Little do we know it as we wind along the West Country lanes, but Castlemorton is set to be the high-water mark and absolute climax of this crusty-raver alliance. Previous Spiral-instigated parties have drawn crowds in the region of five or six thousand. But arriving at the darkened Common, it quickly becomes apparent that the event has escalated beyond all expectations. Thanks to Bank Holiday Monday’s prolongation of the weekend, and exceptionally fine weather, Castlemorton is well on its way to becoming the biggest illegal rave in history. Estimates vary from twenty thousand to forty thousand present.
Our first surprise is the absence of largescale police presence. We encounter only a pair of genial constables who direct us to a safer parking space, lest ‘all your paint gets scraped off by one of the big buses’. The midsummer night scene is somewhere between a medieval encampment and a Third World shanty town. The lanes are choked with caravans, buses, ex-military transports, gaudily painted horse-drawn vehicles, and hundreds of cars (in the near pitch black, I keep gouging my hips on jutting wing-mirrors). The fields are jammed with a higgledy-piggledy throng of tents, pavilions, and eerie-looking fluorescent sculptures (the work of Sam Hegarty, resident artist for the Circus Irritant sound-system).
The Third World/medieval vibe is exacerbated by the bazaar atmosphere. Pedlars hawk their illicit wares, hollering ‘get your acid!’ or ‘hash cookies for sale’, propositioning us with wraps of speed, magic mushroom pies and innumerable brands of Ecstasy. The most medieval aspect of all, we discover later, is the total absence of sanitation. Venturing out on to the camp’s perimeter, we quickly learn to tread gingerly, in order to avoid the excrement amid the bracken, and the toilet paper hanging from gorse bushes. A big placard commands ‘Bury Your Shit’, but unlike the seasoned travellers, urban ravers haven’t come armed with spades.
After stumbling through the choc-a-bloc murk for what feels like a small eternity, we finally make it to Spiral Tribe’s own enclosure, a Wild West style wagon circle of vans and trucks circumscribing a grassy dancefloor. While the event is free, in accordance with the Spiral credo ‘no money, no ego’, ravers are invited to give donations in order to keep ‘the gennies’ (electricity generators) running. Inside the circle, the scene is like a pagan gathering. With their amazing, undulating dance moves, it seems like the crowd has evolved into a single, pulsating organism. Faces are contorted by expressions midway between orgasm and sobbing. ‘Lost the plot, we’ve lost the plot,’ hollers one MC, ‘Off my fuckin’ tree.’ It’s time for us to get ‘on the vibe’, as the Spirals put it, and we quickly score some Tangerine Sunsets at £15 a shot, sold out of the back of a van.
Later, another Spiral MC, crop-headed Simone, hollers ‘Let’s lose it, together,’ then chants the chorus of another track from the forthcoming Spiral Tribe EP, which quotes the lament of a nineteenth-century American Indian chieftain. ‘I am a savage, and I can’t understand / How the beauty of the Earth can be sold back to man,’ toasts Simone. Dancing with the stars overhead, it’s hard not to succumb to the back-to-Nature romanticism. It’s all part of Spiral Tribe’s eco-mystical creed, which is crystallized in the buzzword ‘terra-technic’: using technology to unlock the primal energy of Mother Earth. (It’s also a pun on the Technics SL1200 Mk2 turntable favoured by DJs.) Tonight, the subsonic bass-throb of their sound-system certainly feels like it’s forging a connection between my bowels and the Earth’s core. Years later, Spiral DJ Aztek described the terra-technic rush in Eternity magazine: ‘the sensation is like being earthed and receiving some sort of energy signal’. (Of course, this might have something to do with his professed intake of around eight or nine Ecstasy tablets per weekend, at that time!)
Around 4.30 a.m., the grey pre-dawn light uncovers a scene weirdly poised between idyllic and apocalyptic. The breathtaking Malvern Hills, shrouded with mist, are a sight for sore eyes. But at the Malverns’ feet, the festival site is an eyesore. Shagged-out dancers huddle around small bonfires to ward off the clammy, creeping damp. Undernourished travellers’ dogs roam freely. Bedraggled figures wander around scavenging for cigarette butts to make joints; others panhandle for money to buy more E.
The consensus is that the Tangerine Sunsets are a disappointment. But a spare Rhubarb and Custard left-over from a previous rave is shared, and that’s all it takes to push us over the edge. On my weakened, sleep-deprived system and empty stomach, the effect is almost instantaneous: I’ve got that walking-on-air, helium-for-blood feeling. Even though the music sounds harsh and distorted because it’s overdriven at top volume through an inadequate PA, I’m swept up in a frenzy of belligerent euphoria. A friend tells me later I’ve actually been growling!
One image sums up Castlemorton for me. A beautiful, androgynous girl – short black bob, virulent red lipstick, Ray-Ban sunglasses, burgundy short-sleeve top – is dancing on top of a van. Her fingers stab and slice, carving cryptograms in the dawn air, and her mouth is puckered in a pout of indescribable, sublime impudence. She’s totally, fiercely on the vibe, living in the moment, loving it.
By ten in the morning, the sun’s breaking through, the temperature’s rising, and our rush has dwindled to a buzzy lassitude. We sprawl on the grass. A photographer friend-of-a-friend, supposedly here to document history-in-the-making, has been dozing for five hours; he wakes, mutters ‘Wicked sleep!’ and we piss ourselves laughing. All around, the exposed flesh of slumped, catatonic bodies is visibly blistering in the baking heat. A couple of well-trained four-year-old crusty-kids are wandering around selling outrageously overpriced packets of Rizla rolling papers to desperate ravers, and Spiral personnel are collecting the first night’s rubbish in binliners. Overhead a police helicopter patrols intermittently (later, a crusty will fire a flare-gun at it, much to the public’s outrage). By noon, shattered, we decide it’s time to go home. Bidding farewells, we wend our way through the revellers and wreckage. On the long journey home, my friend keeps falling asleep at the wheel.
During the next five days of its existence, Castlemorton inspires questions in Parliament, makes the front page of every newspaper, and incites nationwide panic about the possibility that the next destination on the crusty itinerary is your very own neighbourhood. Tabloids like the Sun stoke public fear and resentment of ‘the scum army’ of dole-scrounging soap-dodgers having fun on your tax money. In the quality newspapers, commentators line up to fulminate against the malodorous anarcho-mystics. Novelist Anthony Burgess (mis)informs his Evening Standard readers that New Age travellers like to listen to New Age music, and decries the outdoor rave phenomenon as ‘the megacrowd, reducing the individual intelligence to that of an amoeba . . . dehumanization purchased in the name of freedom.’
Back at Castlemorton itself, local residents complain of fences being torn up for firewood, of dogs savaging sheep and chickens being released from coops, of finding syringes in the hedgerows, of catching crusties defecating in their back gardens or trying to sell acid to their kids. Above all, they whine about the incessant barrage of techno, which sends them ‘all funny’. ‘There’s something hypnotic about the continuous pounding beat of the music, and it’s driving people living in the front line into a frenzy,’ one 42-year-old villager tells a newspaper. Lambasting the West Mercia police for its failure to thwart the rave and its kid-glove handling of the party-goers, local farmers form a vigilante militia. The police, for their part, claim they wanted to avoid a repeat of the Battle of the Beanfield.
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 Crimin
al 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.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 21
