again in a seven-car convoy. We career, lost, around Kent. The destination is finally located deep in a forest near Tunbridge Wells.

Here, and seemingly unnoticed by police, it's finally 'going off'. As sunbeams penetrate the foliage, 200-300 kids dance into a fresh day to the banging psytrance they've sought all night. The mission is over. It's not the 'big one'. But, they assure me, there's always next week

sorry it's sooo long