How I always preferred my clubs.
You dial a number and a voice tells you a time and place.

You pile into a car and drive out into the country, doubting just how true the voice's instructions had been.

You start to see hordes of similarly wild-eyed, confused and nervous looking individuals in their cars and you feel slightly more relaxed.

You sidle up next to a fella who seems to have the energy of an ADHD child on speed, and he jabbers directions at you.

You then join massive convoy that drives out into the middle of nowhere until, eventually, you see some lights emitting from the bottom of a quarry.

You may soon hear the dull thud of a heavy kick being forced too loudly out of a gigantic stack of speakers, but only as long as your arrival doesn't coincide with one of the many disruptions to the sound brought about by such a wide variety of reasons, it's a wonder they're ever able to find the cause.

You fill yourself up with whatever substance you prefer to kill brain cells with and gurn the night, and quite possibly much of the next day, away to intermittent tunes played through far too many second rate speakers.

And you hope the old bill don't turn up at any point.
( Moey, Tue 14 Apr 2009, 15:16, 7 replies)

depending on your age,
you are either reminiscing about the old skool m25 raves in which case I applaud you or....


you are reminiscing about the old Spiral Tribe type free parties that over the course of of one weekend at Castlemorton in the early 90s almost singlehandedly destroyed the wonderful free festival network that (bar annual trouble at the Stonehenge Festival) had existed reasonably successfully since the 70s.

In which case YOU UTTER BASTARD! The merging of rave culture and free festivals was an unmitigated disaster due primarily to morons not turning off their sound systems for days on end and pushing local residents to and then beyond the limit.

Prior to the free raves there were always travellers with kids living on site and thus by about 2am the music would quieten down and wouldn't start again til lunchtime. This arrangement worked for decades - within a year Spiral Tribe and their ilk had destroyed the uneasy status quo.

People who blame the Criminal Justice Bill aren't looking at the reasons behind why it was rushed through. A whole eccentric (and admittedly dole and drug-dealing funded) strain of British society that delighted me in my teens no longer exists and I think that's terribly sad.
( Monty Boyce, My cheese game is strong, Tue 14 Apr 2009, 15:52, closed)

33.
I just used to turn up and dance a lot. That's about all I remember of them, to be honest.
( Moey, Tue 14 Apr 2009, 16:08, closed)

I'm only a few years older than you
but I was an early starter and, in truth, something of a hypocrite as I thought the earliest festival/rave crossovers were fucking GREAT.

The problem was that it all got too big very quickly (the problem with rave culture as a whole, in my opinion), to the point when the government HAD to stop it, as it annoyed too many people.

Prior to that a few farmers got severely pissed off but that was it - and for the most part the festival circuit was just that: a single festival moving on after each weekend - not a network of noisy buggers all over the country simultaneously fucking off rural and urban taxpayers in a very public way...
( Monty Boyce, My cheese game is strong, Tue 14 Apr 2009, 16:26, closed)

I went to such a mix
that there's every chance I ended up at a few of the Spiral Tribe style ones.

I got into the rave thing relatively late, but growing up in the countryside I (mis)spent much of my later teens and early twenties hanging around with travellers and going to their parties.

My enduring memories of the whole illegal rave thing amounts to dancing around in quarries to truly second rate sound systems, which would never play for more than a few hours at a time until something went wrong.

I do remember reaching a point where either I out grew it, or it out grew me. Either way, there were a few years where I couldn't imagine dancing anywhere other than under the stars and I used to love every bit of it.
( Moey, Tue 14 Apr 2009, 16:35, closed)

Same here
I was forced to grow up or become a full-time renegade - and chose the latter. Sometimes I'm not sure I made the right choice...

I'd give my right bollock to be back on the 80s free festival trail. It was like nothing you'll ever see in your life in these sanitised times. They were like going back in time to a medieval county fayre or the back streets of Victorian London - full of proper vagabonds, scary old fellers with battered top hats with feathers in and tin whistles, actual vagrants and some incredible characters.

The whole experience was a bit scary at times but I never saw much more than petty thievery and drunken fighting - nothing like the armed drug robberies I saw in the rave years. Gentler people in gentler times, united by genuine outsider status rather than the false mateyness of ecstasy takers.


/misty-eyed old hippie
( Monty Boyce, My cheese game is strong, Tue 14 Apr 2009, 18:24, closed)

I miss a lot from those days.
But that life was never for me, I'm too clean and lazy to live such a bohemian existence all the time.

The parties were ace, though.
( Moey, Wed 15 Apr 2009, 11:45, closed)

I miss those days....
What ever happened to predictability, the milk man, the paper boy, raves and MDMA...?
(ohnonotagain It's worse than you thought. I'm Canadian., Thu 16 Apr 2009, 5:35, closed)