It’s been almost 22 years since John Major’s government passed the Criminal Justice Bill, which gave police increased powers to shut down events “characterised by an emission of repetitive beats”, i.e. the illegal raves that had started to take over the British countryside weekend after weekend. In the summer of 1994, 50,000 ravers descended on Westminster to protest the bill, which they saw as an affront to their movement and values.
Although that era of rave fell away after 1994, with licensed super clubs welcoming those who could no longer party in fields, it birthed an entirely new movement. After the marches in Westminster, the political tendencies of rave organisers were quickly channelled into the Reclaim the Streets movement, which employed many of the same tactics used to get thousands of people to a field in Essex, to get thousands of people to close down busy roads for environmental reasons.
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Much of rave culture lived on in The Haçienda and Madchester, the novels of Irvine Welsh, the rise of the superstar DJ and festival culture, the emergence of jungle, 2-step and the “hardcore continuum” of British underground culture – not to mention the colonisation of an entire island, Ibiza.
LOCKED OFF, a new documentary released on VICE today, shows that the bill has had little effect on quelling the hunger for free parties. Across the country, teenagers, often armed with little more than a sound system, some bolt cutters and a NOS dispenser, are taking over warehouses, abandoned buildings and empty fields to keep the dream of free parties alive.
WATCH: ‘Locked Off’, our new documentary about illegal raves in the UK
There is, undeniably, a simple hedonism at the centre of this movement – teenagers trying to have fun on the cheap, doing a ton of drugs and staying up all night. But you might watch the film – kids losing their minds to jump-up and gabber – and wonder how much of the culture of rave has survived; whether or not contemporary raves maintain the same kind of outsider, countercultural ethos as their forebears. Can you ever truly make a statement against the system when you’re two pills deep with half a gram of M-cat on the way?
Since the Teddy Boys, subcultures have defined themselves in opposition to societal norms – basically, through sticking it to the man. At a base level, identifying as a punk, a goth or a raver is an attempt to demonstrate, through music, fashion and lifestyle choices, an opposition towards commercialism and expectation. All of those subcultures came through at a time when young people were wildly underrepresented in the media, where top down, old-fashioned institutions tried to dictate the culture of the day. They were a form of resistance inasmuch as they created a youth culture where there was none, resisting the mainstream and creating something different from the ground up.
Today, though, there is surplus of creative culture. Any two-bit bedroom producer can get on Radio 1; brands clamour to work with trendy visual artists and grime MCs; there are government-funded courses that can teach young people how to DJ and MC. It’s never been easier to try your hand at being a musician, a fashion designer, a club DJ. We have fetishised and commercialised youth culture into infinitum.
What there is a deficit of is physical space. Much of this youthful creative culture happens either in an internet vacuum, rarely crossing over into the real world, or behind need-to-know guest list events organised by brands. At the same time, half of British nightclubs have been closed, and the ones that remain are often expensive and opposed to young attendees. All-ages and underage events, which enjoyed a boom in the 2000s, are being stamped out by tighter licensing restrictions and high insurance premiums for venues that allow young attendees. The rise of American-style ID checks mean that even local pubs are out of the question. In London, places like Camden and Soho – which were once full of weird shops and stalls, places you could lose a day as a teenager – are being transformed into trendy street food locales, full of high-end boutiques. Outside the capital, young people are often treated like pariahs, asked to move on by police for no reason.
In this climate, where space is at such a premium, just being able to have somewhere to go becomes a form of resistance in itself. Taking over a warehouse in central London is, whether consciously or not, a reclaiming of territory from a London that has tried to push all but the old and the rich to the sidelines. Taking over a field in North Wales to have a party where everyone wears baggy jumpers and takes drugs in cars is a forced retaliation to high street clubs, where most people stick to conventional norms of beauty and attire, and promoters are focused on selling expensive cocktails.
In this climate, no one is crying out for more new young fashion designers. What they need is a space to call their own, and that’s what this rave scene appears to provide. Whether or not it finds a more conscious political element remains to be seen. In the film we hear from Scumtek, an organisation more focused on the use of space in a capitalist context, who work with squatters and the homeless to reclaim buildings not just for parties but as a practical retaliation to the number of empty properties in London. The younger generation, by and large, seem more concerned with just having fun.
But this scene is still nascent; many of the people involved are too young to remember 2004, let alone 1994. But at a time when space for young people is increasingly unavailable, they’re already enacting a major change. Sometimes, just getting fucked in a field can be the most politically significant thing you can do.
More on VICE:
This Is the Guy You Call When You Want to Put On an Illegal Rave
I Sleep Where You Danced: What Happens to Nightclubs After They Close Down?
