I recently spoke at the EMP Pop Conference 2008 in Seattle. This is the paper that I presented.

If there’s one thing that remains true across all music criticism it’s that everyone seems to hate hippies and ravers. Well, I apologize in advance, because this story includes both of them, at length, trying to work together to fight against the man. Haters take heart, though: as you might imagine, when both of these groups combined—despite some impressive organization and protest actions—they were almost completely ineffective. The political climate, a lack of overall commitment, and consistent intimidation all led to the failure of their cause. But let’s back up for a moment.

In 1994 Michael Howard, the Home Secretary of the Conservative Party in Britain, proposed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. Among other things, this bill specifically targeted free outdoor gatherings of people “at which amplified music is played during the night” that “sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”

At stake? A way of life. For the ravers an important line was being drawn: now they could either pay to go to clubs in cities or they could risk getting arrested trying to attend the free outdoor parties usually put together by soundsystems that would travel up and down the country, setting up shop in open fields and disused airfields. England’s version of hippies, the so-called “travellers,” made their living by following the free festival scene around England and, for them, the ravers were a source of income—they brought money to spend on entertainment, food, and drugs—which the travelers, who had plenty of experience in finding ways to make ends meet, nearly always had on hand.

For the ravers, the lifestyle was a relatively recent one. The explosion of dance music in England had only taken place a few years before. (1988 and 1989 is widely regarded as the second Summer of Love, in which acid house and ecstasy turned a generation of young people onto electronic music.) The travellers, on the other hand, were an already established part of English culture.

Beginning in the early ‘70s, travellers would roam around the country during the spring and summer months to a host of free festivals soundtracked by jam bands like Hawkwind and Pink Fairies. It was a movement that, as author Matthew Collin notes in Altered State, was mostly composed of “disaffected middle-class dropouts choosing to live an itinerant existence on buses and caravans.” The most notable of the free festivals throughout the ‘70s was a yearly gathering at Stonehenge during the summer solstice, which gradually increased in size each year until 1984, when the participants numbered—by some estimates—as many as 60,000.

In 1985, English Heritage—a governmental organization charged to both protect and promote England’s historic environment—and the Wiltshire police force conspired to keep the festival from occurring by creating a roadblock more than seven miles from the site. When faced with the obstruction, a convoy of vehicles (more than 100 of them) veered off the road into a nearby field. The large vans and buses were soon slowed by the uneven terrain and the police easily caught up with them. What happened next is now known as the “Battle of the Beanfield,” but most reports regard it as less of a battle and more like a police action.

In all, sixteen travelers and eight police officers were sent to the hospital. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was unrepentant afterwards, saying that she was “only too delighted to do anything we can to make life difficult for such things as hippie convoys.” Increasingly called to action by this and other police activities designed to harass and threaten, travelers continued to tour the free festival circuit throughout the late ‘80s and, as Collin notes, became “highly politicized, [while] struggling for survival.” Simon Reynolds, in Generation Ecstasy, puts their number at the end of the ‘80s at as many 40,000 people.

Enter dance music. Collin points towards two major players in the introduction of the ravers and travelers. First was a man named Fraser Clark who published an irregular magazine called Encyclopedia Psychedelia. After his first rave, Clark quickly renamed the mag Evolution and, through his tireless writing, helped connect the dots between the hippie ideals of the ‘60s and the burgeoning rave movement. Both had much in common: a strong belief in the autonomy of the individual, an interest in psychedelic drugs and a love of music.

Second was the coterie of traveling soundsystems that mimicked the movements of the hippie convoys. Looking for places to throw free large outdoor parties, they soon joined forces with the convoys, who already had a great deal of experience in finding suitable area in England’s countryside to hold events. Armed with huge speakers, turntables, and the generators to power them, these soundsystems traveled throughout England with only one goal in mind: having a good time.

The most famous of these soundsystems was called Spiral Tribe. Simon Reynolds wrote extensively about the group in Generation Ecstasy. He describes Spiral Tribe’s leader Mark Harrison as having a visionary gleam of a prophet in his eyes, but “despite the cultic, almost Manson-like aura, a surprising amount of what Mark and his acolytes say make sense.”

What Harrison and Spiral Tribe talk about is the energy that is created from living outside of the law-abiding, licensed rave attending, major label purchasing horde. Their claim was that “outside the law” is the only place where “real life is to be had.” That if you “stay awake, you begin to discover the real edges of reality, you stop believing in anything anyone told you was true, all the false reality that was hammered into you from birth.”

Great quotes were half the battle, but Spiral Tribe also had a striking spiral logo, its fascination with the number 23 and—most of all—its members shaved heads and all-black clothing contributing to the mystique around the group. And, of course, the music. Spiral Tribe, unlike many soundsystems, actually had a production arm, which further increased their visibility in the press. With songs titles like “Breach the Peace” and “Forward the Revolution,” it’s not hard to understand why Big Life, a respected indie dance label, snapped them up thinking that they might rave’s analogue to the Sex Pistols.

But when you listen to the music that they produced—and the music that they played—it’s also easy to understand why the alliance between travellers and ravers was an uneasy one. Michael Howard’s repetitive beats wording was spot on—to Spiral Tribe, repetition was the driving force behind the harder-edged almost undanceably fast tunes that, over time, reached gabba tempos. Travellers, used to the soothing sounds of Hawkind, couldn’t help but be often alienated by both the weekend ravers looking for a good time and the unrelenting beat of the soundsystems that seemingly provoked police response via their outlandishly long events.

Spiral was one of many soundsystems traveling around England at the time, throwing larger and larger bashes throughout the early ‘90s. The largest of them all was held in 1992 in early May. An enormous group of travelers and soundsystems descended upon Castlemorton Common for a week-long rave that, by many estimates, brought in nearly 40,000 participants altogether, rankled Parliament, made the frontpage of almost every newspaper in England, and stirred fear about the next destination of the ravers. Typically, Spiral Tribe was one of the most colorful soundsystems there, taking up a central position at the party.

As the festival began to wind down and the police—who had stood by doing nothing, content to let the party run its course peacefully—were called into action by residents of adjacent lands, incensed by the more than 100 hours of continuous, loud techno; the campsites trashed by many of the weekend ravers unaccustomed to traveling life; and the fact that unsupervised dogs had killed more than 30 sheep. Barry Smith, a local landlord, said to a local newspaper that “most people are afraid to come out of their homes. If I had lived up on the common I would have shot someone by now.” Many members of Spiral Tribe and a few others held on to the bitter end—and eventually got arrested for it.

The subsequent trial of the 13 held responsible for the Castlemorton rave would be one of the longest and costliest in British history. The government reportedly spent four million pounds trying to prove the group was conspiring to create a public nusiance. Unfortunately, that was a near-impossible task, considering that Spiral Tribe was not the first group to come to the site and the police had basically let the party go on without interruption. After ten weeks, all of the defendants were acquitted.

As Matthew Collin opines in Altered State, though, the reason that the government let the laughable case go to trial may have been to simply test the laws that they already had on the books. By the time that the Castlemorton trial started in early 1994, Home Secretary Michael Howard was already formulating the Criminal Justice Bill and he was watching the trial closely, trying to ascertain whether stronger laws needed to be written to potentially prosecute and hopefully prevent another Castlemorton. When the verdict came in, Howard knew that the legislation that he had penned would have to be enacted to do so.

The Criminal Justice Bill was introduced in late 1993, a few months before the Castlemorton trial, but the response to its legislative suggestions were immediate. Ravers and soundsystems were fearful for their right to assemble outdoors per the aforementioned repetitive beats clause. Travellers and gypsies were equally worried about what was contained in section 62, namely that police were given the right to seize and remove any vehicle that was not moved upon request. Under section 67, the travellers were faced with the prospect of having to pay for their homes to be taken by the police—then potentially having to pay again for any charges that the police incurred in taking it away.

The wording of the bill—the idea that a law could be single out a musical form—was a first. The most famous track made in opposition to the bill was Autechre’s “Flutter,” which purposefully contained no repetitive beats during its nearly ten-minute length. When I talked to Sean Booth of the group about how invested they were in the fight against the bill, though, he told me that “It was just a way to take the piss really. That was all we wanted. To point out how daft it all was.” In a Melody Maker interview at the time, Andrew Weatherall, made the same point, “How paranoid are the government? This culture’s music is predominantly instrumental. There’s no rallying cries to tear down the walls. That’s how scared they are—of music that’s got no lyrical content.”

Prodigy’s producer Liam Howlett, whose “Their Law” was also crafted in response to the CJB, was similar to Autechre in his disinterest in becoming too attached to political causes. In a November 1995 issue of Mixmag—only a year after the Criminal Justice Act’s passage—you could find a news item detailing how the Prodigy refused the use of a track on a documentary about the struggle to stop the building of a road that would link the M11 to London’s road network. Howlett was quoted as saying, “Music and politics don’t mix….We’re against the CJA, but we’re not prepared to get involved in the shit of it.”

This apolitical stance from some of the more successful artists makes sense. Just like any artist will get frustrated during an interview that attempts to affix a certain genre label to their work, Prodigy and Autechre seem to be happy to distance themselves from protest—something made all the easier by the fact that dance music is often instrumental or, in “Their Law”’s case, has lyrics that are general enough that they could be put towards almost any cause.

The irony, of course, with “Flutter” as well was that—because of its non-repetitive nature and its genre—it would hardly be used by soundsystem DJs at raves or festivals. It was a sort of concept protest song, only eclipsed it its uselessness (I use that word in its most functional sense) by Orbital’s anti-CJB track, which was simply composed of four minutes of silence tacked onto the end of a 12-inch. Those protest songs that did try to actively talk to the idea of the CJB—Retribution’s “Repetitive Beats,” for example—are largely forgotten. Unlike something like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Ohio,” I think this may be down to the fact that the CJB songs were made in reaction to an imagined future, rather than any particular event.

In a similar way, this is also why the legislative battle against the bill never took off. The travellers were seen as freeloaders, of course, that didn’t bother to pay their way in society. The ravers as spoiled middle class kids who were ludicrously fighting for their right to party in outdoor venues, take drugs, and avoid adult responsibilities. A popular cause this wasn’t. And the press was hardly behind them. One letter written in to Melody Maker at the time claimed that it was the music papers that were the only ones not biased in their coverage.

The most powerful forms of protest were coordinated by a group called the Advance Party. Shortly after the conclusion of Castlemorton, many of the hardcore members of the Spiral Tribe left England for continental Europe, ready to spread the gospel of noise to new audiences—and just as eager to leave the continued hassle of the police behind. Of the Tribe members and soundsystems left in the United Kingdom in 1994, many banded together to create the Advance Party.

At first, they simply lobbied the Parliament. Unfortunately, they didn’t find much help in the Conservative’s opposition. The Labour Party abstained from voting on its passage. In Melody Maker, Tony Blair’s second-in-command at the time, Alun Michael, admitted that the Criminal Justice Bill was “a complete rag-bag of a bill,” but that the Labor Party “knew the CJB would be misused by Conservatives to suggest that we’re ‘soft on crime.’” For Tony Blair, who began his term as the shadow Home Secretary with a speech that proclaimed that the Labour Party would be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime, abstaining was the only way to wipe their hands clean of the Bill altogether.

As a result, the groups soon moved onto to large protest marches. The first, conducted soon after the contents of the bill became public, was held in Trafalgar Square on May 1st and drew anywhere from 30,000 (the protestor’s estimate) to 6,000 (the police’s official figure). As Melody Maker tells it, the march was a peaceful one, attended by representatives from the Green Party, Charter 88 (a pressure group that advocated for Britain to adopt a constitution) and SQUASH, an organization that fought for squatter’s rights—a group that also came under attack in the proposed bill.

On October 9th, however, the protest held in the same area was a much different matter. While the alliance of groups still held strong, when police attempted to push back against soundsystems that were trying to enter Hyde Park, the largely peaceful crowd that had massed—100,000 according to some reports—and a few protestors started trouble by smashing windows and engaging in other minor vandalism. The mainstream media, of course, focused on the few that caused trouble, branding the protest yet another reason why the Criminal Justice Act was a good idea.

Despite the aforementioned sustained opposition, the Criminal Justice Bill passed into law on November 3, 1994. And then…well, nothing, really. In my reading of the music press of the time, few police enforced the law, instead choosing to utilize older laws or to simply let unlicensed raves go on without opposition. The NME even reported police in Derbyshire helping some ravers in July of 1995 move speakers to help their party to get underway.

The travellers, on the other hand, were also relatively unaffected. Itinerant living has hardly abated in Britain and while it’s hard, for obvious reasons, to attach a number to the group, there seem to be thousands still living out of their mobile homes on public land. I can only imagine that the dissolution of the sometimes-uneasy relationship between the travellers and the ravers was most likely welcomed with a sigh of relief. No longer burdened by a group that brought additional legal pressure upon them, the travellers were able to continue their itinerant lifestyle.

The big question, though, is why the Criminal Justice Act was rarely used. The reasons for this are many, but from what I can gather, with many of the larger soundsystems out of the country by this time, the free parties that continued on were smaller, more self-contained and less threatening. Few soundsystems were as brazen as Spiral Tribe and even fewer wanted to put on another Castlemorton. Instead, the soundsystems went further underground than ever before. A 2006 article in the Guardian pointed out that there were just as many free parties going on during the mid-‘90s. Now, though, the parties are smaller—and police seem to feel that it’s much easier to simply wait for the party to be over, rather than to take the trouble of arresting revelers.

In fact, the only major rave that was shut down using Criminal Justice Act powers was one put on by United Systems, a group that had its origins in the Advance Party. Called Mother, it was the last ditch attempt to put on a party on the scale of Castlemorton. To stage it, however, word had to get out to as many people as possible and word soon got back to police that something big was happening on July 7th. When soundsystems rolled up to the site, police were waiting with roadblocks for them. Eventually, eight people were arrested and three convicted under the Criminal Justice Act in connection with Mother.

In its December 1995 issue, more than a year after the Act had passed, Mixmag published a letter from a reader named Big F. F relates that after more than two years of living on the free festival circuit that he had enough of Britain. The hassle wasn’t complete, but it was bad enough that it caused him to move to Portugal. (The Mother rave had been the final straw.) He then goes on to describe the week-long rave that he had just been to in France where he kept looking over his shoulder, waiting for the police helicopters to descend like, “a scene out of a Vietnam film…but no, it’s allowed to happen and it’s fuckin’ wicked. I’ve found my life again. You can’t fight forever—it turns you bitter and angry without realizing it. Live, love, and party.”

Thanks: Simon R., Joy P., Sean B., Andrew P., Peter S., James B., Todd H., Ben W., Alfred S., Mike P., the guy on eBay gracious enough to send Mixmag’s from 1994 across the Atlantic and the many others whose help was instrumental in putting this presentation together.