garage – devizine.com

The biggest risk for any media reporting negatively on illegal raves is that, in their youth, their fifty-plus target audience probably attended illegal raves themselves!

What the actual F are they trying to prove with their negative coverage of an illegal rave, when tax-dodging billionaires ripped a financial hole into the country, political extremists march causing division and spreading hate, yet all seem unscathed from media assaults, and countrymen illegally hunt without concern journalists might pop out of the hedgerow with a waggy finger? That a few kids want to have a party? Really?!

Their laughable problem is, rage-bait backfires and they lose readership. Post comments on their social media shares in support of the ravers, by all means, but don’t rise to the temptation of clicking on these articles, because they couldn’t give a monkey’s arse about your opinion, they only want to feed their advertisers with blossoming stats.

The Castlemorton Common Festival in May 1992 was the UK’s largest illegal rave, with an estimated 50,000 attendees, a mere fraction of the hundreds of thousands of folk who regularly ventured out to party their cares away at the peak of rave culture in the nineties. Perhaps there’s some diehards still at it, more organising events, but for the most, they’ve matured, settled into life, yet retain fond, kaleidoscopic memories they don’t want tarnished by negativity about the slim chance of a comeback!

Media platforms pathetically attempt to enrage for clickbait with damning reports about the odd slight bank holiday gathering, when the feedback suggests the reality for a majority is the only annoyance it might cause them, is that they never dusted off their white gloves and whistles, and attended themselves?!

I have to laugh at the audacity, the final irony being, when acid house parties first appeared in the eighties, there were only a handful of Ibiza-returning aficionados partying, until one invited a journalist and the newspapers exploded the scene! At first they encouraged it, tongue-in-cheek, The Sun even sold acid house t-shirts. But once the scene blossomed, out of government control, and t-shirt sales waned, they turned nasty, exploiting it with scare stories for parents to wither in fear their teenagers might be involved. It was more likely they weren’t, until they saw the newspapers, but by then it was on Top of the Pops.

It was as if they did it just to sell newspapers; who’d have flunked it possible?! Crazy to think how the press would be so callous, but now it seems they’re up to it again, and I predict adverse effects, again. The bottom line being it’s no new-fangled trend, and wasn’t back when; for as long as mankind has been on Earth, they gathered tribally to dance to hypnotic beats, and didn’t need TicketSource to do so.

There’s nothing for younger people to do in the cesspit we call “progress,” and just as it was back in the nineties, if they want to ensemble, gather freely for enjoyment, make the most of what little freedom they retain building communities, friendships and celebrating their time alive, then so be it. Open your eyes and look around; there’s far worse they could be doing.

So, journalists, get your own life, and quit jumping on their backs for hits …..please share this article if you agree with this hypocrite writer, or give the codger a chewing gum, bottle of water, and send him off to the fantastical utopia of blissful yore swishing in his mindset!!

Wednesday, racing down to the newsagent on the corner on my Rayleigh Tomahawk, fifteen pee in sweaty palm. Pick up my Beano, six pence left for halfpenny sweets. The lady stood irritated behind the counter holding a small paper bag, as the kid front of the queue rubbed his chin pondering the crucial quandary. “You’ve got four pee left,” she’d calculate, while the boy finally opted for another flying saucer rather than a fruit salad chew.

If there’s something delightfully everyday about the subjects on Trowbridge’s Sitting Tenants lockdown album, A Kitchen Sink Drama, none more retrospectively thought-provoking than the fifth tune, the Newsagent, which encouraged the placement of this archived memory to my frontal cortex.

Unlike many a lockdown inspired project, this lives on the sunny side of the street, no matter how working-class notion of destitution. A semi-acoustic concept album, all from a shed in Trowbridge, as folk, as best pigeonholed, it’s acutely observational and mostly sentimentally mellow, perfect lazy Sunday afternoon music. Yet it never escorts you down a dark alley. Of people-watching in a back street pub, of a welcomed arrival of a letter from an old friend; subjects are ordinary, with an optimistic air of market town affairs. Even the album sleeve is a line drawing of Trowbridge town centre.

Released on 208 Records, usually reserved for garage mod-revival, still it retains something of that period in sound and particularly subject. Rob himself polished his skill fronting Swindon mod band Roundabout, some twenty-five years past. A band I do recall fondly. But even if you don’t, here is something indie-folky, with a taste of local excellence.

Revived since lockdown this garage-folk band’s fifth album was recorded in Rob’s garden shed, with only bassist Geoff Allwright, and using Ian Hunter’s lyrics. It’s beautifully peculiar, a mite psychedelic in as much as McCartney vaudeville moments on Sgt Pepper, engrossing as Nick Drake, quirky as Pentangle or The Pretty Things. It’s the Kinks jamming carefree on a Sunday, especially on the most upbeat Lincoln Green. It nods to Lionel Bart on the Austerity Street, John Martyn on The Tin Man, and incredibly on the captivating eleven-minute finale, Falling Backwards, where things do get acute, Ralph McTell.

Like a Ralph of Trowbridge, it’s like, why is this down the road but new to me? Why didn’t it post a leaflet through my letterbox instead of a pleading politician?