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, 1 reply)

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)