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
From their inaugural party (Harry’s birthday) just over three years ago DIY have grown from a core of three or four into an extended posse that numbers over 100.
The 30 or so people who are actively involved include DJs, decor and graphic designers, lighting wizards and crew members. They’ve networks of loyal followers from south to north and a dedicated contingent of travellers. Not only has their following grown but so have their resources. Starting with just a couple of turntables they now have their own vans, PA, studio, record label, radio shows and could soon be the owners of a pressing machine. If the set up sounds like a multi conglomerate from America the attitude is a million miles from there. From the flat and now an office in Nottingham DiY organise all their events with a laid back and easy-going attitude that ensures their posse of friends keeps on growing daily.
The evening before as they set up the all nighter that we were later to fall victim to, a party for Time Recordings and their own Strictly 4 Groovers label, | had a chat with three of the main members of DIY, Harry, Rick and Damien, in their studio.
Harry: Our main intention from the start was really to be able to do our own thing… rather than having to pander to club owners, record labels, managers or who-ever. Half the time we do pretty stupid things really, like tonight we’re going to throw a big party and loose lots of money on it probably. Free parties are the reason DIY exists as it does today. They’ve been regularly organising them for a number of years, two Summers ago their almost weekly gatherings near Derby attracted hundreds of people. As their name grew and grew they began to get offers of club nights but it is to the idea of free parties to which they remain loyal. Having been involved before the tabloids discovered a cheap headline they’re in a position to know the in’s and out’s of what goes on behind the scenes.
Harry describes free parties as being ‘‘a creature of the south’, the first ones occurring in the West Country around Bath and Bristol, where the scene is still strong. Of course, free parties are always linked to travellers in the press and for all the snobbery that gets directed towards them, if it weren’t for them the scene might not be as alive as it is, Harry: ‘Travellers were the first sort of people who had the approach that they were into putting in a lot of effort for no (financial) reward really, most people aren’t.’ Damien, “And they already had the knowl- edge to find the sites where you could actually hold a party.”’
They also had a supply of tarpaulins and the essential generators. The other advantage was that police would be more reticent in storming into a party on a site where people were actually living. Indeed parties without the travellers — ‘cover’ had got nasty, with police steaming into marquees in the name of ‘safe- ty’ and causing uncontrolled stampedes. So free parties with travellers involved were the most likely to come off. That was, until Castle Morton. Although a number of sound systems there had their equipment confiscated and held for six months DIY were lucky to hold on to theirs. But the after effects of Castle Morton are still being felt. Harry: ‘Castle Morton nearly killed parties but it’s made it impossible to be a traveller, which isn’t anyone’s fault. But you can’t beat the police force at the end of the day and if you want to keep doing parties — sometimes you’ve got to be a bit crafty. You’ve not got to go somewhere where — they think you’re going to be.” Thanks to a number of sympathetic landlords who are coming forward with offers of sites, free parties look set to continue, for a while anyway.
DIY parties are renowned for offering not only the best in dance music but also for paying attention to decor and visuals, they like to ‘‘keep it fairly state-of-the- art, our video projections are by Project Love E, even though it’s free it doesn’t have to equal crap.” The free parties are what DiY are all about, their other ven- tures pay for them, Harry: ‘The organisation is self perpetuating, some parts we make money and some parts we loose it. We don’t mind making money but it’s not our prime concern.” If you haven’t seen a flyer with a DiY Du on in the last month then you can’t have been out much. Their home town night Bounce (Fridays, fortnightly at the Dance Factory) has been supplemented by no less than eight other regular Bounce’s across the country, from Liverpool to Exeter, taking in Bristol, Bath and Birmingham along the way. Bounce in the three sto- ried Dance Factory has an atmosphere, like all DiY events unmatched any- where |’ve been. The crowd are a very mixed bunch, dressed up, dressed down but all with a happy, friendly attitude. Surrounded by plaster fish, miles of trans- parent netting and a huge furry heart you can trance out downstairs or chill out with Pezz and co upstairs, but get your tickets early as it always sells out beforehand.
DiY have also just started co-running a monthly all nighter in Leicester with Beef. Held in the aptly named Starlite 2001, a Slightly tacky, rough around the edges venue, Sponge runs from 10pm to 6am and features guest DJs chosen for interest and attitude rather than simply star rating (first two were Darren Emmerson and Andy Weatherall) along with DiY regulars. Their ever loyal fol- lowers flock from everywhere to the club, the last one saw a mass exodus from Liverpool. Taking you up in all the right places, they know exactly when to start bringing you down with Digs (Rick) and Woosh (Pete) rounding the morning off with an absolutely perfectly timed set of house and garage with a hint of disco. After three ‘last tunes’ the crowd still refused to go home and while the bounc- ers actually stood in front of the decks to ensure they got a bit of kip that day everyone still stood for nearly half an hour on the dancefloor without budging!
A DIY contingent also visited Ibiza this summer, playing as guests of Summum and Cafe Del Mar and have been invited back by ‘‘Ibiza’s mellowest man who’s going to sort us out’. Rather than running expensive trios people managed to make their own way there “‘turning up off their own back and managing to find us somehow. It was more of a loose gathering than a promoted venture.” says Rick.
High up in the club charts lately has been the track ‘I Shall Be Released’ from Alabama 3, it’s the first release from the Strictly 4 Groovers label, a project which has been in the pipeline for some time as Rick explains: “Our longest standing idea was to set up a record label, because you can carry on doing club nights and free parties for so long but the record label can go on forever.” It’s something they’d been meaning to do for over 18 months but it took a friend who demo’d a song they liked to kick start them into action. ‘‘Also it’s like loads of things have sort of fallen into place.” chips in Harry, “‘As if by accident. This studio had been here, quarter of a mile round the corner fromm where we live, with this bit in.” ‘This bit’ being a portakabin type room in the basement of Square Dance studios, which they bought and are constantly adding pieces of equipment to (they’re currently on the look out for old analogue synths). As with their other arms, instead of hiring out the studio they let friends in to ‘mess about for hours”’ at no cost. If they come up with a good track Strictly 4 Groovers is there to put it out. ‘We let them come in here and come up with something without the pressure of having to fork out 3 or 400 pounds out of their own pocket. £35 an hour isn’t the best way to make you relax, especially if you’re trying to make something different. We’ve got 15 DJs in all and it’s our intention over the months to get organised and get all of them in making a record.”
At present there are three DiY related records around, the aforementioned Alabama 3, a Dreaming |n Yellow track ‘Excommunicate’ on Time Recordings 0992 and soon out on Warp their dub mix of ‘I Shall Be Released’ along with three other DiY mixes. ‘‘We learnt so much on the first record. Like don’t take a tune you think is alright and try to remix it so it’s good, you’re better off starting from scratch, if you’re remixing someones tune beware of eclipsing the original as they might get upset when your version does better, and that old adage, ‘‘as soon as you start to get into that music business side of things there’s so many sharks about… and there’s so many strange chaps from London!”’
As if the hours in the day weren’t already filled DiY DJs also have around 30 hours of airtime on local pirate radio station Touch FM (107.3). This includes a Serve Chilled show for six hours on a Monday night.
As well as the upcoming nights below DIY are currently on the look out for a venue to house a multimedia installation. They plan three floors of interactive video and music to create ‘‘a total environment” and a “room within a room” effect. They’ll be doing PAs along with guest DJ spots in the new year as well. For a bunch of people who’ve been described as hippies (they’re not) they cer- tainly get things done. That description probably arose from the fact that they don’t actually run round acting like they’ve got ‘important things to do’. You’re more likely to see them sitting chatting with their extended family. It just goes to show what you can accomplish with the right attitude. |’ll leave the last word to Harry: “We’re into people getting along with each other, we’re not into preach- ing a message to be anarchistic or whatever. A sense of humour at the end of the day is the one. We’re into having a laugh with as many people as possi- ble… where there’s no-one around telling you when to stop, how many people you can let in, stamps on hands, all that crap. You’re just having a few hours at the weekend, occasionally, when you can get away from it all and just have a laugh in a field somewhere.”
By 1992 leaked documents from Avon and Somerset Constabulary demonstrated the existence of Operation Nomad. Force Operational Order 36/92 marked `In Confidence’, revealed:
“With effect from Monday 27th April 1992, dedicated resources will be used to gather intelligence in respect of the movement of itinerants and travellers and deal with minor acts of trespass”.
An intelligence unit set up by Avon and Somerset produced regular Operation Nomad bulletins, listing personal details on Travellers and regular festival goers unrelated to any criminal conviction. A Force Operational Order issued by the Chief Constable also stated:
“Resources will be greatly enhanced for the period Thursday 21st May to Sunday 24th May inclusive in relation to the anticipated gathering of Travellers in the Chipping Sodbury area.”
This item referred to the annual Avon Free Festival which had been occurring in the area around the May bank holiday for several years, albeit in different locations. However, 1992 was the year Avon and Somerset Police intended to put a full stop to it. As a result the thousands of people travelling to the area for the expected Festival were shunted into neighbouring counties by Avon and Somerset’s Operation Nomad police manoeuvres.
The end result was the impromptu Castlemorton Common Festival, another pivotal event in the recent history of festival culture.
West Mercia Police claim they had no idea that an event might happen in their district, the truth of which relies on the unlikely situation that Avon and Somerset Police did not inform their neighbouring constabulary of Operation Nomad.
In the event, a staggering 30,000 Travellers, ravers and festival goers gathered almost overnight on Castlemorton Common to hold a free festival that flew in the face of the Public Order Act 1986 and the Entertainment (Increased Penalties) Act 1990. It was a massive celebration and the biggest of its kind since the bountiful days of the Stonehenge Free Festival. West Mercia Police claimed that due to the speed with which it coalesced, they were powerless to stop it.
However, the authorities used Castlemorton in a way that led people to suggest it had been at least partly engineered. After all, a large number of people had been shunted into the area by Operation Nomad, was it really likely that West Mercia police were unaware of this? The right-wing press published acres of crazed and damning coverage of the event, including the classic front page Daily Telegraph headline: “Hippies fire flares at Police”. The following mornings Daily Telegraph editorial read: “New Age, New Laws” and within two months, Sir George Young, then Minister for Housing, confirmed that new laws against Travellers were imminent “in reaction to the increasing level of public dismay and alarm about the behaviour of some of these groups.” Indeed, the outcry following Castlemorton provided the basis for the most draconian law yet levelled against alternative British culture. Just as the Public Order Act 1986 followed the events at Stonehenge in 1985, so the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill began its journey in 1992, pumped with the manufactured outrage following Castlemorton. By the time it reached statute two years later, it included criminal sanctions against assembly, outdoor unlicensed music events, unauthorised camping, and `aggravated trespass’. The law also reduced the number of vehicles which could gather together from twelve (as stipulated in the Public Order Act 1986) to six.
The news-manufacture used to prepare the public palate for the coming law was incessant, with media descriptions of Travellers including “hordes of marauding locusts” (Daily Telegraph), and “These foul pests must be controlled” (Daily Mail).
Read an excerpt from DiY founder Harry Harrison’s new book, Dreaming in Yellow: The story of DiY Soundsystem
WORDS BY: HARRY HARRISON | EDITED BY: GEMMA ROSS | PHOTOS BY: ALAN LODGE
7 MARCH 2022
Never has there been a more turbulent time in UK politics than in the 1980s. Through a new era of young ravers discovering evolving variations of electronic music, political restraints tightening, and an allure to join a growing counterculture, the coming-of-age put all their efforts into free parties. In the final ten year lead-up to the new millennium, youth rebellion grew stronger and soundsystem culture was created. DiY was one of the first house-focused soundsystems in the UK finding its feet in the Midlands, and once it lifted off, brought a fanbase bigger than they could have ever imagined. DiY by name, DiY by nature, the collective grew immeasurable amounts finding its way overseas to a peak-era Ibiza where the parties continued, this time legally, and developed international fans.
By May of 1992, DiY Soundsystem reached its most lawless and revolutionary peak. One of the most infamous free parties of all time, Castlemorton Common Festival, took place with the help of the DiY collective inspiring the legislation of 1994’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. The historic event signalled a change in these seminal beginnings, and the counterculture now faced backlash as a result of Castlemorton, the biggest and most hedonistic free party in UK history. DiY founder Harry Harrison has now documented the story of the soundsystem’s anarchic beginnings in a new book, Dreaming in Yellow: The story of DiY Soundsystem, due for release on March 23 via Velocity Press. Read an excerpt set around the collectives epic rave at Castlemorton below.
It’s late evening on Friday, May 22, 1992. My oldest friend and I had walked slowly, disbelievingly, up the small hill and were now sitting on the grass, pleasingly cool after the heat of the gloriously radiant spring day. Silently we looked out across at what had been, until a few short hours ago, a peaceful and forgotten corner of middle England. Now, in the settling, liminal dusk it resembled some giant military operation or perhaps a huge, dark creature with endless rows of bright white eyes. In every direction, visible from our vantage point, luminous streams of headlights flowed along the entry tracks and the roads stretching into the distance. Who knew how many vehicles were arriving; certainly several thousand cars, vans, trucks, buses and horseboxes were pouring onto this enormous common laid out below us containing unknown numbers of ebullient revellers. Twenty-four hours earlier we had never heard of this place. Castlemorton had just been another name on the map, another quintessentially sleepy English shire, certainly not the sort of place where history is made.
On that portentous night, Pete was two days shy of his twenty-seventh birthday, I was eighteen months to the day younger. It had been ten or so years since we had met at an underage drinking establishment in Bolton and had been through innumerable existential rites of passage together during the intervening, tumultuous decade. With others, we had been founding members of a music collective that had grown exponentially in tandem with the explosion of dance music and had, beyond our wildest expectations, succeeded in uniting our twin passions of music and protest into a remarkable, cohesive alliance.
Pete had introduced me to Crass, the seminal anarcho-punk band and in their brilliant pamphlet ‘Mindless Shocking Slogans and Token Tantrums’, they quoted Wally Hope as declaring:
“Our temple is sound, we fight our battles with music, drums like thunder, cymbals like lightning, banks of electronic equipment like nuclear missiles of sound. We have guitars instead of tommy-guns”.
Only we had replaced guitars with acid house. Seemingly out of nowhere, house music had shown every possibility of providing the perfect weapon with which to dismantle, in some small but meaningful way, the anodyne and monotonous world which we had grown up in and largely rejected. From small parties around inner-city Nottingham in the summer of 1989 onwards, our collective, known as DiY, had tried to use the irresistible power of these new electronic sounds as a musical weapon to challenge convention; to attempt to unite people beneath a banner of liberation and pleasure. And now here we were, witnessing the effects that the actions of our group, and those of many more, had catalysed into this huge free festival.
Various soundsystems, including our own, were transmitting their rhythmic pulses across this darkening common, mingling with shouts of joy, recognition and exhilaration. This looked, smelled and sounded like revolution; a righteous revolution against the entrenched and heartless establishment which had been quietly and ruthlessly running England for centuries. We had intended to shock, we had intended to challenge and now the sheer scale of this revolution had become clear; magnificent yet terrifying, ranged endlessly below us, looking as if for once we were winning.
The first free festivals we had attended many years before had been small, myopic and backwards-looking affairs, culturally and musically outdated, but now we had arrived at this – a whole generation seemingly drawn to these relentless beats and their concomitant clarion call to social action. I turned to Pete, sitting next to me on the grass and voiced my fears, saying:
“You know what, I think we might have pushed this too far.”
To which Pete, looking out over the great chaos below, just replied, quietly:
“It’s never too far.”
Dreaming in Yellow: The story of DiY Soundsystem, written by Harry Harrison, is out on March 23 via Velocity Press. Find out more about it here.
Gemma Ross is Mixmag’s Editorial Assistant, follow her on Twitter
The union won an apology and out-of-court settlements for two photographers and a video journalist who were detained while covering a Black Lives Matter solidarity protest for Eric Garner at Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush, London, on December 10, 2014.
In order to escape being confined with the protesters at the shopping centre, the three were filmed by the police showing their press cards and were then told to leave the area, preventing them from reporting on the subsequent arrests of 76 protesters.
The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) conceded this should not have happened and that the police and media guidelines agreed with the NUJ, British Press Photographers and Chartered Institute of Journalists had not been properly followed.
The MPS also accepted the three NUJ members had felt that they were being “subjected to state surveillance for reporting on political protest” and said it “recognised that journalists play an important role as a public watchdog and that freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of a democratic society” and that they would “value continuing discussions with the NUJ to update the police and media guidelines” in the spirit that they “hope to ensure that incidents such as this will not occur again”.
Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ general secretary, said:
“While we are pleased this has been resolved and the police have apologised, the fact that it has taken so long to get to this stage is wholly unacceptable. Journalists must be allowed to do their job without any police interference and without their safety being compromised. The NUJ will continue to make this abundantly clear to the Metropolitan Police Service and other forces, and will carry on representing and supporting members who have been treated unfairly.”
Jason N. Parkinson, video journalist, said:
“I welcome the out of court settlement and public apology from the MPS. However, this case has taken more than nine years to conclude. We repeatedly requested all the footage of the police evidence gatherers and bodycams from that night and yet none was ever released.
“This apology is nothing that we have not heard many times before, the same words and the same assurances. Yet we have seen more journalists arrested while doing their jobs in the past year than I have witnessed in my entire 20-year career.
“I want to thank Bindmans solicitors and the National Union of Journalists for their persistence in this case. It should also always be reminded that without the Human Rights Act these defences of journalists’ rights to report such events without fear of intimidation, detention or violence would not be possible. If we lose the HRA the situation for journalists in the UK will become much worse.”
Jess Hurd, photographer, said:
“We will not have access to justice until the police are accountable for their actions. This means not losing key evidence. While I welcome the apology from the Metropolitan police, it reads just the same as all other apologies. Journalists should be able to work without fear of violence and targeting by the police.”
Eric Garner died following a New York police officer using an unlawful chokehold on him, which was captured on footage. The event became a cause célèbre and sparked BLM marches worldwide after Garner was heard repeatedly saying, “I can’t breathe”.
Jason N. Parkinson and Jess Hurd are also currently part of a legal action against the MPS for holding surveillance files on them on the Domestic Extremism database.
Another submission for a feature in ‘Saturday Guardian Mag’
“We are running a feature on the 30th anniversary of the Criminal Justice Bill in The Guardian’s Saturday magazine. It will publish on Saturday 20th April. “
First submission for a feature in ‘Saturday Guardian Mag’
“We are running a feature on the 30th anniversary of the Criminal Justice Bill in The Guardian’s Saturday magazine. It will publish on Saturday 20th April. “
In this video, I go through my whole process for editing a landscape image from start to finish in Lightroom and Photoshop. I begin with merging multiple shots in Lightroom, doing some basic editing, before using Photoshop to remove some people from the scene and then finishing back in Lightroom. – Thomas Fitzgerald
Posted in.|Taggedlandscape, lightroom, Photography|Comments Off on How I Created This Dramatic Landscape Photo in Lightroom & Photoshop – From start to Finish
Anonymous Nottingham gather in the Market Square, Nottingham.
Then, treking off to visit the usual suspects in tax evasion and worker exploitation.
Barclays, NatWest, Burton/perkins, Boots, Starbucks, RBS, HSBC, Santandar, BHS, etc … oh and of course Vodafone, twice {again!!!}. Included in this demo were the Broadmarsh and Victoria Shopping Centres.
Although the security were as worried as ever, the police seemed quite mild and all was good natured. Folks included street performers in on the act.
In this experiment Dr Rob Thompson from the University of Reading shows how long it takes a cup of water to soak into parched ground. This is why heavy rainfall after a drought can be really dangerous & might lead to flash flooding
Judge Justice Saini has refused permission for the Solicitor General to pursue retired social worker Trudi Warner for Contempt of Court over holding a placard outside court telling jurors they have a right to acquit on their conscience 🪧
Last Saturday marked 4/20, an international celebration of all things weed, and to mark it a photographer processed a roll of film using cannabis flower.
Alan Lodge's Blog - Tash's Blog on stuff wot happens - A radical British politics rooted in nature is spreading – and the establishment doesn’t like it -
Alan Lodge's Blog - Tash's Blog on stuff wot happens - ‘We went from naive, hippyish protesters to hardcore anarchists’: the criminal justice bill protests, 30 years on -
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
