Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (28 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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On the last day, after inexplicably hanging around rather than attempting to sneak a getaway, thirteen members of the Tribe are arrested, and several sound-systems are impounded. Police forces across rural Britain start collaborating in Operation Snapshot: the creation of a massive database with names of ringleaders and licence numbers of travellers’ and ravers’ vehicles. An intensive campaign of surveillance and intelligence work is mounted to ensure that any future Castlemortons are nipped in the bud. And the Conservative government begins to hatch the ultimate death-blow to the free party scene: the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act.
Terra-Technic Terrorists
 
‘Let us admit that we have attended parties where for one brief night a republic of gratified desires was attained. Shall we not confess that the politics of that night have more reality and force for us than those, of say, the entire US government? Some of the “parties” we’ve mentioned lasted for two or three years.’
– Hakim Bey, ‘The Temporary Autonomous Zone’
 
 
I first met Spiral Tribe a few months prior to Castlemorton, at a ‘legit’ club called the Soundshaft with which the Tribe had some vague connection. Within minutes, I’m informed that I’m already part of the cosmic ‘spiral’. Synchronicity is at work: my T-shirt, of sampler-wielding cyber-punks The Young Gods, happens to have a luminous spiral in the middle. What’s more, there are pictures of bees on the sleeves, which echo a recent Spiral Tribe rave at a farm, where a hive was knocked over, unleashing a vast cloud of bees. (Nobody got stung.) Even more synchronistically, the farm was in Hertfordshire, a county with which the Tribe claim a ‘special connection’, and where I just so happen to have spent my childhood. The Tribe grin like maniacs, each coincidence confirming their mystical worldview.
The next night, I attend my first Spiral Tribe party, at a dilapidated squatters’ house in North East London. Five years earlier, an equivalent squat party’s soundtrack would have been dub reggae or hippy music like Gong. But tonight, a thick, tactile web of techno-voodoo rhythms writhes through the murk. Gyrating light-beams glance off walls mottled with dry rot and mildew, illuminating cryptic Spiral Tribe insignia, and refracting through the curlicues of ganja smoke. Downstairs in the makeshift chill-out room, assorted Spiral folk huddle by a gas fire, rolling spliffs. Some snort ketamine, an anaesthetic drug suddenly in favour with the hardcore psychedelic contingent within rave culture. Slang terms for ketamine are ‘baby food’ (users sink into a blissful, infantile inertia) and ‘God’ (some users are engulfed in a heavenly radiance, and, if religious, become convinced they’ve met their Maker) .
A week after the squat-party, I get the chance to interrogate Spiral Tribe in the aftermath of another event, this time at a derelict pub. Upstairs, survivors lie slumped and glazed on soiled mattresses. On the wall, someone has aerosol-sprayed a pentagram with the number twenty-three in one corner. The uncanny power and alleged omnipresence of the number twenty-three is one of a motley array of mystical beliefs to which the Spirals subscribe. It’s the sum of paired chromosomes in a DNA helix. All Spiral Tribe information phone lines contain the number. And Castlemorton kicked off on 23 May. ‘Twenty-three is gonna slap you in the face, freak you out, it’ll really start to make you doubt your security in what you know,’ the Tribe’s spokesman Mark Harrison warns me, promising that I’ll start seeing the number all over the place. (I don’t.)
Expounding his anarcho-mystic creed, Mark has the visionary gleam of a prophet in his eyes. After half an hour of his breathless, punctuation-free discourse, I’m mesmerized. I begin to see why he has such a hold over his disciples – and that’s what they are, for all the party line of no hierarchy. At one point, a Tribesman describes Mark as the Second Coming, only to be swiftly silenced by a reproving glance from the guru himself. Yet despite the cultic, almost Manson-like aura, a surprising amount of what Mark and his acolytes say makes sense.
‘We keep everything illegal because it’s only outside the law that there’s any real life to be had. The real energy in rave culture comes from illegal dance parties, pirate radio, and white label 12 inches that bypass the record industry altogether. Rave is about people creating their own reality. At our parties, you step into the circle and enter ritual space, Spiral Tribe reality. Last summer, we did a party that went on for fourteen days non-stop,’ he boasts, referring to The White Goddess Festival at Camelford in Cornwall, which lasted from 22 August to 4 September 1991. ‘It’s a myth that you need to sleep. Stay awake and you begin to discover the real edges of reality. You stop believing in anything that anyone told you was true, all the false reality that was hammered into you from birth.’
‘In the old days, rock bands had to go to record companies and sign their souls away just to be able to put out a record,’ says saucer-eyed Seb, the former music student largely responsible for Spiral Tribe’s own mindwarping, mutant techno. ‘But now cheap technology means anyone can do it. Just compare the music released on white labels with the stuff released by major companies – you can taste the freedom. Rock ’n’ roll had that freedom once, very briefly, before it was turned into a commodity.’ Seb refuses to be credited on the Tribe’s EPs. ‘If money is your God, we’re the Antichrist,’ he enthuses, ‘The record industry turns energy into money, into dead metal. We want to release the trapped energy. All the money we make goes back into the music.’
Although Spiral Tribe recognize that for a lot of hardcore fans, raving is just the latest twist on the working-class ‘living for the weekend’ ethos, they claim that people often come to their parties and see the light. ‘Sometimes, people come to our parties and say “Fuck it, I’m not going to work tomorrow.” Next thing, they’ve sold the house, bought a vehicle, and they’re sorted.’ ‘Sorted’, in Spiral Tribe parlance, means more than just fixed up with E, it means attuned to a new reality, ‘spiral reality’. ‘Ask any of us the time and we say “spiral time.” ’ Sure enough, Seb’s watch is resolutely stopped at the wrong time.
Like a lot of millenarian groups, Spiral Tribe combine paranoid conspiracy theories (the Masons, the Illuminati, et al) with fantasies about returning to a lost paradise. ‘If you compare techno with music from primitive or non-Western cultures,’ says Seb, ‘you’ll find that those musics, like techno, are based on harmony and rhythm, not melody. That’s what’s amazing about the house revolution, everyone was waiting for it, and nobody had done it – stripped it all down to the percussive, even the vocals. It’s all voodoo pulses, from Africa. If you look at what happened with
The Rite of Spring
by Stravinsky, he got rid of melody, he entered harmony and rhythm, and he had a riot at the first concert. With our music and our parties, we’re not trying to get into the future, we’re trying to get back to where we were before Western Civilization fucked it all up.’
In many respects, Spiral Tribe and the entire free-party movement constitute an uncanny fulfilment of the prophecies of Hakim Bey. In his visionary tracts, ‘Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism’ (1985) and ‘The Temporary Autonomous Zone’ (1990), Bey called for the rebirth of a new ‘festal culture’ based around the ‘jubilee concept’ and ‘spiritual hedonism’. His notion of ‘a psychic paleolithism based on High-Tech’ fits the Spirals’ back-to-Nature, terra-technic shtick like a glove. Similarly, the Spiral’s tribal disorganization corresponds to Bey’s exaltation of ‘clans . . . secret or initiatic societies . . . “children’s republics,” and so on,’ as opposed to the claustrophobia of the nuclear family. Later that summer, all Spiral members shave their hair off to symbolize their group-mind.
On a more general level, the illegal free rave, with its lack of entrance fee or security, is a perfect real-world example of the ‘temporary autonomous zone’, aka the TAZ. For Bey, the TAZ is an advance glimpse of utopia, ‘a microcosm of that “anarchist dream” of a free culture’, but its success depends on its very impermanence. ‘The “nomadic war machine” conquers without being noticed’, filling ‘cracks and vacancies’ left by the State, then scattering in order to regroup and attack elsewhere. ‘Cracks and vacancies’ sounds very like the abandoned air bases (like Smeatharpe in Devon), industrial warehouses and derelict government buildings that Spiral Tribe and other sound-systems take over for a few days, before moving on. Less literally, the free festival circuit answers Bey’s call for ‘the construction of shifting “autonomous zones” within an invisible nomadic network’. Rave culture as a whole arguably fulfils his ‘spiritual project: the creation or discovery of pilgrimages in which the concept “shrine” has been replaced . . . by the concept “peak experience” ’; ‘a peak experience’ that must be ‘on the social as well as individual scale’.
Bummer in the City
 
When I interview Spiral Tribe they are already promising that 1992 will be ‘the maddest summer since 1989’, a non-stop conflagration of illegal raves and altercations with the authorities. The ignition point is set to be ‘Sound System City’, a massive convocation of ravers celebrating the Summer Solstice on 21 June, at a site as near as possible to Stonehenge as the police’s four-mile exclusion zone will allow.
In the event, the subcultural energies fermented by the Tribe slip out of their control: the ‘maddest summer’ peaks too early, at Castlemorton. And Spiral Tribe take all the credit and all the blame. On one hand, thirteen members are charged with a variety of offences including causing a public nuisance contrary to common law. (Skilled propagandists, the Spirals twist the phrase into ‘public new-sense’.) But on the other hand, all the music rags and national newspapers want to talk to them, and they get signed to dance label Big Life, whose owner Jaz Summers is convinced that this crusty-raver malarkey is the next punk rock, with Spiral Tribe as its Sex Pistols.
With corporate money at their disposal, the Tribe hire a massive articulated lorry and a 23 K sound-system for their next and most daring confrontation with the authorities. Given the exclusion zone around Stonehenge, they decide to up the stakes and hold the Summer Solstice mega-rave right in the heart of the capital. Sound System City will be built at Mudchute Farm – a public park, in the East London area known as the Isle of Dogs, that’s rumoured to be situated above a ley-line. The rave will be illluminated by the flashing light on top of the ill-fated Canary Wharf tower. Part of the unsuccessful Docklands development scheme, and built to be Britain’s new financial centre, Canary Wharf is a symbol of Tory hubris, of late eighties ‘boom’ economics gone bust. But Sound System City itself becomes a symbol of Spiral Tribe’s own hubris: it’s the first and biggest in a series of defeats that results in the ‘maddest summer’ petering out ignominiously.
11.45 p.m., Saturday, 21 June: my posse arrive too early. There’s only one other car in the vicinity, its back seat crammed to the roof with bottles of Evian: obviously the owners are budding entrepreneurs looking to slake ravers’ thirst. We drift across the eerily calm and deserted field, and run into a reconnaisance team from the Tribe on the other side, busy working out how to break the lock on the gate and drive their monstertruck on to Mudchute Farm. Brusquely, they order us to disappear, lest local residents get suspicious. We retreat to a friend’s house for an hour, then set out again. By this point, the major access roads into the Isle of Dogs are blocked by police, who are turning back anybody who doesn’t live in the area. Hundreds of frustrated ravers mill about on the pavement, trying to muster enough courage to rush the barricades. The rave has kicked off, we learn; over a thousand people are already in the area, partying their socks off, but nobody else can get through to Mudchute.
There’s one faint hope: the two main roads are sealed, but there’s a pedestrian-only tunnel under the Thames that connects the Docklands area to Greenwich and the rest of South East London. We hightail it across the river, but we’re too late: the boys in blue have cordoned off the entrance. ‘Rush ’em,’ says a crustie, sniggering at the druggy double-entendre, but nobody does. The muffled thud-thud-boom of the Spiral’s distant sound-system taunts and tantalizes us. Spirits flagging, we cross the Thames again and navigate a circuitous route through the backstreets of North East London in an attempt to work our way down to the Isle of Dogs, all the while cursing the poor strategic aforethought of the Spirals in choosing a site accessible via only two main roads, both of which are easily blocked. Around daybreak, we get within a half-mile of Mudchute. Looking at the map, we realize it might be possible to cross the Docklands Light Railway and get to the rave. Just as we’re looking for an egress, a private security firm van drives up. Defeated, we beat a retreat. Later, we learn that the police easily dispersed the rave around 3.30 a.m., with no arrests; some hardcore Spiral-types have headed north to a free party in Leicestershire.
Other abortive raves follow throughout the summer of 1992; the police intelligence network is too efficient, local farmers spread manure on their fields, and the desperately unhappy travellers are shunted back and forth across county lines. One Spiral rave in Surrey, supposedly on private land and at the owner’s invitation, sounds like a good bet, but the local police quash it anyway. The result is a glum convoy of some fifty cars, which – prevented from reaching any of the back-up sites – winds up on a picturesque stone quay facing the English Channel. The sense of anti-climax is crushing, and as we drive back to London, I resolve never to go on another Spiral rave. Amazingly, my friend sets out again at 8 a.m. when she learns that the Spirals have finally pulled off a free party after all, only to find a gaggle of red-eyed crusties crashed out on a beach around a pathetic Tandy hi-fi system.

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