At the beginning of November 2022, after a free rave party with over 3,000 people gathering in the outskirts of Modena, Italy, was shut down (without any major confrontation with the police), the newly elected Italian right-wing government led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy (FdI) party (a party with neofascist roots), introduced a new decree to ban raves (it should be highlighted that Italy is not facing at the moment an illegal rave emergency, there aren't indeed massive illegal raves being organised all over the country ever week).
Dubbed the "anti-rave law", the decree established restrictions on gatherings of more than 50 people that could be perceived to be posing a danger to public order, safety and health, punishing those who organized events on public or private grounds or buildings belonging to third parties.
The decree also provided for a prison sentence of between three and six years and fines ranging from €1,000 to €10,000 for the organisers and criminalised the simple act of participating in those gatherings, establishing, in such cases, a reduced sentence.
Given the vague terms in which the decree was formulated at the beginning of November, opposers highlighted that it may have constituted a restriction to the fundamental right to freedom of assembly, as protected by Article 17 of the Italian Constitution, as well as Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 21 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees people's fundamental right to gather in public spaces (think political protests, strikes, student protests in schools, universities and so on) to express their views or dissent and share ideas.
Amendments to change this section followed in December and political protests by students occupying schools or by trade unions or political parties occupying public spaces were removed from the decree that now limits the offence to "anyone who organises and promotes the arbitrary invasion of other people's land or buildings, public or private, for the purpose of carrying out a musical or other gathering of entertainment" when there is "a concrete danger" to public health or safety as a result of non-compliance with drug, safety and hygiene regulations. The application to groups of 50 or more people was also lifted after protests from unions and political parties. The decree (that also includes legislation on separate matters that do not have anything to do with raves such as the abolition of COVID-19 vaccine mandates for doctors earlier than previously planned) was approved at the end of December and therefore it has now become law.
When at the beginning of November Meloni's cabinet passed the decree, the Prime Minister claimed she was proud of it. Yet the regulations imposed by this decree are not new, but echo the UK's Criminal Justice Act of 1989 and Meloni seems to be using the same anti-raves excuses employed by Thatcher's government at the end of the '80s in Great Britain to combat illegal raves.
In 1989 in the UK, the word "rave" had a negative connotation for the authorities, after all every sub-culture breeds its own moral panic. But, for those who took part in this anti-establishment ritual, raves were "temporary autonomous zones", forms of escapism, but also places where you could make a statement about being part of a collective. In the introduction to the play "Headstate" (1996) Scottish author Irvine Welsh states "the only way working-class people can now meaningfully interact is in club, at raves and at parties".
Nowadays we may be digitally united by the Internet, but a rave, especially in a post-Covid world, remains a place of physical connection in a disconnected world. Just like in the late '80s empty warehouses where raves took place were the last refuge of youth in search of a good time, raves nowadays continue to hint at social issues and an architectural lack of spaces designated for large crowds to have fun and release their energies in post-industrial cities. Raves were, and continue to be, places where people unite to share a common experience (modern anxieties such as unemployment, lack of stable jobs and future prospects…).
In many ways the Italian anti-rave decree proves that governments are still afraid of raves, officially as they are places where substances are used and abused, but, in reality, because a rave can unite people, especially marginalised adolescents in the real world.
Bruce Eisner in Ecstasy: The MDMA Story stated that raves are a rite of passage. "Raves can be viewed as contemporary mutations of these traditional initiations, which played a vital role in the psychic transition from youth to adulthood," he wrote. "It is important for the young to gather together, to dance their dances, to sing their chants, to remain awake through all night, to take their drugs and have their visions - activities that were important components of the ancient rites."
What follows is a brief essay on the history of Acid House and raves as a tribute to the 35th anniversary of the second Summer of Love (1988-2023). Rave on.
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To be able to talk about raves in the UK, we have to introduce Acid House. Call it a movement or a subculture, Acid House shaped, moulded and remodelled a decade and the mind of those who lived through it, affecting the life of Great Britain from the late '80s.
The Warehouse club in Chicago is considered the place were "House" music was born and where Frankie Knuckles, its father, used to DJ-ing, but the "acid house" genre was born when Ron Hardy played at Chicago's Music Club, a tape with a peculiar track on it assembled by Marshall Jefferson and Nathaniel Jones, AKA DJ Pierre. The two produced with a Roland TB-303, originally designed as a bass-line machine, mesmerising fizzling sounds while they were simply trying to figure out as it worked. The monster that came out of their session was called "Acid Tracks" and was released by Jefferson and Jones under the collective name Phuture. Doubts about the name aroused: someone suggested that it came from the fact that they were "putting LSD in the water at the Music Box", while Larry Serman boss of Trax records said that it sounded like the acid rock he remembered from Vietnam, while Marshall Jefferson commented that "It was a mood, it didn't mean drugs".
Since then musicians tried to defend the term and separate it from the connection with LSD, defending the music belonging to acid house as affecting like a drug or connecting the word "acid" with Chicago slang term "acid burn", which indicates "to steal", or sample somebody else's sounds (this explanation was provided years later by Paul Staines of the Freedom to Party Campaign in the UK as he tried to play down the drug aspect of the scene to discourage anti-party legislation).
Bearing in mind this definition now, we have to make a jump in time and space and make the acquaintance of Ecstasy, the drug known as MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine). Between 1982 and 1986, those who used E in Britain were club runners and goers, musicians but also fashion designers, models and people gravitating around the fashion business. The first E parties in London took place in 1985, when the first article on the drug MDMA also appeared on The Face. In the same year, in April, Newsweek published an article entitled "Getting High on 'Ecstasy'" stating: "(…) users say it has the incredible power to make people trust one another, to banish jealousy and to break down the barriers that separate lover from lover, parent from child, therapist from patient".
British revellers discovered the real power of Ecstasy on the Spanish island of Ibiza. A touristy place and a haven for hippies from the mid-'60s, Ibiza turned in the '80s a new haven for British youths deluded and disillusioned from the situation at home. These youngsters trapped in pointless low paid jobs or subsisting on the dole started travelling to Tenerife in the winter and Ibiza in the summer, doing odd jobs, serving behind bars, giving out promotional tickets for clubs or engaging in illegal activities including credit card scams, robberies and drug dealing. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wanted a nation of entrepreneurs, but these youngsters were different from the yuppies back home, as they were into DJing, writing, clubbing, dancing and dealing.
These young Brits used to hang around the Amnesia club in Ibiza, where Alfredo Fiorillo, its DJ, launched his mish mash of various records and sounds, later re-christened "Balearic", indicating a mix of genres and a whole gamut of musical possibilities.
In 1987, while Britain was depressed and moribund, stuck in Thatcher's third term of conservative rule, four DJs, Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling, Johnny Walker and Nicky Holloway reached Ibiza. Here they got in touch with the Ecstasy culture and brought it back to the UK.
The Ibiza crowd dressed in signature baggy sweatshirts, dungarees and strings of beads around their necks, tried to recreate a holiday atmosphere at the Project Club in London after 2.00am when the club officially closed. When the Project closed Danny Rampling launched Shoom in the Fitness Centre gym near Southwark Bridge, while Oakenfold and Ian St. Paul launched Future at the Sactuary. Shoom adopted what was going to become in future the symbol of a generation, the Smiley logo.
Nights of happy madness followed in which people were seen hugging teddy bears or hugging each other while their fluorescent accessories traced fluid patterns under the strobe lights. Bodies were packed tightly together and nobody cared about showing off, clubbers were indeed there to be part of a rite, to lose themselves in an almost Dionysian ritual.
Fashion played a role: anything baggy, or two sizes too big was desirable; then Smiley or Boy's Own T-shirts and dungarees; patched jeans, shorts and bandannas, clothes that also served to recreate the Ibiza mood. This kind of dressing down, this anti-style was compared by Professor Hillegonda Rietveld, expert in the study of sound and music in media, culture and the creative industries at London South Bank University, to an anti-language, indicating "an oppositional and marginalised group".
According to Rietveld, the lack of style constituted indeed "a style in itself" that ended up marking an identity, a way to reject and react to yuppie clichés, and to the exclusivity of some clubs. The Sunday Times remarked in October 1988 that "the hordes" that frequented the clubs "were not the regular designer-label disco-music devotees, but a hotchpotch of traditionally marginalised adolescents."
Often present among the other club paraphernalia were cycle masks full of Vicks VapoRub to enhance the E rush or white gloves and light sticks to heighten the visual faculties, but ever present was the pill of Ecstasy costing between £15-25 – from White Doves and Triple X's to M&Ms, Dennis the Menaces, Rhubarb&Custards (taking their name from school dinner desserts), Snowballs, Disco Biscuits and Love-hearts (from the popular '70s candies).
MDMA gave a sudden expression of being all right with the world, of feeling good, it was considered an empathogen with the power to hook the mind to the body making the users feel the insistent rhythms of house music pulsating inside them, urging them to dance. Ecstasy helped spreading feelings of belonging to a peace and love fraternity, of being at one with the crowd.
While Shoom moved to the YMCA in Tottenham Court Road, Paul Oakenfold organised the "Spectrum" events at Heaven in 1988, while Nicky Holloway was starting The Trip at The Astoria. Quite often when clubs closed people kept on dancing outside, something that confused the police who, called to disperse what they thought was a raging mob, found themselves in front of Day-Glo revellers who danced when the officers switched their sirens on, started jumping up and down and shouted: "Can you feel it?!" The authorities could hardly have known that the siren and slogan formed the refrain to Todd Terry's house classic, "Can You Party?".
Acid House exploded and with it the Summer of Love, that summer of 1988 in which London clubland produced a crowd that would have become dangerous for the establishment later. A new summer started, with a name plagiarised from 1967, when the first Summer of Love took place. The Timelords, one of the incarnations of Situationists band KLF, writing their manual in which they explained how to produce a number one hit in "the easy way", stated "At the time of writing it is the Summer of Love 1988 and we would seriously advise anybody in search of the groove to spend the night at the ubiquitous acid house event, drink very little alcohol, loose your mind on the dance floor and shake your hands in the air 'till you feel it".
But, together with the Summer of Love came the media panic generated by all the newspapers that started investigating the scene and enquiring what "acid house" really meant. The first suspicions surrounded the word "acid" were always connected with LSD with the consequence was that records containing the word "acid" were soon banned.
After the first Ecstasy related deaths, the police started its raids, though at that moment no one was totally aware of the risks of the drug and indulged in taking the tablets. An article published on New Statesman & Society (2nd September 1988), stated that Shoom, Spectrum, Love and The Trip were the clubs where acid house music was the dominant beat, and Ecstasy was the forbidden drug. The same article described acid house as "a dislocating dance sound" and its records as "using barely coded references to ecstasy as a way of adding excitement to what, in some cases, was a routine and uninventive attempt to capture the awesome relentless of the best sounds".
The magazine stated that Acid House was "an authoritarian language of hedonism, hysteria, subservience and control" and the movement cast the foundations for a "Dionysian culture" (New Statesman & Society, December 1988).
The scene wouldn't have developed into what it did without Ecstasy providing the intensity and positivity needed. Ecstasy also changed the way music was made: looking back on the phenomenon, in an article published on Q in June 1998, the Stone Roses' Ian Brown stated that the drug changed the way people made music as kids started making records in their bedrooms again, with the consequence that new and independent labels mushroomed. "It was like thousands of people waiting to start work and suddenly being allowed to. It was way bigger than punk. It shifted everything," Brown explained.
Yet, soon things changed: at the end of 1988 fear spread through the media. On 5th September The Sun titled "London's weirdo acid house craze"; on 19th October The Sun wrote "Evil Of Ecstasy"; the day after the same newspaper suggested "Acid House Horror", while a Radio One DJ, Peter Powell, declared the movement was "the closest thing to zombiedom". In the meantime, D-Mob anthem, "We Call It Acieed!"(1989), with its bleeping battle of mind piercing cry of "ACIEED!" climbed the charts while Radio 1 banned all the songs containing the reference to the word "acid".
On the political front, Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government introduced Section 28 (commonly known as Clause 28), a legislative designation for a series of laws across Britain that prohibited the "promotion of homosexuality" by local authorities (in effect from 1988 to 2000 in Scotland; from 1988 to 2003 in England and Wales). Boy George answered with his "No Clause 28" anthem. The song opened with a Thatcher impersonator stating "The aim of this government is to make everyone as miserable as possible".
In the meantime, as the increase in arrests for public order disturbances reached 2,000 people between 1987 and 1988, Tory ministers, invoked the 1960s legacy of 'permissiveness' to rationalise raves, an apparently difficult political problem of law and order. According to Steve Redhead and Antonio Melechi writing from the pages of the New Statesman in December 1988, the mass arrests worried the government about "the re-emergence of deviant subcultures". "For a government riding high after a third successive general election victory, this might have seemed to be a political stumbling block", the article highlighted.
Around the same time, Tony Colston-Hayter, seeing the potential of acid house parties, started commercialising the events, launching large outdoor parties, hedonist wonderlands such as Sunrise that took place in hangars, or fields along the orbital M25 that encircles London, which eventually became the road of the ravers, and was later honoured in Adamski's eponymous track.
The events were successful as people were attracted by the prospect of doing drugs and by the sense of adventure in finding the location: the exact place of the party was kept secret until the very last moment and ravers would call at a certain time a phone number connected to a hotline that was printed on the ticket to find the location. In this way, they avoided being discovered by the police.
The summer of 1989 arrived bringing with it "a rave new world" with large crowds of people dancing and metaphorically sticking two fingers up the establishment. Meanwhile MDMA started being mixed with other substances, MDEA or MDE (3, 4 Methylenedioxyethyl-amphetamine) and MDA (3,4 Methylenedioxyamphetamine), and, as Ecstasy was being adulterated with amphetamine or replaced by concoctions of E with other substances, the vibe changed turning the celebratory mood of the early days into a sort of aggressive euphoria.
Simon Reynolds, author of the encyclopedic Energy Flash, saw raves like a "matrix of lifestyle, ritualised behaviour and beliefs". For those who lived it, raves were like a religion, but, "from the standpoint of the mainstream observer," Reynold noted, they looked more "like a sinister cult." Reynolds explained in his book that raves pushed him to think "about questions of class, race, gender, technology. Mostly devoid of lyrics and almost never overtly political, rave music (…) uses sound and rhythm to construct psychic landscapes of exile and utopia".
Nicholas Saunders experienced the rave mania and wrote about it in his E and the Dance Culture, stating about raves: "That experience was a revelation. I felt as though I completely understood what raves are all about - including the music, which had always grated on me. (...) the music constantly provided energy to lift one up without ever letting one down; (...) I found myself not only dancing to the heavy beat, but breathing to it too, sometimes letting out sounds along with the music. There was subtlety hidden in the change of the beat, a kind of tease that made me smile each time. And it felt so healthy, as though I was moving in a way that was true expression of myself, with every part of my body feeling free and flexible. I felt much younger, almost reborn."
But raves weren't just a political experience, dancing became indeed a political act, or rather an affirmation of belonging to a society, as Sheryl Garratt reports in Adventures in Wonderland, stating "In 1987, Mrs Thatcher had declared that 'there is no such thing as society' and that we should rely on ourselves first. In fields and warehouses and aircraft hangars around Britain, for a while it felt as if we were building an alternative society of our own".
Mrs Thatcher's assaults on the idea of community, on the notion of collective, were indeed met by a movement that, through music, dancing and drugs, reconstituted and strengthened that idea of community even if it was for one night only. There were also no prejudices: it didn't matter who you were or what you wore or how you danced, as raves were anti-élitist and pro-inclusivity places.
The Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie commented in an article on Mixmag in 1991, "In the eighties all you had was Thatcherism which was all about isolating and alienating people, encouraging a selfish mentality. I think what dance music did, in an unconscious way, was bring people together again - maybe it was partly due to drugs or ecstasy, but you'd have five, six hundred people with their arms up in the air dancing to something like 'We Are Family', smiling and singing along. (...) Raves taught people to like each other again, get back in touch with their feelings, especially young people."
Negative reports by the media continued in the meantime: after Sunrise's Midsummer Night's Dream party, the newspapers insisted in casting dark shadows on the acid house scene. The Sun reported the story of young girls dancing near dealers "while drug-crazed youths writhed to alien rhythms, tearing heads off pigeons in their frenzy as a mere six policemen looked on helplessly".
The Happy Mondays maraca man Bez in his biography Freaky Dancin' (1998) remembers how the massive outdoor events taking place in the countryside were perceived as a subversive force on a scale never encountered before by the government that "panicked at the uprisin of their future electorate an banned partyin with the speedy introduction of the Criminal Justice Act".
The police tried more than once to interfere with the means of communication of the ravers, mainly pirate stations and mobile phones through which the indications to reach the place where the rave would take place was revealed. Colston-Hayter was convinced by his old friend, the Libertarian Conservative Paul Staines, to launch a Freedom to Party campaign at the Conservatives conference in Blackpool. As an organisation, Freedom to Party presented the alliance of Sunrise, Energy, Biology, Ibiza and World Dance among the others. Colston-Hayter defended the rave organisers with the words "Maggie should be proud of us, we're a product of enterprise culture".
Yet the government wasn't proud at all of these "entrepreneurial" kids: in December 1989 Graham Bright, MP for Luton South and Parliamentary Private Secretary to Prime Minister John Major for four years (later implicated in the "Cash for Question" scandal in 1994) proposed a fine up to £20,000 or six months of imprisonment (or both) to the organisers of illegal raves and the confiscation of any profits in excess of £10,000. The first suggestion would have required a legislation, while the second could have been implemented by the making of an order under the 1988 Criminal Justice Act. In this way the Bill was going to criminalise a whole section of the youth population.
Usually the main law involved for what concerned parties was the 1982 Public Entertainment Act, that stated a licence was needed to hold a public event. The parties organised in 1988 escaped this rule since they were defined as "private". Yet the 1967 Private Places of Entertainments Act stated that private entertainment events done for financial gain must also have a licence.
The Bill was met with derision by the main stars of the scene: Guru Josh released the track "Whose Law (Is It Anyway?)"; female raggamuffin toaster MC Kinky highlighted in an interview on Number One in 1990 that raves were "the only thing England has where all races, black, Asians or whatever, are having a good time together." The band VIM sampled Thatcher's voice, cut it and put it on their record "Maggie's Last Party", so that it sounded like a continuous "Rave, rave, rave".
Hopes and rebellions were eventually shattered by the Home Secretary, the Rt Hon David Waddington QC MP: according to him, illegal acid house parties caused enormous problems for local people in terms of noise, disturbance and traffic congestion, as well as placing considerable burdens on the police and local authorities. It was clear that the UK government was afraid of the youth challenging its order and rebelling to its subordination.
The 1988 Licensing Act had given more power to the police "to monitor premises and increased the licensing sessions from one a year to seven", but Home Office Minister John Patten suggested to add a "confiscation of 'criminal proceeds'" to the 1988 Criminal Justice Act. The Sun claimed that the Acid House evil craze had ended, the party was officially over, but the truth then (and now as well with Meloni’s law in Italy) is that the ravers were the scapegoat of a society that wasn't (and isn't) functioning any more.
The first Freedom to Party demo took place on 27th January 1990 in Trafalgar Square but apparently it did not mean anything to the government despite its slogan "Write a letter. Say 'Maggie! Maggie! I want to dance!'", reverberated on the speakers. A second demonstration followed in March, but on 13rd July 1990 the Entertainment (Increased Penalties) Bill became active and confiscation started. The official excuse was the physical safety of party-goers at unlicensed venues, but the truth was that the establishment was caught in a moral panic, while the protagonists of the story reclaimed their own connection to the establishment that hated but that had also generated them.
The band The Happy Mondays, for example, stated they felt like "Thatcher's children" or rather "illegitimate children": according to them young people selling drugs at raves were - in their own ways - entrepreneurs, maybe illegal ones and very different from the enterprising business people Mrs Thatcher expected, but still entrepreneurs.
Acid House and raves were indeed apolitical phenomena, but they were also the result of the spirit of the '80s and they had happened because people had no serious expectations of getting anything better out of life (come to think of it, the situation is not so different nowadays, raves are still a way to escape an unsatisfying reality...). In his autobiography Bez stated that ecstasy "took the monotony out of bein on the dole or sinking under the pressure of trying to cope on criminally low wages in a desperate bid to maintain dignity". If among the effects of prolonged E taking there is the loss of seratonin which might eventually take to memory loss, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, violent outbursts and other break downs, being without a job might take to the same effects. "Not much of a risk then, considerin the outcome can be pretty similar, whether it is the result of the external effects of livin in a run-down community or the internal effects of takin drugs within the same community," Bez concluded.
On 22nd November 1990 Margaret Thatcher resigned. Yet the war on raves continued: when the fourth term of conservative rule started with John Major and with an incompetent and directionless government, the new leader continued Thatcher's work when he insisted in keeping the 1986 Public Order Act active. For this government ravers and New Age travellers continued to be a problem, a threat, while ecstasy continued to be a reasonable refuge, a logical solution to real life problems.
1992 brought more "crimes against the government”, including pirate radios and the resurgence of illegal raves. This was also the year in which dancing under the Canary Wharf Tower (One Canada Square) represented mocking and destroying at the same time everything the skyscraper, also known with the nickname of "Thatcher's cock", stood for, in particular the upward-aspiring ambitions of an Enterprise Culture that had left too many behind.
Once again, the government was scared of the power of the people coming together and generating a community and so it took further restrictions with Part 5 of the 1994 Criminal Justice Act. This section put restrictions on outdoor raves, festivals and travellers, focusing in particular on the latter. Techno travelers, a hybrid created when hippies came in touch with the Acid House movement, were rather popular at the time and were targeted as they moved around in their buses and organised free illegal events.
The Bill was the result of the government's dislike of people who lived differently and gave the power to the police to dismantle gatherings of ten people. Besides, according to the Bill, even if officers reasonably believed that those ten people were setting up a rave, or were merely waiting for one to start, they could have ordered them to disperse; failure to comply was a crime punishable with a three-month prison sentence or a £2,500 fine. Moreover, the police were granted the power to stop anyone who came within a one-mile radium of this potential rave and order them to proceed no further. Other provisions made illegal squatting, travelling, and aggravated trespass. At the time, lawyers claimed the Bill was ill-drafted, while civil liberties groups branded it oppressive.
One extremely interesting point that many forget about the Bill is that it tried to usher people back into licensed leisure patterns: conspiracy-theorists at the time claimed that Part 5 of the CJB was the government's payback to those major brewing companies for their contributions to the Conservative Party coffers. Ecstasy was usually taken with water and not with alcohol and sales of alcoholic beverages went down while raves were all the rage in the UK. Alcopop beverages were introduced to get a generation that had lost its appetite for alcohol reacquainted to it. In much the same way, you may argue, there could be something fishy about the current anti-rave law in Italy, as the government seems interested in banning illegal entertainment while supports club owners (when clubs closed down during the Covid-19 pandemic, both The League's Matteo Salvini and Brothers of Italy's Giorgia Meloni, at the time at the opposition, claimed the government was taking away young Italians' right to have fun), facilitating in this way leisure establishments owned by their own friends (Tourism Minister Daniela Santanchè owned shares of the Forte dei Marmi-based Twiga club till November, when she sold them back to the original club owner and to her own partner...but this would require a separate investigation, so let's go back to the original raves...).
The CJB, in its most abominable point, prohibited also house music, defined as "sounds of wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats" and explained the word "rave", as a "gathering on land in the open air (including a place partly open to the air) of 100 or more persons (whether or not trespassers) at which amplified music is played during the night (with or without intermissions) and such as, by reasons of its loudness and duration at the time at which it is played, is likely to cause serious distress to the inhabitants of the locality". Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh stated the bill was "possibly the most Orwellian entitled piece of legislation ever".
The 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act became law on November 3rd and effectively active in April 1995, despite all the demos against it and the records released in protest, among them Retribution's "Repetitive Beats" and the Primal Scream's cover of The Clash's "Know Your Rights" that was featured on an Anti-Criminal Justice Act album.
At the beginning of the application of the CJA, the New Statesman commented "The consequence of such wide-ranging hostility to a booming part of youth culture will be alienation and division. Politicians should be aware of the costs involved in precipitating this reaction" (New Statesman, 16th August 1996).
Already on 4th November a campaign called the "Invasion of Britain" was launched on the Internet; among its supporters there were the shaman Fraser Clark and Timothy Leary. It consisted in sending e-mails to English multinationals or institutions, protesting for the introduction of a law that was killing the right of gathering. A fanzine for ravers, Tech-net, added that the CJA showed that the government was scared of the people's power: the Act re-staged indeed the eternal dichotomy of "Rave Vs the Establishment".
In the first story featured in Irvine Welsh's Ecstasy, the only way to make himself heard for the main character is to dance, to party, since that is the only thing that proves that you are alive, this is the true struggle against a government that wants to suppress a form of entertainment ("(Glen) felt that you had to party, you had to party harder than ever. It was the only way. It was your duty to show that you were still alive. Political sloganeering and posturing meant nothing; you had to celebrate the joy of life in the face of all those grey forces and dead spirits who controlled everything, who fucked with your head and livelihood anyway, if you weren't one of them. You had to let them know that in spite of their best efforts to make you like them, to make you dead, you were still alive. Glen knew that this wasn't the complete answer, because it would all still be there when you stopped, but it was the best show in town right now.")
Acid House remains important not for the paraphernalia around it, for the music, clothes, lifestyles or drugs of choice, but for something else, for its spirit, creativity, expression and enjoyment of life for its own sake. In 1996, Irvine Welsh deemed it important as a "reaction against the narrow individualism defined by the political right". E culture allowed indeed a generation in the UK to get a glimpse of a communal experience, of what unity meant, when politics was about the individual.
Some used this experience to create spaces for themselves, releasing records, launching independent record labels and opening record shops. "I think the culture was more important than the drug in the way it showed working class kids they could be an independent person", commented Paul Oakenfold in an article published on Q magazine to celebrate the 1988-1998 decade, "They started running their own clubs, DJ-ing, designing artwork and making records".
But raves and drugs didn't only have an impact on music, but on literature as well: the publishing market was indeed invaded by rave fiction and chemical related stories. The genre found a prophet in Irvine Welsh, whose novels and short stories often featured drug taking and rave scenes. In "The Rosewell Incident", featured in the anthology Children of Albion Rovers, DJ Lenny Dee gets a mention while the alien land on Earth to conquer it and set an amazing rave. In 1997 the Melody Maker recommended among the best acid house books Matthew Collin and John Godfrey's Altered States, the collection of chemical stories Disco Biscuits edited by Sarah Champion, Jeff Noon's Vurt and Pollen and Nicholas Blincoe's Yello Salad. The article also mentioned Alan Warner's These Demented Lands, follow up to his Morvern Callar (translated in Italian with the title "Rave Girl"), with its "aggressive, mission bound rave assault troops".
Often the books published in these years had their own soundtracks, as it happened with the anthology Disco Biscuits, and with Welsh's Ecstasy. Besides the books were often promoted with club nights with DJs and writers, Irvine Welsh and Jeff Noon for example did presentations with LTJ Bukem and Marshall Jefferson at The End, in London.
Raves also keep on coming back in fashion collections: Jeremy Scott relaunched the colours of psychedelia and childlike jewellery in his S/S 2015 collection; Miu Miu's Resort 2017 collection was an ode to the ravers of the 1990s; each year Loewe releases a Paula's Ibiza capsule collection, named after the legendary 1970s boutique on the island. The capsule is usually a celebration of hedonism with colourful prints and bright fluorescent yellow, orange, pink and green shades (and at times iconic Smiley faces).
Raf Simons' S/S 23 collection the designer's last one for his own brand, was presented last October with a show-cum-rave at London's Printworks, a printing press turned dance club (soon to be demolished).
Acid House in the meantime faded away, giving life to many other genres, splintering into the speed fuelled rhythms of hardcore, gabber, jungle, drum'n'bass, and Big Beat, in a rush of polydrug use and poly-rhythmic beats. All of them represented the changes society went through and the fast and faster lifestyles we have adapted to.
Global socio-economic deterioration, a pandemic that doesn't seem to go away, climate change, the war in Ukraine – these are just some of the worries on our minds. Raves still offer a release from such worries, constraints and anxieties.
But raves also changed their aims and objectives: last summer youth organization Repair Together launched "clean up raves" in Yahidne in northern Ukraine, with DJs playing techno music as volunteers and locals worked together to restore areas liberated from Russian occupation. Other events followed as documented in the link on the Repair Together page that takes visitors to an Instagram post entitled "Can raves save culture?" with a video showing 300 people who gathered in Ivanivka to clean the House of Culture destroyed by Russian troops last March.
Guess you can maybe stop raves, but you can't stop youth culture chasing what it believes in or transforming what governments conceived for decades as mere illegal gatherings, into temporary autonomous zones to reclaim their freedom and their thirst for culture.
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