Unbeknown to us here at FPPHQ, someone has created a map based on the entries on our blog. Click on a Love Cabbage and it gives you some info about the party, together with a link to the party report on our blog, give it a try!
P.S. This site, and all other linked sites, appear in a column on the right hand edge of the blog. If you notice that any of them are dead, or have one you wish us to add, just let us know at freepartypeople (at) yahoo dot co dot uk.
As becomes apparent from the introduction, this book was pieced together by Iain Donnelly from Keith’s freeflowing notes. Had I not read the introduction, I wouldn’t have realised this, and it’s worth bearing in mind when you read it. Donnelly, in the Editor’s Intro, characterises those notes as ‘often disjointed’ and holds that Keith ‘tended to throw down words on paper like a dysfunctional beat poet. It was my job to find order in the chaos’.
This turns out to be a rather different kettle of fish to the other free party memoirs (A Darker Electricity on Spiral Tribe and Dreaming in Yellow on DiY) on the Velocity Press imprint.
Why? First of all, the timeline is more… twitchy. This doesn’t affect the reading experience negatively, and in fact it might make for a more interesting read! Secondly, there is not much by way of politics. Finally, the way women are written about is… well let’s just say that I reckon some of the source material this was compiled from was somewhat old. Nevertheless, this is a great, if rambling, read. There’s colour, chaos, regular clashes with authorities, an often childlike impulsiveness, and plenty of humour.
Although I never knew Keith, I feel the book gives the reader a reasonably accurate idea of what he was like, faults included. Even though he has a tendency to be headstrong, he has a degree of self-awareness about his shortcomings that makes him relatable. He could certainly be classed as an unreliable narrator, but this adds to the charm. Even though seldom touched upon, it seems likely, knowing what we know now about racism in police forces, that they treated Keith more harshly due to his mixed ethnicity. It is certainly clear that the local cops recognized him very quickly and felt he was a thorn in their side.
Even though I had never been to a Desert Storm party, I had of course heard about them and Keith, and the Bosnia trip years before. Oh, and of course this slice of genius: Desert Storm – Scoraig ’93
I was pleasantly surprised to discover a thread leading from DS to Bassline Circus (a personal Fusion Festival favourite, as it provided a home to the kind of sounds not generally favoured by the average Fusionist). They also interfaced with Spiral Tribe (more of that later), Reclaim The Streets, DiY, and the anti-Criminal Justice Act movement.
Speaking of which, it’s unusual for two books to have the same image on the front, but whoever decided to put Matt Smith’s iconic image on the cover of this one had the right idea. Keith peers into the lens, left hand seemingly on the steering wheel, right clutching a mic, leaning precariously out of the Desert Storm van. The camouflaged vehicle, roof laden down with giant speakers and with Sheona, hands in the air, climbs the hill past the Plaza cinema towards Piccadilly Circus, leading protesters on one of the three marches against the Criminal Justice Bill.
The tale begins in Helmand’s Green Zone in Afghanistan. Keith, mid-battle, decides he doesn’t want to die, at least, not until he’s written a book. His decision to join the 52nd Lowlanders is motivated by a desire to take revenge on the Taliban after the failed 2007 Glasgow Airport terrorist attack.
Keith is the result of a fling in Moscow in 1968. His mum, a ‘slightly out-there hippy chick’ was there to research communism, while dad, a ‘dodgy Marxist..activist from Sudan’ was there due to the fact that he ‘had escaped from [Sudanese] jail with the help of the Soviets’.
Young Keith takes an interest in mechanics, and has a short-lived hobby of making bombs out of stolen ingredients. This sets the tone for the risk-taking and rebellious life he went on to live.
An early interest in music leads to his role in forming the not-terribly-originally-named House and Garage Club. Tipped off about a stall on Camden Market, Keith makes his way to London by train, dodging ticket inspectors on the way. Following this he somehow scams a free overnight stay in a hotel before travelling to Camden to complete his quest. The stall, run by a Simon Slime, sells tapes of the latest house (compete with track listings), and once Keith gets his hands on a couple of these he heads to Black Market Records on a buying spree.
One of his regular run-ins with the cops ends with Keith leaping out of a window and landing in a thorn bush. A major mushroom dosing misjudgement results in Keith and his friend Mad Dog entering what could only be described as psychotic states. A chaotic sequence of events, including trespassing on roofs, kickboxing cops, and attacking police cars culminates in the handing down an 18-month sentence, at which point Keith decides to fly off to Corfu with a new name, Krob.
Armed with a letter of introduction and the name of a bar, Keith, sorry, Krob soon lands on his feet with a regular DJing gig in the town of Pelakas. There he makes friends and enemies, fights, and gets involved in more than one holiday romance. On his return to Glasgow Keith hands himself in, then spends three weeks in a Young Offenders Institution. In the end, though, he only has to pay a fine. More DJing ensues. It is not long before Keith and his friends start thinking about ways around the restrictive licensing laws of the time. During 1990, when Glasgow was nominated City of Culture, clubs were permitted to stay open until 6 a.m. This didn’t last, and the old 3 a.m. opening time was reinstated on New Year’s Eve. The logical conclusion of the crew that would later become Desert Storm was that after parties simply had to be arranged, and the energetic Keith was instrumental in bringing some of these about. The tunnel rave he organised with the nascent Desert Storm was not a free party, but an unlicensed one costing £3. To make sure the punters found their way from the clubs to the rave, many of the crew left to flyer the clubbers as they left the venues, leaving some to guard the equipment. Before too long, cops are spotted near the entrance. Unfortunately the head cop recognises Keith. Thankfully, he gets away with it this time.
Inspired by the relative success of their first do, DS begin the hunt for a new venue. Due to the violent nature of Glasgow nightlife at the time, knife wielding idiots almost manage to ruin the party. In the melee, a car runs over a girl’s leg. Twice. This is all, by the way, before the after party even gets going. Then, after it has started, there’s the small matter of a punter with a serious facial knife wound. As Desert Storm’s parties grow more popular, more ‘dodgies’ start turning up. Would this, then, be the last DS event? History tells us that no, it won’t.
How does Keith propose to continue organising parties without the disruption from the spectrum of Glasgow heavies? By hiring the biggest, hardest, most-feared doormen, of course! Even Keith himself realises after a while that this is a mistake. There is a temporary sense of relief when the scary doorman and his equally-scary mates identify the knife-carrying punters with ease and disarm them (yes, of course they handed their weapons back at the end!) Not long after this, though, there is what Keith’s friend calls ‘the whirlpool of darkness’.
For another party, Keith and co. masquerade as a letting agency, looking for a venue for ‘a music video’ (that classic acid house trick). Abandoning the Desert Storm name for a while, a new venue, The Unit, is established, but, thanks to a machete attack on the venue (bit of a theme here!) security has to be upped.
Further adventures ensue, including a romance with a schoolgirl (!), skiing trips, near-shipwrecks, and crashes (both car and motorbike varieties).
The gist of the philosophical chapter can be summed up in these quotes, but Keith’s ramble also takes in Stephen Hawking, the wave/particle question, and many other avenues of tripped out enquiry:
Keith, however, offers an alternative suggestion:
I suggest it’s a bit of both.
One interesting point he makes in this section is that, when travelling around Europe with mobile sound systems, the common ground he found with each and every of his fellow travellers was that they all took psychedelics in their early teens.
In 1994, the Desert Storm van, laden with speakers, leads the anti-Criminal Justice Bill march in central London, pumping out loud techno and Keith’s exhortations to ‘Kill the bill!’ Right at the moment the police are charging into the crowd of demonstrators and setting about them with batons, someone figures that it would be an appropriate moment to ask Keith if DS would be interested in joining an aid convoy to Bosnia for a New Year’s Eve party! Keith, being Keith, thinks that yes, this would be a very good idea. The Spirals, accompanied by a huge rig, are also at the demo, but they do not have permission to join the march. Keith gets acquainted with them, especially Debbie.
In the midst of the anarchic march, Keith needs a pee, and heads off to find a side street. He is confronted with a bunch of cops who he later finds out are TSG. Their shoulder badge numbers are covered up, and they are kitted out in balaclavas. In one of the more sinister passages of the book, Keith spies a ‘tray with strange little silver vials on it…the cops were snapping off the tops and necking the contents.’ They then notice Keith and he makes a quick exit. What’s in the vials, wonders Keith, ‘hippy-bashing juice maybe?’
Keith’s connection to the Spirals is cemented, and Mark, who’s experienced similar issues (see A Darker Electricity), suggests throwing parties for free. This would reduce interest from the authorities (no Public Entertainments License would be necessary for a free event) as well as discouraging gangsters (no door takings, no cash box to run off with, no threats of protection money).
Keith takes acid with the Spirals and, mid-trip, another hitherto-undocumented and highly disturbing episode takes place: Chris ‘Terminator’* warns the Spirals’ Glaswegian visitors to stop dancing as a drive-by shooting is about to happen. The music goes off, everyone ducks, and Chris wields his shotgun. No drive-by occurs, and, knowing what I know about Chris, I understand it was very likely all in his head, but that the shotgun itself was real. Chris then goes on to attack the RAC man who was there to fix the Desert Storm truck. He doesn’t like uniforms, apparently. Although there is much more to be said about this person, who was at one stage often seen around the Tribe and in their publicity shots, I will end by saying that his omittance from A Darker Electricity, as well as nearly all other accounts of the times by those closest to the Spirals, is very well deserved.
*I suggest we stop using the name Terminator too, as he was a real person, not a fictional one, and someone who is known in the community to have abused, seriously hurt and damaged people in very real ways.
Keith’s first visit to Bosnia is even more nerve-wracking, but there are, as always, moments of comic relief. There is the unfortunate cook for the aid convoy, whose vegan fare Keith describes as ‘lentil death’, throwing his pots and pans into a ravine after someone has cooked meat in them. Then there is the ‘morale hoover’, a name given by Keith to the member of the convoy whose very presence sucks the happiness out of just about everyone. The night before Christmas Eve, Desert Storm entertain a load of drunken squaddies in yet another surreal episode.
Why on earth do Keith and his intrepid fellow travellers, decide on taking a free party sound system to a war zone? Keith characterises music as ‘an essential’ and not a luxury. Keith’s attitude to music is reinforced when Dimethyltryptamine entities inform him, in block capitals, of his life mission: ‘YOUR JOB IN THIS REALITY IS TO PUT THE MUSIC ON’. Can’t argue with that.
The travelling sound system at some stage makes it to Italy, where the live set up is stolen. After putting out some feelers in the underworld, the thief is identified, but alas the kit has already been sold on. Unfortunately, even though the parties are free, gangsters still want a slice of the (drug) pie, and this time it’s the Camorra, a particularly nasty kind of mafia. Keith manages, at least by his reckoning, to defuse the tense situation before Desert Storm skip town.
More travels ensue, sometimes with a rig, sometimes without. Keith and his friend arrive in Venezuela for a gig. On the way to the airport their promoter stops off in one of Caracas’s barrios to procure coke for them. The cheap charlie causes all kinds of issues. The paranoiacs and coke-clouded situations in this part of the tale are fantastic anti-drug propaganda. There’s violence, there’s prostitution, there’s confusion. Coke doesn’t expand your minds, people, it makes them narrower.
Keith, ‘a little mental’ at a later juncture, finds himself in India straddling a Yamaha Enticer, armed with a replica 9mm. In a near-catastrophic misunderstanding (Keith is looking for a nightclub), our hero finds himself getting into big trouble at a Sikh temple for not covering his head or removing his shoes. Aside from this episode, the book doesn’t tell us much more about his Indian adventures, but the Publisher’s Note reminds us that Keith ‘slipped in and out of trouble with ease’.
Just when you think the book is over, there’s more: Ray Philp’s Epilogue, in which Keith explains a little about his army days, is followed by separate afterwords from Bstorm and Bizzy. Following these, there is a bunch of black and white photos. We see piles of speakers, more piles of speakers, and a New Year’s Eve rave in Barça. We see Keith as a child, at his mock wedding in Pelekas, without a shirt (but with a tie!) looking spun out next to a wall of cops at RTS, playing live sets, jumping off a bridge in Bosnia, and in his army uniform.
In Bstorm’s Afterword, the lead up to Keith’s death is laid out: ‘we were getting ready to go and do a rave out in Italy’. Bstorm hung out with Keith just hours before his death and didn’t detect anything unusual in his words or actions. They were due to travel to Italy the very next day, and Keith jumped into the Thames. Bstorm wonders if anything happened to Keith in the intervening hours, and acknowledging that Keith had been through a lot. We will probably never know.
What is Keith’s legacy? Firstly, Bstorm and others have resolved to keep Keith’s spirit alive with his tracks. Then there’s Bassline Circus (see above), and the immortalisation of Desert Storm in film, both documentary and feature. Indeed, the main party in Beats was apparently based around a DS party, and although this was something I wasn’t aware of when I watched it, there was a gritty realism to the party scenes. There is also footage of the Desert Storm van and some of their actual parties in the film, I’ll watch for these when I watch it again.
As for Keith himself, where is he now? His ashes are floating in space thanks to the space flight memorial fund.
A disclaimer first: we were involved in a little background work (figuring out e.g. dates of parties) for this documentary, so what you are about to read is a little biased.
I had been looking forward to Aaron Trinder’s documentary for a long time, and even though I had heard plenty of positive feedback from others, nothing could replace experiencing it for myself. It was well worth the wait. This film is joyful, inspiring, and nuanced, and provides a crystal clear view of times that we often spent in a euphoric cloud. The main achievement for me though was that, considering the subject is so multifaceted, the view of the scene is nothing short of panoramic. Trinder has wisely balanced this out by zooming in on pivotal aspects of the history. He, however, managed not to get too bogged down in the nitty gritty of the chronology. Figuring out the right dates for everything, working out which sound system or DJ was at which event, and making orderly lists, as I may have mentioned before, is perhaps the least pleasurable aspect of chronicling our scene, and Trinder thankfully seems to be of the same school of thought!
Even though there are plenty of hard facts for the avid rave historians among you, parts of the documentary are as colourful, psychedelic, and disorientating as befits the topic. In fact, they are reminiscent of the coming up sequence in Beats*.
The introduction describes acid house, but it is not lingered on unneccesarily. The absence of the Achilles heels of acid house (the pound signs reflected in the glistening eyes of both organisers and opportunistic criminals, the cops getting on top) were transformed into some of the strengths of our movement, at least for a couple of years…
We meet key figures in the scene but are never told that certain individuals or particular crews were more important than the others. Collectives like Free Party People, Spirals, DiY, Bedlam, Warp and Tonka are the main focus, with a nod to the second-gen deep housers influenced by DiY and some footage of more recent UKteks at the end. Important forerunners such as Circuses Normal and Irritant, and pre-acid house fluoro lunatics Mutoid Waste Company are also invited to the party. Early and reasonably unsung heroes such as Fun-de-mental and Sweat get a mention too.
Inclusivity and cooperation are central themes, as they should be. It is great to see the sentiment that ‘everyone is Spiral Tribe’ expressed here. It is a principle many of us partygoers were aware of at the time, but this aspect of Tribe history is often forgotten in the rush to canonize the core Spirals, and turn back the clock to the idolisation and guitar solos the house and techno scenes of that era were moving swiftly away from. The Do it Yourselfers, too, were welcoming, unless, as Grace says, ‘you’re a total knob’.
Although I am not fully in agreement as to the importance of Glasto ’90’s place in the discourse as number one mothernode of free party folks and travellers, the argument made in the documentary for this is very strong, and the elements of a great oral history are all there: the KLF turning up with a tape, the spangled Mondays, the dancefloor horse.
On the last leg of the road to Castlemorton Common the embattled Spirals are plagued by stormclouds of doom and paranoia. After the police brutality at Acton Lane in the spring, and a Roundhouse party in the new year where everything seemed to go pear shaped, the mood was dark, and the Tribe escaped to North Wales to, as was said in the sixties after the first flush of psychedelia passed, get it together in the countryside.
There are of course plenty of fond reminiscences about the golden years of the free party and the rebirth of the free festival, but not everything is projected through a rose-tinted lens. The racket and the mess that was made at the larger events, and how that affected locals, is one of the issues touched on. Mark Spiral, outside the courtroom, having just been acquitted, seems genuinely spooked and contrite about the scale and noisiness of Castlemorton, a huge contrast with the other bookend: the trial began with an militant platoon of shaven-headed Spirals in their uniform Make Some Fuckin’ Noise Ts marching in to the court.
We learn about the free festival’s musical progression, from the original space rock riffing to the future sound of pumping techno and house. The legendary pyramid tent is used to illustrate this (r)evolution. It belonged to Nik Turner of Hawkwind and covered the main stage at Stonehenge free festival from the early seventies, and a couple of decades later housed (pun intended!) DiY’s legendary outing at Glastonbury Festival’s Travellers’ Field’s colliding of cultures in 1990. The traveller-raver subculture clash is not glossed over, it is made clear that the new blood flowing onto festival sites was not always welcomed by one and all. Having said that, this shift meant that ‘Five years of suffering’ were over, at least for some of those who lived on the road. Don’t remember who said it (I will have to watch again!) but this is a beautifully expressed explanation of the ecstatic rebirth of traveller events half a decade after the violence of the Beanfield.
I hope that this film will serve not only to spread the word about what an amazing time we had back then, but more seriously to bring witness accounts of shocking of police brutality at parties such as Acton Lane to a wider audience. I see this as part of a broader movement (see also Dreaming in Yellow, A Darker Electricity) to document our culture as it was in the early nineties.
* Have you seen Beats? You should, it’s another great film about early nineties free parties, only it’s fictional. The visuals the protagonist sees soon after dropping his first pill are… well, you should watch it yourself!
P.S. We always add categories to our posts, and as you can see from the enormous list at the top of this entry, we went a little overboard this time! Any comments about the functionality and navigation of this site are most welcome 
P.P.S. This is a short teaser version of a more detailed review, so if you want to read more, including the reactions of a certain blogger’s festivalgoing mother to the film, watch this space
P.P.P.S. Where can you see this documentary? Right now, your only chance is to catch it at a film festival near you. For the moment this is not available on general release or streaming services. If you want to help to make that a reality, please follow the link to donate: https://freepartydoc.info/donate Here is a list of upcoming screenings: https://freepartydoc.info/screenings-1
It comes as no great surprise to learn that Ed Gillett helped Jeremy Deller with his (highly recommended by us) Everybody In The Place documentary. What is surprising, considering the incisive insight Gillett has into subcultures of the early nineties, is that he was a child in that era. As with other great titles on this topic, Garrett’s Once in A Lifetime and Collin’s Altered State to name a couple, it is clear that Gillett is a part of our scene and, as is the case for those other rave chronicles, I don’t think a book like this could have been written without that love of dancing.
The titles and subtitles of the chapters provide a clear picture of the themes tackled. Here are three of the first four, and these are the ones I’ll focus on as they match the remit of this site the most:
This is not to say, however, that the rest of the book isn’t fascinating, and I couldn’t stop reading once I had reached the end of Make Some Fucking Noise. I reckon you won’t be able to either, even though some of the material about, for instance, the current state of superclubs, is rather depressing. Thankfully, the author’s idealism and faith in the scene carries a note of hope through to the end.
One aspect of Party Lines that sets it apart from previous works on the subject is the fact that marginalised groups very much pioneered the outlaw, underground, under-the-radar dancefloor. This forms the foundation of chapter one and continues throughout. The narrative proper commences with a blues party in St. Pauls in 1973, which sociologist Ken Pryce is attending to secretly conduct research into “‘lifestyles, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of [Bristolian] West Indian communities'”. Pryce is stated to be “far from the only observer to draw insalubrious associations between late-night dancing and criminality”. Ed Gillett though, counters this with his position that “over the second half of the twentieth century the blues dance would go on to become a vital source of refuge and release for Black and other marginalised people”. A Jamaican-run shebeen in Brixton is cited as being an unambiguous example of this, catering for Black and Gay communities at a time when the mainstream was not welcoming to them. As many of my British readers may already know, the reason establishments like this existed was the ‘marginalisation of Black… people in twentieth-century Britain’. Gillett points out that the exclusion of dancers based on race was not made illegal until a new act of Parliament in 1968. This fascinating first chapter deserves to be read in full so I won’t attempt to tell you much more.
In the second chapter we learn about Windsor and the other early British free festivals, and Gillett joins the dots between the suppression of Black soundsystem culture and that of ‘predominantly white’ hippy subculture. Again, I urge you to read and digest this chapter, it places the pivotal events and currents in hippy and New Traveller subcultures in context. Few have written on this sprawling and multifaceted topic so concisely and lucidly*.
Chapter three commences with a surprising appearance by Paul Grady, performing at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in 1987 as the infamous Lily Savage when a police raid occurred. As the first policeman burst into the pub, O’Grady recalled thinking that the copper was a stripper! Again, Gillett provides us with evidence of the systematic and persistent authoritarian suppression of subcultures, in this case the battle was an element of Thatcher’s wide-ranging ‘war on deviance and disorder’.
The fourth chapter, while sticking to the well-trod Spiral Tribe and DiY→ Castlemorton→ Criminal Justice Act path, manages to reveal fresh perspectives on the rise and rise of the free party, and the early nineties renaissance and subsequent fall (for the second time) of the free festival. As in Dreaming in Yellow and the Free Party: A Folk History documentary, the Travellers’ Field collaborations at 1990’s Glastonbury Festival are seen as being the root of the cooperation between old and new subcultures that culminated in Castlemorton. Although I myself feel this is an oversimplification (we could go back a year or two and find similar events at which these two subcultures shared spaces), it is of undeniable importance. In an important footnote, an interview with Youth is quoted, in which it is pointed out that all night dancing occurred at Glastonbury long before acid house in the form of reggae soundsystems.
From the very beginning, this rubbing together of acid housers and New Travellers created sparks. One particular second-generation New Traveller left Glastonbury in a huff due to his elders not allowing him to bring the bleeps to the festival. As we now know, however, many of those frictions gave rise to joy. Roger Beard, a familiar name to those with knowledge about this topic, is mentioned here, and this is the first I have read about his part in a foiled scheme to transport busloads of Future-bound London clubbers down to Stonehenge for the Spring Equinox in 1988. Beard served a cross-culture conduit in both directions, bringing ‘Traveller contacts into the clubs and his DJ friends out to the fields’.
Gillett tackles the excesses of Castlemorton with realism: ‘Allegations of antisocial, destructive or self-indulgent behaviour levelled against those involved in the free party scene might have been exaggerated, but they were not imaginary.’ He balances this with the realisation that the marginalised New Travellers, picked on by establishment and the press alike ‘felt no urge for deference or politeness towards the world of privet hedges, pristine tea rooms and twitching net curtains which so clearly disdained them.’ It was in one of these pristine tea rooms that myself and a small handful of my fellow unwashed free partiers enjoyed cream teas on a stolen credit card on our way home from a free festival in 1992.
Gillett indicates the major role the press had in advertising Castlemorton (it was the lead item in the Six O’Clock News). He also states that by the time of Castlemorton, they were not in possession of much of their own, functioning kit, so had to rely on others. The tribe only played ‘a peripheral part in proceedings’. As I have long held, the tribe often lent their name to events to which they brought little apart from a DJ or two and some backdrops. The punters would turn up in droves and the real identity of the organisers would become that little bit trickier to uncover if you were asking for the wrong reasons. Sometimes, though, the Spirals did make a huge noise about the fact that they were the people responsible for making, er, such a huge noise, and because of this they receive some (in our view) deserved criticism from a member of the underground press for ‘putting raves back in the establishment’s crosshairs’. Another indicator of some Tribers’ arrogance that one is quoted as saying they ‘rediscovered the scattered remnants of the free festival scene’. The crossover between those two scenes began a good year or so before the Spirals turned up.
The machinations behind the scene of the diverse participants in the anti-CJA movement make for an interesting read, featuring the ubiquitous SWP bandwagon-jumpers and their polarising Kill The Bill slogan, as well as the fluffy Vs. spikey discourse of the times. Suspicions, long chattered about underground, that a couple of prominent anti-CJA campaigners were ‘spy cops’, re-emerge in Party Lines.
Other chapters cover: God’s Cop, how pirate radio stations joined the establishment, New Labour and their bleak re-labelling of ‘creative industries’, the (also bleak) superclub, the drug trade, the televising of the revolution, the demonization of Black genres and events, Business Techno, the Plague Rave, and the future.
One angry quote from later on in the book sums up what Gillett (and I agree with much of this) thinks is wrong about the tendency in dance music literature to perpetuate a creation myth with specific named heroes we would raise onto pedestals, point a spotlight at, and worship in the way we did those rock dinosaurs we wanted to replace. He points to a nuance lacking in much popular discourse and explicitly condemns the widespread whitewashing of subcultures and countercultures by capitalistic currents. This nuance, though, is not missing from Gillett’s story:
‘It gives us heroes to venerate as the sole progenitors of an entirely new cultural form, instead of a knotty mess of interlinked subcultural influences to untangle, from the blues dance to the free festival. It serves financial interests by cultivating desire: you too can have your very own Balearic experience for the low low price of a ticket to see Paul Oakenfold DJing. And it also arguably serves a social or political function, stripping out dance music’s associations with Black, queer or marginalized cultures, enabling a larger and more lucrative mainstream audience to claim it as their own.’
Although there is much to be set to rights, the throbbing drumbeat of the book is warmly optimistic throughout. We finish on a high note as the writer, at an after party connected to the launch of a documentary on the subject of free parties, watches, in sweet harmony, ‘past, present and future dance with each other, coloured lights playing over my face.’
I’ll certainly be rereading Party Lines– it’s returning to my bookshelf as soon as it’s returned by the two friends I have promised to lend it to once this review is completed!
* For a less concise but very informative take, you owe it to yourself to bookmark https://www.ukrockfestivals.com/ and have a long slow browse through the heaps of posts they have about the rise, fall, and rebirth of the new travellers’ scene.
Update– The Spiral Tribe do at Rats Run/Longstock Free Festival, Hampshire was on the same weekend.
Shout going out to watermouse who alerted us to this first video, thanks! And an even bigger shout out to dj jenjen (aka mis-chief) who shot both videos
This was the first time Black Box [DiY’s custom-built rig] had been to a festival and it became clear from the off that things had changed over the winter and spring. Hungerford was probably the first festival where the sound systems and the ravers had really taken over from the bands and the traditional festival-goers. There was some tension behind the scenes, but this was minimal compared to the the sheer visceral excitement in the air. For the first time, our movement felt like it was beginning to come of age, that it had great import and that it was growing. The feeling was irresistible and exhilarating, and it would reach a whole new level just three weeks later [Avon Free Festival on Sodbury Common].
Harry Harrison, Dreaming in Yellow. Velocity Press, 2022, p.142.
Any ideas for an exact location anyone? Any reminiscences, however druggfuddled, are most welcome as always, as of course are photos
There is a record of the 1990 event on the ever-excellent UK Rock Festivals site, but in 1990 there was no rave dimension to the festival: http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/hungerford-common-90.html
UPDATE 8/1/22:
Some confusion about the date for this one. Some are saying that it was the end of November, but one newspaper article (coming to this page soon!) published on Tuesday 10th December indicates that the party took place on 7th December.
A Spirals document entitled SPIRAL TRIBE’S CALENDAR OF POLICE HARRASSMENT AT FREE PARTIES – 1991-1992, still accessible via Wayback Machine, describes the bust at the end:
9.12.91– ASCOT FREE FESTIVAL, BERKS.
Police raid site during departure of sound systems. 3 arrests for ‘possession of controlled drugs’ – vitamin pills and tobacco.
NO CHARGE
Here is a transcription of News Of The World* article on this event:
TICKET TO RAVE
5,000 DELUGE SITE FOR ILLEGAL BASH
Chris Pharo reports
THE organisers of a wild rave party which attracted 5,000 youngsters, many dabbling with drugs, could have coined in £100,000 in advance ticket sales – the News can reveal.
More than 600 people, among them Prince Andrew, protested to police, jamming the 999 emergency line as the party raved on for 24 hours.
It began at midnight on Saturday, when new age travellers with a group of mystery organisers set up a massive sound and lights system on the Staravala [sic] site off Kings Ride in Ascot.
Within minutes, the huge eight-foot tall speakers were pounding out music while hypnotic lights swirled across the site.
By 3 am in the morning, some 5,000 partygoers, with some 2000 cars, had deluged the site reducing the handful of police officers sent to keep an eye on the illegal bash to mere car park attendants trying to keep the traffic off the roads.
Drink and drugs flowed,… but officers were powerless to act for fear of being lynched by the massive crowds.
Meanwhile, residents from all over the local area, including some living as far away as Martins, Heron and North Ascot, were swamping police stations with protest calls.
It seems the music was so loud that it blanketed nearby homes and Heatherwood Hospital just 500 yards away and instead shook windows and turned the stomachs of helpless locals up to a mile-and- a-half away.
Environmental health officers from Brucknell Forest Borough Council were also called to the scene, but were forced to remain incognito and powerless to act because police were so vastly outnumbered by the crowds.
Repeated requests for the sound to be turned down were ignored as the party raved on into Sunday morning.
The calls of protest continued and even Prince Andrew, driving past the site towards his home at Sunninghill Park, stopped and asked what was going on and what action police officers proposed to take to stop the bash.
A police 999 operator was telling callers that if nothing could be done to help Prince Andrew, nothing could be done to help them.
The party raged until midnight on Sunday, when crowds began to dissipate.
Police then took the opportunity of storming what was left of the party, making seven arrests and demanding the music be turned off.
All the arrests were for drugs related offences. In the moments after the police task force of around 25 officers stormed the site, the mobile disco had been spirited away by the shadowy figures of the rave.
Local residents told the News of the torture that the rave caused.
Mr Alfred Bye said: “It went on all night and day. They were even dancing in the road. The police must stop this in the future and I’m sure it will happen again. I had some of them knocking on my door and asking to use the phone. I told them they’d get a boot up the backside from me.
Mr Gerry Archer, who lives in Martins Heron, said: “The music made my stomach churn. I had no sleep and have now written to Andrew MacKay, MP, demanding he takes urgent action to get Government legislation that gives the police the power and resources to stop these things.
A spokesman for Bracknell Forest Borough Council said officers would demand that the landowners, the Crown Estate Commissioners, cured [sic] the site by the weekend and ousted the new age hippies illegally camped there.
Land agents were thought to have begun high court action on Monday to do just that.
Inspector Andy Steel, of Windsor Police, who mounted the police operation and raid on Sunday, said: “We fear they are already planning another event at the weekend. We will support the council’s demands to get the site properly secured and we have developed a contingency plan should that fail.”
A police source told the News that young people from London and Bristol had made up the majority of the party-goers and that some of the tickets for the rave had been sold at £20 each prior to Saturday night.
* If you are too young to remember News of the World, it was one of the crapper tabloid rags of the era. See if you can spot the parts of the story that are inaccurate bullshit 
And here is a second newspaper article, not sure which paper:
POLICE HELPLESS AS 5,000 ROCK THE NIGHT AWAY
By Jim Stevens
HUNDREDS of residents besieged the police with complaints as 5,000 people danced the night away at an illegal party just outside Bracknell.
But police and environmental health officers could only stand and watch as thousands of revellers turned up at the old Staravia site, off Kings Ride, Ascot, on Saturday night.
Prince Andrew even got caught up in the chaos. Buckingham Palace said he drove past the site while the party was raging, but could not confirm national newspaper reports that he stopped to ask police what was being done to stop it.
Police were massively outnumbered as more than 5,000 people who arrived in their droves for the party organised by New Age Travellers, who have been camped on the site for the last week and a half.
Deafening music from two sound systems in the back of vans pounded out from 10.30pm until just after midnight on Monday morning, when the number of revellers had dwindled to several hundred.
Drugs were freely available inside three dilapidated marquees, including ecstasy, cannabis, amphetamines and cocaine.
Police switchboards were jammed with more than 150 complaints from people living as far afield as Martins Heron.
After police and environmental health officers moved in on Monday morning there were seven arrests for drug and theft related offences on the Crown Estate land.
This is the fourth successive weekend rave in the Bracknell and Crowthorne area.
There was a smaller party on the Staravia site the week before and two previous parties at different points on the Devils Highway, in Crowthorne.
At the Staravia party’s peak, during the early hours of Sunday morning, there were up to 2,000 cars on the 40 acre site and a constant stream of between 10 and 15 cars queuing to get in.
Entry was free, although some people clearly came with tickets, police said. The lack of police manpower meant they were unable to safely accompany environmental health officers onto the site and ask the travellers to turn the music off.
“Bracknell borough’s assistant environmental services officer Steve Loudoun said: “When we went in at about lam on Sunday morning we realised it was a rather large event. Our powers to do anything are non existent without the back up of the police.”
On Sunday afternoon the police and council officers made another effort to negotiate with the New Age Travellers, but to no avail. Their main problem was being able to reach the sound system which was surrounded by a mass of people.
The music was finally switched off just after midnight on Monday morning when 20 police officers entered the site with council officers.
Inspector Andy Steel, who was in charge of the police operation, said: “If we had had 200 officers we still would have had problems.
“‘We had sufficient manpower to cover the police area but with an event like that you cannot dip into an endless pool.” He added: “We are aware of the complaints and we did everything we humanly could to control the party.’ “If we did anything pre-emptive, injuries may well have occured, not only to people there but to officers. “We may well have had serious problems if we had gone in at any time on Saturday evening or Sunday morning.”
Despite the recent wave of popular rave parties police are anxious to remain vigilant and do all that is possible to stop them.
Sergeant Steve Huckin, assistant chief press officer for the Thames Valley Police, said: “We do not really want to stop people having fun and enjoying themselves. We are not killjoys. But we are concerned because of the nature of the parties. They are unlicensed and do not have a public entertainments licence, which means they do not have all the protection of fire and safety regulations that a licence holder has. And there is a risk of people getting injured.”
With people also trying to peddle drugs at these parties the police were also concerned, he said. “The chief constables intention is to carry on taking action, even with the resource implications, to stop parties, prevent people being put at risk and minimise disruption to the community.”
Bracknell borough council will now be pressing for a change to existing legislation., giving them stronger powers to clamp down on parties. The landowners of the site were hoping to evict the travellers this week.
Here’s a third article, this one from the Sun was published on Tuesday, December 10, 1991.
Andrew In Rave Snarl-Up
By JANE McCORMICK
PRINCE Andrew was caught up in the chaos as police tried to break up a 5,000-strong acid house party, it was revealed last night.
Andrew, stuck in a huge traffic jam, pulled up and asked an officer: “What on earth is going on?”
The prince was driving past the illegal rave at Ascot, Berks, on the way to his Sunninghill Park home two miles away.
Blast
Police failed to stop the party in a 40-acre field, which blasted music for 24 hours at the weekend.
Inspector Andy Steel said: “The Duke of York was driving past the site.
“He stopped to find out what was being done about it.”
Police eventually broke up the party and arrested seven people for drug offences.
NB This post refers to the second party at this site, for the earlier do, please read this post: https://freepartypeople.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/saturday-23rd-november-1991-free-party-at-staravia-factory-ascot-berkshire/
More from Snufkin:
That Ascot party was awesome. Last day of November 1991 and it was cold, minus ten at least I’d say. We had been living there ten days or so, on the site of a demolished jet engine factory called Staravia. The site had been used for storing pea gravel so there were mounds of the stuff everywhere and huge ruts frozen solid.
… Easygroove turned up with the whole Circus Warp crew and added their tent onto our shambles. Spirals turned up later and they had to stay out in the cold. I remember walking away from the party at one point, tripping my tits off I turned back to look. There were 5000 people raving in a bodged together tent and the heat of their bodies formed a fog around the tend, which pulsed and throbbed with the lights. As I watched, the fog sat up on its haunches, like something ethereal out of ghostbusters, smiled a snaggletooth smile at me, winked and then settled back down again, curling itself around the party contentedly. No, really!
I can’t remember how long we partied for, maybe til tuesday, it got pretty twisted by the end. I had the burner going in my trailer all the way through and the site was big enough that it was possible to sleep now and then, but I don’t remember too much sleeping..
Here’s a map: http://wikimapia.org/9626663/Spiral-Tribe-Rave
Thanks again for the nice long comment Snufkin. Does anyone else remember this at all? Any photos?
We know Mutant Dance threw their first ever party at this location, but that is all we have, so far! Help us join the dots please!
Leave a comment or email us with photos, flyers etc. at freepartypeople(at)yahoo(dot)co(dot)uk. Cheers!
Legends tell that there was a cracker of a free party on this date in Little Farringdon. Tell us the rest, dear readers
Once again, a date is all we have, help!