Dreaming in Yellow : The Story of the DiY Sound System
Harry Harrison book launch at The Angel, Nottingham.
Saturday 26th March 2033
Dreaming in Yellow : The Story of the DiY Sound System
Harry Harrison book launch at The Angel, Nottingham.
Saturday 26th March 2033
“…. If 1993 had been the year of DIY becoming a semi-legitimate busi ness, getting an office and studio, making music and travelling, then 1994 would prove to be the year of politics. All our endeavours, going right back to those early house parties, had been based on equality and collectivism, much like a workers’ cooperative. Essentially, this was socialism in practice; providing most of our events for free or certainly at low cost, everyone got paid the same and anyone with kids got a twenty pound ‘nipper bonus’. We felt as though we had been political throughout, then basically adding some excitement and colour to the mission statement of the old anarcho-punks, plus providing an income for dozens of people. Throughout this book, I have outlined how DiY had two main drivers: politics and hedonism. However, by 1994 we were perhaps guilty of letting the latter overshadow the former. And then, as mentioned above, at the tail end of 1993, Michael Howard, the vapid home secretary and future leader of the Conservative Party, announced the provisions of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill, shortened universally to the CJB, proposing to effectively criminalise our lifestyle.
When the White Paper was published, we quite literally could not believe the government was serious; it felt like a Situationist prank. It was Tash, as always, who obtained the White Paper. Tash, aka Alan Lodge, was another unsung hero of the free festival and party movement. Having quit his job as an ambulance driver many years before, Tash had gone on the road for many years before settling in Nottingham. Unlike the posturing nihilistic behaviour many anarchists, the real deal. Scrupulously organised, both with his huge library photos documenting the traveller lifestyle and with his political activism, was always Tash sent for various bills, statutes. was always Tash writing letters and attending demos, and always Tash heading down Parliament represent his people at committee meetings that most us wouldn’t even know about.
And now hour had come: proposed Act of Parliament which one could ignore, and so egregious in its provisions that an entire subculture rose to prevent becoming law. The CJB itself was real ragbag Tory prejudices strung together in desperate act of mollifying Middle England and holding off the resurgent Labour Party under its shiny new leader, Tony Blair. It was ill-conceived and badly drafted. The Bill would abolish the right to silence on arrest and criminalise trespass, both basic rights going back centuries, privatise prisons and allow for the potential introduction of prison ships, introduce possible life sentences for juveniles, and allow the police take and retain intimate body samples in preparation for a national DNA database.
But the most outrage was unquestionably aimed at Sections 63-66, which dealt with ‘raves’. That the authorities had even used the word ‘rave’ was astonishing. By 1994 it had already become an out-dated word and only used ironically among actual ravers. Coming from the Tories, sounded risible, the political equivalent of dad-dancing a wedding. The four sections made it firstly a criminal offence to organise a ‘rave’, if outdoors and with more than ten people in attendance, or if refusing to leave said ‘rave’ if directed to do so by the senior police officer present. For the above crimes, the penalty would be up to three months imprisonment and/or a Level 4 fine, that being up to £2,500. Section 64 would allow the police to enter the land on which the ‘rave’ occurred, Section 65 to arrest any individuals who attempted to get to the ‘rave’ when directed not to do so. Finally, Section 66 gave the police the powers to seize ‘sound equipment’ if they felt that the conditions above had been met. Most infamously, Section 63, Subsection 1, Paragraph b contained a legal definition of music so as to include ‘sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. In other words, the civil servants who had written the CJB did not consider what we played at raves to be ‘music’ and so had attempted to legally codify that word to include the racket that we made. This was madness, both laughable and sinister in equal measure, but we weren’t having it and began preparing for a fight. At an initial meeting at the Cookie Club in Nottingham, representatives of all the local sound systems, plus Tash, met to form a plan of war. We would organise demonstrations and benefits, raise money to publicise the evils of the CJB to the wider public, maybe record some tunes of repetitive beats to highlight our feelings of injustice and anger. It was genuinely a powerful moment when we all agreed on a plan of action, with solidarity among the systems. All we needed now was a name, an umbrella organisation and banner to fight beneath, and when someone proposed the name ‘All Systems No’, there was no discussion.
In London and the south, other groups were quickly formed, the Advance Party and the Freedom Network being the biggest. We travelled down to a community centre in Brixton to one of the Advance Party meetings, recognising many faces from Spiral Tribe and Bed lam and merrily taking the piss out of each other’s music. Shortly after, we attended another meeting at the home of Exodus collective near Luton, those guys having established a commune probably nearest in similarity to Crass of anyone in the whole rave movement and really pushing the boundaries of what an ethical house music collective could be. Nothing creates solidarity more solidly than a shared sense of injustice and feeling compelled to fight it, and for the next eight or nine months the different systems came together amazingly. Together we booked our old haunt, the Marcus Garvey Centre and held a series of fundraisers and all-nighters with a DJ from each crew playing and all monies going to the anti-CJB fund. …. “
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