Alan Lodge, Black & White Surveillance Salon de Normandy by The Community Room 412, Normandy Hôtel, 7 Rue de l’Échelle, 75001 Paris, France October 22nd – 25th, 2020.
Black & White Surveillance is a presentation of photography and archive materials surveying Alan Lodge’s extensive counter-documentation of police surveillance and his past involvement in legislative action and activism.
Alan ‘Tash’ Lodge (born 1953 in Luton, Bedfordshire) is a photographer based in Nottingham who has focused on alternative movements since the mid 1970s. After a short career as an emergency paramedic in the London Ambulance Service, Lodge took up photography and documented the early ‘free festivals’ in 1978. In 1985 Lodge joined the Peace Convoyon its way to Stonehenge where a festival was planned to take place and he photographed The Battle of the Beanfield. In 1987 Lodge published the booklet Stonehenge: Solstice Ritual, a photographic account of the rituals taking place at Stonehenge. Since the events at Stonehenge, Lodge has covered a range of issues including the Travellers movement, Reclaim the Streets, the road protests in the mid 1990s and the campaign against the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. Lodge is also well known for his documentation of police surveillance, in which he received a ‘Winston Award’ for in 1998. Since the late 1990s Lodge has been a major contributor to the media network Indymedia.
In recent years Lodge has continued to extensively document his involvement and attendance of public demonstrations and festivals, and has actively involved himself in various welfare and advice agencies. He has worked as a field worker for the Release organisation and has sat on the management committees of several charities, including Festival Welfare Services, the Travellers Aid Trust and the Standing Conference on Drug Abuse (Scoda). Lodge’s website One Eye on the Road operates as an extensive archive of his prolific photographic career, as well as an essential resource providing legal information and advice. Lodge has successfully taken the police to court and won damages for false claims made against him. He has also pursued a number of complaints against the police.
Lodge’s work has appeared in publications & journals including Guardian, Independent, i-D, Select, Sounds, DJ, Radio Times, New Statesmen & Society and Squall. His photographs have also been used in TV documentaries across the BBC and Channel 4, including most recently for Jeremy Deller’s BBC documentary piece Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992.
Annoying my son to get him to pose, with aggression 🙂 This issue of Festival Eye was the first after the police action at the event that became known as the ‘Battle of the Beanfield‘ when 1600 police officers attacked a convoy of travellers on the way to Stonehenge in June 1985.
Imagine life bursting back to our land and seas, where wildlife numbers are growing instead of shrinking and we’re working with nature, as a part of nature, instead of exploiting it. Nature can recover when given a chance. We have to give it that chance.
Watch the video below to see the transformation of an ecologically degraded part of Britain’s uplands…
By protecting, restoring and regenerating species-rich mosaics of habitats, rewilding helps reverse biodiversity loss and bring back the abundance of Britain’s wildlife. We’ve demonstrated that rewilding also helps to mitigate climate heating by drawing down millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere. We’ve shown in our report ‘Adapting to Climate Heating’ report how rewilding allows wildlife to disperse and adapt as our climate heats, saving a significant number from further decline or extinction.
Rewilding also presents opportunities for communities to diversify and create more resilient, nature-based economies — and reconnects us with the wonders of wild nature, improving physical and mental health.
The breakdown of our climate and the species extinction crisis are no longer fringe concerns but are increasingly recognised as urgent existential threats to both nature and human society. Yet the gulf between our awareness of that threat and the inadequacy of our current response is terrifying. Now, more than ever, we must reset our relationship with the natural world. Nature is a part of us. It’s our life support system.
Britain should be teeming with wildlife. Instead many of our wildlife populations – from songbirds to insects and plankton – are collapsing. To repair our planet we must urgently achieve net carbon zero — and natural climate solutions can contribute significantly to this aim. Protecting our living world and our climate are largely one and the same. And rewilding, the large-scale restoration of ecosystems to the point where nature can take care of itself, plays a vital role in both.
Attended by all sorts of ‘interested parties inc: festival folks, travellers, FWS, English Heritage, farmers, landowners, council, MP etc …. can’t remember now if the police contributed. [Oh and pictures at an exhibition by Tash, of course]
In 1973, Andrew Sproxton of Impressions Gallery in York visited Daniel and, using a pair of scissors, cut freehand from a roll of stickyback plastic, a tailor-made advertisement which he applied to the rear upper exterior of the Free Photographic Omnibus.
Mother, fighter and visionary photographer – Tish Murtha emerged from the north east in Thatcher’s Britain to expose the struggles and triumphs of her local community.
Tish’s daughter, Ella, uncovers her poignant story in this heartfelt documentary, piecing together a portrait of a woman who wielded her camera as a tool to celebrate overlooked working-class lives and to strive for social change.
Tragically, Tish died aged 56, her work relatively unknown, but now, Ella unlocks the doors to her mother’s long-hidden archive. Inside, a treasure trove of unseen images, personal artefacts, letters and diaries awaits, revealing the true essence of this enigmatic artist.
…… I am much affected by her work and this film.
addition …. She enrolled on the ‘Newport course’. I went for interview there and Daniel Meadows described me as ‘an interesting case’ 🙂 But I eventually decided to come here to Nottingham. I might well have met her. Would have learned from her and it I think. https://www.northerneyefestival.co.uk/daniel-meadows
In 1973, Andrew Sproxton of Impressions Gallery in York visited Daniel and, using a pair of scissors, cut freehand from a roll of stickyback plastic, a tailor-made advertisement which he applied to the rear upper exterior of the Free Photographic Omnibus.
On this day, 1 April 1649, a farmer and writer called Gerrard Winstanley along with a small group of 30 to 40 men and women occupied St. George’s Hill, Watton, Surrey, England and began tilling the land collectively. Over the coming months, numerous local people would join them and for the movement which became known as the Diggers.
Winstanley was a Protestant who began to write pamphlets criticising the church which held that “god is in the heavens above the skies”. Instead he argued that god was “the spirit within you”. In a pamphlet published in January 1649 he wrote: “In the beginning of time God made the earth. Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another, but selfish imaginations did set up one man to teach and rule over another.” The politics of the Diggers were a form of proto-communist anarchism, advocating direct action, common ownership and the dissolution of hierarchy.
The people are growing stronger In truth it is a fact That the power of the people’s from The criminal injustice act They thought that they could put us down Then right before their eyes All oppressed united join hands and swiftly rise The act it seems was drafted for a chosen few’s convenience So what’s left for the rest of us Down right disobedience
“As a 45-year old taxpayer, I object to this persecution. I am glad my son enjoys the camaraderie and happiness that is the predominant experience at a rave. I am proud that he is intelligently experienced in the use of drugs, although I am horrified that this makes him a criminal. By taking away the freedom of one group, the freedom of us all is lost. I need my right to silence, my son needs his right to dance in groups of more than 10 people.
All of us need the right to opt out of conventional lifestyles”
Guardian Reader
Posted in.|Taggedguardian, quote, rave|Comments Off on Quote : As a 45-year old taxpayer, I object to this persecution ….
Throughout the ’90s, the DiY Sound System put on countless free events, ran a recording studio and two record labels, and took their hedonistic parties around the world. Here, Harold Heath speaks to co-founder Harry Harrison about his new book, Dreaming in Yellow: The Story of the DiY Sound System, and the collective’s trailblazing legacy in the free party movement.
The origins of DiY Sound System date back to a mid-‘80s England that was a very different place to how it is in 2022. In many ways it was an England that was freer than today: you could still squat properties, still claim the dole while learning to play an instrument or put on parties, and the country was still host to a teeming underground of free festivals.
However, the Conservative government had also brutally smashed the miners’ strike, embarked on a post-colonial war in the Falklands and overseen record unemployment levels, while Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared that “there’s no such thing as society”. It was into this harsh political context that DiY was born: a high-impact collision between the British radical, anti-establishment culture of squatters, anarcho-punks, travellers and free-partiers and the birth of UK acid house.
As we chat over Zoom, DiY co-founder Harry Harrison, now a genial, laidback father of two living in Wales, is full of brilliant stories and joie de vivre as he happily recalls his role in some of the most revolutionary events in recent British cultural history. “We were in the right place at the right time,” he says. “It was the end of the free festival scene, that last gasp of Stonehenge and anarcho-punk, when Glastonbury was lawless — the world was very different then. And I think we saw ourselves as promoting that lawlessness but using acid house as the perfect weapon.”
The free festival scene Harrison refers to has largely disappeared, but throughout the ‘80s there was a calendar of outdoor free events, mainly attended by so-called ‘new age’ travellers, hippies, punks, post-punks, ‘crusties’, squatters and others on the fringes of society. It was a fiercely anti-establishment subculture and one that Harrison and co. soon came into contact with via the Nottingham squat and house party scene.
“We hung out with a load of anarcho-punks and they were hardcore, serious poly-drug users,” he recalls. “They were messy as fuck, but they also organised loads of benefits for the miners. And we were into animal rights too, so we smashed a few butcher shop windows, went hunt-sabbing for a few years, all those kinds of anarcho-politics. Then we went to free festivals at 16, 17 and it just blew my mind.”
That punk ethos would feed directly into the character of DiY, creating a unique take on the rave template that put community, freedom and non-profit at the heart of what they did. “That’s why we were called DiY,” continues Harrison, “it’s a punk thing: it’s don’t listen, don’t vote, don’t take any shit, do it yourself, learn three chords and form a band, but instead of learn three chords it was buy some decks, get a soundsystem.”
Harrison became an enthusiastic attendee of the free party scene. “We went to a festival near Blackburn in probably ’83 and there was a chalk board that said ‘Line of speed 50p, Line of coke a quid, Mushrooms £2.50! We were like, ‘Wow, when does the music stop?’ and they were like, ‘It never stops, it goes from Friday to Tuesday’. Unfortunately, the music was a bit shit, it was Hawkwind and stuff, God bless them and all that but it wasn’t happening. But then acid house crossed with the free festival movement, that was where we were at and we were instrumental in it.”
“Everyone at our gigs got 75 quid with a 20 quid ‘nipper bonus’ if you had kids. Everyone got the same, the lighting guy, the sound guy, the DJs, and if they didn’t like it they could fuck off and go and DJ somewhere else. We had our major DJs but they all lugged the gear at the end of the night”
By the time Harrison, along with Pete ‘Woosh’ Birch (who sadly passed away in 2020), Richard ‘Digs’ Down and Simon DK formed the DiY collective in 1989, they’d already been into house music for a few years. “The one thing we had in Nottingham was DJ Graeme Park,” says Harrison, “who was playing house at the Garage from ‘87 onwards. We started going there every Saturday, that was my first experience of house music.” The DiY collective included engineers and sound crew as well as DJs, and they put together their own custom-built soundsystem and began putting on free parties.
DiY’s anti-establishment stance remained solid for as long as they functioned as a unit. While the mid-‘90s saw the rise of the superclub and the gradual encroachment of capital into dance music, DiY remained resolutely underground, alternative, and committed to an egalitarian vision of the disco, one that was reflected in how they dealt with money. “What I’m most proud of is that we were a collective,” says Harrison. “Everyone at our gigs got 75 quid with a 20 quid ‘nipper bonus’ if you had kids. Everyone got the same, the lighting guy, the sound guy, the DJs, and if they didn’t like it they could fuck off and go and DJ somewhere else. We had our major DJs but they all lugged the gear at the end of the night.”
DiY’s free parties began in summer 1990. They were mostly small affairs at first because, as Harrison recalls, most people on the free festival/ traveller scene still weren’t into house music at this point. Every weekend over winter 1990 the DiY crew were in the south-west of England, where the travellers were, putting on their free house music parties. Harrison remembers a particular event in the free festival calendar at Chipping Sodbury at the end of May 1991 as a major turning point. Up until then, soundsystems playing dance music were looked down upon by many of the traveller and crusty crew, but for the first time, the festival was all sound systems and no bands.
“It was getting bigger and bigger, you could feel it growing,” continues Harrison, “and instead of sound systems getting shit, being told to fuck off into the corner because ‘that’s not proper music’, suddenly there was this force of numbers, suddenly there were thousands of young people there.”
“The government were already a bit pissed off about raves, but Castlemorton really blew the gaff”
Momentum continued to grow over the winter of ’91 and then came the first big event of 1992: the Avon Free Festival at Castlemorton common. It’s difficult to imagine now, a five-day-long completely free festival/rave, attended by tens of thousands of party-goers, with the authorities powerless to act against it. An estimated 20-50,000 attendees — nobody seems able to agree on the numbers — turned up to the biggest illegal rave in UK history in the shadows of the Malvern Hills and partied over a very long weekend.
“The sun shone for the entire five days,” remembers Harrison, “I’ve never seen British weather like it. God was definitely on our side… And no one really organised it. There we no flyers, mobile phones, it just came together organically. You could never recreate it now, it was just unique, it was our generation’s Woodstock. We set up on the Thursday night and we didn’t finish till Tuesday.”
Castlemorton is an event that has since gone down in history, its ripples felt for years afterwards. It marked the beginning of the end of the ‘new age’ traveller lifestyle and of illegal outdoor raves via the Tories’ Criminal Justice Bill a couple of years later. As Harrison says, “The government were already a bit pissed off about raves, but Castlemorton really blew the gaff. That was May 1992 and at the Tory party conference in September, [senior Conservative] Michael Howard said he planned to introduce legislation to make things like raves illegal — and the Criminal Justice Act was made law in November ’94.”
DiY were unique among the soundsystems at Castlemorton in that they played deep house rather than the hard techno that was adopted by many other UK travelling sounds like Spiral Tribe. “Castlemorton was nine soundsystems and I went to all of them and the music was just a nightmare!” says Harrison. “It was just appalling, nosebleed techno, 160 beats per minute! As well as house, we played John Coltrane, Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy. People came to our tent and stayed for two days, it saved their sanity. Because we really believed in the music. I guess we really believed in the ecstasy as well but you can’t really say that anymore… But there’s something sacred that happens when you get the right people, the right music, the right drugs in the right place — it just doesn’t get any better than that.”
“We did some properly mad shit that makes me shudder when I look back, it was so reckless and lawless… I look back now in my mid-fifties and just think, ‘Wow’”
Harrison’s role in the collective, after an aborted attempt at DJing (“I couldn’t be arsed: too difficult, too expensive, too serious!”) was as organiser, galvaniser and promoter. It’s an essential job in the success of every UK underground party: the facilitator, that one mate with a big personality who by default ends up putting on events, the larger-than-life member of your crew who makes things happen.
“I was the brains!” he laughs. “The gobshite! At the height of our fame around ’93, ’94 we had 13 or 14 DJs and my job was to herd the cats. I was the organiser. We were a collective but I also thought in a Stalinist way that if I don’t DJ I can kind of control things. I guess I was the strategist, the organiser, promoter, gobshite and money launderer!”
Because of their music policy, DiY were uniquely placed to take their free party ethos outside the traditional UK free festival circuit. As Harrison says, “We played Cafe Del Mar in Ibiza six weeks after Castlemorton, that was the unique thing about us. We were part of the Balearic scene, the crusty scene, the club scene, the soundsystem scene. There’s no way Spiral Tribe are going to play at Cafe Del Mar and there’s no way that Brandon Block is going to play at Castlemorton, so that was our unique selling point I guess.”
DiY also ran their successful club night Bounce for five years till the late ‘90s. They toured the country and built a network of Bounce events in major UK cities, their legal endeavours partly subsidising the illegal parties. They also took their events to places like Paris, Ibiza and Amsterdam, to Atlanta, San Francisco and Dallas in the US and to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
And then there were the record labels. DiY put out a strong album in ’93 on Warp Records called ‘Strictly 4 Groovers’ before launching their Strictly 4 Groovers label in the same year. It ran till ’98 when it was replaced by DiY Discs. The Strictly 4 Groovers label featured beautiful mid-‘90s deep house like Crime’s ‘Rhythm Graffiti’ EP, To-Ka’s ‘Keep Pushing’ and ‘Good Together’ by Charles Webster and Pippa Jones as South Central, as well as music from members of DiY. DiY Discs continued in a similar vein with a series of deep releases from artists including Plej, Atjazz, Rhythm Plate, Stacey Kidd and Digs, Woosh and Mr Ski, building a reputation for high-quality underground house music.
However, nothing is static, certainly not in the wild world of clubbing, DJing and promoting. Over the last few years, the crew have met up and put on occasional events, making it all the way to their 25th and then 30th anniversary celebrations, but by the late ‘90s, Harrison says the DiY collective was “Fluctuating — there was quite a lot of addiction, quite a lot of mess, quite a lot of people moving, raising kids and so on…” Perhaps inevitably, real life had begun to infiltrate the dream world of the idealistic DiY. Gradually, parts of the collective moved on and went their separate ways.
Harrison originally wrote the first chapter of what became Dreaming in Yellow 20 years ago and was offered a publishing deal, but abandoned the project. “I’ve been waiting 20 years to write this,” he says. “I started it in ’98 when I had loads of time and no discipline. Then I had two kids and I had loads of discipline and no time.” He eventually finished it, fitting the writing around his job and family and it was speedily snapped up by Velocity Press.
“I just think it’s a fantastic story. We had some right scrapes, some outrageous behaviour, some truly moving moments: it’s just a fucking great story. DiY just never said no. It’s in the book but the core four of us, Digs and Woosh, Simon DK and myself, we did some properly mad shit that makes me shudder when I look back, it was so reckless and lawless. We smashed some police Range Rovers out of the way at a free festival in 1991… I look back now in my mid-fifties and just think, ‘Wow’.
It’s also a historically important story. I get emails every few months from sociology students who want to write about parties and protest in the ‘90s and need a quote. And I’ve not read anything yet that’s properly documented the sheer hedonism of the ‘90s.”
Looking back, now that the dust has well and truly settled on what Harrison refers to as “the intense battleground of the early ‘90s”, DiY’s legacy is perhaps clearer to see. They were a vital link between the traveller/‘crustie’ free parties and the wave of acid house hedonism that swept the country in the late ‘80s. DiY championed collectivism, celebrating the centrality of the group over the individual, pioneering a radically egalitarian approach to parties, where the power of music could change lives.
They set a standard, in terms of their music policy and the quality of their soundsystem but also in their not-for-profit approach — an approach that totally epitomised the very best of the UK house scene. “I meet people now and they say, ‘I came to one of your parties; it changed my life’. Still to this day. I think that’s our legacy,” says Harrison. “The music was vitally important; we thought we could change the world through house music and ecstasy. Maybe we did.”
Dreaming in Yellow: The Story of the DiY Sound System is out now on Velocity Press
Photography: David Bowen, Dilys Jones, Alan Lodge, Max Longtime, Matt Smith, Sharon Storer
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An ongoing diary of stuff, allsorts, and things wot happen ……
I am a photographer with a special interest to document the lives of travelling people and those attending Festivals, Stonehenge etc, what the press often describe as ‘New Age Travellers’ and many social concerns.
With my photography, I have tried to say something of the wide variety of people engaged in ‘Alternatives’, and youths’ many sub-cultures and to present a more positive view.
I have photographed many free and commercial events and have, in recent years, extended my work to include dance parties (’rave culture’), gay-rights events, environmental direct actions, and protest against the Criminal Justice Act and more recently, issues surrounding the Global Capitalism.
Further, police surveillance has recently become a very important subject for me!
In recognition of this work, received a ‘Winston’ from Privacy International, at the 1998 ‘Big Brother’ Awards. The citation reads: “Alan Lodge is a photographer who has spent more than a decade raising awareness of front-line police surveillance activities, particularly the endemic practice of photographing demonstrators and activists”.
I am based in Nottingham, UK.
Quotes & Thoughts
“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But, conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one that it is right.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.
In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!!”
Harry Lime [Orsen Wells] The Third Man 1949
“Civilization will not attain to its perfection, until the last stone from the last church, falls on the last priest.”
Emile Zola
“….I have an important message to deliver to all the cute people all over the world.
If you’re out there and you’re not cute, maybe you’re beautiful, I just want to tell you somethin’- there’s more of us ugly mother-fuckers than you are, hey-y, so watch out now…”
Frank Zappa
Tash on YouTube
