The imminent arrival of a ground-breaking documentary – ‘Free Party: A Folk History’ – about the British free party scene of the late 80s/early 90s, has stirred some stark memories and buried feelings within me; for I was part of the DJing and music-making side of the DiY sound system, based in Nottingham.
DiY were renowned for organising free parties in diverse rural settings: “new age” travellers’ sites, disused airbases, quarries and woods; but, unlike some of their contemporaries – like Spiral Tribe – they eschewed fast, raucous break-beats in favour of the sparser, more melodic stylings of deep house, usually imported from New York or Chicago.
What I want to do here is give you a few snapshots from a free party that ran for days (or weeks?) in 1992 on a travellers’ site at Breedon-on-the-Hill in Leicestershire, not long before the infamous Castlemorton rave. I really hope I can give you a taste of what it was like to be truly on the ground at a free party.
I made records and DJed with my friend Max Essa. We were originally from the clubbing side of house rather than the travellers’ scene. At this time, we didn’t own a car and would get lifts to the parties from two female friends, Trevlyn and Gaynor. Trevlyn, as the driver, had a particular habit of never wanting to leave a party, or she’d go missing into some travellers’ vehicle and take ages to emerge, requiring then further hours to sober up enough to drive. So leaving was always extremely difficult!
It’s important to remember that at that time not everyone was a DJ. Far from it – your average party-goer didn’t imagine it was something they could ever do. On arrival, the crowd would part for us as we strode through bearing record boxes, as though we had some esoteric permit to take control of the music. Often, there’d be a fellow DiY DJ already on the decks who’d be happy to let us drop our boxes and give us a time to come and take over. Then the drug-taking would start, if it hadn’t already.
My main memory of Breedon is of an occasion where Max and I DJed for 5 hours on 6 acid trips (to be precise!). Unsurprisingly, I can only stir faint embers of the bucolic madness of those hours. I recall how some of the more hardcore travellers would just be forever with us, locked onto the music; vast, black pupils staring into the air as they stomped their endless stomp, hour after hour.
Then there’d be these different groups of city clubbers pouring in and out as the party tore on. LSD is a drug that can cause major upheaval in your personality or outlook, to say the least, so you might be thinking, ‘How the hell do you cope with that challenging situation?’
What I noticed was that, when focused on an important task, LSD seemed to become an incredible tool of concentration, rather than agent of disorder. It seemed like my whole existence was hanging in the microscopic, liminal space where stylus met vinyl. I had this vital, thrilling job to do that I simply couldn’t let myself be distracted from. Everything was working perfectly – we were high on the moment and easily propelling the dancers further. I think we probably took that much because we felt it was fuelling that energy and informing our seemingly on-point selection of records. Plus, we were in a swirling pit of ecstatic mayhem and had obviously decided there was no holding back. Dogs and children were also a perennial feature of any DiY dance floor and I reckon they had a comforting influence on me, amongst the bedlam.
It’s easy to speak of these times in terms of a glowing idyll, but of course there was an almighty edge to nearly everything that went on. In fact, perhaps the lawless chaos of being hugely intoxicated around similarly demented strangers, in a location far from the reassurances of so-called civilisation, augmented the highs; you needed that friction to create a spark. Compared with today’s concept of ‘Safe Spaces’ these locales were crammed with infinite jeopardies. It was anarchy in action, like being on a lawless island. But I guess the shared goal of being united in euphoric dancing negated those dangers.
However, It was at Breedon (I think) that I saw a rather notorious traveller attack a guy with a video camera. It was so at odds with the sunny and lysergic atmosphere of that day. The guy had been filming on and off for hours. This was a huge rarity. I mean, it was unusual enough for someone to brandish a snapshot camera, let alone a camcorder. But the traveller just started lunging at the guy, smacking the camera from his hands and connecting a few blows. Later, a friend told us the attacker was a wanted man and had already warned the guy not to film him. This moment sent a sort of “Altamont” chill through my tripping body. Violence and LSD make horrific bedfellows, to say the least.
However, violence was almost unheard of in those situations. Paranoia could run rife though: Max was often quite neat and tidy in appearance and there was one occasion when Gaynor told me, “Max is freaking a few people out, you know.”
“How come?”
“The way he’s dressed – some of the travellers think he’s undercover D.S.”
I did laugh… but from another angle, it could obviously be a terrifying prospect to be suspected of being undercover drug squad at a party like that, in the middle of nowhere. Actually, I never recall any police presence at Breedon. Perhaps they just let it happen as it seemed to be suitably self-contained, away from any residential areas. This was also before the Criminal Justice Bill, of course.
Another fragmented memory I have of Breedon is of standing around a huge fire, again tripping, in the half-light of a slow dawn. A sort of hardcore/breakbeat DJ called Bad Boy T had turned up with some mates and was waiting to go on the decks. I think he was actually wearing a baseball cap with his name on it. They all sat in the car, right by the fire, with the engine thrumming away constantly. It’s not the sort of thing you’d generally admit in a time of such love and unity, but a growing resentment rose in me, verging on a bad trip, because I hated the idea that he was intent on shattering this halcyon dawn with harsh music. I was further irked by the fact he was sat in the car, not joining the rest of us in the open, with the engine running as if to say, ‘If I’m not going on, I’m out of here’.
In the middle of this peculiar stand-off a sudden roar arose from over the horizon. We all turned nervously to scrutinise the perimeters. What was it? The police? A dawn raid of tow trucks come to drag vehicles from the site? As we stared, I saw four cars tearing over the hillside, being driven like rally cars, zig-zagging wildly, ploughing up the grass, like boy racers in a show of aggressive bravado. But something was wrong… for these were no old bangers, these were very far from being battered off-roaders; as they drew nearer people started laughing and whooping, the cars were glinting in the burgeoning light revealing their pristine condition – and there were stickers with numbers right across the windscreens. These were luxury cars – freshly-stolen from a showroom – and the grinning, miscreant drivers were doing laps of honour around the crowd of revellers, to much amusement. It was like a sort of Red Arrows display of executive joy-riding, laid on for the muntered hoards.
Of course, vehicles were integral to the true free party experience because, as much as you might be dancing under a tarp or taking a shit in the woods, a lot of your time would be spent dosing, yabbering or taking drugs in a car, truck or bus. In fact there were some free parties where the weather was so bad everyone stayed in their cars. Most often, you would hop between different vehicles, chatting with various configurations of people, like a sort of dishevelled drive-in scene from ‘Happy Days’.
Vehicles were the only ticket required to access a free party – and your only means of escape. You may be wondering how we got away the day of the 6 trips. As mentioned, the trips seemed to imbue this incredibly heightened focus for DJing. However, as soon as we stopped, I collapsed on the grass as a whole torrent of sensory data poured into my head from every direction. Suddenly, I was awash on a sea of rank disorder. I was really tripping then; and, as it does, it went on and on and on. LSD is like a fever that keeps propelling you into further thrilling, frightening or nonsensical rabbit holes, no matter how exhausted or overloaded you feel. There’s a constant unfolding of unpredictable and strange events, perceptions and obsessions.
Eventually, Trevlyn was located but she was far too intoxicated to drive, as we all were. Also, either the car had got stuck in some mud or the battery had gone flat, I can’t remember, but we had to push it some distance to get us moving. I found it all pretty overwhelming. I won’t say who did volunteer to drive but let’s just say it took a combination of enormous bravery and utter foolishness to take on that monstrous task.
I’ll never forget looking out at the road ahead as we sped along, my brain completely unable to make sense of space and distance, shuddering at the thought that the driver was as ruined as me… how they did it, I’ll never know. The final thing I recall is passing the eight enormous cooling towers of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, belching smoke about a quarter of a mile away, and it just looked like a plasticine model that had been stuck to the window, inches from my face.
It’s hard to imagine peculiar subcultures like these existing ever again. Such lifestyles needed to be hidden from scrutiny for a protracted time in order to flourish, which is probably impossible now: people would see endless photo streams of the event in real time, judge its merits on purely visual evidence spun through their own, innate assumptions, and decide whether to participate or not. This is to lose the journey, the legwork, the miles of scoured countryside, the hours of marination in the environment and the drugs; but most of all the long, shared hours with other people – other people who had made similar convoluted odysseys to arrive at the same magical place.
