Castlemorton and beyond: Fighting for the right to party
I spent some of the early 90s in squats and fields dancing to acid house and early hardcore, and I spent the last few months chasing up some of the people who organised those parties for this Sunday's Observer Music Monthly, to trace the rise and fall of the free-party movement. I wanted to diagnose outwards from Castlemorton, the UK's largest free-party festival, and an acknowledged turning point in the state's tolerance of the travelling soundsystem movement.

The video above captures the whole Castlemorton affair: battered bus convoys (0:40), daisy-shirted ravers (2:02), the dyed hair and dreadlocks (2:43), the free-market theory as applied to whistles and light-sticks (3:21), Vicks inhalers (4:15) and the music (3:43 - Assassinator's Do It Now - bad tune). Plus, it ends with a naked man jumping off a cliff. Good times.
Swiftly, the police and the state moved in to put a stop to the free-party movement. Castlemorton dominated the BBC News two nights in a row, and the profile of these kids having fun was far too high to let them get away with it. A dedicated police unit was later supported by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, section 63 (1) (b), which outlawed "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats". The entire crew of one soundsystem, Spiral Tribe, were arrested, and other soundsystems fled across Europe. Maybe it wasn't Castlemorton, though, which drew free-party soundsystems to the attention of the authorities: maybe it was Normski's fault.

A few months earlier, Spiral Tribe's profile had already risen to the point where they were interviewed by Normski in a squatted Rotterdam library, for broadcast on his Dance Energy show (above). Sebastian, a Spiral member who I spoke with for OMM is featured in a younger, eager, incarnation.

All jokes aside, the tension between the state and hedonistic travellers in this country has a long and sometimes brutal history. Back in June 1985, the "Peace Convoy", a caravan of 140 vehicles, descended on Stonehenge for the intended 14th Stonehenge free festival (above). There, an already ongoing rivalry with police exploded into the "Battle of the Beanfield". This was cited by a couple of the people I spoke with, including Joe Rush who now co-runs the Mutoid Waste Company soundsystem and was a member of the "Peace Convoy" at the time, as a major escalation in the long-running and sometimes violent tensions between, on one side, travellers, free-party organisers and ravers, and on the other, the police and the state.
According to some I spoke with, tensions have now eased and compromises have been made, to allow some soundsystems to hold legally licensed events. "In the Thatcher years, the battle lines were drawn," Mutoid Waste's Joe Rush told me. "Now it's more relaxed." Maybe it was back then, too, although we didn't know it.

This footage (above) from a 1988 Sunrise party in a field shows a long-haired raver who looks suspiciously like the current leader of the opposition (0:08). Even though his attendance is categorically denied by the Tories, it's not as far-fetched a possibility as it sounds: Paul Staines, now an influential rightwing blogger, was back then Sunrise's PR officer. To promote the cause of his parties, Staines even invented a new explanation for the term "acid house" – that "acid", on the streets of Chicago where house music was born, meant stolen, and was a reference to the sample-based music, and not a reference to drugs at all, honest – a made-up fact that was passed off as truth until two Chicago-born musicians laughed him off a stage.

Read Tim Guest's story of the free-party scene, and interviews with the survivors of the scene, in this Sunday's OMM.