[Image: featured in the Sun, November 1988]
While the tabloids churned out anti-rave propaganda at a fever pitch, the police waged an ever-escalating war against rave promoters and partygoers, monitoring pirate radio stations, tapping telephones, and tracking promoters with helicopters.
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According to the law at the time, the police were supposed to observe but not intervene in gatherings of more than 100 people, a measure intended to minimise the possibility of violence. This led to a cat-and-mouse game in which rave promoters attempted to outwit the police, using secret rave hotlines and clandestine marketing tactics to elude them for long enough to get the party started. In a documentary by the BBC, one promoter describes an occasion on which his crew sent a lorry the wrong way round the M25, and while the Met gave chase, sent the soundsystem in the opposite direction, towards the intended site, ensuring the party was in full flow by the time the police arrived.
But legislation soon began to catch up. In 1990, Tory MP Graham Bright introduced the Entertainments (Increased Penalty) Bill, known colloquially as ‘the acid house party bill’, raising the penalty for throwing an unlicensed party from a £2000 fine to £20,000 and a possible six month jail sentence.
This was instrumental in bringing dance music into clubs, where the music could be commercialised, rents and alcohol duties could be collected, and subversive behaviours could be monitored. It also brought the rave scene back under the logic of traditional patriarchal nightlife culture, in which parties are for boozing and going ‘on the pull’.
Simon Reynolds notes that, “one of the most radically novel and arguably subversive aspects of rave culture is precisely that it’s the first youth subculture that’s not based on the notion that sex is transgressive. Rejecting all that tired sixties rhetoric of sexual liberation, and recoiling from our sex-saturated pop culture, rave locates bliss in prepubescent childhood.”
By 1992, the Met’s Territorial Support Group, a specialist paramilitary-esque unit set up to secure the capitol from terrorism and disorder (though more often found decked up in riot gear at political demonstrations), had become something like a dedicated anti-rave squad. On April 19, they surrounded a rave going strong in an abandoned warehouse on Acton Lane in West London. After some time causing confusion around who could come in and who could leave, they broke through a wall with a JCB digger, and proceeded to smash up the equipment and assault the partygoers.
One Spiral Tribe member, years later, told the Guardian, “everyone who was there remembers exactly what happened. Being forced down onto muddy floors, being battered. It was a horrible experience.”
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After the historic rave at Castlemorton, attended by 20-40,000 people, 13 members of Spiral Tribe were arrested and charged with public order offences. Their trial became one of the longest and most expensive in UK history at that time, costing the taxpayer £4million. Despite best efforts by the police, all 13 were acquitted.
However, police pressure continued to mount on the free party scene at the same time as movements were made to extend legal licensing hours in clubs, with superclubs like Cream and Ministry of Sound able to thrive while underground DIY parties became all but extinct.
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