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, politicalย 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.ย
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 โprogress,โ 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 โฆ..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!!
Oramics and its Place in the Progression of Electronic Music
In 1997 I was a 24 year-old factory worker, keen to learn all tasks on the production line to work my way up, but suddenly the run of the ladder was pulled too high for me to reach. Shift managers who had were axed, were replaced by โteam leaders,โ that of precisely the same duties and responsibilities, though you needed a diploma to apply.
The government tried to thwart my only other life objective three years past, to party; they had failed. I worked in the factory now for one reason, to fund this escapism. Once free, the Criminal Justice Bill ensured someone profited from our jollity, as rave culture was pushed into nightclubs and legal paid events.
If The Prodigy were right, this was music for the jilted generation, perhaps so too was Luigi Russolo in his 1913 futurist manifesto L’arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noises,) when he argued that the ear would become accustomed to a new sonic palette of industrial soundscapes, and musicians would require a new approach to instrumentation and composition. Though Iโd not have contemplated the noises of the factory manipulating my music perceptions at the time, I was aware of how Kraftwerk were influenced by the sounds of traffic for Autobahn.
Neither would I have given much thought to the development of electronic music; my time with analogue pop of punk and Two-Tone was short-lived. Through new wave post-punk and electronica to American hip hop and electro, and the rebellion from the hit factories exploiting it; rave culture, I had grown up with electronics as a staple to music and knew no different.
Pre-internet research on the subject wouldโve been a needle in a haystack, even if Iโd the motivation to study it. In my naivety I assumed one thing, that Kraftwerk created electronic music, because Iโd seen a clip of them on the BBC program Tomorrow’s World. Though the show made no claim to this, I was only two on the 25th September 1975, when it originally aired.
Ralf Hรผtter and Florian Schneiderโs Kraftwerk were certainly pioneers who popularised the krautrock genre worldwide. The industrial links between Dusseldorf and Detroit and creative ones between Berlin and New York were influences reflected, which turned the cogs of hip hop and house. And now, here I was, in a meadow near Luton, at Universeโs Tribal Gathering, where I figured weโd come full circle.
Kraftwerk played their one and only festival, it was monumental. The once monocultured rave phenomenon had divided into copious subgenres, Universe were the first to fully embrace this with a tent dedicated to each division. Yet from each tent masses united at the main stage, some DJs refusing to play their set because theyโd miss this performance. Reflecting back on it now, I cannot deny it was something to behold, but Iโve since discovered they wasnโt the complete roots to electronic music I assumed they were. Its complex international evolution includes too many names to mention, but this fascinating insight has been encouraged by my study into one important innovator largely uncredited, born here in Devizes, Daphne Oram.
We outlined her work briefly in the introduction to this series of articles, and with help from Daphneโs niece, Carolyn Scales, we delved into her upbringing in Devizes, and how influences in engineering meshed with her love of music. Now we need to fit her role into this vast evolution of electronic music, by looking at Oramics, discovering how that influenced the progression, and why it is not as well documented and I believe it should be.
Once Daphne left the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1959, she coined the term Oramics, a name for her studio in Tower Folly, a converted oast house at Fairseat in Kent, her technique for creating graphical sound, and the Oramics Machine which spawned from it.
Carolyn described The Oramics Machine as, โan early synthesiser,โ but as with Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin who created photoelectronic instrument the ANS synthesizer, historical records rarely reference them. The first commercial synthesizer is credited to American engineer Robert Moog a few years later in 1964. Precursors to Moog mentions Harald Bode who laid the groundwork for separate sound-modifying modules used in the Moog design, the Hammond Organ Companyโs Novachord in the late 1930s, Canadian engineer Hugh Le Caineโs Electronic Sackbut, Herbert Belar and Harry Olsonโs RCA Mark I and II Sound Synthesizers, and some cite Thaddeus Cahillโs Telharmonium, an electromechanical sound generator from 1897, which weighed in over two-hundred tons.
The original Oramics Machine was the size of an office photocopier, so was also too cumbersome for the average musician. By its definition, itโs a synthesiser but worked differently; the composer/musician drew onto a set of 35mm film strips which ran past a series of photo-electric cells, generating electrical signals to control amplitude, timbre, frequency and duration.
The reason for the omission, Carolyn suggested, was because The Oramics Machine was lost after her passing. โDr Mick Griersonโs team tracked it down to France in 2008. Working with the Science Museum. Griersonโs study provided the first full contextualisation of the machine, an assessment of its historical importance, and a detailed description of its workings. The machine became a central part of the Science Museum exhibition Oramics to Electronica, originally planned to run for six months in 2011. The showโs press and public uptake saw it extended a further four years.โ
Perhaps inspired by Moogโs development of the Minimoog, Daphne worked on a Mini-Oramics, but never completed a prototype. Goldsmiths’ PhD student Tom Richards, who pored over the unfinished project and built it over forty years later, suggested โthere were a lot of reasons why she didnโt launch Mini-Oramics. She was working on her own, and wasnโt affiliated to a large organisation or university.ย She had ups and downs in her life, and at the time she was working on Mini-Oramics, she also worried that her approach to musical research was out of fashion when compared to chance-based and computerised techniques. She was unable to secure the further funding she needed and she eventually moved on to other research.โ
If funding and the ferocity of music technologyโs progression at this time surpassed Daphne, both her music and written works were visionary. If you thought Pete Tongโs Heritage Orchestra was pushing new boundaries in 2004, Carolyn noted, โin 1948, Daphne created a piece for double orchestra, turntable and live electronics called Still Point, long thought of as the earliest composition to include real-time electronic transformation of instrumental sounds.โ Again, Still Point was never performed and was considered lost. โDr James Bulley found fragments in the Oram archive,โ she continued, โand working collaboratively with Dr Shiva Feshareki, began a reconstruction, later finding the full score in the belongings of composer Hugh Davies.โ
โA performance was commissioned by BBC Proms and performed by turntablist Shiva Feshareki, Bulley, and the London Contemporary Orchestra in 2018 at the Royal Albert Hall, reaching a substantial audience live and via BBC Radio 3,โ Carolyn explained. โThe reaction was one of awe, with the piece described as โthrillingโ. Critical responses suggested that this realisation of Oramโs previously untested ideas represented a challenge to electronic musicโs received history.โ
The more I research the more I find examples suggesting Daphneโs work was so avant-garde, abstract or insistent on anthropological creativity against trending dehumanised mathematical methods, she was set apart from the contemporary canon of self-generating computer music, positioning her work in a kind of unique scientific-spiritual space, combining technical rigor with a romantic model of artistic expression. This would frustrate her, when projects were either underfunded or too radical for others to follow, and they were consequently lost in time.
In 1971 she authored a book titled An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, wherein lies a quote often cited in discussions about music technology: โWe will be entering a strange world where composers will be mingling with capacitors, computers will be controlling crotchets and, maybe, memory, music and magnetism will lead us towards metaphysics.โ
Daphne visiting her parents in Devizes
It was also her dedication to authorial control, while cybernetic-influenced composers embraced self-generating systems with indeterminacy, which caused Oram’s approach to differ from the era’s prevailing trends, despite this cybernetic orientation. Exemplifying the generosity of her father, James, Mayor of Devizes, Daphne actively supported composersโ rights to royalties while she was a Trustee of The Performing Rights Society in the 1970s.
Daphne Oram suffered two strokes during the nineties, and passed away in Maidstone on the 5th January 2003. Yet on Daphneโs centenary, where much of the world remains dubious about the ethics of artificial intelligence, we must debate her legacy, for my final part of the series.
Oh, and if you were wondering, all I saw of Kraftwerk at Tribal Gathering was the fluorescent outlines of their boilersuits!
On the first day of advent, a time of peace and joy to the world et al, Devizes Police report on a โlarge unlicenced music eventโ at the weekend, (spelling mistake included) in Great Cheverell. Am I the only fifty-something who’s thinking โgreat, let them be?!โ Not according to Facebook commentsโฆ..
UME they called it. UME? It was a rave, wasn’t it?! Perish the thought calling it a rave might encourage a resurgence of nineties skullduggery, when we partied without a care in the fields of England. Freedom of expression and the need to take a moment to enjoy life I favour to deem it, during an era of hyperinflation, playing the blame game after committing financial suicide, with media promoting a facist uprising, and a government labelling anyone who campaigns against genocide a terrorist. Can we let our hair down here, mate? Not on your Nelly, I’m confiscating your hi-fi!
โOfficers were called to reports of the event at approximately 12.50am on November 30th,โ they said. In other words, some comfortable living, curtain-twitching huckmucker got their knickers in a twist that they might not be able to hear a pin drop in their chocolate box village, for one lone night out of a kazillion.ย
โThere were approximately 100-150 people present and a moderately advanced set up with generators, large speakers and stage area,โ the Devizes Police report informed Facebook users,ย and G&H reporter Jason jumped the bandwagon for further hopeful outcry and clickbait. Hold on a cotton-picking minute;ย didn’t they call it โlarge?โ At the summit of the rave era in 1992, 40,000 revellers attended Castlemorton; let’s keep this in perspective, eh? It wasn’t a rave or a โlarge UME,โ it was some friends throwing a party, wasn’t it?! You can fit more people into the Devizes Conservative Club!
Sensationalism continued upon the announcement, โthree people have been arrested for drug related offences.โ Hold the front page. Police could make more arrests for drugs on a single night in any of our town centres, and you know this.
Though it is with great respect for the police, we gratefully hear externally that they turned up three times but the event was allowed to continue. โDue to the event taking place on MOD land, officers liaised with the military, and an effective plan was put in place to minimise the disruption to the local community and address the illegal gathering,โ the Police continued.
And that’s the correct action to take in my honest and experienced opinion. Police providing a presence is usually welcomed for the need of safety and advice. No one really wants to piss off the neighbours, they just want to party.
โOn this occasion, we seized a large amount of sound equipment and generators from the site,โ they also said, which is a shame, because such equipment is expensive and it undermines the motivation to put such events on. Do police confiscate the horns and hounds of the Beaufort Hunt as they rampage across the countryside slaughtering wildlife for kicks?
I raved through acid house and into jungle, and no matter how many years rack up between those happy daze and now, I can never comprehend how or why the authorities concluded we were doing as much harm as they claimed we were. Sure, it was rebellious, it was unlicensed, and uncontrolled, but we policed ourselves, we tided up afterwards, we respected the land and the residents too.
It was only later, post Castlemorton, when the government clamped down, restricted us, and forcibly closed down parties that anarchy and anger against the system ensued, just as did in the early eighties with the free festival scene. Let’s learn from our mistakes and prevent history repeating, again.
The trick surely is then, to call a compromise, accept that people want to party and not all can afford festival tickets, and allow these events some leeway. For there’s a lot worse they could be doing. Judging by the positive comments on these reportsโ shares on Facebook, I’m not alone in that notion.
Being honest with myself though, I’m unsure if I’m more hacked off with police confiscating the equipment or the fact I didn’t go myself, but really, who needs an Uncle Albert in the corner, reciting his memories of parties of yore?!!ย
Two people asked me in Frome what the music scene was like in Devizes. I replied it’s great, but by comparison it’s conventional, and this was prior to witnessing the sublime close encounter which was Hengeโฆ..
Before you read further, note, I use the word โweirdโ as a compliment. But yes indeedy, those friendly aliens, who take the term space-rock literally, landed their interstellar craft at Frome’s glorious centrepiece The Cheese & Grain last night for an eccentric, electric showdown of universal proportion. It was, in short, out of this world.
Excited about catching Henge live after fondly reviewing their album Journey to Voltus B in January, it was every bit as enthralling as I’d have imagined. The Cheese was brimful of kindly weirdos akin to the rooftop scene in the popcorn-munching abomination that is Independence Day; other than no one punched an alien like Will Smith! From aspiring space cadets to ageing hippies and middle-aged ravers, Henge remotely charged their plasma ball hats and casted a musical tractor beam over them, compulsing them to dance.
With phasers set to fun, Henge launched their wild show much like the energetic take off sequence of their latest album, and I pondered if they plotted to play out the album and be done with it, as is a common occurrence for established earthbound bands; not a chance, us humans were bequeathed a cosmic, extraterrestrial proportioned party.
There’s a space journey narrative to the album which includes an Orb-esque plodding ambient period of hypersleep, a convenient opportunity for them to avoid, and divert the live journey to play some past album tracks, to keep the show’s pace consistent. These aliens of superior knowledge and proficiency made a wise choice, the place was positively throbbing.
Here’s the music which should’ve been playing in the Cantina scene of Star Wars. Here’s the music which would’ve caused both Miles Davis and Eat Static to have seizures. It’s jazzy, uptempo electronic skullduggery somewhere between prog-rock and trance techno, perhaps, or rather, in a field of their own playful invention.
Yet to pigeonhole it would take a textbook of notes. Henge are toytown, rave vaudeville, a guitar circus in space; they’re alien, unique and clearly on a higher plane of existence. The beauty of them is, they want to share it with you, lovingly. As a spectator you are welcomed on their, what’s best described as, an encapsulating musical space trip.
They analysed our planet, took a murky sample of the River Frome, and advised on the best path for the future of humankind; seemingly to demilitarise and direct its funding towards either ecological revitalisation or space colonisation, and they mastered it hilariously with a peacenik singalong finale.
But they did so as they did with everything, an uplifting sonic musical experience, the likes I’ve never seen before, and I’ve raved with glow sticks at Longleat’s UFO Club, partied worldwide, done, dusted and worn the T-shirt out of many a groundbreaking festival. This was on another planet, truly fantastic; please abduct me again sometime soon!
I’ve seen some weird street theatre in my years on this planet, but I awoke this morning, trying to recollect if I’d ever seen any musical band as weird as Henge. I’d like to say I hadn’t, but an earth half-hour prior I witnessed the support act.
A rib-tickling one-man-band Mancunian hedge monkey called Paddy Steer, who, dressed in the single-most bizarre illuminated space-wizard costume ever, delighted us with a set of experimental percussion and low-fi fluctuations, the likes you’ve never heard before. If Henge owned the mothership, Paddy was his own microsatellite, orbiting a stratosphere of his own mind-bending imagination, and it was as equally mind-blowing as it was hilarious and engagingly original.
Paddy Steer has found a new level of eccentricity. They broke the mould when they built this alien Gandalf come Frank Sidebottom, on a mushroom journey to Lala Land with S Clay Wilson, and his music is inspired by the fable of it. Making the Mad Professor seem sane, he kept a perfect instrumental harmony as his decorative kit wobbled and a billion and one leads dropped out of their ports, much to the frustration of the sound engineer, but with nonchalant precision and scratch of his wizard beard, Paddy amused the audience by continuing nonetheless, profoundly. It was something to behold and impossible to wipe the smile off your face until Paddy had packed up and returned safely back to Discworld.
Together they made for the kind of fantastically bizarre gig you’ll never find in Devizes, unless you intoxicated yourself with mushrooms and imagined the whole thing. It remains to be fact, Frome is the diverse local centre for counterculture and the eccentrically creative; Henge and Paddy fit like a glove, if The Ozric Tentacles were born here. But it was my second night in Frome, after a Dadโs taxi adventure saw me drop the kids off at the Cheese for Lucy Spraggan on Thursday, a kind of Gen Z Lily Allen.
Lucy Spraggan on Thursday, local rural skullduggery with The Wurzels on Friday, and space adventuring rave circus aliens Henge on Saturday, The Cheese & Grain is punching above Fromeโs weight. To trek elsewhere in the town might not be as bustling, but certainly doesnโt disappoint. From the Merlin Theatre to The Sun and 23 Bath Street, entertainment options are vast here, but when in Frome, I did as the Fromans and found solace while waiting for the kidโs gig to end, at the Rye Bakery by Frome station.
Hereโs a hidden gem wine bar, pizzeria and generally cool hangout away from the live music tourist trail, hosting music Thursday and Saturday nights, in which our own Jon Amor Trio appear on the 24th. For our entertainment on this particular Thursday some groovy modern jazz was supplied proficiently by a quartet called Fushal. They were wonderful, the whole scene is, I might relocate and call this blog Fromzine, if only those aliens of Henge would land here again!
Thereโs a cold remote ambience of burrowing doubt in the opening of Westburyโs singer-songwriter Serenโs debut song, in which, as the title suggests, she usesโฆ
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!โฆ
Devizes Music Academy is set to bring joy, energy and a whole lot of sparkle to the stage with its latest musical theatre production,ย Sister Actย laterโฆ
Thimbles on standby, Devizes Outdoor Celebratory Arts are calling all creative craftspeople and makers to their new project, The Makers Exchange. Itโs a new craftโฆ
Whether you’ve a bizarre inclination to meet the Addams Family in the flesh and figure this might be your closest opportunity, you couldn’t think ofโฆ
If Iโm considering reviewing worldwide music again, why stop with this planet?! Though Iโve reasoned two tenacious links to mention this madcap Scottish interstellar outfit; one, their tour lands them at Frome’s Cheese and Grain on Saturday April 19th, and two, they’re called Henge, and as Wiltshire houses the most famous one of them, thatโll do!
Why am I so keen to mention them? It’s the challenge of summing up something completely unique. It requires a gaping pigeonhole, comical jazzy post-rave space-rock probably best suits; bonkers, in a word. Someone shared a video of them headlining the Shambala Festival and I was abducted, though while Iโve not listened to their previous three albums, weโll launch off with their forthcoming album Journey to Voltus B, set for release on January 31st, exactly ten years to the day from when the band gave their first live performance on planet Earth.
This is truly out of this world fantastic, and what should’ve been playing at the Cantina in Star Wars. It’s like Scott Joplin came after Eat Static, or Miles Davis was a member of Hawkwind. If Funki Porcini met Altern 8, or Philip K Dick was a guest on Yo Gabba Gabba, it’s the sum of all these parts yet it’s none of them, because it’s alien, pinching Jeff Wayneโs stash for testing purposes and stranding him on an uninhabited Plutoid!
Over seven certifiably insane but glorious tunes you travel to Voltus B with the half-druid mutant electronic spacerockers, the planet of an advanced civilisation with a looming atomic future, and you get to decide their fate!
Side B of the vinyl version of the album has been innovatively cut in โparallel grooveโ with two tracks, both called Power of the Atom, pressed concentrically to each other on the same side of the record. While one track tells the bleak fate of Voltus B after its inhabitants use their newfound knowledge of atomic power to make weapons, with the planet annihilated in war and entering a nuclear winter; the other tells the story of the planetโs future after the aliens decide to use their scientific discovery to create limitless clean energy through Nuclear Fusion.
But you are supplied with the mission brief enroute. Ascending is the opening tune and first single, which is out now and available on all platforms. It blasts off without waiting for you to lock into position. Then itโs a Slingshot around Mars to get us on our way, a post-punky robotic vocal track with equal pace, which falls dramatically by the third tune as we enter Hypersleep. As it suggests, this is the dreamy ambience of the Orb, and you await for landing, in audio bliss. Descending next, and weโre off again with the crazy uptempo nut-filled jazzy explosion of synths. Youโre welcomed to Voltus B like it was a nineties free party, then comes the concluding narrative, like Edward Packardโs Choose Your Own Adventure book series, on acid!
Of the new single, Henge frontman and crew captain, Zpor, explains, โwith this new single Ascending we are setting the scene for our latest adventure into space. As we blast off from Earth, it becomes clear that YOU, the listener, are among our crew for this high-stakes voyage, where the fate of an entire planet is literally in your hands.โ
This is, without doubt, mind-blowingly progressive, and highly entertaining, especially for stoners, Trekkies and kids of all ages alike, and I tick all those boxes. Itโs child-friendly psychedelic vaudeville, the Jetsons meet the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, in Lego.
This new favourite thing made me think about the end of ET, and why Elliot couldnโt go with him, because if music is like this elsewhere in the universe and I was Elliot, Iโd have packed glow sticks into my backpack and not looked back at Earth once!
In support of their latest campaign, HENGE are embarking on an extensive run of UK shows planned for 2025. Join the band at the following locations and venues:
Somewhere just outside Westbury a sizable barn hosted the most memorable new year’s eve raves in the mid-nineties, but Iโd never have imagined then, that thirty years later I’d be saying I went out raving in Westbury last night, but I did, sort of!
Attendees at the Westbury Conservative Club yesterday willingly admitted not a lot happened here, but none I badgered about it, Uncle Albert style, seemed to recall any of the raves, nor can I find any record of them online. It is not all in my warped imagination, honest, that I recall a rumour circulating one year that Altern 8 played a live PA. They may have done, but with hazy recollections, my matured mind must consider the very real possibility it could’ve been any number of random nutters dressed in illuminous bodysuits and dust masks, probably was, and no one wouldโve been any the wiser if it was!
No one there at the time gave a hoot if Altern 8 played or didnโt, it was never an era for live music, (it wouldnโt have been โliveโ music anyway,) it was all about DJ culture. Likewise, events for rave die-hards today mostly rely solely on DJs, unless youโre lucky enough to trek to festivals or city gigs from bands like Orbital. That is, not to discredit them, even those who combine cheesy raves with soft play centres, just to say, when local trance-techno collective Hedge Monkey organise something of a reunion, or comeback gig in an era geared more toward actual live music, with instruments and everything, it was something matured, proper, and fantastically different.
โWe were a band years ago,โ singer Lou Cox explained for our preview piece, โeven played Glastonbury festival twice! But this was before social media, really. Iโve been recording music with Jase the whole time, but we never did anything with it. Just recently we decided to get it all back together and itโs been fab, so we decided that we need to have a comeback gig!โ Both Jase, the main man at the control tower of Hedge Monkey, and Lou, were que sera sera on what the gig indicated for the future of the band, but based on what I and a packed club of devoted fans, friends and family of the collectiveโs members witnessed, I sincerely hope thereโs more to come.
It was, in technical jargon, banginโ. If weโre at the boundary for the westcountry penchant for crusty trance-techno, historically bands emerged from it, like Eat Static, tended to knock out endless layer-building electronic beats, chuck a few samples in and tick them off as a job well done. Not that thereโs anything wrong there, itโs the beats and bass entrancing the crowds and hence giving the subgenre its name, but as a collective Hedge Monkey brought out multiple female singers, who did their parts and returned to the dancefloor with their friends, and a real drummer, with a real drum kit, and these elements gave it body and soul, something I feel often overlooked from the ambience of techno.
Alongside the archetypal gorgeous, plodding basslines of trance it was experimental too, with dubbed rises and delays akin to what Norman Cook later brought to the breakbeat party, but with a squeaking overlay of wobbly 808s it held tightly to acid house, the root of it all. But to repeat myself, for itโs worth noting, each singer brought their own styled vocals to the melting pot, one even brought alto choral tones, and the drummer watching the tempo, Hedge Monkeyโs sound is unique, as if striving to make the subgenre formulated to traditional pop music templates without rejecting its roots. At one point interpreting Nina Simoneโs Feeling Good, at most though, original compositions which wouldnโt look out of place when LFO and 808 State ruled the day.
Needless to say, without intoxication, as Iโve matured way past all that, and even booze was off the cards being I drove, I still felt the irresistible urge to shake my thang to this like the noughties never happened! There was a communal, reunion feel to the gig, without cheese, glowsticks, and the poorly researched assumptions of what symbolised the rave epoch, and though not part of that and alone, by the end I made temporary friendships in the manner the rave scene has always advocated, and this besides the sublime sounds, blessed the party with vibes of yore; top one, nice one, and all this grandad needed to be sorted was a nice cup of tea and cheese toastie when I got home!
Itโs a question Iโve asked Chippenham singer-songwriter Harmony Asia on each rare occasion I catch her for a chat; if sheโs planning to capture aโฆ
David slew Goliath with a sling and a stone. Bishop’s Cannings Parish Council used evidence, against a group of Devizes Town councillorsโ more circumstantial landโฆ
Retrieved footage from a stolen drone of the Wiltshire Hunt Saboteurs reveals the Beaufont Hunt making a fox kill earlier this month, and itโs undeniableโฆ
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
If rural West Country had a penchant for trance in the happy daze of the mid-nineties, heady nights of fluorescent-clad crusties with eyes like flying saucers and gyrating like robots at the UFO club down Longleatโs Berkeley Suite, or bumbling around a nearby forest afterparty keeping Wrigleyโs in business, trance-techno, it could be debated, tended to be heavily influenced by German Tekno and of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream which predated it, and in doing so, often felt rather soulless when compared to rivalling subgenres spawned from the rave era, of house or drum n bass, but there’s an alternative, Hedge Monkey….
House, jungle, happy hardcore, et al, they all had their pros and cons, but I tended to saunter them all with equal love, as I arrived on the rave scene at its inception, acid house, and if any splitting subgenre related closer to those roots it was trance and techno. Louโs smooth vocal chants on Westburyโs electronic dance music ensemble Hedge Monkey blesses it with something bands like Eat Static lacked, a soulful voice and meaning. With an underlying base of trance-techno of yore, Hedge Monkeyโs engineer Jase cherry-picks other dance music influences and moulds them into the melting pot. If Massive Attack came from rural Somerset, their sway to hip hop might be lessened, and you might find yourself with a sound not so unlike Hedge Monkey.
Being honest, I hadnโt heard of them until last night; I may have completed my rave honeymoon when Hedge Monkey was blossoming. Theyโve three tracks on SoundCloud worth checking out, two new and one being a โsamba dubโ of an older tune. โWe were a band years ago,โ Lou explained, โeven played Glastonbury festival twice! But this was before social media, really. Iโve been recording music with Jase the whole time, but we never did anything with it. Just recently we decided to get it all back together and itโs been fab, so we decided that we need to have a comeback gig!โ
The comeback gig is Saturday November 30th at Westbury Cons Club, tickets are ยฃ8, from HERE. Thereโs DJs until 9pm, then Hedge Monkey swings on stage. If youโve a passion for dance music of any pigeonholing subgenre, you should take note of this gig.
Based on the tunes, thereโs more going on than mindless techno stomp, the vocals on the first tune Deeper Meanings, echoes out as 808 squeaks build in layers to a bouncing beat akin to Leftfield. Itโs uplifting, euphoric trance, like Warpโs early days, elements took me back, conjured happy memories of fluffy nuggets like Tuff Little Unitโs Join the Future, (or am I showing my age now?!) which used subtle piano to give balance to the hypnotic ambience. Similar here, actual drum beats, guitars, and vocals give it body, makes it a band, which it is, rather than the sole bedroom producer flouting the usual samples.
The second tune, Lou’s Samba Dub Lung, shakes up more experimentally and contemporarily, dubbing a chemical breakbeat. Thereโs absolutely no reason for Plump DJs or The Chemical Brothers not to spin this one in my humble opinion, yet still, thereโs still something underlyingly faithful to the trance techno of its roots, the dirty little tent on a muddy Somerset field!
Final tune to mention, then you can go take your meds; Turkish E, take us back to trance.ย Itโs seven minutes of bliss, retaining uplifting vocals, squidgy 808s, shroom-inspired twirls and block rockinโ beats. You know, I might have an efficacious relapse if I attend this reunion-type gig, just try to prevent me from waffling Uncle Albert moments; โwhen I was in the rave,โ type stuff! Ruffle your matted dreadlocks, unearth your tie-dye T-shirt from the loft, ignore me best you can, and I might see you there!ย ย
If we spoke only last month about Wiltshire Councilโs threats to prosecute Wiltshire Music Events over posters advertising a Bob Marley tribute event in Devizes, it seems we were only at the tip of a disheartening iceberg for event promoters. Promoter for Adrenaline Stomper rave nights at Venom Nightclub in Westbury, Chris Freeman is the latest victim of their crackdown on fly-postingโฆ.
Mr Freeman tasted their venom, and was given a 24-month Conditional Discharge and ordered to pay ยฃ1,465 on the 19th April for flyposting, and then Wiltshire Council had the audacity to brag about it online. But, karma is a bitch; in a gloaty moment of stupidity, they displayed a photograph of the offending poster, acting like an advert for the event! We do hope it backlashes upon them, and entices people to attend on the 13th July. You canโt make it up! You’ve got to love our Council. I’m such a conformist I will certainly not give it this massive rave a plug for them….
Cllr Nick Holder, Cabinet Member for Transport and Street Scene, waffled, โweโre committed to reducing fly-posting in Wiltshire, and this prosecution is part of our wider clampdown on this unsightly blight on our communities.โ As unsightly as, say, the construction of a ยฃ2.4 billion tunnel under Stonehenge that the High Court stated was โunlawful,โ perhaps? Or the thousands of miles of unrepaired roads in the county, the plight of vacant high street shops due to hikes in rent, the construction of solar farms on areas of outstanding natural beauty when they could quite easily be put along our motorways, or maybe, just maybe, the human faeces pouring into our rivers the government they back allowed water companies to ignore? That level of unsightliness? A poster, advertising an event? Really?!
โIt creates a bad impression of an area,โ the councillor who couldnโt bear the thought of people enjoying themselves at a party he obviously wasnโt invited to, continued, โand it costs the council thousands of pounds each year to remove.โ As costly as ยฃ1.4 million for a PCC re-election in 2021, because the Conservative candidate was a drink-driving wildlife assassin, perhaps? Or the ยฃ57,000 taxpayers paid to bail out MP Michelle Donelan for slanderous comments on her personal Twitter page? That kind of costly? To rip a poster off a lamppost, really?!
Chris Freeman personally expressed his โdisappointmentโ to see Wiltshire Council brag about their successful prosecution, telling us, โitโs disappointing what theyโve done, still canโt believe it really.โ
โI just want this whole thing done with,โ he said. โBeing Iโm someone in the local community and having lived in Wiltshire all of my life, with no previous convictions of any kind, of course I cannot begin to tell you how very disappointed that this went to court, without even a warning.โ Mr Freeman continued to suggest not only had it had a significant impact on him mentally, but also taken a huge toll on his family, even without the financial burden now in place.
Chris, a keen fundraiser for local charities, and a regular Father Christmas for local schools,ย asked Facebook users ifย justice was really served, โespecially considering these types of events bring business locally into our local towns, shops and hotels?โ
The nature of the events they seem to target could suggest the possibility of cherry picking events they take a personal dislike to, being that other event advertisements appear to be immune to the crackdown. Of course, this is highly debatable speculation, and far be for me to say it’s so. But with the hospitality industry at its knees post lockdown, again, maybe, just maybe, a little compromise is needed here from Wiltshire Council, just, yโknow, a level of compassion, a little communication, and understanding, perhaps, maybe, just a smidgen?!
โIn times like these,โ Chris continued, โevents that promote wellbeing, and aim to give people a reason to smile should be pushed forward, not pushed back.โ Bingo, sir.
Obviously though, we have to go along with Wiltshire Council on this one, and we cannot tell you that the Adrenaline Stompers Festival 2024 at Venom Nightclub in Westbury, on Saturday 13th July promises to be their biggest single day event to date! We really shouldnโt say, it hosts over forty DJs and thirty MCs, over indoor and outdoor stages, has weekend camping including a shuttle bus to & from the event, and retails for a mere ยฃ35 a ticket! Because, you know, your council wants you tucked up in bed by ten pm, after enjoying an entertaining TV show with Ant & Dec in…. so, jump to it.ย
Just who is Theodore Thump? A wise pet rabbit? The mysterious sixth Beach Boy? This album newly released from Shedric, Swindon soloist and groovist ofโฆ
Buzzwords, like โturbo,โ or โsonicโ are cliche, overused trends which gain popularity because they sound impressive, even if they are empty of meaning. I avoidโฆ
Itโs always nice to hear when an inaugural local event is successful, especially one as unique and original as Marlborough School of Languagesโ annual Fiesta.โฆ
Right here, right now in Devizes, Palooza spawned and has become the fast-growing house music event brand in Wiltshire. They’ve beenย invited backย to perform atย Fatboy Slimโsโฆ
Featured Image: Helen Polaxpix What has Devizesโ greatest millennial musical export, England rugby player Jodie Ounsley’s ghost writer, some scummy mummies, a professor of biology atโฆ
Hurrah, at last! Only The Brave is the debut song from Burn The Midnight Oilโs revised lineup; something Iโve been anticipating since watching them rehearseโฆ
Well, I had fun, danced my little socks off at Paloozaโs inaugural house music experiment back in early March, and Iโm glad to hear theyโve another coming up on Friday May 10thโฆ.
Palooza delivered everything they said they would to the Devizes Exchange nightclub early March, with a knockout inaugural night of smooth house music vibes. Here’s my take on it. The DJs were bang on the money, the atmosphere was unpretentiously buzzing with positive and uplifting vibes I compared to the UK rave scene at its peak, but a few more through the door wouldโve been welcomed. As it is with dance music culture, a new thing has to grow and develop, and this works through word-of-mouth; hence why I mention it!
What impressed me most was the age demographic there. I spotted a number of older ravers, reliving their misspent youth, and I saw younger clubbers too, but all mingled with the shared ethos of good vibes, and thatโs what made the night so satisfying. If you missed the last one, I advise you check in on the next one in May; keep up-to-date with them on Facebook.ย Tickets are HERE.
Four Dauntsey’s Sixth-Formers have been awarded travel scholarships, and plan to cycle all the way from their school to Bonn in Germany, shortly afterโฆ
Leading Wiltshire digital entrepreneur Natalie Luckham, AI Educator and founder of award-winning Wiltshire social media consultancy Naturally Social is hosting a free โIntroduction toโฆ
Devizes Outdoor Celebratory Arts key into the town’s majority demographic for its first annual event of the year, mature couples, with an affection forโฆ
The Wiltshire Music Awards 2026 entered an exciting new era when Stone Circle Music Events announced was as official sponsor and organiser. Backed byโฆ
Newly formed and locally based collective Palooza hosted their opening night at The Exchange nightclub in Devizes yesterday, offering house music with universal appeal and the ethos of raving days of yore; mind I don’t have an Uncle Albert moment here, โwhen I was in the rave!โ
Greg Spencer, the kingpin in organising the event, told me he’d be interested to read what I had so say about the do. While a DJ night is a different kettle of fish to reviewing a live band, the kettle or main premise is the same for anything, points scored for doing what it said on the tin. In other words, was it as advertised?
Palooza hyped it to be โthe hottest house event in Devizes. Deep house and soulful grooves, tech melodies to uplifting beats.โ The only indifference was it’s the โonlyโ house event in Devizes for some considerable time. Other than this trivial, my dancing clogs didn’t stop, so top marks all round for a fantastic treat.
Welcomed, then, for those dance music hunters and an inaugural shindig hoping to blossom, I hope so too. Retrospective glimmers to the heyday of UK rave culture have been successful in larger towns, yet always seem to come with a marginalised hook.
Raver Tots invites parents of toddlers to force their youth culture down the throats of their impressionable offspring, in a bizzare soft play-happy hardcore mesh, and Trowbridge recently saw the Pipe & Slippers Raves, patronisingly focusing on middle-aged ravers by reducing noise levels and ending at a respectable time.
Though both successful, they feel presumptuous and a tad condescending, in my opinion. I never felt the need to embed my nostalgic skulduggery on my kids; they find their own way. And as for the idea of finishing a party at eleven o’clock so foggies can retire to their slippers in some kind of care home fashion is, quite frankly, insultingily ageist and badly researched; ravers danced all night, into the next week if possible. What in the good name of John Digweed gave them the ludicrous Cinderella notion we can’t now cut a rug after midnight?! It’s not done via age concern, rather cashing in on nostalgia.
The reason for being critical of these others is that rave had no uniform or restrictions. It was universal, the loosest era you can dub a youth culture, for it engulfed every preceding one and fused them in one electronic explosion of positivity and joy.
Ravers came from punks, mods, soul boys, travellers, new romantics, rastas, bikers, the lot. No one gave a hoot about your roots, ethnicity, political sway, sexual preference, and especially not your age; we all danced together under the same sun. It was the most unassuming epoch ever.
And, delightfully last night, the ethos matched. Palooza filled โthe Binโ with a handful of older ravers proving they still got it, but equally attracted a wide age demographic, interacting without the slightest hint of aggravation. That’s the ticket, that’s precisely the atmosphere old ravers cherish with pride, and one which, evidently, is being passed onto the younger present. We stopped racial tension, drunken nightclub brawls, and football hooliganism; really.
The Exchange in Devizes faces historic self-deprecating banter from locals, infamously dubbing it โthe corny bin.โ I beg to differ. The modern Exchange is on a level way above your typical nightclub. By comparison, it’s comfy, congenial, and affordable at both the foyer and bar. It retains the exceptionally simple but functional design of square amphitheatre dance floor, with all seating facing inward to it and the bar stretching across the rear. It makes the perfect spot for a house night of Paloozaโs challenge to recreate the integrity of classic dance music culture. I’m only here to report back that it did, with bells on, oh, and shake ma thang like a Polaroid picture.
The air held a manner of anticipation, and the three DJs delivered. With splinters of classic house samples from Leftfield to Fatboy Slim, the speakers pumped of joyous contemporary beats, bang-on the timeless vibe of house music since its inception. Glow-sticks passed around, smiles and hugs exchanged, no bullshit from tossers, just carefree merriment and united celebration.
Another top point scorer from me was Palooza didn’t try to be something it wasn’t, it didn’t try to cater for all and meld every dance music subgenre into a single night, for that would feel cramped or sycophantic by modern standards. If you attacked it objectively because you wanted abstract minimalist techno or darkstep breakcore, you failed to see the simplicity of a working formula of yore, the enduring practicality of association. Because, while one day viciously throwing down on his box, Jack boldly declared, let there be house, and house music was born, in 1987, when your scrupulous pigeonholed subgenre was an itch in its daddy’s bell-bottoms.
Soz, but a market town like Devizes couldn’t sustain something so codifying as a quasi-amapiano ethereal techno gig; think broader, and dance your trainspotting cares away!
Palooza met that challenge head-on and unruffled. Greg expressed to me that he’s only in it for the love. It now needs the opportunity to grow and harness its ethos. It needs to extend a welcoming hand to those looking for a regular and affordable quality dance music night in Devizes, of which I’m assured it will. And hey presto, ravers young and old will arrive there, Harvey Ross Ball’s smiley face logo will be smiling on our town, and house music willย be reborn, and for that applause, Palooza gets my top rating; feel the melody that’s in the air and beeline the next date, one and all.
Feeel the melody that’s in the (Devizes) air! If the nineties house clubbing revival is whatโs happening elsewhere around the nation, we have to admit, sadly itโs been a smidgen scarce in Devizes. Thatโs set to change, Greg Spencer from Palooza gladly informs us Devizes is on the verge of a groundbreaking shift in its nightlife scene. About time too, I might add, thereโs still a bit of life in this rapidly ageing raver yet, yโknow!
The inaugural Palooza DJ House Event is set to make waves at the Exchange Nightclub on Friday 8th March, offering deep house to soulful grooves, tech melodies to uplifting beats, and promising an extraordinary night of music, rhythm, and unparalleled community spiritโฆ.well, thereโs a thing, thatโs what it was always about.
Greg, who has previously owned a record shop and music venue, has been involved with festivals, and written dance music, signed to labels and remixed for other artists, tells me how he took a break from it all whilst raising a family, but like many of us feeling thereโs something missing from middle-age, heโs aching to zip up his boots and go back to his roots, โfor the fun,โ he expressed. Yeah, Iโll go along with that!
This inaugural Palooza DJ House Event promises to redefine Devizes’ nightlife, creating a space to celebrate music, forge connections, and craft unforgettable memories. Palooza urges Devizes to โget ready for an introduction to a new world of rhythm, and become a part of it. Join us at Palooza, and let’s create memories, dance, and celebrate the beauty of music.โ
They promise the event will have its share of surprises and special moments, making Palooza a truly unique experience each and every time. Palooza’s inception arises from a shared passion for the dynamic beats of house music. The event’s creators areย dedicated to bringing this unique experience to the heart of Devizes, sharing their love for music with the local community.
The team has carefully selected a thrilling lineup that combines the infectious beats of our local DJs, known for setting the dance floor ablaze, with globally recognized music from the house music scene. Each performer will infuse the night with their distinctive style and boundless energy, creating an unforgettable musical experience.
โPalooza isn’t just an event,โ they continue, โit’s an immersive journey into a world of rhythm and connection. The energy is palpable from the moment you arrive, drawing you in and making it impossible to resist the allure of the music. This event offers the freedom to dance without inhibition, lose yourself in the music, and connect with fellow party-goers whoย share the same passion for house beats. Whether you’re a seasoned clubber or a first-timer, Palooza invites you to a night of boundless energy and camaraderie.โ
In a unique initiative, Palooza invites partygoers to suggest their favourite house music track before the event for the opening DJ set. Visit the Palooza Facebook page to contribute to the music poll selection and shape the unique atmosphere of the night.
Just one? Tricky, but, twist my arm, if I had to pick just one it would be Sunscreemโs Perfect Motion. Remember it? Oh, I do, vaguely! In a cloud of strawberry scented smoke, the dancefloor like an air hockey pitch, my feet gliding like two pucks, and, if youโll pardon the puck pun, not giving a puck either, about any inhibitions, or cares, just you, and a fluffy crowd of smiling faces; If rhythm’s a drug, I’m hooked on you, So show me every move,ย We’ve got perfect motion…. Noooo, someone stop me, I double dare you!! I better sit down, have a cuppa and a bourbon biscuit, calm myself down a bitโฆ. until March 8th, coincidently my birthday!ย
by Ian Diddams images by Chris Watkins media โChicagoโ is a stand out example of the musical theatre genre โ great songs, great characters, greatโฆ
After much deliberation, Devizine is to pull out of any further organisation of the Wiltshire Music Awardsโฆ.. It has not been an easy decision, andโฆ
It seems Shrove Tuesday celebrations in Devizes have fallen as flat as aโฆ.well, you get the gagโฆ Traditionally organised by Age Concern Wiltshire, and oftenโฆ
The mighty mighty Minety Music Festival announced The Bluetones as their Sunday headliner at their Eames Laurie Main Stage, and The Dub Pistols on theโฆ
The celebrated Shindig Festival at Malmesbury’s Charton Park announced their headline act for May bank holiday 2026, and being that it’s Bob Vylan, it isโฆ
Drizzly Sundayโฆagain. Iโve just finished designing the poster, so allow me to reveal the lineup for Rowdefest this coming May, might cheer us up aโฆ
Bristolโs fine purveyors of idiosyncratic folk-raving, Ushti Baba, who if youโre in Devizes you might recall played Street Festival in 2022, have a new singleโฆ..
Chucking Fairport Convention a human beatboxer is probably not the best idea, neither would handing Mr C a concertina; herein lies the genius of Ushti Baba.
โA song about the brittle nature of art and of those creating it and the fragility of meaning; the stories we tell ourselves about who we are,โ the band describe it, from an idea originating back in 2015 while jamming with other musicians around a campfire outside squatted garages.
I would never advocate anyone covering Sparksโ This Town Ainโt Big Enough For The Both of Us, but if someoneโs life depended on it, and it was up to the Afro-Celt Sound System to save them, it might come off a tad like this! Though this remark might sound a smidgen critical, it really isnโt intended to be, because that would be one heck of a tricky number to effectively pull off, and while Ushti Babaโs sound is kooky, itโs avant-garde and beguiling, ergo apt for such a unnatural request. If anyone could make a good job of a cover like that, the Baba could, for which youโve got to hand it to them!
It could be bigger than Diggers! See what I did there? Okay, you youngsters might need Google, but while you’re researching Chippenham’s hedonistic past, aโฆ
There’s no sophomore slump for Monkey Bizzle; prolific in their art, these rural chav-choppers return with a second album, Agricultural Appropriation, only five years andโฆ
Featured Image:@jenimeadephotography Just another rainy Saturday afternoon in Devizes, whereby I watched a profound fellow dramatically sacrifice himself to the devil, then popped to Morrisonsโฆ
Just when I think every musician within a ten-mile radius is under our radar, another one pops up, and usually, they produce electronic music. So, I say, look, I know Devizes is a blues town, but Devizine covers all arts, and besides, Iโm an old raver; ergo, if youโre creating music, electronic or not, youโre very welcome hereโฆ.
Proving Iโm an old raver, for photographic evidence is nil and memories vague, West Lavingtonโs musician and composer Moray Macdonaldโs alter-ego Cephidโs forthcoming album, Sparks in the Darkness had me pondering a post on a Facebook group for ravers, which I wouldnโt be on if I wasnโt! Someone posted a video highlighting the work of Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, another commented rightly she was a pioneer of electronic music, a second added โerm? Kraftwerk?โ causing me to rant; it doesnโt take much these days!
Yeah, Iโll give you, Kraftwerk were the primary electronically generated pop group, but Derbyshireโs magnum opus, the Doctor Who theme, an electronic rework of a Ron Grainer composition, predates Kraftwerkโs first commercially successful album Autobahn by eleven years.
This raises a fascinating point; at electronic musicโs clunky inception few sought it viable for commercial pop. Fatboy Slim pointed out, Youโve Come a Long Way, Baby. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop created sound effects ideally for sci-fi series. Lesser-known German electronic pioneers Tangerine Dream only became familiar to the masses during the eighties for their numerous Hollywood film scores. Organisation zur Verwirklichung gemeinsamer Musikkonzepte, Kraftwerkโs quirky and pre-synthesizer antecedent, was the crรจme-de-crรจme of kosmische Musik, Dusseldorfโs experimental scene of the sixties, but while it took psychedelia and space-rock to another planet, Melody Maker mocked it โkrautrock,โ a name which stuck as its genre.
Seems rockโs phobia of electronic progression was the reason for Britpopโs retrospection to acoustic instruments once rave came of age. The chalk and cheese mingle side by side in todayโs pop; David Grayโs self-dubbed style, folktronica hammered that last nail in.
The relevance of all this is, while immersed in Cephidโs gorgeous complex structures and intense electronic textures, one cannot help but contemplate the combined efforts involved in contributing to this development, as it harks itโs influences and indulges those passed, no matter by Sparks in the Darkness comparisons all would sound timeworn. From the impact the Doctor Who theme mustโve had on the English television-watching nation, to The Art of Noise and Yello, and from avant-garde American electro outfit Newcleus, to Universeโs Tribal Gathering 1997, when I observed every raver ascend from their chosen subgenre tent to pay respects to Kraftwerk. Cephid encompasses these, yet is ultra-modern, uses tech as orchestral, and is as fresh as the Buxton spring; like Jean Michel Jarre came after dubstep, as if 808 State created Tubular Bells!
Futurism and sci-fi remains a large part of marketing presentation for electronic dance music, from the eerie android on the cover of Kraftwerkโs We Are the Robots, to Phil Wolstenholmeโs Vergina sun spaceship on the Orbโs 1992 album U.F.Orb, Sparks in the Darkness follows suit with a mysterious red sphere projecting across a cityscape for its cover, strikingly designed by Tiago Marinho.
The album commences akin to ambient houseโs finest, floating or bubbling spooky and mysterious layers of atmospheric swirls, but its orchestral build indicates time has passed since the fluffiness of The KLF and Orb. Moray Macdonald cut his teeth touring with progressive rock and metal artists such as That Joe Payne, Godsticks, Kim Seviour and Ghost Community. This is sharper, unsubdued, his harder-edged rock influences will insure bands like Pink Floyd, Hawkwind and the Ozric Tentacles will be acknowledged here; erm, The Prodigyโs punk fusion post-Jilted Generation too, in part. The opening track To Catch the Eye of the Heaven flows into the next, as a raver I note Leftfield, and Iโm holding out for it kicking in.
Thirty seconds into the second tune, the single Worlds Before, and it does, and when it does itโs immense, a stomp to make New Order blush, with all the workings of modern technology, you are encased in this, what is a culmination of many years of work, and thereโs no going back.
Moray defines it, โsoaring melodic leads cutting through spacious washes of synths, while propelled by layers of sequencers, drums, and percussion. Pulverising techno seamlessly giving way to complex progressive workouts and moody, groove-driven soundscapes, all packed with lasting melodic hooks.โ Yeah, Iโll go with that! It has the concept album quality in which you must indulge in it completely. By Terminus weโre nodding to up-tempo trance-techno, breaking with vocal coach Angel Wolf-Blackโs celestial chants, but behind its entrancing bleeps binds this driving rock drum, either by Emily Dolan Davies, who has drummed for Bryan Ferry, The Darkness and Kim Wilde, or Graham Brown of The Paradox Twin.
Midway the pace lessens and Of Promises trickles into something definably more electronica, of Tangerine Dreamโs sombre movie moments, of Don Johnson contemplating his fate as he leans on his white Ferrari looking out across Miami harbourโs night sky. Moray Macdonald has created music for film, theatre and art installations, and it shows.
Strobe takes off from where Of Promises lands us, like the later track Dead Handโs Decree, itโs The Chemical Brothers on their best behaviour. Moray states, โthe Cephid was created as an opportunity to bring diverse influences together into a single coherent artistic statement.โ From his work with artists across the modern progressive scene, to his early love of experimental electronic music, many musical facets are represented, but still it flows in one radical and unique package impossible to pigeonhole.
Thereโs no surplus of talent left out of this project, Placeboโs Shelby Logan Warne, and Jerry Kandiah producer of Killing Joke and The Futureheads have mixed and mastered this, and while its not commercialised, just like Delia Derbyshireโs work in the sixties, itโs too groundbreaking to be ignored.
As The Old Me, plays out, even its name prompts me to imagining myself hearing this in a field somewhere in 1991, amidst matted trilby wearing juniors, eyes the size of saucers and dribbling on a Wrigleyโs, it is so innovative, so radical, Iโd probably have had a seizure!
โWhatโs wrong with him!โ one raver asks another as I lie comatose.
โHeโs had a premonition of the future of electronic music and his fragile mind cannot handle it; somebody get him a Technotronic album, pronto!!!โ
The single Worlds Before is out now. Sparks in the Darkness will be released 9th February 2024. Find out more about the project HERE.
Stone Circle Music Events announced today that all proceeds of CrownFest will be donated to Wiltshire Hope & Harmonyโs Dementia Choir. CrownFest is an all-dayโฆ
If Devizes Scooter Rally has already established its base at Whistley Roadโs Park Farm and Full-Tone are moving to these new pastures, last year theโฆ
Dubiously biased and ruled with an iron fist, the mighty admin of the once popular Devizes Facebook group, Devizes Issues, is using the iconic Greatโฆ
Suh Gen Z? U might think U is well dank two-footing pensionerโs doors for TikTok followers, n U might think U snatched the kiki, vibing n vaping through a Taylor Swift concert, polishing off a whole bag of Haribo, U total ledge. But I have wig for U about your so-called โboomerโ parents; your slang is wonky at best, mate, they ainโt boomers at all, theyโre more likely the wicked, jilted generation X, and it might just be fact that in a time of yore, before you were a twinkle in your daddyโs dilated pupils, they secretly partied harder, faster and longer in an hour than you will ever hope to achieve throughout your entire life…..
Big yikes, tho, donโt get salty, Iโm not out to diss U, so donโt ghost me, Iโm here to give you the tea on how to find out if your parents were what we deemed in the nineties as โravers.โ
Now, U might assume you know what this entails, but I can assure you, soz, but you have absolutely no clue at all. To rave in the nineties wasnโt clubbing in soft play centres covered in neon glow sticks and daring to drink six Primes, like it might be today. Raving back then was mostly illegal, multitudes gathering in fields and disused warehouses across the UK, all of which wouldnโt pass modern health and safety regulations; but this is only the tip of the iceberg, the rest will knock you the fuck out like you is Chris Rock at the Grammys, and these facts are Will Smith.
Yep, they might be dictating and demanding now, stamping their control over you, preaching right from wrong, and bigging up their own behaviour by comparison, but I ask, how well do you really know them, what secrets might they be hiding about their own misspent youth? Were your parents party to this outrageous trend? Did they gyrate like broken robots with eyes the size of saucers, masticating the shit out of a Wrigleyโs Juicy Fruit?
Here are some tell-tale signs to help you discover if, in some long-forgotten past, your parents made some fucking noise, and if they secretly, knew the score (you may need to Google these archaic expressions):
1: Ask Your Grandparents
Grandparents might hold several clues but may not think it wise to let you in on them. Try asking them about what time your parents would get home after going out on a Friday evening. If they answer โusually around 1 or 2am,โ you are off the hook. If they answer โsometime on Tuesday evening, and then they slept until Thursday,โ then it’s a reason for suspicion.
If fortunate enough your grandparents still live in the same house as they did when your parent in question was young, go to their former bedroom and carefully peel back the wallpaper. Should you discover hundreds of blue smears, that will be blu-tac remains, and it’s very possible they adorned their walls with a thing called “flyers.” These were basically adverts for forthcoming raves. It was the carbon footprint fire insurance write-off done thing at the time, though collecting flyers doesn’t constitute they actually attended raves, it could’ve been a bluff to look cool and gain a shag, but it’s a good starting clue. Take some wallpaper paste to avoid detection.
2: Check for Jawbone Structure and Oral Hygiene
If you think it likely your grandparents would’ve taught good oral hygiene, yet your dad’s teeth looks like someone threw a grenade into Wookey Hole, chances are he was gurning his face off in a field somewhere, long before you were an itch in his โbaggies,โ and this is the aftermath.
Remember, donโt ask why, but the jawbone structure of Johnny Bravo and the teeth of Gollum is your gateway to enlightenment on the issue; I think it best you follow further instructions as your Dad sounds like the kind of right cheesy quaver who were dubbed โthe white gloveโ brigade. Again, it was a thing at the time.
3: Blowdry your Hair and other Audio Clues
More simply, blowdry your hair. If they start dancing to the sound of the hairdryer it’s time to prepare for the worst; it sounds like they were officially on a โpukka one,โ at more than one point in their life.
Attend a football match or other sporting event, should the refereeโs whistle evoke blissful memories and your parents respond thus: โwhistle posse!โ you should be concerned.
4: Shout Outs
Shout out โI’ll take your brain to another dimension,โ from the top of the stairs, and repeat three times. If they reply, โwhat the devil are you on about now, foolish child?โ then youโre back in the safe zone. If, however, in a glorious screech of reminiscence they respond, โpay close attention!โ Then it’s a pretty safe bet Iโm afraid.
Alternatively, you could try the rave mantra, โtop one, nice one,โ and they should respond with โget sorted!โ If that doesn’t trigger them nothing is likely to, and you can be safe in the knowledge they probably listened to boy bands in the nineties, the sad acts.
5: Search for Photographic Evidence and Pop Music Knowledge
Time for some research. You should note your parents are not of your generation who feel the need to photographically document every second of their lives on social media. In fact, pulling out a camera at a rave would be seriously frowned upon, so a decade gap of photographs in the famโs archive of your parents might hold a clue. If all you find are the odd snap of a family occasion, where your parent can be seen snoozing on a sun-lounger in the background with a grin like the Cheshire Cat, or a photograph of them standing next to their XR3i or 3.0 Capri turbo, you should be wary.
Give your parents a pop quiz starting off with chart hits of the eighties, then the nineties. If they come up all chicken dinner with the eighties questions but fail like Joey Essex on Mastermind on the nineties ones, it’s because ravers forgot all about pop hits and chart positions when they first reached for the skies and got mullered at a rave party, fact.
6: Suspicious Purchases
If your mum neglects to buy you the bitesize GCSE maths book you’ve been asking for, but instead gets you a pair of Technics and a mixer, something is definitely amiss, and there’s a likelihood they want you to be the life and soul to a hopeful resurrection of the trend. Say โno, I’m not Carl Cox, I only want to pass my exams.โ
7: The Obvious Final Exam
Only attempt this if your parents have scored high in all the above tests, and never, I repeat never question why; there are some skeletons in closets you really donโt want to uncover. For this final exam you will need a packet of M&Ms, favourably of the plain old chocolate variety. Take the sweets out of their packet, place them in a money bag and offer one to your old folks. The correct response from the average parent should be something along the lines of, โoh, no thank you, itโs very kind, but you eat them my love.โ
However, should your mum or dad respond with a sniff, and a โna, sorted mate!โ itโs pretty much concrete that your parents have had equal if not more โrave accessoriesโ than Bez of the Happy Mondays, (Google him and prepare yo bad self.)
The bottom line is to never worry too much about it, okay so your parents were hardcore, but you do not need counselling, itโs not biggie, really; just ensure they are comfortable and never throw out any of these things pictured below. They are called cassette tapes, and they might be the only fragments left of a long-forgotten youth culture very sentimental to them. You should note, the times were vastly different from today, we had an economic recession and were dictated to with an iron fist, by the last desperate attempts of a failing conservative government, but at least we didnโt have Ed Sheeran. You cannot judge your parents by the order of things today, this is not Minority bloody Report.
Dreadzone, the Phoenix rising from the ashes of Big Audio Dynamiteโs success, when drummer Greg Roberts and keyboardist Dan Donovan teamed with Julian Copeโs sound engineer Tim Bran, were the prolific electronic dance triumph of post-raveโฆ.
Owing their accomplishment to the fine blend of reggae into the contemporary melting pot of dance culture, harking back to Two-Tone yet too encompassed the burgeoning breakbeat house scene which in turn would fuel drum and bass. But Dreadzone never went there, the final piece of the jigsaw was bringing in vocalist Earl 16, and they stuck to their guns producing memorable anthems of techno-reggae dub bliss, particularly unforgettable being Little Britain sampling Carl Orffโs Auf Dem Anger.
But if you, like me, were bouncing around a muddy field like Zebedee on a day out from the magic garden to a 1937 classical symphony you might not appreciate me reminding you, Dreadzone celebrate their thirtieth anniversary this year; but it might cushion the blow by letting you know you can join the party at Fromeโs Cheese & Grain on Friday 21st April.
Still in the forefront of the festival scene, in 2022, Dreadzone refocussed their show after MC Spee was forced to step back from touring and they explored different aspects of their history and catalogue ahead of their 30th anniversary this year. With a reconfigured line-up for 2023, the bandโs live shows will feature core members Greg Dread and original bassmaster Leo Williams, plus legendary reggae vocalist Earl 16, as well as Bazil on technology and Blake Robert (Gregโs son) on guitar.
They have been releasing albums and progressively bettering, refining, and perfecting their own unique and inimitable take on dub since their inception in 1993. Dreadzone opened the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury in 1994, though if memories of that are hazy at best, I fondly recall a night at Shepardโs Bush Empire in 1995 when I was still dancing to an imaginary dubplate in the cloakroom queue!
With plans for their 30th Anniversary firmly underway, standby for a new studio album later in the year too.
All the local mainstream are on it like a fly on a turd, and the negativity of keyboard warriors is flowing fast and furious. Who am I to steer off the bandwagon, yet you know weโll handle the news Wax Palace obtained permission for a โrave festivalโ to happen near Erlestoke with a slightly different angleโฆ…
An angle much less based upon the fact your esteemed editor had a youth some indeterminable time yonder, where he gyrated in muddy fields with eyes like saucers, masticating the shit out of a Wrigleyโs Doublemint, and more on the notion, I hope, that while we have a great music scene in these backwaters, there is little to tickle our younger residentโs tastebuds. This then, is great news, surely?
But is raving still a progressive thing, or does it dabble largely in retrospection? And what exactly will this Wax Palace provide in the way of entertainment? Harry, one of the organisers, a man who unbelievably convinced Wiltshire Council, conservative at the best of times, to grant them permission to hold whatโs best described, to avoid media confusion, as a โrave festival;โ can he sell ice to Eskimos, or what?! In a short chat with him, I suspected he could.
He giggled at the question, โweโd do our best, thatโs for sure! Itโs been a bit of a task, but we got it through, and they seemed very with it, during the hearing.โ Throughout Harry projected himself as level-headed, reliably assured of the achievement of Kaleidoscope, the name of the event.
The first myth from the Gazetteโs report to dispel is that these guys are bundling down from Yorkshire to ruin our peaceful community, when Harry explained the company is only registered there, and he lives close to Erlestoke himself. โThe group who first run it were students in Leeds,โ he explained, โbut weโre very much Wiltshire born and bred.โ Herewith the reason for bringing it to Devizes.
Promoting this today is neither here nor there, theyโve a solid base and early bird tickets have already sold out for the estimated 800 strong event. โThis is our third edition of the festival,โ he said with me interrupting about how to define it, โit is very much a festival, but we hope it has the apogee of a rave, though licenced, as the articles have focused on. It started as one night event, next time it was two, now weโve got the full weekend, and our largest line-up yet.โ
To spoil my queries of disambiguation, musically, Kaleidoscope will offer the whole range of rave subgenres, from house and disco to techno to drum & bass; โyou name it will be there!โ But this only got me pondering the setup, if it would, as legendary pay-raves like Universeโs Tribal Gatherings once attempted, to host each subgenre in a different tent. Because much as this appeased the then evolution of the diversity, it tended to clash into one immense noise when central! โWe donโt have genre-split tents,โ Harry clarified, โtheyโre split more-so by their set design. Weโve got three stages, one indoors, another outdoor, in which weโre shaping out an old school bus for the DJโs, which should be really fun.โ
Harry jested jealously at me rapping about raves of yore like Universe, โwe missed that golden era, but we very much like to be inspired by the ethos.โ This is great, though Iโm trying to avoid an Uncle Albert moment where I preach on memory lane, but it does bring to question how niche is the market, does Harry think rave is either coming back, or it never really lost its appeal?
โI think it is coming back, commercially, perhaps it did lose a bit of what it was meant to be. In the last few years, Iโve heard people referring to their club nights as raves. I think the term rave now covers something broader and less political than it did, originally.โ Harry hopes it does come back, encouraged to bring back those original values.
Though Iโd suggest, rave was apolitical, it wasnโt until government interjected with the Justice Bill post-Castlemorton which both forced it underground and for ravers to think politically. Originally it was solely a celebration of life, and to party, and that really was our only objective. Which neatly covers another misconception; we raved everywhere and anywhere, if it meant standing in a muddy field, or if it meant going clubbing, location was irrelevant, so long as we could blow off steam and dance!
And herein lies my pitch at why I think this is a fantastic addition to our local events, because if youโre the first to complain about this, I sure hope youโre not the same one whinging about acts of anti-social behaviour in youth culture. If Wax Palace can provide a safe haven for young to go and enjoy themselves, itโs surely a positive.
Wiltshire Council were keen to label this a festival rather than a rave, as rave connotes to some to be an illegal, uncontrolled gathering. I say, this is the name of the genre, and doesnโt relate to illegal gatherings at all. After the Justice Bill the scene became anarchistic in frustration to the restrictions, but it never began like this. There was a sense of one big family, a tribal movement, and it was all about smiles. This, I feel is an important point to reduce this common misconception, and something Harry was also keen to express. โWeโve worked really hard to build a real sense of community,โ he explained.
Today, of course, the original ravers have come of age, and organisations like Raver Tots have marketed retrospection in the form of taking your kids to a rave, but throughout our chat I got the feeling the ethos of Wax Palace was much more progressive, about introducing “rave; the next generation,” and thatโs good to hear. โWe like the idea through the way we organise events and our approach will introduce the idea of raving to a market who are only just coming to an age where theyโre able to go to clubs. So, itโs nice to think we have the chance in shaping that impression they have. For a lot of people, this could be their first music festival, and for it to be local and described as a rave would be really exciting; exactly what Iโd wish Iโd have had in my village when I was 18.โ
Tickets are here, Kaleidoscope takes place from 2nd-5th September.
Avoid negativity of misconceptions bought about by a bygone era, well organised and safe pay raves have happened since day dot, and providing youth with entertainment is paramount to building bridges; Wax Place, I salute you!
Christmas has come early for foxes and normal humans with any slither of compassion remaining, as the government announced the righteous move to ban trailโฆ
Chippenham folk singer-songwriter, M3G (because she likes a backward โEโ) has a new single out tomorrow, Friday 19th December. Put your jingly bell cheesy tunesโฆ
Wiltshire Music Centre Unveils Star-Studded New Season with BBC Big Band, Ute Lemper, Sir Willard White and comedians Chris Addison and Alistair McGowan revealing theirโฆ
Daphneโs Family & Childhood Connection to Devizes Celebrations of Daphne Oram have been building in London since the beginning of December, for those in theโฆ
Part 1: An Introduction March 1936: newlywed French telecommunications engineer Pierre Schaeffer relocates to Paris from Strasbourg and finds work in radio broadcasting. He embarksโฆ
Yesterday Wiltshire Council published an โupdateโ on the lane closure on Northgate Street in Devizes as the fire which caused it reaches its first anniversary.โฆ
Okay, I confess, that’s a clickbait title, forced to make you shout, pantomime style, โoh yes it was!โ On this, the thirtieth anniversary of The Castlemorton Free Festival I’m predicting vast quantities of media coverage, hailing its significance in the counterculture of the nineties, and indeed it was the largest illegal gathering in the UK, comparable with the Stonehenge Free Festivals a decade prior.….
And indeed, due to the knickers of a local Tory councillor getting in a twist, it heralded an act of law to prevent so much as four pixies gathering and listening to “repetitive beats,” a desperate last stand from fraying Thatcherism.
But arriving on the scene Friday, dusk had already befallen and we hadn’t a clue just how much it had blossomed. From its epicentre it seemed like just another, typical weekend for us, and in personal reflection, it was not my most memorable rave at all.
In the late eighties acid house was a secret, an exclusive collective no more than a couple of thousand strong. Pyramid promoting, predominately via word-of-mouth, but also by media overexposure, had created a monster; a burgeoning culture trend, an apolitical rebellion whose only ethos was carefree dance. But authorities could neither control it nor let it be. No one made any money from it, that infuriated them, so government made it political, the aftermath of Castlemorton was their Empire Strikes Back.
What was more important to me this weekend thirty years ago, was I finally passed my driving test; a catalyst to seeking raves easier than our only previous methods of blagging lifts or hitchhiking, both of which had unpredictable results. Devastating irony was this particular weekend would be the last of the great raves!
I had my Ford Escort, which I hadn’t fully paid my mum for, so it was legally still hers, and we headed off to Malvern in it; no motorway lesson nor taking-it-steady-on-local-roads starter kits for me!
This legendary party line phone message the Beeb published this week I never heard. On this occasion the usual method of a reliable source phone call was not needed; HTV broadcasted a bulletin about it, they made it too easy for us!
The common was positively buzzing, as more sound systems bolted on and revellers flocked to explode the population to city status. Just how many attended is the query for great debate, safety in numbers was our philosophy, but when we staggered up the hillside at sunrise, our rural chillout zone, the penny dropped.
I recall duly and rather dully contemplating, “they’re never going to live this one down, they’ll never let us get away with it,” it didn’t take Nostradamus, as this sprawling linear development metropolis of o’ bangers and hippy buses expanded like a Sim City game along across a single country track.
Yet the first evening proved unsuccessful in purchasing “rave necessities,” we were ripped off with duff “red & blacks,” soon to be aptly dubbed, “Dennis the Menaces.”
Financially this put us in deficit, and while the upside wasn’t so up, the downside seemed to be equally as prominent, as if the upside had of happened. Supply and demand reduced the potency, these were changing times. But we did it to ourselves, our own worst enemy in so effectively promoting this new way of life. Such was the effect of ecstasy, coming complete with an uncontrollable desire to share the experience, as standard. In this much, that is why we had come to this final kaboom; Castlemorton was the rave to end raves in the UK, least on the same scale.
Second downer for me was when a friend of a friend was badly injured, hanging off the side of a bus which was being pursued by police. The deep graze on her leg needed medical attention, a clean dressing, but the only car available was sporty without adequate room on the backseats. I was in no fit state to drive, so in a flash of unnerving planning, a friend had whisked away to an accident & emergency ward, in my car. We were stranded here for inestimable period. The sun was blazing with little shade, I couldn’t contemplate straying too far, eager to see my little red car returned safely.
I needn’t have worried, but understandably I did, I was a naรฏve 18-year-old, laughable now that I considered myself grownup. Feelings of doubt haunt the intoxicated teenage mind, but to give this story a happy ending, the car returned with injured passenger in fine fettle, and I was rewarded a gift for my assistance, the pick-me-up I sorely needed. So, because my friends didn’t receive a similar package, I had no choice but to temporarily abandon them, and head to the DIY tent for a dose of their celebrated trancey house grooves.
And for that moment it was an amazing experience, yet I’d argue no more than previous raves, like Lechlade the previous weekend, and so, so many others. Every time it just got bigger, but not necessarily better, Castlemorton was the breaking point, and for this, it deserves to be the one historically recorded and remembered. Though in turn we should use the anniversary of it to reminisce on the era as a whole, and the โhappy dazeโ of our youth.
Rave continued regardless of the Criminal Justice Bill, albeit it took a shot in the leg, dispersing the scene into localised events, or, more agreeable to society, the great pay raves. But the most important factor of the importance of Castlemorton was the international media exposure, and the new ruling forcing sound systems to exile into Europe, for this only caused Britain’s enthusiastic tenet and attitude toward rave to go global.
In turn its effects on musical progression, the aesthetics of festival design, fashion, politics, and resurgence of counterculture are undeniably prominent today, and for those who attended this particular eruption, they’ll always make some fucking noise about Castlemorton; a raver’s Mecca; deservedly.
Join the St Johnโs Choir and talented soloists for a heart-warming evening of festive favourites, carols, and candlelit Christmas atmosphere this Friday 12 th Decemberโฆ
This afternoon I find myself contemplating what the future holds for historical discovery and learning for all ages, fun and educational exhibits and events inโฆ
Featured Image: Barbora Mrazkova My apologies, for Marlboroughโs singer-songwriter Gus Whiteโs debut album For Now, Anyway has been sitting on the backburner, and itโs moreโฆ
Having to unfortunately miss Devizesโ blues extravaganza on Friday, I crossed the borderline on Saturday to get my prescribed dosage of Talk in Codeโฆwith aโฆ
No, I didnโt imagine for a second they would, but upcoming Take the Stage winners, alt-rock emo four-piece, Butane Skies have released their second song,โฆ
Featured Image by Giulia Spadafora Ooo, a handclap uncomplicated chorus is the hook in Lady Ladeโs latest offering of soulful pop. Itโs timelessly cool andโฆ
Words by Ollie MacKenzie. Featured Image by Barbora Mrazkova.ย The creative process can be a winding, long, and often confusing journey. Seeing a project comeโฆ
Simply because, with a bit of grammatical jiggery-pokery, the name of their sound system crew abbrevates to MiLK, Swindon’s cheeky ravers, Mid Life Krisis, rolled up to premier music venue, Old Town’s Victoria with a mock-milkfloat DJ box on Saturday night!
Personally, this is simply too serious not to blog about. Have they thought to stop, and consider the implications of their actions, I ask you? Milkmen are the fourth emergency service, ergo impersonating them equates to impersonating a police officer!
Think, guys, think; you ever hear anything about Benny Hill these days? Where is he now, huh?
I’m deeply offended, and suggest if they want to be milkmen, they break out their glowsticks, get up before their rave is over and start putting some bottles on some old ladies’ doorsteps!
Seriously though, because I occasionally do serious, big respect to Mid Life Krisis for their inventive skullduggery. I’ve seen similar from a long, fragmented memory of the cheeky chaps of Skint Records’, Bentley Rhythm Ace, who not only abbreviates as BRA, they used a Bentley frontage as their DJ booth; but never as a milkfloat, and that is in itself, bloody awesome.
Could I suggest, like Bra, you get some windscreen wipers that move to the music?
Thereโs a cold remote ambience of burrowing doubt in the opening of Westburyโs singer-songwriter Serenโs debut song, in which, as the title suggests, she uses … Continue reading “Serenโs New Single; Worm”
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! … Continue reading “Don’t Click on Illegal Rave Rage-Bait!”
Itโs a question Iโve asked Chippenham singer-songwriter Harmony Asia on each rare occasion I catch her for a chat; if sheโs planning to capture a … Continue reading “Harmony Asia Can Do This”
By 1994 the Criminal Justice Bill had become an act. Attempts to enforce it were either greatly exaggerated, such as riot vans and police helicopters crashing a birthday barbeque, or were disregarded as an unnecessary government enforcement from the police on the ground. Though we may never have had another Castlemorton, the mid-nineties and even into the millennium, free raves struck back from the body-blow.
Urbanised parties took over railway arches, disused warehouses and squats, the people fought tooth and nail to preserve the culture, and in a way, they did. Rural parties continued, localised and smaller, but communal and friendly. Albeit any forces resisting against them, caused many larger ones to become more viciously anarchistic over time. There were attempts to party in aid of a greater cause, environmental issues for example, such as the Reclaim the Streets protests.
Yet in turn, rave bore an impact on culture and society, which outreached the free party scene. We spoke of musical genres breaking apart, so that large pay-raves erected multiple tents of differing sounds; house, drum n bass, techno, happy hardcore, speed garage, the list continued to get more diverse, until at Universeโs Tribal Gathering 1997, where originators of computer-generated music, Kraftwerk played a main stage, and everyone from each individual subgenre tent came out to pay respects to the roots.
Likewise, Liverpool super-club Cream wanted in on the large festival rave, and created Creamfields, where the likes of Run DMC played. And the scene redeveloped in many avenues, Acid Jazz was popularised, and if it was only short-lived, it birthed incredibly successful Jamiroquai. It also returned hip hop to the forefront, as breakbeat, chemical and big beat were the sounds of the later nineties. The indie and rave divide, parted dramatically since the days of Madchester, the Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, and Primal Screamโs Screamadeleica had realigned, with the punk nature of the Prodigyโs new look. The crossover blended once again, as indie kids accepted electronica wasnโt intending to lay down and die.
Clubs rocked to The Dust Brothers, later to be the Chemical Brothers. Mo-Wax, Skint and Wall of Sound roared a big beat, hip hop melting pot ethos, rooted by rave parties, and everyone flooded to Brighton beach to see Norman Cook โlarge itโ as Fatboy Slim.
What was clear, by this conjunction, while the movement had altered, and divided, rave was now embedded in our culture, and was spreading globally. The paid peanuts DJs who once rocked up to an illegal rave now jetsetters, playing clubs worldwide.
Clubland never had it so good, buy a MixMag, relish in a party, legally, without the need of convoys, service station coups and risks of police brutality. I bought a silk shirt, wore it at Lakota in Bristol, but headed there after a free party in the forest of Longleat, the night before, and without care for basic hygiene, my paisley chic was ruined by the sweat marks of a boxer. I was oblivious โtil presented with embarrassing photographic evidence afterwards.
But commercialisation of the culture had always loomed. In the race to become the โking of rave,โ as rock n roll had Elvis and reggae had Marley, they failed to note this plastic throwaway ethos Iโve previously mentioned. In 1992, thousands of twenty-somethings blissfully unaware of the references, sang ‘Eezer Goode ‘Eezer Goode He’s Ebeneezer Goode, simply because the Shamen reached number one in the pop charts, in just the same way thirty years previously, no-hopers sang โLucy in the Sky with Diamonds,โ oblivious to its blatant LSD connotations. Iโd argue if we have to have a โking of raveโ itโd would have been the ever-progressive Prodigy, but they never cared to call for the title.
The point is, commercialisation got the better of us eventually, as it did for every previous outrageous youth culture. It would be difficult to imagine in the days of Scott Joplin, that his rags would be considered conforming for a hoity-toity jazz festival in market towns like Marlborough, as in the 1910s, he played to lewd degenerates and desperate sailors in New Yorkโs underworld and bawdy brothels.ย In a short few years after the peak of rave culture, Leftfieldโs Release the Pressure will be used in an advert for Cheese Strings. And donโt get me started on Yo Gabba Gabba.
And now we live in a time when reflections of nostalgia from forty-somethings comply with Albert Trotter moments, and a misunderstanding of what happened is ingrained in our culture. I cringe at how the tragic Wonder Woman sequel depicted the eighties, in an almost caricatured version of the fashion, and foresee bearded twenty-somethings attending wistful โraveโ nights dressed in glow sticks like tourists on planet Mars. I never waved a fucking glowstick in the nineties, any more than I wore legwarmers in the eighties!
A van speeds past me, a youngster wears his hood up while driving. Why? Is there a leak in the vanโs roof? Yes, we ravers popularised the hooded top in the UK long before the โhoodyโ culture, and if we wore the hood up, it was because we came out from a sweatbox into the cool night air with perspiration evaporating off of us. We did it to prevent dehydration from precipitation, rather than cos it made us look well โard.
And then Ollie Mursโ heart skips a beat, with a drum loop the Ratpack wouldโve rejected in 91, and I yell, NO! Get your own youth culture kids, nicking ours is disillusioned by commercialisation, unless youโre standing chilly at Peartree services at 3am, teeth masticating the life out of a slice of Wrigleys, eyes like saucers, and waving your arms about like a broken robot with a hundred others, surrounded by cars beeping their horn and playing a chewed up Easygroove cassette, then you are not a raver. And donโt you even let me see you asking Alexa to search the word cassette!
Last thing I want to do is end this series on a sour note, but duty calls. I read an article about how the days of the illegal rave had returned in all its former glory. โIt was just like 1992,โ they quoted in a story about a warehouse takeover, then informed partygoers discovered the happening via a Tweet. Eh? Have a word with yourself, Tweets were a novelty eighties band who rehashed an oom-pah so your granny could do a little bit of this and a little bit of that and shake her bum at some family disco of yore. We went raving without a clue what a pager was, while scare-story spreading tabloids suggested we all had mobile phones, in an era where mobile phones were thought of as the devilโs business. They couldnโt comprehend how an entire generation could all descend onto one field simply by word-of-mouth.
โ…and if you tell that to the young people today, they won’t believe you…โ
The Four Yorkshire Men sketch, Monty Python.
In conclusion; as we say farewell to my little series reflecting back on those heady ravey dayz, Iโll confirm, there was numerous amazing times, the best times of my life, times evoking stories I could bore you into an early grave with. And by the thankful response to this series and the masses of posts of stories from so many old skool ravers in the variety of Facebook groups, it is clear Iโm not alone in this theory. Although, my rose-tinted specs were large enough to engulf those dilated pupils throughout most of the examination.
Probably the most active of those groups, aforementioned DOCU FREE PARTY ERA 1990-1994 – WERE YOU THERE?was originally set up as a research project by one Aaron Trinder a filmmaker on a mission to document the era in a film. We wish him all the best of luck with this monumental task. And it is a monumental task, as unlike most previous youth cultures which borrowed from various trends and cultures, say the teddy boys borrowed extensively from rock-n-roll, mods borrowed from jazz, Italian suits and scooters, and so on, rave borrowed from everything and anything.
United, the melting pot came from any source, we electrified it and, even if it was relatively short-lived, what exhausted out inspired everything that went hereafter; modern pop, multiple dance music subgenres, fashion, video technology, literature, childrenโs entertainment, and most importantly, despite the authorises misunderstanding us and their traditionist values causing hateful vengeance upon us, a wealth of people power; the notion that masses can make a difference to life, society and politics. Evident by politicians consistently doing what our Iron Lady wouldnโt do at the time, make a U-turn to save their popularity and votes. For this, we should all be proud.
I would reward myself with one last disco biscuit, but Iโm unsure if my ticker would take it. Slapped with a finale date though, it would be on my bucket list, and what a way to go, reaching for the skies in one last sweet harmonyโฆ..
Whoโs ready for walking in the winter wonderland?! Devizes sets to magically transform into a winter wonderland this Friday when The Winter Festival and Lanternโฆ
One part of Swindon was in perfect harmony last night, and I donโt mean the traffic circumnavigating the Magic Roundabout. Rather The Lost Trades wereโฆ
Raging expressions of angered feminist teenage anguish this month, perfectly delivered by Steatopygous via their mindblowing debut album Songs of Salome, I hail as theโฆ
I’ve parked the van on the opening of a farm track, to have a sandwich and scan the area. Iโm looking for a quarry which runs alongside the train track. A few years ago, I was a delivery driver, and though I didn’t know the roads, I’d recognise village names with fond memories. On this occasion I’ve turned off through the sleepy Oxfordshire village of Cassington; my memory of it was not so sleepy.
Those reading this too young or not into the south west free party movement of the nineties might wonder why, while those who were will know exactly why, and no doubt will be screaming a delighted, โyes mate, red and blacks!โ Later to be referred to as Dennis the Menaces, without concern to what Beano publishers DC Thompson mayโve made of it all.
The distant resonance of an MC echoed through the valley, alas only in my head. โGet off the railway track,โ he warned, โthat is a live railway track!โ A memory abetted by a rave tape capturing the irreplaceable moment, one of thousands I carelessly released into a skip many moons ago, foolish to the notion theyโd be sought after.
On rave tapes, weโd either have a โmasterโ or a recorded, taped from Christ knows how many cassettes down the line. Often inaudible by todayโs standards, but recorded live at various events, they chartered the era. Endless weekday hours spent cutting up flyers to use as covers, doubles of those already pasted on my bedroom wall. In 1990 I had obtained a few, in the space of a year the wall was covered with them, overlapping to hide the roached edges.
Akin to the accumulation of flyers, my rave tape collection increased like wildfire. From popping into Swindonโs Homeboyz Records, which at the time occupied a loft space in a head shop on Fleet Street, to ask for โthe kind of tunes Iโve been hearing at the raves,โ in which I was sold two, recorded from Coventryโs Eclipse; Frank De Wulf, and the second, Sasha and Top Buzz, to the point where an entire collapsing shelf was bursting with alphabetically arranged cassette boxes, with the wrong tapes in each. Ah, weekday timewasting activities; we lived for the weekend.
Another delivery driving time, after a few visits to Great Tew, I found the private airfield at Enstone. I recalled arriving there in 1991, one misty morning after a lengthy standoff at Peartree services outside Oxford. These were customary; convoys from every direction flooded in, police would surround them, rumours would circulate they were to search every vehicle moving out, meanwhile the bottleneck swelled, car stereos melded into one colossal clamour as kids danced on the embankments, blowing horns and whistles, undaunted to the likelihood of a tipoff, lawlessness supervened, petrol and spearmint chewing gum went mysteriously missing, and police finally acknowledged they were outnumbered, and allowed free passage out of there.
For the journey my mate spoke of nothing other this track heโd heard. โYou remember the donโt talk to strangersโ advert with the boy and his cat, Charlie, went, like, Charlie saysโฆ…โ Yeah, I did, but hadnโt heard the song. Coincidently the DJ spun it as we arrived, and he wasted no time, leaping from the car prior to stopping, yelling โthis is it!โ and running off headlong into the fog.
I myself got lost in that fog sometime later, asked a friendly crusty if I could climb on his van to see if I could find my friends. The view of synchronised trilby hats and bobbed hair dipping into the low-level mist enticed me to dance, to which he seemed completely content with, as I stomped on top of his van. But as others, noting my joy, decided to do similar, I climbed off, persuading them not to follow my bad example, it was this guyโs home from home.
Charlie did say that, but with these carefree strangers, it didnโt seem to matter, hence the irony in the Prodigy’s song. Everyone had the smile of the Cheshire Cat, everyone would lend you a chewing gum in exchange for a rizla, and right in the moment, that was all that mattered. It was short-lived, a few years of complete bonkers, but it had a profound effect on society. Football fans returned from clubbing the night before, far too intoxicated with love drugs to cause the trouble the sport had become associated with. Football chants were adapted from โyouโre going home in a fucking ambulance,โ to โyouโre going home in a fluffy ambience.โ
In a clubland where once, to accidently knock over someoneโs pint, or look at their girlfriend for longer than a millisecond, would likely evoke a fight. Now, the clubber sighed, โI know you didnโt mean to spill it, no worries mate,โ to which the reply would be โsorry, Iโll get you another.โ One clubber said, โis that your girlfriend pal? Sheโs gorgeous,โ and thatโd be seen as a compliment, perhaps understandably backed by an informal warning, but it certainly wouldnโt end in a drunken scrap.
Such was the scene expanding, a legendary party at the end of the summer of 91, somewhere near Banbury, extended into a nearby field, with a narrow track joining to two. A continuous stream of pedestrians sauntered to-and-fro, until a BMW hurtled through the wanders. A lone hippy cursed the driver, pleading he slowed down. The car came to a screeching halt and backed up. All four doors opened and some rather mean-looking urbanites, full of sovereign rings and bling stepped out to confront the scrawny fellow. Towering over him, the driver and his passengers asked him to repeat what he said; it was a setting akin to a violent scene of a gangster movie, and the expectant crowd held their breath. The crusty replied he had asked them to slow down, because someone could get hurt. The rude boys considered this, got back into the BMW and drove on, at a snailโs pace all the way to the end, carefully stopping for pedestrians.
An incident Iโll reiterate as an example to how genuinely passive and diplomatic raves were. We policed ourselves, troublemakers were dealt with, often in a medieval fashion. Yet troublemakers were few, unlike nightclubs you had to make reasonable effort to find a party, so most were aligned to the concept we were there for that and only that, to party. So too, if you overstayed a party till its conclusion, you willingly picked up and bin liner and helped clean the area, (okay, there was always a chance of finding some money or hashish, Iโll give you!)
The country suddenly seemed at peace, least it did to us, and the authorities had a problem with this.
There was a frustrated lost terrier, scrambling around in the dark, barking, scared without its owner; it was the Conservative Party. John Major walked into this, and knew if he was to overthrow the shadow of Thatcher, heโd need to take drastic change to society.
Me, my mates? We didnโt give a fuck. Other than the annoyance of the odd rave being broken up, when the police got the itch, we had no political opinion, we had no concern over much at all. Because, we knew there was a happy place, somewhere we could go, freely, and we were in the moment of building our own society, shaped as we wished, policed as we required, but as many adolescent dreams, we thought we knew it all.
Itโs nice to hear when our features attract attention. Salisburyโs Radio Odstock ย picked up on our interview with Devizes band Burn the Midnight Oil andโฆ
In thanking everyone who supported this year’s Wiltshire Music Awards, Eddie Prestidge of Stone Circle Music Events revealed his intentions of continuing with the awardsโฆ
Featured Image: Lillie Eiger Frome Festival is launching itsย โ25 for 25โย fundraising campaign with a very special concert featuring three locally based acts:ย Tom Mothย โ best knownโฆ
Iโve got some gorgeous vocal harmonies currently floating into my ears, as The Lost Trades release their first single since the replacement of Tamsin Quinโฆ
Rolling out a Barrelhouse of fun, you can have blues on the run, tomorrow (7th November) when Marlborough’s finest groovy vintage blues virtuosos Barrelhouse releaseโฆ
by Ian Diddamsimages by Ben Swann and Ian Diddams Self-appointed โMoroseโ Mark Harrison was once again on totally top form at Komedia last Sunday entertainingโฆ
Wiltshire Council confirmed Blue Badge holders can park freely in council-operated car parks again, following a vote at the Full Council meeting on Tuesday 21โฆ
Featured Image Credit: Jamie Carter Special guests Lightning Seeds to Support Forest Live, Forestry Englandโs summer concert series presented with Cuffe & Taylor, has announcedโฆ
Twas the night before my life done gone flipped upside down. It may not have been the colossal party the rest of the country were having, but Marlborough was, and always will be, lost in its own little world. Numerous attendees at the aforementioned Read’m and Weep rock concert on the common, just three years earlier, Iโd suspect now joined us in marching up to the same common after the pubs called last orders, this time heading for an โacid house party.โ Others, who failed to register or accept the change of era continued on their rocky road. No harm done.
With a fire at one end, and an older comrade who rigged a speaker to his Beetle at the other, blasting out whatever music he had which could be deemed as close to acid house as possible, it was a Marlborough-fashioned interpretation of an acid house party, and in rural backwaters you learned to make do.
The morning after undoubtedly the strangest of my life, for some reason everything Iโd ever thought had been turned on its head. For the remainder of 1990 we continued with archetypical house parties, where gullible parents went away, but by the spring of 1991 we invited ourselves onto traveller sites, the first being the Belthane festival on Hungerford Common. And while it opened my eyes to see so many living on the road, they seemed unconcerned of our presence and were, on the whole, welcoming. If the urban raver story starts in clubland, note rural ravers didnโt have that luxury, least not without a vehicle.
Indeed, we had a small nightclub in town, but like many it favoured appeasing the old-hat drinking culture. If club owners were aware of rave clubs, they werenโt prepared to make the switch, fearing itโd only diminish their drink sales. At the time the closet place to head for was Swindon, where Extos held legendary nights at Hardings. By the time weโd scrouge a lift and arrived, the club was full, and weโd stand outside in blankets, waiting for a tip off to the party.
So, for a while, best my mate and I could hope for, was to loiter outside the pub, as going in would empty the wallet we needed to escape our town. As newfound ravers leapt in cars and soared off, one of us dared to ask, โalright mate, going to the party?โ in hope of scrouging a ride. At art college I had a reliable source, two Oxfordshire individuals into the scene, with bob haircuts and a VW Beetle, one phone call would reveal a clue where to head, if only someone would give us a lift!
The Oxfordshire buddies listened to what we called, โbleep.โ For many years I considered it, like ska, a description of the sound, but sources online class it as genre. Rave, or hardcore were the sweeping generalisations, and in 1990 little had been done to separate it into subgenres. There was mellowed vibes type rave, hardcore, house and garage, sure, but at the time it cured into one immense, chaotic noise. Subgenres would derive much later, as the scene exploded and separated. It was however, of small significance UK artists now created their own sound, aside acid-house styled bleep, German techno, which was stiff and structured but lacking soul, and the trancey Goa House, breakbeat house was looming on the horizon.
Hereโs a thing; I argue with myself if we could even call all this a โyouth culture,โ rather class it a movement. Youth cultures of yore had a definitive uniform, musically and fashionably. Rave was a melting pot, electronics seeped its way into all genres, and new arrivals descended onto it from all walks. If the Northern Soul clubbers say it was them who inspired it, theyโre not wrong. Neither are the travellers, punks and skins, new romantics, Rastas, or trendy eighties kids. What were once separate identities, rarely seen together, now flocked to the same party, danced and celebrated together, without fussing or fighting, save a mite of banter. This was the chief reason why I class this era as the most wonderful show of unification the nation had seen since the second world war, and Iโm honoured to have been a part of. But Iโm uncertain if it matched the definition of regulated youth culture, as previous mods, rockers, punks and skins did.
The music reflected this, a melting pot of inspirations, whatever angle you came at rave from, you added your portion into the mix. The upcoming trend derived from Britainโs ties with reggae through the Windrush generation, and the surging dancehall flavours we deemed โragga.โ Fused with the archaic hip-hop concept of breaking the beat, ragga and breakbeat house surged over bleep, and fast became the mainstay. X-L Recordings, Moving Shadow, Urban Shakedown and many other labels headed this change.
But here is the second thing; we were the throwaway generation, jilted, plastic population, and didnโt care for who created the music. There was no interest in holding a torch for particular bands or labels, unless you were master of ceremonies, the DJ. Leaving the choice to one person, it existed as a DJ culture, and theyโd soon become the stars of the show. If it was genre-bending, we relied on their faith to perpetrate a certain style; when Sasha got on the decks it would be โfluffy,โ whereas as when Easygroove did, it would be โhardcore,โ with the upcoming breakbeat twist. Thatโs all we knew, and rightly cared about.
What swept at us as a trend became a way of life; we lived for the weekend, vaguely remembering to attend college or jobs in the week. Every weekend an ever-growing number roamed the roads at night, invading unsuspecting service stations, joining to convoys with a lead car who we hoped had an inkling where the party was. Bristol moved east, London moved west, meeting in the Shires, where police would be outnumbered and, rather prevent a riot, would grudgingly allow us free movement. Naturally there were times when they got flustered, upon service stations appropriations, for example, but suspect many appreciated the overtime, and left us to enjoy the ride.
At the Gloucestershire one fondly recalled as โthe one with the haystacks,โ someone drew my attention to the police standing on a ridge overlooking the site. To our amusement, and seemingly theirs too, they were imitating our dance moves, and you know what they say about imitation, sincerest form of flattery!
Despite the ruminates of bad blood with travellers, from the Beanfields and free festival movement of the previous decade, they tended to only throw their weight at them. Attempts to move them on, before ravers flocked to their sites turned hostile. Though if, as my friend and I did once at Pitton near Salisbury, ravers arrived early, theyโd witness the true horrors of life on the road, as eviction resembled a massacre rather than a battle. There are shocking things I could tell, of which Iโve witnessed, effectively ethnic cleansing, destruction of a way of life, and homes. It was not the vision of Britain I pre-held, naรฏvely, reason enough for us to continue to rebel, when all we really wanted to do was party. Opps, some pig knocked off my rose-tinted specs.
Sorry to pop the bubble of happy daze, but there were downsides. Aside the growing harassment from authorities, which would see raveโs demise in the end, there was also comedowns, maintaining motivation for everyday life, failed attempts to find the party, else the event raided and broken up too early. The latter became greater with every weekend, as the sensation blossomed.
You see, we adopted a pyramid-selling technique, only wanted to spread word of our newfound love. Kids we hadnโt seen since leaving school would wander into the pub, they were looking for something, they didnโt know what, but we did. We had the answer, the escapism, and we welcomed them with open arms, took them under our wings and looked after them during their first rave experience. Then, the following week theyโd shed their old identity, and weโd see them fully assimilated, like Star Trekโs Borgg, through the foggy morning, wearing a puffa jacket, round pink shades and diamond-cut trilby, giving it, โalright? Iโm mullered mate, wot you done?!โ
Thus, we all played a part in promoting the scene, until it got too big for the authorities to leave alone. Some weekends when we didnโt go party, somehow rave crept in. I ventured back to Essex to see old friends, and theyโd have similar stories, of Raindance and other events there. One weekend we attended my mateโs brotherโs wedding in Liverpool, only to find in the basement where the reception was held, a steaming club-rave. The sound attracted us, and we unbolted a fire escape to both gate-crash, and discover likeminded raves were happening nationwide. Meanwhile, his mum wondered where weโd got to, and wandered in to find us amidst a pumping party. Upon her return sheโd been shocked, but happily reported the scene as โloads of kids, just dancing, having fun, no one fighting, no one drunk, and one gave me a hug!โ
If a little old lady who accidently stumbled into a rave could see it for all its upsides and worth, why couldnโt the police and government? Why did it ever have to end? Because at the time we couldnโt envision that finale, we assumed it would go on forever.
Wiltshire country singer-songwriter Kirsty Clinch released a Christmas song only yesterday, raising funds for the Caenhill Countryside Centre near Devizes, and itโs already racing upโฆ
It was never just the fervent ambience created which made me go tingly with excitement about Melkshamโs young indie band Between The Linesโ demo singleโฆ
A second track from local anonymous songwriter Joyrobber has mysteriously appeared online, and heโs bitter about not getting his dream jobโฆ.. If this mysterious dudeโsโฆ
Itโs not Christmas until the choir sings, and Devizes Chamber Choir intend to do precisely this by announcing their Christmas Concert, as they have doneโฆ
If Devizesโ celebrated FullTone Festival is to relocate to Whistley Roadโs Park Farm for next summerโs extravaganza, what better way to give it the rusticโฆ
This afternoon sees the inaugural grand ceremony of Stone Circle Music Eventsโ Wiltshire Music Awards taking place at the Devizes Corn Exchange. Itโs a selloutโฆ
A branch of a classy supermarket chain seems an unlikely place to start a story of oneโs first rave experience. It was a shop which, on a later occasion, my mate and I decided to walk ten miles back to, to thank them for such a lovely pizza. Overlooking the fact, it was the extra topping of liberty caps we added ourselves which sparked the idea, and, in turn caused us to only make it a hundred yards out of the village before we collapsed in a hysterical heap. Just as well, given I worked there at the time.
Oh, for the time, Iโm slipping down my rose-tinted specs again, but, while Iโm grateful to those reading this who lived it, Iโd rather those too young would too, who they need to understand the era leading up to it, to know why we did what we didโฆโฆ
A protest at end of term school disco, 1988. Teachers, thought they were โhipโ enough to do the โinโ thing, hiring a standard DJ to deliver the latest pop sounds. One year away from leaving the institution we saw ourselves as mature. Obviously not, but sufficient to warrant a plain and simple fact; the pop chart was not aimed at us.
A decade old now and electronica has become timeworn and abused by the Hit Factory and Stock Aitken Waterman. The formula was simple, derived from sixties bubble-gum pop, and aimed an even younger audience. An assembly line of drum machine synthpop churned out uninspiring samey trash, a monotonous drone promoting pop stardom to Australian soap opera actors, failing have-been musicians convinced by a fat cheque and dreadful teenage dreamboats. They punished the last part of the decade; they commercialised the once experimental epoch. It should have been a crime.
We all sat in protest on the dancefloor, booing, as the DJ spun, I Owe You Nothing by latest teen-pop sensation Bros, two brothers from Camberley with Pet Shop Boys manager Tom Watkins, stupid belt buckles and leather vests donning crucifixes, which seeing as what they did for pop, was actually quite apt. The only person left dancing was a good friend of mine, who took the ingenuity to bring a Sony Walkman, and he skanked out of time, through the protesters in his own little world, lip-syncing the words to Buffalo Solider.
For me, even my love of hip hop worn thin. While it still had a nostalgic place in my heart, as it spread out from the Bronx it seemed to be whitewashed, typecast far from the original ethos. Yes, Grandmaster Melle Mel rapped conscious lyrics on The Message, but that was the exception to the rule. Now, seemed every rapper had a chip on their shoulder, something to criticise, a plastic attitude and some serious bling. It was either this, or sell yourself like a cheap tart; take MC Miker G & DJ Sven rapping over Madonnaโs Holiday as red for why hip hop lost its way.
A far cry from the untroubled origins of hip-hop, where the idea was to throw your cares away for the duration and party. A notion closer to the new impending wave of electronic music, fresh from the underground.
In any case, at 14 Iโd moved to Marlborough, where breakdance seemingly hadnโt the same impact as it had on my Essex town. Prior to starting school there, my mother suggested my brother and I attend a concert on the common, as promoted on GWR Radio, surprisingly. It mayโve been a tactic to encourage us to blend into our new home. What actually happened freaked me out. If I considered Iโd descended time, back to the seventies, before this day, I certainly did now. I believe the band playing to have been popular local rock band, Read’m and Weep.
Looking back now, they were excellent, but through my trendy suburban Essex eyes I was shocked at the sight of scruffy rock kids perched on car bonnets, uniformed in black, smoking, drinking from bottles before me. I felt like the character Sam Emerson, the younger brother in the movie The Lost Boys, when they go to the beach fair. If one of these โweirdosโ glimmered fangs at me, I was legging it.
In fairness, being bored with the direction of hip-hop, and annoyed with commercial pop, I had a sweeping overview of rock, as soft metal took the charts by storm. And as I emersed fuller into the cultural differences of my environment. I began to find it was the only musical avenue worthy of attention, and had to backtrack my knowledge to the classics. But as I was taking in Led Zeppelin, Hendrix and The Doors, in order to make friends at school, they became accepting of a new wave of electronic music called โhouse,โ as it was, it had a commercial side, but looming was the psychedelic underground roots, sub-labelled โacid house.โ We kind of met in the middle.
I find it amusing child-friendly raves have become a popular attraction recently. Organisers such Raver Tots and Big Fish, Little Fish attained a gap in the market with new parents who thought the stork has ended their raving days.
Ingeniously they create a pay-rave/soft play centre crossover, largely based on the hardcore era of the mid-nineties, as that’s the generation with easily persuaded toddlers. Way to go to push your diehard habits onto your saucepan and lids, but indulge now, as it doesn’t last! If you asked my daughter ten years ago what her favourite music is, she’d reply “reggae,” an obvious spoon-fed response. Now she’s engulfed by current pop, and you have to let them find their own path, their own thing. Pushy parenting backfires.
But that’s not the reason it amuses me, neither is the fact since the dawn of rave participants never take themselves too seriously. Yes, it’s “cheesy” by their own definition. Yes, there’s a childlike euphoria involved with raving too. Sucking of lollies, cuddling complete strangers, and dancing like a lunatic to a breakbeat sample of the Sesame Street theme. But it’s a notion the flipside, the “indie” kids could never fathom, in all their depressing reality-driven gloom; rave was never to be taken too seriously. It was quintessentially an escapism.
No, the reason it amuses me is thus, at the time rave was not the place to take a toddler and few did, save for perhaps the travelling folk who, for them, the sites were their home. Rave was illegal, primarily, until big businesses saw the opportunity to make a fast buck. Rave was daring, criminal and that’s what, unashamedly, made it exciting. In fact, the spread of the trend grew from a scare story, a tabloid attempt to frighten parents into believing every teenager, including theirs, was off their rockers in a dangerous derelict warehouse somewhere around the London orbital. Truth is, my friends and I hadn’t a clue about it, until now.
In fact, in 1988, just before some doughnut invited a lucky journalist to an acid house party, the scene was tiny, a secret association only a select few Ibiza diehards knew about. The desire to recreate their hedonistic holiday in the Balearics in London gained little attention, until one day the newspapers splashed it across their front pages. Needless to say, it backfired, now every teenager in the country wanted in on the deal. Including me.
As ever, the Sun was the main culprit, Gary Bushell pasting a light-hearted angle, often satirical and tongue-in-cheek but definitely in favour of the exploding trend, in order to sell their “acid house t-shirt.” Soon as sales dropped, they turned nasty on the surge they had a hand in prompting. It’s almost as if they deliberately blossomed a teenage rebellious phenomenon in order to flip it over and create hysteria, to sell papers; who knew they could be so callous?!
But it was too late. D-Mob sounded it out; We Call It Acieeed. Prior tunes to hit the charts never wrote it directly on the wall. It was always just about “house” music, pumping up the volume, or jackin’ your body. One could differentiate, draw a definite line between run-of-the-mill “house,” hence being commercial, or the evil, drug suggested “acid house.” At least to our adolescent mind. Truth is, it was all the same.
Yet meanwhile we were still convinced electronic music was sold out to commercialisation, therefore we’d rewound back to the space rock of psychedelic sixties and seventies. Unlike my peers though, I retained small penchant for the original hip hop, and swept house with the same brush. It was short lived, but I liked house for all the silly samples of Bomb the Bass’ Beat Dis. It was as if electro had turned full circle, and divided from the cliche of fierce rap styled US hip hop, particularly now the west coast had as much clout as the east.
It’s also worth noting, although we took its source as American, British acts like Coldcut were now producing house. As the media hysteria became old news and mellowed, by 1990, the average joe blogs could be forgiven for assuming it had all been a flash in the pan. Little did even we know the trend was growing, and since graduating from pupil to student, felt we had moral responsibility to check it out for ourselves.
Perhaps not just our age, but also rural Wiltshire was hardly cutting edge when it came to trends. So, two years on and the words on our lips were “acid house,” despite the term had metamorphosed into “rave.”
With local Tory backhanding secret social clubsโ slaps on the back, our school opened its doors and poured children into the only supermarket in town, where the branch manager welcomed weekend staff, he could offer ยฃ2.20 an hour to. I succumbed for want of my own pocket money. Surprisingly, it was there where my adventure into rave begun.
Yet it was there, working my Saturday job, allowing us the newfound financial freedom to maturely decide where best to invest our earning, which happened to be getting wasted. A friend, a year or so senior, dropped the killer bombshell, to which I hide my excitement and pretended to know all about. “You going to the acid house party tonight, up the common?” he inquired.
Well, my feet didn’t touch the floor before arriving at the opposite side of the warehouse below the store, where my buddy priced up tins of soup. Shocking to think barcodes were still some way off, and one would have to be like Clint Eastwood with a pricing gun. But nevertheless, he stopped as I told him the news, and his face lit up with excitement, and a slight evil grin.
1991 beckons next week, as I relive my rave honeymoon, be there!
In association with PF Events, Devizes Outdoor Celebratory Arts introduces a Young Urban Digitals course in video mapping and projection mapping for sixteen to twentyโฆ
by Ian Diddamsimages by Penny Clegg and Shakespeare Live โAntony & Cleopatraโ is one of Shakespeareโs four โRoman Playsโ, and chronologically is set after โJuliusโฆ
Unlike Buck Rogers, who made it to the 25th century six hundred years early, Devizesโ most modest acoustic virtuoso arrives at the 21st just shortโฆ
by Ian Diddamsimages by Chris Watkins Media and Ian Diddams Whilst probably best known for his editorship of โPrivate Eyeโ magazine and thirty-five years asโฆ
New short series of articles exploring rave culture thirty years on, from a personal perspectiveโฆ.
In the early eighties my nan and grandad stood at the head of the hall, preparing from requests they adlib a speech for their surprise anniversary party. My grandad did the standard honours, thanking everyone for coming, excusing any clumsiness with his words by suggesting, โweโre still at ten thousand feet with the surprise.โ At this point my nanโs sister interrupted with astute cockney humour; โbit like your wedding night, eh, Carrie?!โ
โNo,โ my Nan causally retorted, โthere were bombs on our wedding night!โ
Itโs a sentiment which will live with me forever, how anyone can pass off bombs during their wedding, in jest. Most people nowadays get irate if rains on their special day. Because, whenever my grandparents spoke of the war and living in the east-end during the blitz, it was a joyous transcript, never revealing horrors we know happened. I ponder my own memories of youth, wonder if itโs the same rose-tinted specs, or if the era really was as utterly fantastic as my memory of it is.
And in this much, thereโs a thing; nothing we did was particularly new-fangled. Tribally, ancient folk gathered to celebrate and hypnotically dance to drum beats, and the occurrence never trended or waivered. Though it maybe debatable, I think, with the introduction of computer technology in music, designer chemicals and enough chewing gum to keep Wrigleyโs in business, we partied harder, faster and longer than any previous youth culture did, and probably ever will in the future!
We made party a way of life. We did not think politically until they came for us. Our only concerns were where the next party would be and if weโd have enough cash for some petrol and necessities. Our only motivation was the joyous unification of a tribal-like movement, or in other words, a fuck-off legendary party. Our only philosophies were how beautiful said unification was, and how we could promote it to the world. Yet, unbeknown at the time, the latter was most likely our downfall. No one makes some fucking noise anymore.
Often referred to as “you remember, the one with the haystacks!”
I do recall the fabled week of the second bank holiday of May 1992, how we gathered at a common in Malvern. I also recollect wandering up a hillside on the first morning, observing how large the event had grown, and I remember thinking to myself, nice as it was, they were never going to let us live this one down, they were going to have to attempt to put a stop to it, politically.
So, Iโm drafting a series of articles exploring the time, from a personal interpretation, hoping to conclude, itโs a bit of both; rose-tinted specs, and the most explosive period of counter-culture hedonism ever. Individual because events and accounts vary vastly from person-to-person; how, where and why they โgot into,โ the sybaritic nineties trend of rave. Lots of memoirs I do read or see, like the most successful, Justin Kerriganโs 1999 film Human Traffic, are set in an urban environment. Unlike these, we spent our youth in the Wiltshire countryside, and this I feel is a major contributing factor which differs our story from most, especially prior to passing my driving test! Thumbs out, โyou going to the party, mate?โ
Iโm doing it now because of the significance of the anniversary. Thirty years ago, I class my โpersonal summer of love.โ It was 1991, I was eighteen, standing in an unidentified field somewhere in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds, gyrating like a robot through the morning mist, eyes large as saucers, and a jawbone tremor you could break a walnut with. Imagine, not alone, but with countless likeminded others. In fact, Iโd lost my mates an uncalculatable time ago, which mattered not one iota. How did I get here? Why did I go there? Where the bloody hell was I anyway? To reflect back with any hope of clarity is not only to understand the epoch and the time, but the mindset, and for this we need to go back further, much further.
I put my pre-initiation to becoming a โraver,โ into two significant recollections. The first was in the spring of 1984, in my Dadโs Ford Cortina, heading for the Asda at the Chelmer Village outside Chelmsford. Growing up in Essex had one advantage to my friends in the west country, we had pirate radio, and I mean pirates. Anchored off the East Anglia coast were the legendary Radio Caroline, where BBC Radio headhunted many DJs, but who appeased their fanbase by continuing playing sixties and seventies songs, and its sister, the short-lived Laser 558, which toppled Carolineโs listeners by using American DJs which played a continuous mix of contemporary tunes.
Hard to imagine at the time we considered having a cassette deck in a car radio as something only for the gods. In fact, I went to edit that last sentence to call it a car stereo, but reflecting back it wasnโt even stereo, just the one speaker below the dashboard! Reason why my brother and I would screech requests from the backseats for my Dad to turn it up. On this occasion we were particularly demanding, as there was a song, Iโd never heard the like of ever before. Sure, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotteโs I Feel Love was timeworn, and we existed amidst the dawn of new romantic, the electronic eighties pop in Britain was governed by the experimental post-punks. They either got with the program or fell into obscurity, whinging about how Adam Ant sold out.
Nope, I hadnโt a Scooby-Doo what a Roland TR-808 was, but I knew what I liked. I wasnโt aware of Factory Records, but I knew what Blue Monday was, and I knew liking Duran Duran might make me more attractive to the opposite sex. But this American song was wildly different, it was like ultramodern sonic funk, it was Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force. I figured aside the Dr Who theme, this was the sound of the future, this was space-age, flying cars type stuff. And for the best part, I was right. Little did I know Iโd be standing in a cold west country field seven years later, gnashing my teeth to electronic beats which made this sound old-hat.
I went out and loaded myself with American electro and early hip hop, discovering Grandmaster Melle Mel, Hashim, Newcleus et all, and we nagged Dad for a video recorder. My parents couldnโt see the point to recording TV, or hiring a VHS cassette, but the latter soon become a family weekend activity. We hired National Lampoons Vacation the first weekend, but prior to that, my brother rented the movie Beat Street, and everything, the Bronx culture, the graffiti, the breakdancing, the rapping, all fell into place.
Before I knew what was what, we were breaking in the school playground to commercialised versions, Break Machineโs Street Dance, Ollie & Jerryโs Breakin’… There’s No Stopping Us and Hey, you The Rock Steady Crew. Well, I say breakdancing, but that was a showy skilful fad for flexible kids. As a shy, cumbersome one, surrounded by puppy-fat I ticked none of those boxes and made do with โbody popping.โ This was far simpler, just had to join hands with the kids in the circle either side of you and do a kind of connected wave. That will impress the fairer sex, we must have figured, least I donโt know why else we did it, but we did, and less said about it the better.
Just like our school playground….. or maybe not!
The second significant recollection as a pre-cursor to becoming a โraver,โ was a trip to the dentist. I needed my four remaining milk teeth extracted. For this, unlike today where you stay awake, numbed but perceptible to the dentist tensioning a foot to the side of the chair while he wrenches into your gum full force, they put me to sleep using gas. The nurse held my hand and told me to count to ten, I remember feeling uneasy as the gas took effect, it felt strange, it was the first time I was high; destined to be a โraver,โ Iโll leave it up to your imagination if it was the last!
Do come again next Sunday, for the second part; might actually get on to the party stuff by then!
I mean, Devizes own contemporary blues throwback, JP is getting bookings, and rightly so. He’s off to Trowbridgeโs Lamb next Saturday for a double-bill withโฆ
As the excitement continues to detonate to an exploding point for our very first Stone Circle Music Events Wiltshire Music Awards on 25th October, weโฆ
by Mick Brianimages from Lauren Arena-McCann The playwright Tom Stoppard is probably best known for his work โRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Deadโ, his absurdist comedyโฆ
You might think it’s a laryngologist’s dream come true, this Lewis Capaldi-led decade’s penchant for the blue-eyed soul singersโ melismatic strain to cause Mick Hucknallโฆ
Nothing cruel about our George Wilding; with his perfect match and another local legend of local music, Jolyon Dixon, they’re knocking out great singles likeโฆ
A figure appears through the labyrinth of florescent drapes, strobing with ultra-violet lights. Sheโs void of expression, hypnotised in her individual realm she perpetually gyrates, wearing a black figure-hugging bodysuit, highly decorated in costume jewellery constructed from glowsticks. Itโs not the image families would conceive of when thinking of Longleat, rather a cheeky posse of rhesus macaque monkeys ripping the rubber insulation off their Volvo.
Yet the Wiltshire raver of yore will note, and reminisce, to trek to Swindonโs Brunel Rooms would be to face happy hardcore, jungle or house, whereas there was a tribal movement of tranced techno-heads, a conglomerate of Wilts and Somerset rural ravers in the basement of the Warminster manor, and it took on a wildlife of its own; the UFO Club at the Berkley Suite. Memories of it flood whatโs left of my neurons, Iโm halfway into Trowbridge DJ and Producer, Neonianโs debut EP Vaxxor, released this coming Friday (5th March.)
Not before the opening title track, that is, which detonates a more breakbeat house prose at you, something for the peaky middle of a set by Plump DJs in a glasshouse club off Brighton beach in the latter nineties. Thereโs a lot going on here, for a four track EP, and itโs having all subgenres large.
Released through Weatnu Records, thereโs parts of Vaxxor where I thought a more conventional and contemporary danceable beat might rear its head, but it doesnโt, it solidly rides a wave of classic electronic dance music with a penchant for the techno-trance feel, hence my memories of the UFO Club. That said, Vaxxor, as a tune contains definite traces of punky chemical beats, akin the Prodigy or Chemical Brothers, yet rather than a gimmicky vocal or sample element for possible mass-appeal, Neonian seems aware pop has detracted from this trend of recent, ergo its concentration is on perusing a consistent beat and sonic hi-hats.
This leaves you semi-prepared for the more trance-techno sound of the following tune, Glow. For this it is thumbs up as the most poignantly danceable, in the four-by-four psytrance fashion akin to Goa trance. Hypnotic Jerk takes elements of this, and slides into a downbeat โhypnotic cocoon teetering on the edge of normality.โ Imagine Nightmares on Wax if triphop hadn’t been invented. Weโre in the chillout tent, Eat Static are playing a Sunday morning set, thatโs where it is; yeah, Iโm with you, mate, got a flyer I can roach?!
All these four tracks were recorded during the lockdowns, and together are a glorious testament to the psych-subgenres of the UK underground dance scene. But if youโve any misgivings to the variety of the melting pot, Iโll confirm Neonian blends and crafts it with distinct precision. To affirm heโs clearly nodding to his influences, the testament comes to a finale like a returning migratory bird to its nest. Proof to the Tower finishes this short journey off with something, though layered with aforementioned influences, strips the sound back the subgenresโ combined roots.
Proof to the Tower drips with elegant attributes of post-punk electronica, aligning New Order, Depeche Mode and even the stiffer originators, Kraftwerk and The Art of Noise. The EP is getting radio plays from BBC Radio Wiltshire, Kinetic7Radio (Bleeps & Beats show), Radio TFSC and Radio Wigwam, and Iโm far from surprised.
Neonian is the work of Ian Sawyer, who has previously released a few singles, a mini LP ‘Treasure’ and provided remixes for Frannie B, NNYz?, Sergeant Thunderhoof and James Harriman. โI make music, for myself,โ Ian explains, โI can’t really describe it but it’s mainly made with synthesisers, loops and samples. Influences include New Order, Boards Of Canada, Coil, Pye Corner Audio, Factory Floor, and Russ Abbot.โ Unsure about citing that last one, though Vaxxor certainly has an atmosphere!
Nonetheless these tributes to the pioneers of electronica and nineties trance, techno and breakbeats are often viewed as rather soulless, this does what it says on the tin while retaining something fresh to boot. Clearly, four tracks with Neonian arenโt enough, Iโd like to hear a fully-mixed electronic concept album, perhaps, to be fully sucked into its deep and hypnotic grooves.
Excuse me for being so fussy, but some uplifting sections, with gimmicky elements such as female vocals would be advantageous. Not solely for my own palate, rather in hope itโll attract the attention of a wider audience. As, like William Orbit did when he got the phone call from Madonna, I think while Vaxxor is damn cool with florescent socks on, Neonian, I feel has yet to achieve his magnum opus, but when he does, judging by this EP, youโll want to standing in the middle of it, making boxes and reaching for the stars.
Available on all Digital Platforms March 5th 2021; ‘Vaxxor’ is now available to Pre-Order on Bandcamp via the following link. You get to download the track ‘Glow’ now and the rest of the EP when it is released on March 5th.
In view of recent illegal raves in Wigan and Bristol, I’ve a theoretical question which is twisting my melon, making me contemplate my past, my attitude at the time weighed against my moral judgement of adulthood.
My art college gave me an ultimatum, return at the end of the summer break having redone three pieces, and on their merit my application for the second year of the course will be based. My young life hinged on this challenge. But what was on my mind as I walked out of the meeting? Iโll tell you, it was, where this weekendโs party would be.
It was the summer of 1991, the peak(y blinder) of my rave honeymoon, partying was not a treat, it was a necessity, a way of life. If we had this pandemic, and consequent lockdown restrictions, would it have stopped me from going raving? Thatโs the conundrum sliding a wedge between the hypocrisy of my matured moral standards if I fancied following sheep and bleating on social media about youth attending recent events, and my own prerogative and carefree attitude during that era. I quiver at deciding if I should therefore blame todayโs youth for their ignorance toward these modern boundaries, be they for safety or a judicious excuse for control.
And if I did throw caution to the wind, as I suspect the most likely, would it be possible to adhere to social distancing measures, given our brand of intoxication caused the type of enhanced euphoria one simply had to share? Effusive embraces were routine, sharing of accessories from hand-to-hand and mouth-to-mouth commonly accepted, hugging random strangers all part of the joyous moment.
Of course, itโs hindsight, and our generation should thank our lucky stars we didnโt have something along these lines to prevent us. Still, unresolved, I called to help opinions of members of a Facebook group, โDOCU: FREE PARTY ERA 1990-1994 – WERE YOU THERE?โ Taking as red by its very title, affiliates were indeed there, when rave culture was at its peak in the UK, and by their want to join the group, might just be capable of recalling at least fragments of it!
In contradiction to my rampant hugging observation, one member figured social distancing was possible at a rave, provided there were no marquees. โBecause free festivals and outdoor free raves never had singular big stages,โ they pointed out, โthere was always plenty of space.โ
The overall consensus was, 79% said yes, they do think they would have still attended raves in spite of the pandemic, against 14% saying no, and 7% unsure. I requested thoughts rather than stats, and thus where grey areas and interesting points occur. I stated shouting โfuck yeah!โ wasnโt really supplying constructive assessment, but many, I guess, are still partying too hard! Palpable comments flooded in, such as โIโd have given no fucks and partied on regardless,โ โIโd have dropped everything an jumped in a motor if was going to Bristol party on Saturday but Iโm sitting here feeling gutted, reading reports on news of what Iโve missed; Iโm 56 by the way!โ and โI wouldnโt of given a flying fuck,โ which balanced against frankness I secretly wanted to hear, like, โto be honest, in 1991 I donโt think anything would have stopped me going out.โ
Pop Quiz: where were you heading if you had one of these?
Some thoughtful estimations came with a twist or satirical stab, like โbut hey, send ya kids to school, thatโs fine!โ and โIโve seen three covid deaths; all had underline health issues. With that in mind I wouldโve stayed at home until it was safe, however, it seems there are a few laws that pushed through that are total designed to stop the dance. If these total draconian laws arenโt removed after covid then I will be at the base of Nelsonโs Column with 40k ready to fucking roll and dance, as this total gets my wick!โ And therein lies a common accord, bringing the restrictions, or punishments into question, rather than prevention of spreading a virus. โDo I blame the kids? No. Do I think less of them for raving? No. Do I worry about them spreading covid? Yes. Do I think covid is a real issue? Yes. Do I think that the Tories are using it to their full advantage? Yes.โ
By the early ninetiesโ businesses sought profit from legal raves, be clubs or outdoor events, but rave rose from the ashes of the free festival scene, its fundamental roots was illegal, many faced persecution from the law and anger towards authorities are imbedded eternally. Itโs fathomable to question the motives of lockdowns. โAs it was right in the middle of the Criminal justice act and freedom to party marches,โ one said, โIโd likely have been full blown cospirytard and thought it all to be another way for the cops and government to stop us having a good time, would have gone anyway, stuck my fingers up and hoped it was fake, or that the amount of chemicals in my system killed Covid before it killed me!โ
โThey are not anti-rave laws,โ one protested, โthey are anti-people rules, temporary measures, as none of them have passed through a white paper in parliament so cannot be ratified by the Lords, ergo, NOT A LAW!โ
Hunt Emerson shows us one method of social distancing; you need this comic in your life…https://largecow.com/
Others calmly suggested similar, without the need of caps-lock. โSeems to me they were brought in to stop raves, but had the benefit of also stopping other social gatherings with >6 people. Nothing the Tories do is ‘the will of the people’ – they just get on with shafting us whether we like it or not.โ Adding, โmy comment was only trying to express what a minefield this topic is, and that it is okay to have what might appear to be contradictory views because the whole thing is a mess.โ I know, thatโs why Iโm raising it; always spoiling for a rumble! But letโs not forget here, no one is condoning the actions of the modern kids raving through a pandemic, merely pondering what they themselves might have done under the circumstances.
Ah, social distancing circa; 1991
And there were moments of conformed clarity, โlives are at risk here – the kids going to lockdown raves might not get any symptoms, but they could easily pass it on to somebody else who dies or suffers long-term damage. Kids will be kids and their thoughts are probably not with the greater good. I even understand that they just want to hang out with their mates and have a good time… but I still worry about what will come of their actions, and part of me thinks they could just hold off having 700-strong raves in warehouses for a little while.โ
And others in denial, โI wouldโve carried on going to free parties regardless of some non-existent virus!โ Or completely oblivious, โI was tripping so much I doubt Iโd have noticed, just presumed it was Sunday or bank holiday for 3 months!โ
Some brilliantly imbalanced professionally considered thoughts with fond reminiscences, โwe were the lucky generation. Would I have partied back then with Covid? Most certainly. I feel sorry for my teenage daughter and generation who arenโt able to know what freedom to party was all about. Hell, they canโt even have normal rights if passage anymore. We need to be careful, as there will be a generation growing up scared to go out into the world. Itโs happening already. Working in mental health, Iโm seeing already what could happen to a whole generation if this carries on for too long. My fear is, it will.โ
And โafter being locked indoors for months, young people are going stir crazy and I don’t blame them. At 22 I didn’t need to shield anyone and really only thought of my needs. My 50-year-old self however is sensible and won’t even go to the pub.โ
So, the general mood was either, โI would like to think my younger self would be wise enough to not do raves in a pandemic, but I doubt I would have been. So, can neither applaud them or condemn them,โ or โI would go, but I have never been very responsible.โ With the added notion, โit’s very difficult for me to say whether that might have changed if someone I knew or loved died of the virus.โ
….or maybe not….
Yet punters aside, thereโs no party if thereโs no one to organise it. Perhaps irresponsibly, the ten grand fine dissuaded organisers, rather than spreading a virus. โFines might have made me think twice about trying to put anything on,โ one suggested. Back then, least post-Criminal Justice Act, police had powers to confiscate the PA, hence their point. โLosing your rig is one thing, getting stung for ten grand, is quite another.โ Though another pointed out inflation, โa 10k fine in 2020 wouldโve probably been about 2k in 1990 so the risk wouldโve been different.โ
Specifically, a shareware notion was given, โat RTS, Stop the City, CJB, police asked โwho owns the rig?โ The crowd reply they all do. A ten grand fine could be met if everyone put a percentage in. โFight them at their own game…. with smarty pants on.โ
Whereas an owner of a sound system professed more consideration, โas to whether I would have run a rave this year – no. Iโve chosen not to go to any events this year, although I think Bath and Branwen were โacceptableโ – they were outside of the main lockdown periods, they were outside, so ventilated, and people were able to social distance. I don’t think that Halloween or NYE indoor parties are a good idea, and in fact are pretty irresponsible in the current times and situation. But as was said, to lambast them could be hypocritical. We were all young once, and our irresponsibility levels probably exceeded what we like to think they would be looking back with our rose tints on.โ
Another who begun their party outside Perth in the mid-seventies, proudly still going, โbasically if thereโs a party going on, weโre in the van, rig loaded,โ still offered caution. โNow weโre in a whole different kettle of sardines. I know of too many deaths of this pandemic, so I ainโt partying anywhere indoors and, deffo keeping my distance if I do go anywhere, and wearing a mask. So those that went to the party at Yate, itโs only your loved ones youโre gonna hurt.โ
In conclusion, maturity develops responsibly, we didnโt allow time for it in youth. Yet, thereโs a notion these regulations are implemented deceitfully and with a tyrannical agenda. The point of suspending events and pubs whoโve gone to great lengths to ensure safety, when schools and universities remain open, despite the improved technology of providing online tuition, feels draconian to many, and consequently a backlash is a nature course.
Thereโs two ways of reacting to a pandemic. The archetypal social order of medieval Europe completely disintegrated during the Black Death. People felt death was inevitable, but had a unique way of handling it. Some desperately sought refuge, others braved the disease, laughed in its face, and partied. They cossetted themselves in the finer aspects of life, alcohol, music and, of course, disorderly parties, causing a flourishing new era of music and art, like the virelai, ballade, and rondeau.
Anyone got any Veras? The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Nuremberg Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel
One member of the group pointed out, โno one stopped partying during the 2000/2001 flu epidemic in the UK. The virus was ‘only’ killing old people and the medically vulnerable. Most people didn’t know it was happening. 22,000 people died in a very short period in the UK.โ They also believed there was a pandemic going on during Woodstock Festival. Though this proved to be a slightly ambiguous urban myth by Reuters factchecker, who states, โWoodstock took place months after the first season of the Hong Kong flu had ended in the United States. Although there was to be a second wave in the U.S. the following winter, it is misleading to say it happened in the middle of a pandemic.โ
and then this happened in someone’s back garden…. Castlemorton 1992.
What is clear though, no generation can be blamed for irresponsibly in youth, and the need to party is naturally paramount. Whether or not it is correct to do so under these conditions is debatable, but while you are, for many, the show must go on. Question is, can you blame them, if you once liked to blow your whistle and wave your hands in the air, like, I dunno, you just didnโt care?
Intoxication levelling nicely, some friends and I trekked up the hillside and looked down at the sight below. Well aware it had become fairly large, as was the illegal rave scene in the summer of 1992, we hadnโt fathomed just how large. Overwhelmed by the unexpected magnitude, I sighed, doubting this would ever be allowed again. Still, we had no idea then, we were part of an historic moment; didnโt really care or wish to be.
Ravers were apolitical, we only wanted to celebrate life, dance harder than any generation prior, and masticate lots on chewing gum. Yeah, it was anarchy, but it was a passive anarchy, there was order and morals amidst the chaos. It was more movement than youth culture, as we only did what ancients have always done, but embracing technology to do it, and while previous youth cultures had a set uniform and rules, rave was a melting pot of expression which anyone and everyone would succumb to, regardless of their previous cultures, age, gender, race or religion. It was, basically, too radical for the conventional government.
When I eventually made it home after the festival of Castlemorton Common in the Malvern Hills, the first thing I did was check my parentโs newspaper, and smiled to myself at a job well done; then I slept for three days. Lechlade on the Beltane weekend may have made the front page of the broadsheets, now this had similar clout with the tabloids; still didnโt fear it would be the final nail in the coffin. An estimated forty-thousand revellers flocked here; government were eager to act. A change in the law was conceived the following week, and would take a couple of short years to implement; a final stand from a crumbling, desperate Conservative substitute of Thatcherism. Many of the sound systems jumped ship and took off to Europe, and although this spread the culture worldwide, those left in Blighty were forced into smaller, localised events, large scale paid raves and the clubs.
Nowadays I sigh, all I have is diminishing memories and fantastical fables like a quibbling old wino. Unbelievable to youth today, we took no photographs at the time; to bring out a camera at an illegal rave in the early nineties wouldโve been frowned upon. But, Iโm okay with that, never the diehard, content that it is now just a treasured part of my youth. As with every trend, they usually return, two decades normally, when the influence of parentโs stories inspires their youth. When 2010 hit, then, I was prepared to venture to the loft in search of my white gloves and whistle, just, you know, for nostalgic reasons and to hark to youngers about how we used to do it, Uncle Albert style. I donโt think I could stomach a full-on sess, the convoys, dancing all night to banging techno, probably just give me a banging headache.
The thing is, I doubt the rave scene ever completely ended, that intransigents still party and press rarely jump on it. I attended one over a decade ago in Savernake Forest, but it didnโt have the same vibe. Pushed further underground, the gabba-techno, the attitude of ravers reflected a much harsher vibe, of punk, of pure anarchy. Regrettably, the happy vibe which once reigned had passed, due to the outlawing of the culture and the spread of harder drugs. I winced at a report in the Independent which spoke of โa rave just like the old days,โ when it continued to suggest ravers heard of the event via Twitter.
It was always just tremoring in the mountain. For rave is akin to the monkey-god, Sun Wukong, trapped under the mountain, awaiting release. How do I feel about three thousand youths gathering at a disused RAF airfield on Charmy Down near Bath? I feel the nature of Monkey is irrepressible! It is inevitable, if, for whatever reasons, even a worldwide pandemic, if you curb freedom you will get a backlash. Yes, itโs horribly ignoring social distancing, but so are the idiots fighting outside every Spoons in the country, and even if Iโve not attended for the longest, even if the original ethos is waning, I believe the media desire to exemplify an illegal rave without revenue for big business, negatively. Iโm firmly convinced, from experience, that in the eye of the storm, any modern equivalent of what we once did would never be as vehement or disparaging as a brawl in a Wetherspoons.
So are the shoppers, the traditionalists protesting against the wearing of masks, so are the pensioners in care homes, the children in the parks, so is everyone heading for the beach every weekend. Letโs not fool ourselves, millions of us are now ignoring, rebelling from the lockdown restrictions, we only need to stop to contemplate it all, and give self-policing on social media a break. Our once happy lockdown bought about peace and tranquillity, now is causing frustration and a rebellious nature, a bit like the downfall of raves. What then, could be more apt? Instead of scorning at them, attempting to stop them, perhaps the government and police forces should suck it up, accept its inevitably and work on methods to stage relative social distancing measures for them.
What do I think of the media exposing the return of rave? You know, when the Ibiza die-hards recreated acid house in UK cities I was just a delinquent, with an appetite for exploration and in need of escapism. We were looking for something, we didnโt know what. The original acid house crew was little over a thousand, recruitment was by introduction, and some doughnut invited a tabloid journalist. โLook at what your teenagers are doing!โ it over-exaggerated. If it wasnโt for the media hype weโd have never known. So, you go on, reporters, and what you think is a scare story will backfire into intrigue before your very Facebook site, and youth will look to attending, and the scene will flourish again like a phoenix rising from the ashes. Then, as a mass, they will look rewards, to how it once was, and how as a group consciousness and rising movement, it had morals and it had principles. We cleared up after ourselves, you may be surprised to note, we looked after each other. You will free a new love generation, and in an era such as this, god knows we need it.
Watch violent crime diminish, watch teenage depression wane, watch a generation free from the restraints of its former oppression, as it once did. See a rising generation thinking for itself, throwing away this baby-boomer selfishness and regain a likeminded consciousness. Wrigleys will be back in business too!
One of the sceneโs most best-known names for more than three decades, Judge Jules has never shied away from pushing the boundaries in dance music. And this year, for the first time ever, audiences will be able to experience the iconic tracks that have defined his career through a ten-piece live band with Judge Jules himself at the helm.
‘Judge Jules: Live’โฆ will be coming to Swindonโs MECA venue on 25th Jan 2020.
Julesโs in-depth involvement in many of the recent wave of โclassicalโ dance events, including Gatecrasher, Colours, Club Class and 2019โs Ministry of Sound tour, inspired the decision to take the impact and emotion of the classical shows, but refine the feeling with a wholly new take on live dance music.
With complete creative free rein, Jules curated every element of the performance. Each track has been bespoke reinvented and reworked in a style unique to this live show, featuring a full ten-piece band, with brass, percussion, drums, bass guitar, lead guitar, keyboard, singers, and of course Judge Jules himself. A 90-minute show from start to finish, the music has been selected to represent the breadth and scale of his career.
โThere is something about music being played live that never fails to send shivers down your spine โ it doesnโt matter what the genre is, hearing a track performed by live musicians on stage is something you cannot replicate in the studio, or even on the best nightclub environment. So, I decided to create my own bespoke versions of my all-time favourite records with a specially selected band. Itโs taken a long time to put together, but finally we look forward to taking the โJudge Jules Liveโ tour on the road. This truly is a new take on the โlive dance musicโ phenomenon and the tour bus starts rolling shortly.โ โ Judge Jules
This is not a show to sit down for โ combining the energy of specially-chosen outstanding musicians with his own inimitable presence behind the decks, Jules will take the audience on a tailor-made journey through dance music with vocals, hands-in-the-air moments and plenty of basslines thatโll take you right back to your very first rave.
With audiences demanding more from dance music and newfound focus on a visual as well as a sonic spectacle, Judge Jules Live is a chance for dance fans to lose themselves in the moment with the kind of experience that you just canโt replicate with a solitary DJ.
The Judge still wonโt budge.
Judge Jules will play Swindon MECA – 25th January 2020
I reminisced about Devotion at Golddiggers last week on our homage to Keith Flint, donโt intend to go there again. But, (itโs a dirty big fib, you know it isโฆ) Iโve been contemplating once, in the early nineties, inactive in my car in the carpark, when, what can only be described as โa cheesy raver,โ completely unbeknown to us, steadied himself on the rolled-down driverโs window and allowed their jaw to run a marathon. He jabberingly informed he had no intentions of going back into the club, in his own words, โitโs all that jungle music, know what I mean?โ
Pop Quiz: Who can tell me what this was, and what it was for? Showing your age now whistle posseeee!
To be honest, I didnโt, it was the first time Iโd heard it called by this name. Although, breakbeat had taken over acid house and techno โbleep,โ the โhardcoreโ label was preliminarily splitting. X-L Recordings, albums like The Rebel MCโs Black Meaning Good and Ragga Twins, Reggae Owes me Money, were providing the hardcore scene with reggae-inspired beats which would assist the divide. Generally, many white youths headed for crashing pianos, hi-hat loops and sped up eighties pop samples, defined as โhappy hardcore,โ while the urban minority bought us a shadier, serious arrangement of sparse beats and deeper basslines, we now know as drum n bass.
At the time we considered ourselves maturing ravers, (oh, the irony!) The upcoming generation separated the two, we buried into a new wave of plodding house. Yet with one eye on the divide I appreciated the lunacy of happy hardcore, enjoyed its merry ambience, but couldnโt help feeling drum n bass held the future. It was the more creative and experimental; proved right in the space of only a few years; A Guy Called Gerald, Goldie, and LTJ Bukem were pushing its boundaries into concept albums like it was 1975 space-rock. They prepared the stage for Roni Size, and mainstream acceptance of the genre.
So, I had to chuckle at the premise of the blurb on the Facebook event page, where Vinyl Realm stages a drum n bass night at The Lamb, Devizes on the 23rd March with DJโs Retrospekt, Rappo and Harry B. โWe at Vinyl Realm feel there is nothing in town for young adults to do. So, to fix that we have a night dedicated to the local producers creating heavy DnB, deep House and banging Jungle music.โ
Hey, what about us middle-aged old skool ravers? I can still shake a leg yer know, still got it mate! And when I say old skool, I donโt mean like on Kiss FM when they blast a club anthem from 2006 and think theyโre retrospective; we were there, at the beginning pal, stomping in the mud! We fought an oppressive government so you kids can rave!!
But yeah, youโre probably right, Iโd only be panting disproportionately and holding onto the wall for dear life, or else chewing some kidโs ear off about how we used to do it, like Uncle Albert on a love dove. Best leave it to the younger crew. All jokes aside, I know Devizes D&B DJ Harry B has posted to Facebook in the past, attempting to gage interest into such a night.
I fully support the notion, good on the organisers of this, they’ve hit the hammer on the head; thereโs nothing of this genre in Devizes, and not a lot for young adults; fair play, I hope it goes well and spurs others to provide entertainment for this age group. Seems like it will, limited to fifty tickets, with forty showing interest on the Facebook event page, this will be an exclusive return of D&B in Devizes which you better get in quick on, if youโre a playa. A snip at a fiver, tickets are on sale now at Vinyl Realm.
I just hope the old pub can hold up under the pressure of devastating basslines! I put my concern to Harry. โIโm going to have a test run up there this week with the speakers,โ he confirmed; storming!
It was a long time coming but we finally made it. It was dawn now, a fog fell upon the disused airfield at Enstone, Oxfordshire. My best friend skipped out of the car milliseconds after it parked in the thick, dew-filled meadow. I looked over to him. โThis is the one I was on about!โ he yelped, and wasted no time waiting for me to react, but dived straight into the eye of the sound system, where, due to the fog, an incalculable number of ravers were dancing like madmen on a day out of the funny farm.
Throughout the journey he had been consistently bashing on about this track which sampled the early eighties public information cartoon, Charley Says. And it had been a long journey, from the Green Dragon in Marlborough, blagging a lift from a random old school friend, who was adamant heโd not succumb to the trend, to the tip-off point, Enborne near Newbury. Only to find other cars of confused ravers, some conjecturing we needed to head up the A34 to Oxfordshire. Our driver, now aggravated by us, stamped his foot and announced it was the end of road for him.
The second section of the journey then, saw us thrown out on the M4 junction, and thumbs prepared, three of us danced a pledge for a lift from the multitude of beaten up cars and vans beeping horns and waving from windows over-enthusiastically.
Eventually picked up, we now found ourselves at Pear Tree services, where police closed us in, threating to search every vehicle attempting to leave. But with the garage under siege and cars queuing up as far as the eye could see, from every junction, the police knew they were outnumbered, and eventually gave up, allowing passage down the A44 to Enstone. Until we were left to go about our business, a temporary mock-up rave had developed at the service station, as crowds gathered on the embankment, dancing and blowing horns to a fusion of a thousand plus naff car stereos; it was 3am, eternal.
If it all sounds implausible by todayโs standard weekend, note that this was spring 1991, and we had become fully-fledged illegal ravers, living for the weekend. A time when the breakbeat sound was in its infancy, when corny rave tunes were welcomed; the hardcore posse blew whistles at taking themselves seriously. I nodded my approval, recalling the Charley Says cartoons, and smirking at its humorously converted connotation, if only for a brief second, before headlonging feet, and maybe juddering jawbone first, into the party.
Forward wind like an Easygroove spin a year, weโre attired in blankets in the carpark of Golddiggers in Chippenham, the band whoโd created the Charley Says tune fully known to us now. Theyโd just played a blinding set of bonkers breakbeat and cheesy rave, full of reggae breaks and nonsensical samples. At a time when the burgeoning youth culture was vacant of a sovereign, as rock n roll had Elvis and reggae had Bob Marely, it was a question of how much an artist was willing to sell-out to claim the crown. Perhaps egotistically, The Shamen were among the nominated, targeting shamelessly at the pop charts. But the raver knew this was futile, rave was a faceless folk music, an epoch of anonymity, and if there had to be a king of rave, it would be the ones constantly pushing new boundaries. If there was ever a need to debate this, while it did, the Prodigy remained quiet and reserved.
Yes, the Prodigy played Chippenham in 1992!
A Glastonbury Festival, donโt ask me what year, time just an illusion now, but I remember after this quiet period, the Prodigy burst on stage at a time when dance culture was incarcerated to a blanket stall or concealed hippy sub-festival the raver took all weekend to locate. Expecting to dance to cheesy rave, a blessing being the hardcore had split into happy hardcore and drum n bass, and weโd retired to the somewhat mature house/garage scene, I stood aghast at what I heard.
Promoting โThe Music for the Jilted Generation,โ The Prodigy took, not only the festival to new limits, but what dance music could be. I recall scratching my head, trying to decide if I liked it. Keith Flint bounded around the stage with a duo of green spikey Mohicans on either side of his head, a kind of Johnny Rotten of our era. The once dancer of the group, now bellowed out grinding vocals. It was punk-rock, not post-punk, but raw, energetic viciousness, yet retained rave, in some small way.
Many cite the following album, The Fat of the Land as their magnum opus, yet it only progressed the ethos of The Jilted Generation to the next stage, and gave the sound prestige in NME followers and the mass media. In a world aware of the Jilted Generationโs influence, which bought us outfits who fused indie back into rave; The Chemical Brothers, Monkey Mafia and Fatboy Slim, it became acceptable to both sides of the indie/rave divide, a non-manโs land not intruded since the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses.
If Liam Howlett was the brains behind the group, Keith Flint was the showman, and for the reasons stated above, Iโve felt the sad news of his suicide today harder than that of the passing of Bowie, of Michael Jackson or James Brown, because though it mayโve been one foggy morning on Enstone Airfield in 1991, the memory is crisp in my mind, the first time we heard the kings of rave.
Devizes set to party like itโs 1999; zipping up my boots with Funky Sensation.
Normally, if thereโs a funky sensation in Devizes it means itโs been foggy post-harvest and the aroma of manure has filtered into town. In a similar light, I confess, Iโve been critical in the past about our only nightclub, events hosted tend to mimic whatโs on elsewhere, and I really feel tribute acts have a home in hire venues and pubs, but not necessarily in a night club. Itโs an age thing perhaps, usual nights too commercialised for me, recalling the clubbing scene of the eighties, how it assisted in spawning a decade of raves. To me, a night in a nightclub should be concentrated on DJ culture, be dissident dance music, and most importantly, should be banging, mate.
Here then is something that lacks in Devizes, flourishing with original music a trend I adore, though surely thereโs a place for dance music too? A glitch set to change; with the potential to be a grand night at the Funky Sensation launch in the Exchange on the 5th April, I caught up with the hosting DJ, George Penny, to find out more about this Funky Sensation event doing the rounds on Facebook.
โBasically, I used to DJ about twenty years ago, free parties, private parties and a club residency,โ explains George, who goes by the DJ tag George G-Force. โBut then work, life, mortgage, wife, child came along.โ Itโs not so uncommon, for many the desire to create, artistically or musically though will return to bite them, and George started mixing again about four years ago. โIโve been trying to get back out on the circuit, but it’s a lot harder now, a lot more competition.โ
Heโs been DJing in Frome and Bristol, with appearances for the ‘House of Discoโ collective and Input2 Promotions, but explains, โI always wanted to try and put on my own party a bit closer to home (Melksham) but had really been struggling trying to find a venue. I only heard about The Exchange three weeks ago and I think it’s perfect in terms of location; hoping to pull people from Melksham, Trowbridge, Calne and Chippenham.โ
So, busting out of retirement, and ready to bring the heat with his unique blend of nu-disco and classic-vocal-funky house vibes, G-Force is set to take Devizes back to an era when clubbing meant clubbing. โWe want to bring the fun back, with good old uplifting, hands in the air, sing-a-long music. That could be a classic disco track/re-edit, house anthem or a modern-day club banger!โ
He brings along special guest DJ, Nina LoVe and DJ Stach. Akin to George, Nina took a decade away from the scene to concentrate on family and studies. But with a childhood filled with classical music and musical theatre, and discovering dance music and raving in the nineties, she couldnโt hold the bug in much longer than 2012, as with the discovery of Disclosure and Gorgon City, that led to a new energy for House music, vinyl junkie Nina started learning to mix.
Bath-based Stach has been playing to enthralled crowds since 1990, kicking off his career within the techno scene on the Isle of Wight. Since those halcyon days, DJ Stach has played many genres and has a wide repertoire; pleasing audiences with epic sets featuring nu-disco, classic and tech-house.
He can be found on the set lists of some of the UKโs best boutique festivals and coolest club nights, as well as elite private parties. Previous sets include: Shindig Weekender, Grinagog Festival, Love Summer Festival, The Backroom, and The Nest in Bath.
I gulp when my chat with George raises Shindig, as organiser Slim Goodgroove and I go back to art college days, the dawning of the breakbeat rave explosion and through to the fluffy house days of his Stardust Collective. Time to get all fuzzy and waffle off a parable or three, Uncle Albert style. Think Iโm boring George now, Iโve a tendency to do that, but in hindsight, I really think a decent dance night is missing from the variety of things to do in Devizes, and welcome this prospect.
โI’ve never done anything like this before,โ George tells, โbut thought I’d give it a shot. Obviously, if we get enough people the aim would be to do it, maybe, three times a year.โ
So, from old raver to young house music aficionado, take note; it may be time to dust off your old white gloves and relight the glowsticks. I never thought Iโd see the day! Tickets for this launch party, at a fiver, are available from today.
When I was sauntering through early morning mist, wearing the half-demented-smirk-half-gurn of a madman on a day out of the funny farm, a dreadlocked ragamuffin lounging at the wheel-arch of his van, perpetually waving one hand from fist to flat palm, appeared like magic through the haze. He greeted me with a wide smile, asked me how it was going. Between concentrating on my breathing, I told him it was going very well, save Iโd mislaid my โposse.โ
I complemented him for his wheels, a high-sided second-hand post office van, as I circled it for further investigation. I found at the rear a ladder and asked if I may climb it, in order to get my bearings. He nodded his approval and so I scaled.
On top of the van I could see above the low lying mist to the beautiful sunrise, below it the hats and scraggly ponytails of ravers bobbing like buoys on a temperate ocean. Overcome with the desire to dance, I shouted down, โcan I have a little dance up here?!โ and again the crusty was only too kind to permit my request.
I was at a disused airfield near Enstone in Oxfordshire, dancing adolescent cares away on top of a total strangerโs van. Other grounded ravers, pointed and joined the dance, until one of the congregation visible attempted to climb the ladder. The owner stood and I suspected he wouldnโt wish for this to become a trend, so I took the opportunity to decend before the girl could reach the top, stating we shouldnโt all clamber on the guyโs home. She agreed and we gathered in a circle, dancing, smiling and trading chewing gum for water.
Free Party, 1991, Cassington Nr Oxford
In todayโs age youโd be forgiven for suggesting I made this up, but really, this is just another insignificant happening from 1991, when rave was in its infancy and everyone partied together in peace, illegally. I guess youโd have to have been there to understand, but we danced, we danced harder, faster and a heck of a lot longer than any previous generation.
We danced in fields, in warehouses, on boats, beaches, service station carparks, and even the occasional nightclub. So much so, if you had to label the decade under one united musical genre, โdanceโ would be most apt. Dancing wasnโt compulsory, more essential; youโd only chew your bottom lip off if you didnโt boogie.
Musically it was pioneering, the first not to lend itself to individual artists and bands, rather a DJ culture where a mesh of tastes merged into melting pot. An era when a child could gather a TV cartoon sample, slam a breakbeat loop over it and make a record twenty-thousand tranced nutters would dance all night to. Almost punk in nature, skill caved into creative urge, like rock it experimented until it developed into a million branches, but like folk music, it was the united music of a people, an epoch.
Easygroove on the ones and twos
Despite not having a โking,โ as reggae had Marley and rock had Elvis, though many tried, the concentration of record sales, and creating albums thwarted; a โwhite labelโ more sought than a picture disc.
The hit factories exhausted albums in the previous decade, now compilations of hits, rather than the โconcept albumโ of the seventies. As the underground surged into mainstream, and everyman and his dog took up white gloves, plastic horns and whistles to join a burgeoning revolution, albums battled โrave tapes,โ to find a home again.
Despite this, albums did quite rightly resurface, many influencing the next decade. This then is my definitive top thirty dance albums of the nineties, let the arguments commence. I complied this list from fond but fragile memories, rather than online researched, so it was personal. Feel free to comment with ones I missed, which in your judgement needed to appear.
But why, I hear you cry, why now; you crazy old sausage?
I theorise trends return in blocks of twenty years, whence the youth inspire their offspring. Think about it, since pop music begun, in the 1950s, when it was supposed to be wild, rock n roll, there was more jazz than the 1930s. The 1960s we accept as the time of mods, merging into flower power, great experiments in music abound, but listen to the charts back then, full of crooners akin to the 1940s.
Ah, but when rock came of age in the 1970s, it stretched to new avenues, glam and punk. Yeah but no but, the 1970s was also jammed with teddy boys; caricatured rock n rollers from the 1950โs with bands like Matchbox, Darts and Showaddywaddy for crying out loud!
The 1980s, again a golden age of musical experimentation, with electronics. But hear the charts, note classic soul from the sixties blessed by adverts for jeans, and rock n roll merged into one excruciating โmegamixโ by a cartoon rabbit who shouldโve been shot at birth and boiled in a stew.
So through all eras we seem to hark back twenty years, the nineties may have been my age of dance, but as the hardcore chilled into clubs, house and garage tunes lent themselves to the disco of the seventies, and indie kids revitalised seventies rock, well, they were just indie kids and ravers were having too much fun to pick them up on their radar. The noughties, if they were naughty at all, rather a cultureless of bombardment of naff, so-called R&B; clichรฉ musical technology found solace in the sounds of electronic eighties, and the fashion matched too.
So, by my reckoning, before this decade is through weโre due a flashback to the rave scene, and with the Tory government treating working class like vermin, itโs not so hard to foresee something major slapping them in the face with a Vicโs Vapour-rub smeared dust-mask and blowing a whistle in their ears; least I cross my fingers and hope.
30- Monkey Mafia โ Shoot the Boss (Heavenly Records 1998)
If you thought Damon Albarn was pushing limits with The Gorillaz at the turn of the millennium, or if you thought Death in Vegas made blended cutthroat techno, Jon Carterโs Monkey Mafia outdated and outstripped them both. This is funk, punk-reggae, ragga and sparse beats fused into a frenzy of techno. Itโs a dark, nasty and rambunctious clatter which wobbles the mind. It now lives on my CD rack dusty, too scared to dip into again.
29- Black Star Liner – Bengali Bantam Youth Experience! (Warner Music – 1999)
If you missed this one, itโs never too late; itโs timeless. Imagine Massive Attack making an album for Indian restaurants, fuse it with haunting epic movie themes and youโre partly the way to the dub/Bhaแน gแนฤ sublime crossover experience of the Black Star Liner. This is so gorgeous I couldnโt swallow it, not even with mango chutney. Savour tracks like Swimmer on the tip of your tongue, as the hair on the back of your neck stand on end.
28- Moby โ Play (Mute – 1999)
Play signifies an end to the most mental decade ever, the fact advertisers, TV producers and filmmakers flocked to acquire every track meant the masses were taking heed of what we knew ten years previous, electronic was musicโs destiny. Moby, mild-mannered for an American (he didnโt write a book about his dick,) and modest of his creative output, had been known to us since the word, or track โGo,โ something we never thought heโd surpass; if I only couldโve heard โPorcelain,โ in 1991.
27- Morcheeba โ Who Can You Trust? (Indochina 1996)
A hefty nightโs clubbing saw us washed up on Brighton beach. My mate hopped over to the little chill-out cafรฉ to ask what the tune was that they were playing; been a Morcheeba fan since. Breezy trip-hop, sublime vocals, it mellows the soul. There seemed to be a plethora of similar styled artists arise to chart after Big Calm, their second album; Dido for instance, M People et-al, while Morcheeba remained in the underground, like an old raverโs secret.
26- Jamiroquai – Emergency on Planet Earth (Columbia 1993)
With the Criminal Justice Act taking hold, the free rave scene lay wounded, and I was open to new avenues. Imagine today, recording stuff off the radio to cassette! I was recording the SoundCity on Radio 1 in 1993 when I heard something awesome, something which bent my conceptions of dance and blistered it with unadulterated retrospective funk. I imagined the vocals were supplied via a large afro-Caribbean lady, visualise my surprise when I saw a skinny honky smaller than his hat, the super-cool Jay K. By the following year Iโd seen him perform at Glastonbury, bought a gaudy cap and submerged myself in acid jazz. My peers didnโt favour this move as much as I; popularity of the genre remained exclusive. While Jamiroquai made it through to mainstream, groups like Corduroy, JTQ and Children of Judah went on to produce a few too many albums of similar formula and the movement was short lived. Still, this debut album was earthy-jazz with a conscious and a didgeridoo, and never surpassed by Jay-K.
25 โ Photex โ Modus Operandi โ (EMI 1997)
Well-worn by 97, drum n bass for me had seen better days. But where Goldie and LTJ Bukemโs pioneering albums wasnโt without their flaws, Modus, with peerless Photek drums colluded with the superior jazzy atmospherics of a thriller movie, and melded dystopian synth arrangements, to make it quite simply, perfection. It was a drum n bass awakening for rural techno-heads too, who so far had considered the genre too urban for their tastes. I recall listening to it on the way our first rain-drenched Glastonbury, prior years being clement; it felt apt as we took shelter wherever we could, and wrapped our feet in plastic bags before our putting boots back on.
24 โ The Orb – UF Orb โ (Mercury Records 1992)
Glastonbury, 1992, maybe, scampering like crafty felons through a maze of tents in the dark, deciphering guide-ropes from hallucinogenic wavy lines and somehow magically avoiding tripping, over the guide ropes I mean. There was a noise, it was not music, it was waves, a soundscape dangling in the air; The Orb were on stage some distance away. Ambient house has no place today, face it, but at the time it wowed. It broke all the rules, hardly strokes of melody, more drifts of resonances and echoes of bass. It was the sort of music to either be awake or asleep to, or drift between them blissfully. While the KLF pioneered this from an ice cream van, the mysterious Orb championed it and their second album UF-Orb was the masterpiece of its genre. There were tracks forty minutes long, which would take twenty five of those minutes before a beat came in. Imagine having to cut Blue Room to three minutes for Top of the Pops!
23 โ Deee-Lite World Clique โ (Elektra Records 1990)
I bought this on cassette, why you cry, when you had vinyl? Convenience is the simple answer. Witness the confused expression on a millennium kidโs face when you show him a โtape,โ but it was the digital download of the era, you could share easier than vinyl. Plus, the American funky sounds of Deee-Lite, which would accompany me on bus journeys to art college, wouldโve been viewed as second place during the early โhardcore,โ section of the dance revolution. Whoโd have imagined in only a few years, DJs like Sasha would take the helm and garage and funky house would be at the forefront. But as we matured it did, for us; the hardcore split into โjungleโ and โhappy hardcore,โ as younger, fresher faces adopted it.
So back in 1990, Deee-Lite was a refreshing break, it was psychedelic enough to satisfy, and Lady Miss Kier had legs which went on forever, should you be lucky enough to climb those platform shoes to the beanstalks of tie-dye leggings. I think, however, the timing wasnโt quite there, and in the UK they never made it far past โGroove is in the Heart.โ That said, itโs still a floor-filler today.
22 – Daft Punk โ Homework โ (Parlophone 1997)
Unsure why on earth anyone would call an album this, the last thing you want to be thinking about when partying full force, but thatโs the French for you. Also unusual for a video to attract me to a song, but when I saw that guy with the dogโs head, wandering the streets considered obnoxious for not turning down the volume on his beatbox, well, I rode right into that enormous plodding bassline and figured here was something solid and timeless. I was right, for though my journey into French house was short-lived, รtienne de Crรฉcyโs Super Discount and Airโs Moon Safari coming close to inclusion on this list, Daft Punk are still strong today and still pushing the boundaries of the genre.
21- Rebel MC โ Black Meaning Good (Desire 1991)
Over the oceans, and apparently, over the seas, you know when we come itโs just reality. This โjungleโ antecedent wasnโt originally on my list, but when it suddenly sprang to mind I wondered how I couldโve missed it out. I replaced The Ragga Twinsโ Reggae Owes Me Money album for it, because in reality, it surely worked the other way around for both the Ragga Twins and Rebel MC; they owed reggae money.
Rebel MC though gave credit, even cameos to his reggae influences, and while he may have been aiming for commercial success in the 1980s, when he fired back with Black Meaning Good, he had a powerful message of which hadnโt been tackled from this angle in hip hop previously.
โNo,’ some say, ‘that’s not the way, Chat like that, your tracks won’t get played, Stick to the formula ya had before, Fame and money and a whole lot more’, Cha! Wheel out ah dat, seh dat can’t be, I gotta true-speak intelligently, Maybe for that I might sacrifice sales, but I’ll put more weight on the justice scales.”
Plus he done it in a breakbeat style which whipped ravers into a frenzy; sounds a bit dated now, but a pioneering album the drum n bass scene wouldnโt be the same without; nuff said.
20 – Eat Static โ Implant (Planet Dog 1995)
Fromeโs space-rock the Ozric Tentacles were always a popular band, but once the crusty techno scene took hold, their new outfit was sublime trance, and was the West Country answer to Orbital and Underworld. Oh, attire me with glowsticks and take me back to The Berkely Suite of Longleat, when the whole Universe was compressed into a much smaller Tribal Gathering and despite stern thumps protruding, the crowd were amalgamated, approachable, and hardcore.
This third album from Eat Static was, for me, their pinnacle, but although times were a changinโ in 1995, clubland getting wise, it couldnโt replace getting down and dirty in a forest where police helicopter search lights scanning through trees were treated as visual effects far beyond a nightclubโs glitter ball!
Oh, Iโm going to have to leave it there for now, and return next week with 19-11; anyone got any Veras?
Halfway up a mountain in Andalusia, early noughties; I spot admist the crowd of mad ravers in a tranced frenzy, a distressed toddler crying, and perpetually calling out “mama!”
Rave culture was never just about popping out to a club to wave your arms in the air, and hug complete strangers on a Friday night, it was a way of life. A way of life which had engulfed me at this point, with a good fifteen years under my belt.
I’d done that, got the T-shirt and worn it out. So-much-so, no matter what my state of mind, I was capable of finding moral standing. I jumped to my feet from where we were “chilling” to assist in a way I wasn’t quite sure of, I just knew I couldn’t sit there and watch the child in meltdown.
A hand on my shoulder stopped me, a trusty friend advised me not to get involved. She was right, the mum could be anywhere in this humongous techno fiesta,ย probably didn’t speak English and, what is more, would be too “off her face” to be concerned.
Heartbroken I tore myself away from the sight, consoled myself there was little I could’ve done.
As much as I loved free party raving, I have to admit it’s probably not the best environment for a toddler. It’d take a strong mentality to withhold parental responsibility when all about you is hedonism and mayhem.
There then is the plight of the last great youth culture, like all previous trends, we grew up, we had kids and now the fragments of that once proud scene consist of the odd occasion where you perchance to hire a babysitter but spend most of your time reminiscing about your car breaking down atย Castlemorton with some delinquent dribbling clubber, or such like fable, Uncle Albert style.
However, the times are a changin’ย you soppy old ruffneck ting, and there’s a growing fad sweeping the nation which allows the hardcore massive turned mom or dad to shove their, let’s face it, mostly harmless ways of misspent youth down the throat of their impressionable nipper; and why not?!
Raver Tots host “family raves” where kids and grownups can hit the dance floor together.
The kids, and I’m gathering parents too, are supplied with endless entertainment; face painting, UV lights, bubbles, balloons, confetti and giant parachutes, all in a rave style atmosphere.
They book some of the UK’s top DJ’sย of yore including residentsย Artful Dodger, Brandon Block, Slipmatt & Nicky Blackmarket, attracting up to 1,500 people.
Rave Tots events have proved successful, selling out up toย 3 months in advance.
Closest to here is one on the 4th February at the Bath Pavilion with Nicky Blackmarket playing classic drum ‘n’ bass with MC Chalky. And 8th April at Swindon’s Mecca with DJ Slipmatt.
Founded by Mike Pickets in 2017, Raver Tots has anย ongoing charitable interestย and supports an array of charities that help children with Autism and ADHD.
They advise ear defenders can be worn although the music is kept to safe levels and club lights are in “rave style” but no strobe lights are used. A maximum of three adults are permitted per child but you can’t get in without a child, insuring this is a totally family atmosphere.
What a brilliant idea, I salute the organisers of Raver Tots and I’m pleased to see just because rave has come of age, there’s acceptable outlets keeping the vibe alive in their own, individual way, keen to note though,ย this isn’t completely unique, Bestival innovating family festival vibes since 2004.
Bestival increased this ethos by hosting spin-off club events of a similar nature called “big fish, little fish family raves,” and they’re at the Neeld Community Centre in Chippenham on the 10th March.
They describe the events as being, “designed as much for grown ups as for children; daft, social, anarchic and a whole load of fun for everyone together.” Which is, in a nutshell, what rave was all about to begin with!
![suitedbootedwithcredit300dpi[3515]](https://devizine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/suitedbootedwithcredit300dpi3515.jpg)
devizine.com 