Scuffles as travellers’ ‘Kill The Bill’ demo ends in clashes with police in London Travellers, gypsies, and squatters gathered in London on Wednesday (July 7) to protest against a new government bill which, if passed, will criminalise trespass with the intention to reside. The Kill the Bill protest turned into scuffles after one protester was arrested for unknown reasons on Whitehall which led to demonstrators trying to block the road. If the new bill passes, roadside camps could result in the seizure of vehicles, larger fines and the potential for prison time, affecting the lives of Gypsy, Roma, Traveller communities, as well as people sleeping rough. Urban Pictures
If it becomes law, residing on land without permission would be a criminal offence, threatening a way of life for communities across the UK by Harriet Grant
Guardian, Mon 5 Jul 2021 14.45 BST
“Iam worried that not everyone knows what is coming,” says Amy, sitting in the truck she has turned into a cosy home for her and her two children. “If this bill is passed it will mean the end of our culture. The end of our way of life.”
Amy, who wanted to be known by her first name, lives with her two sons on a small Travellers’ site down a quiet country lane in the west of England, along the edges of an ancient forest.
Despite the wheels on everyone’s homes, there is a feeling of permanence here. Amy’s neighbours are busy gardening in the sunshine, tyres are filled with plants, wood is stacked in piles ready to be made into more planters. In every corner, life is blooming.
But for Amy, and many others, this way of life is under threat. Gypsies and Travellers are preparing to rally as the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill gets a step closer to being passed into law. If passed, section 4 of the bill, which has its third reading in the Commons this week, will make “residing or intending to reside on land without the permission of the owner or occupier” a new criminal offence.
Amy started a podcast entitled “I choose the road” in an attempt to sound the alarm. “I started to think about how I could get the news out there to other Travellers about what was happening. People might not know their homes could be taken away and they could even go to prison.”
Amy and her neighbours aren’t on the land legally, but “the owners tolerate us for now. I don’t know what will happen once the bill passes, though”. None of the Travellers interviewed by the Guardian wanted to include their full name for fear of being traceable by the authorities.
Across the UK many Travellers live like this, finding fields where they will be quietly tolerated, in breach of planning and housing regulations. Others move much more frequently, having to find somewhere new every few days.
Amy took to the road in the 90’s, after getting involved in a Travellers’ road protest in Ireland as a teenager and living largely in vehicles ever since. “We are known as ‘New Travellers’. We don’t have ethnic heritage but I’ve done this for many years … [The name] allows us to claim our identity without stepping on other people’s.”
For Amy and her neighbour, Jess, living this way is a commitment to an alternative way of life, outside the structures of capitalism.
“It’s about a simpler life,” says Amy, “a life closer to nature where you can hear the rain on the roof, where you don’t need as much money so you can be with your children more. And it’s about community, because living on a Traveller site and raising children here is like living in an old-fashioned village.”
Jess is pottering around outside her van, which is surrounded by the detritus of a creative life. It’s filled with fabric and craft materials and hula-hoops lie all around it. The Traveller community has deep connections to the creative side of British festivals and she hopes to be back on the scene this summer. For now, she is ready to fight for her way of life against the police bill.
“I grew up on a council estate in Wales and I moved to town when I left home and thought ‘oh yes, this is just as bad as I thought it would be’, just depressing and lonely. I realise now what I was searching for was community,” says Jess, who did not want to give her surname.
If this bill passes, she says, “we will be the last generation. I will just keep moving … until they take my vehicle, I don’t have other options in my back pocket. I feel fucking petrified and also angry. People worry about Travellers turning up in their area, but where is the common land? You are taking away my animal freedom to be on this planet. It’s wiping out a culture.”
In the south of England, another Jess lives in converted horsebox and rides a large motorbike. Lately, she has been spending time on Facebook, sharing her story of decades on the road and encouraging others to tell their stories. “Travellers don’t like to draw attention to themselves, but I believe this is a time when it’s urgent to share our stories, our culture and history.”
Jess chose this way of life to be closer to nature. “I don’t even like to sit in the van … it’s just so I can be as close to nature as possible. The doors are always open, I’m always outside. There is a real push towards cultural homogeneity, through the media you are told – think this way, judge people like this. People don’t understand why I would choose this life, but for me it’s sanity. A simple lifestyle close to the earth that doesn’t tax resources and is sustainable on a small income. ”
Today she is parked up at the top of the South Downs, her truck doors wide open. Like Amy, she took to the road in the 90s, as protest camps and rave culture brought people on to the road.
“When I was younger I had a breakdown and pieced my health back together in Ireland and that is where I met people living on the road, including a world of horse-drawn vehicles. It was eye-opening, I thought, ‘oh my God I don’t have to go home, I can live camping’.
“I worked in agriculture, from farm to farm both here and in Europe. Being outside working was good for my mental health. I had choices and I chose it all.”
Jess can’t say where she has been parked recently because it’s barely legal. Many Travellers are on edge, worried constantly about being tracked down and fined by local authorities.
“During lockdown they left us alone’ says Jess. “But before that I was parking my truck all over Brighton or out in the South Downs. I recently got about three section 77s (a legal order to remove a vehicle) stuck on my windscreen. They say ‘you are believed to be residing in a vehicle on the side of the highway and you need to move in the shortest time practicable’.”
“As it stands right now, it is a civil offence – I can move my truck to another place and they mostly leave you alone. You stay a few nights somewhere, take fines in your stride, it’s a hazard of the lifestyle.”
The law will bring a major hardening, from civil to criminal offence. “If this law is enforced they could immediately arrest me, stick me in a police car, take me to the station and destroy my truck.”
Travellers aren’t welcome on the campsites that ordinary holidaymakers might visit. “There are legalities around living on a campsite, they are expensive and they don’t like our vehicles. The special sites set up by councils are full.”
Jess is a confident woman and feels she can speak up if others are too worried to. “Tell me why I shouldn’t live this way? I look after my parents – I work, I pay tax, why do I have to live in a bloody house?”
In Bristol, Luke saw Jess’s message and thought the time had come to speak up. He is part of a group of Travellers who move around the south-west, currently awaiting eviction from a site they broke into and looking at where they can hide next.
“What are we supposed to do? Squatting is gone, soon this will go – just all means of subsistence are being criminalised. You can’t just be.”
Luke is a full-time carer for young people with disabilities, but doesn’t want to live in an ordinary house. “Nomadism is for me. I like sitting round the campfire, I like digging holes, chopping wood. I need community – I was on my own for a very very long time and – when I got into squatting it was like getting into a warm bath, I don’t really want to give up that communal element.”
He is very concerned about the possible further powers that would allow police to seize vehicles on the spot. “If that happens, I’ll just go back to sleeping in a tent in the wood.”
Earlier this month the high court ruled that local authorities can no longer issue blanket injunctions against “persons unknown” to stop Gypsies and Travellers stopping on local land. In recent years the injunctions were widely used to prevent people stopping even if they were new to the area. Campaigners and lawyers plan to use human rights laws to push back against the bill.
For Luke the constant pressure to move on and stay out of sight is stressful. “The whole time we are keeping an eye on where we can go next. Then on the day we move it’s stressful wondering will it happen, how long will we have there.”
He says his life deserves respect. “There is attention on van lifers, young yuppies and that’s fine. But there are some of us who are not photogenic or erudite who have not got other choices. We are out here living in dilapidated caravans and helping each other out. I would like it to be a matter of record that we existed, some of us who clawed our way out of the filth to get here and even that is being taken away from us.”
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Documentary about the work of Joe Rush and The Mutoid Waste Company
https://youtu.be/WZf5z1mnkZM
I Am A Mutoid
a documentary by
Letmiya SZTALRYD
Spreading the gospel of “Mutation”, Joe Rush and his Mutoid Waste Company, an underground collective of wild and subversive performers whose credo is the art made of waste, the parties and the road, shake up the alternative cultural history of Europe.
From London and Glastonbury Festival to Milan, Paris and Berlin, they create a mechanical world of mutant creatures and sculptures built on the military and industrial remains of our consumer society. Both a counterculture and a movement of resistance defending an underground ideal, their spectacular post-apocalyptic raves are legendary.
For a brief moment, at vast and lawless raves such as Castlemorton, a generation glimpsed an alternative way of life. Speaking to survivors of the early 90s free party scene, Tim Guest tells the story of how the state crushed the dream
New age travellers are questioned by police en route to a free party, June 1987. Photograph: David Mansell
Tim GuestSun 12 Jul 2009 00.01 BST
On 19 April 1992 – Easter Sunday – Spiral Tribe, a self-described “rag-tag sound system group who came together driven by the will to keep the party going”, who had been running free raves with a mobile rig across the UK since 1990, set up in a warehouse in Acton Lane, west London. To a packed house, they partied through the night. In the early hours, police officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, a specialist division with duties including crowd control, surrounded the building. Those who tried to enter or leave had to face the TSG (the same group responsible for heavy-handed policing of crowds in the recent G20 demonstrations). According to witnesses at Acton Lane, some TSG were masked and had their ID numbers covered. The Spirals and partygoers barricaded the doors, but after a 10-hour stand-off, the police revved up a JCB and broke through the outer wall. Scores of ravers later alleged they were beaten in the dark of the warehouse; witnesses claim one pregnant woman was knocked to the ground. One man who tried to escape over the roof claimed to have been pushed; he fell two storeys breaking both arms and legs. No charges were brought. The next day a police helicopter escorted the Spiral Tribe convoy, 10 vehicles long, out of the London area.
Simone, one of the original Spiral Tribe members, who had fallen into the free party scene years before after working in a PA hire shop in north London, recalls: “Everyone who was there remembers exactly what happened. Being forced down on to muddy floors, being battered. It was a horrible experience.
“They were letting people in and not letting people out, then letting people out and not letting people in,” she continues, talking from her current base in a Paris apartment. (Like other Spirals I talked to, she didn’t want me to use her full name.) “All of a sudden you peered out of a crack in the wall, and the place was surrounded by every kind of police vehicle you can imagine. They had diggers, they were all in their riot gear, shields. We’d just been dancing for a few days, we’re in the middle of an industrial estate, not really affecting anybody else around, and then all of a sudden they started bashing the wall in. They smashed up the decks, just went to town basically. Imagine people who’ve been up for two or three days dancing; you’re a bit tripped out at this point. People were being carted off to hospital.”
The Spirals were used to run-ins with the law – “we’d had lines of police directing us across fields” – but nothing like this. “At that point we realised the police were really on our case. There was a news blackout. We tried to call all the journalists we knew, and there was nothing. What happened was kind of obscene, but it went unreported. It felt like we had no way of telling anyone.
“Really, what were we doing that was so disastrously wrong? Occupying empty buildings, playing music and dancing. People of all walks of life were coming together on the dancefloor. They [the police] acted completely out of fear.”
Following interim parties at Chobham Common and Stroud Common in Surrey and in the Cotswolds, where they rebuilt some of their equipment, the Spirals elected to seek refuge in numbers. Deciding, as one member recalls, “to take it easy at someone else’s party for a change”, they headed for the Avon free festival, a regular May bank holiday gathering near Bristol. This year, though, Avon and Somerset Police had other ideas. “They were digging trenches, no one was able to go to the site,” says Simone. Police encouraged the sound systems to head towards Castlemorton Common, a few square miles of public land just east of the Malvern Hills. “At Castlemorton we had the biggest space, but our rig was not the loudest,” Simone recalls. “After Acton Lane, half of our speakers were blown. But people were always offering us things to make up for lost equipment.” Spiral Tribe set up in a semi-circle of trucks, with the centre stage under a huge painted spiral, and joined the party.
It was an event that would never be repeated; a brief triumph for those who wanted to party in the face of vested interests that would soon move in to crush the scene. But for that short window – four days – Castlemorton was a free festival on a new scale. Simone recalls spending some of the time hiding, in awe of the size of the gathering. “It was like, ‘Oh shit, what have we done. Things are not going to be the same after this.'” Ten rigs, including Circus Warp, Circus Normal and Bedlam, Adrenaline and Nottingham’s DiY sound system set up and declared their own takes on acid house, hardcore, early drum’n’bass and Detroit techno records played at double speed. An estimated 20,000 to 40,000 people gathered, brought together by the music, the freedom and the drugs: travellers, crusties, ravers and new agers – who came with dogs on strings, blue dreadlocks, shaved heads and fire-breathing kits – and just maybe David Cameron, or someone who looked a lot like him (a YouTube clip recently surfaced from Sunrise, an ’88 acid house rave, showing a long-haired raver who resembles the leader of the opposition – but Conservative central office deny it is him). There was free enterprise, too, as long as you were shopping for lightsticks, whistles or Rizla.
As the ravers drummed up a party, news hounds drummed up a controversy. David Baldwin, a 37-year-old mechanic whose front garden was 20 yards from the nearest sound system, told the Daily Mail he had seen “youngsters injecting heroin in a Renault 5”. Brian Clutterbuck, a smallholder in his 40s, patrolled the edge of his land with a pellet gun. Locals complained about property damage: fence posts, they said, had been ripped up for firewood, and dogs were killing sheep. The local pub and post office shut. In an echo of similar tensions two decades before, locals called the ravers “hippies”.
Castlemorton was the lead story on the BBC Six O’Clock News on the Friday and Saturday nights, and the coverage drew people from across the country. (One raver remembers returning home four days later “with eyes like pandas and my mother asked, ‘Did you have a good time?'” He told her he’d been at a free party. “‘Yes! I know!’ she replied. ‘I saw you on Central News.'”) People in convoys hundreds of cars long hoped those they were following knew where they were heading. Entry routes were blocked not by police but by ravers. Police helicopters flew low over the site to film, and at one point five shipping distress flares were fired at one of them. “This illustrates the lengths to which these people will go to try to prevent police access to the site,” West Mercia’s assistant chief constable, Philip Davies, said. “Many of them have already displayed an extremely aggressive attitude towards the police, and the safety of my officers must be one of my priorities.” There were too many partygoers, in other words, for the police to shut it down.
“These people who live here shouldn’t be afraid,” one told the Mail. “They should join in.” Another, Richard, told the Daily Express: “There is nothing wrong with what we are doing. We are here to have fun in the sun. We chose to live this way and reject the hassles associated with a conventional way of life. Some say we are dirty, but we are environmentally conscious, we make efforts not to dump rubbish. People generally have it in for us because of our lifestyle. I think many envy us because of our freedom.”
In a 1970s short story anthology, Three Trips in Time and Space, three leading lights of golden age science fiction wrote of various futures where teleportation was possible. Sandwiched between two eulogies of ease and motion was a delightful dissenting voice: Flash Crowd, by Larry Niven, in which teleportation brings about a terrible anarchy, where millions wander the earth, materialising instantly wherever the latest sensation carries them, leaving destruction in their wake. This was the future that middle England seemingly feared. It was 1992: mobile communications technology had only just begun to reshape our lives (Simone recalls Spiral Tribe had one brick-sized mobile phone, which held a charge for “about three minutes – we saved the charge and we’d phone up TouchDown radio with the location of the party, which they’d announce at midnight”) – yet, it seemed, crowds were already on the move.
“Castlemorton was scarily conspicuous,” says Sebastian, another Spiral Tribe member. “You had this sense of, well, what’s going to happen next.”
Castlemorton didn’t just teleport out of nowhere: the rise of the free party scene had been a long time coming. In 1981, Joe Rush, a 21-year-old punk living in Ladbroke Grove, joined the Peace Convoy, a rotating caravan of, he says, “around 40 dodgy and illegal trucks, cars, vans and old ambulances” that roved England from the Windsor and Glastonbury free festivals to smaller parties on common land. In the early days the convoy developed its own tactics to use against the police and local authorities: once, after being refused at a service station, they blocked a three-lane motorway and slow-rolled until police relented and allowed them to refuel. Later, the police response grew brutal, culminating in the Battle of the Beanfield, a police action in June 1985, at the intended 14th Stonehenge free festival. One thousand officers – again with their numbers covered – smashed 140 vehicles and beat the travellers, after which, Joe says, the heart went out of the Peace Convoy.
Rush, who later co-founded the Mutoid Waste Company sound system, traces the heritage of the Peace Convoy back to Ken Kesey’s Magic Bus Trips and Acid Tours in 60s America, as well as to the tradition of travelling communities in this country, and also links it to political events such as the 1984-85 miners’ strike. There were in fact direct connections: in 1989, chief superintendent Ken Tappenden, who had been involved in the miners’ strike police action, started the Pay Party Unit, tasked with controlling the rave scene. The unit monitored pirate radio, tapped phones, and organised helicopters to track the organisers. After three months, they had begun 20 major investigations. As Matthew Collin and John Godfrey note in their book Altered State, the Pay Party Unit’s database held 5,725 names and details on 712 vehicles. Within weeks, their 200 officers had monitored 4,380 telephone calls and made 258 arrests.
This was around the time Spiral Tribe’s Sebastian, aged 17, moved down from west Scotland to London to play in a psychedelic band. A friend invited him to a party. “I thought it was going to be like a Scottish party, with a few friends standing around drinking. We went to Old Street station, where there were loads of police and ravers milling about. A car pulled up and took us to Clink Street.” This was a maze of arched vaults on the site of Britain’s first prison, near London Bridge, where DJs including the Shamen’s Mr C championed the new rave sound. “That was my first rush of acid house,” Sebastian says. “After that night, my life was very different.” But the Pay Party Unit was working hard, and legislation followed. In 1990, MP Graham Bright introduced the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Bill, which raised fines for throwing an unlicensed party from £2,000 to £20,000 as well as a possible six months in prison. Nicknamed by Bright “the acid house party bill”, it was a clear attempt to push the free-party scene into the licensed leisure industry, so it could be regulated. “It made a difference,” recalls Sebastian, speaking to me from Paris after a long weekend of DJing in the French countryside. “The parties changed. Everything had gone into a more clubby direction. I’d been educated by mad illegal raves, and the energy was so different to what I was finding after that. There was a hunger to get back to the acid house rave thing. That was the reason Spiral Tribe came about.”
In October 1990 he went to the first Spiral rave, in a squatted schoolhouse in London’s Kensal Rise. “I didn’t have all the fancy clothes, I didn’t have what was necessary to fit in to certain clubs. You walked into Spiral Tribe and none of that mattered. It was like going back to those ’88 raves. People were totally friendly; they didn’t judge you by what you were wearing. I was hooked.”
The Spirals staged their first party in late 1990. By June 1991 they had a mobile rig, and over the next year they travelled England, announcing their integrated ethic on their flyers: “We are here to reconnect the Earth”; “We’re part of the earth; we’re part of us”; “You might stop the party but you can’t stop the future.”
This was where people of my age, in their mid- to late-teens at the time, discovered the parties. It’s hard to picture those days now, before the internet, when mainstream press had a tighter control over how we saw events like this. Word reached us through friends, or from pirate radios such as TouchDown and Rush FM. At warehouses and squats, UV paint across the walls, we gathered to dance all night to pitch-shifted breakbeats that had yet to be harnessed for TV adverts. The music, impenetrable to many – like me – before their first pill, seemed uniquely British: the harsh beats and melodic breakdowns seemed to dramatise the disjoint in our lives, between life in an impersonal money-focused state, and the new easy honesty we were discovering with each other. The open spirit of those parties seemed like a gateway to a possible future. We told each other things we hadn’t said before, and we told them to strangers too. Back then, even the rivalry between sound systems and police had occasional friendly moments. I remember one early morning in mid-1992 walking back through an east London park with the owners of a sound system, lugging a speaker each, as a TSG riot control van followed us. We heard the crackle of their PA system and picked up our pace, fearing arrest. “You should have borrowed our sound system!” they joked through the megaphone, then revved away.
“It was a whirlwind two years, really, but we packed a lot in,” says Simone. Spiral Tribe’s living arrangements were typical of the dozens of sound systems across the UK. “We were all pretty much squatting. Not everyone. Once we hit the road, we used to sleep in the truck, under the truck, take turns in sleeping. It wasn’t that important really. The first parties in London were fivers in. That gave us enough money to pay the DJs a bit, print flyers for the next party and a bit of diesel for the generator. We ate vegetable curries a lot. We didn’t need much, really.”
Most of the sound systems worked to ensure they left little damage after their parties. “We always wanted to leave as little trace as possible,” another Spiral member recalls. “After Castlemorton, we hung out until Wednesday, Thursday, clearing up, leaving the site impeccably clean. Then, as we pulled off site, the police asked us, ‘Have you been at Castlemorton?’ Everyone said: ‘Yes,’ and that was it. Everyone was nicked. Everything was impounded. They really went to town.”
Simone had left for London the day before. That day there was a knock at the door, and she was arrested. “They took every scrap of paper off the wall. We had a mini-office, where we did photocopying and everything, and they took it all.”
In all, 13 Spiral members were charged with public order offences. Their trial became one of the longest and most expensive cases in British legal history at the time, lasting four months and costing the taxpayer £4m. The police used any tactic they could to support their case. “We even all had our handwriting analysed,” says Simone. “We had a messy office full of stuff, and they were trying to ascertain who’d written some philosophical rant. It was incredible. Actually, in the end it turned around in our favour. There was no conspiracy to bring down the government, which I think they were looking for. In the end everything was thrown back in their face, and the jury saw that. It was painful, laborious – luckily, there was a good team of lawyers, everyone had to go in every day and have their chance on the stand. Everyone was just as honest as they could be. There was nothing to hide.” All 13 were acquitted. According to one witness, a superintendent approached a group of Spiral members on the steps outside the court and said: “I just want you to know that I don’t agree with what is happening to you here. This is a political stitch-up.”
After Castlemorton, police pressure on free parties did not relent. Some ravers believe there was an explicit agenda to extend legal licensing hours while cracking down on free parties. In that sense, superclubs such as Cream and Ministry of Sound have their direct roots in the repression of the roving sound systems. And the police tactics worked. “One weekend after Castlemorton we tried to put on a party,” says Sebastian. “We had five back-up venues, and every time we arrived at the next one, the police had already closed it down. It was really difficult to put things on under the name Spiral Tribe, so it was either disband the name, or take it out to Europe. Half of the crew went to Europe, and half stayed in London.”
“Where could we go?” says Simone. “They’d taken every last coin out of our pocket, impounded all our equipment – we weren’t getting that back. We went to France, and it took on a new form.”
There were already UK sound systems spreading across the continent. Mutoid Waste moved to Berlin, where they were when the Wall came down. With Bedlam, another sound system, they held a party by the Brandenburg Gate. Joe and the other Mutoids built a Stonehenge out of scrapped East German tanks they found in an abandoned base. After the party, and without permission, they hoisted two decommissioned MiG fighter jets on to trucks and headed further east.
“There were travellers, ravers, intellectuals,” recalls Joe. “It was a crazy, mixed crowd.”
“The country that really connected was France,” says Sebastian. “Spiral Tribe went to Berlin, and they didn’t want to know. They didn’t have any need for the free party scene. Because you can go to a club all night, and the drinks aren’t expensive, and the security don’t get in your way.”
Back in the UK, it took a few years for the law to catch up with the state’s intentions to wreck the party. But when it did, it arrived with the infamous Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, section 63 (1)(b), which outlawed outdoor parties. In an unusual foray by civil servants into music criticism, the wording of the act defined “music” as that which “includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. Following the act, if there were more than 10 of you and you looked like you were waiting for a party, even if the land wasn’t privately owned, you could be told to leave, and if you did not, or if you returned, you faced up to three months in prison.
Sound systems such as Spiral and Bedlam realised they could not return to the UK. They began a slow migration across Europe, sowing the seeds of rave culture, starting parties that evolved into big-name modern festivals.
In the course of the decade, the music itself took on a more central focus. In 1990, Sebastian (who still records techno under the name 69db) had commuted from a Leeds music course to London every weekend to attend Spiral Tribe parties. During the week he found himself drifting downstairs at the college to the recording studio, and making electronic music which he brought to London at the weekends. He suggested a Spiral label, and found himself handling the music and recording side of Spiral Tribe. The group had previously issued white labels, sold through friends, but through a connection with Youth from the band Killing Joke they landed a deal with Butterfly Records and a £40,000 advance for an album. “We built a recording studio into the back of a showman’s trailer, and we pulled it around Europe,” says Sebastian.
The French techno scene has moved towards live-performance techno. “Some live sets have gone up to 22 hours of live playing,” says Sebastian. “We’re mostly based in France now.” These events in the French countryside attract up to 50,000 people. There the Tribe members remain, continuing to promote the cause of gathering under the banner of music, outside the commercialised system of pop. “Britain is very good at presenting music in certain ways,” says Sebastian. “Ever since the Beatles, we discovered it made money. But music’s a much bigger thing. It can really bring people together.”
“Spiral Tribe could not now organise a festival in the UK,” says Simone, referring to the likelihood that the police would find out and shut it down before it happened. According to Joe Rush, communications technology has paradoxically made it harder to arrange events outside the system. Police monitor websites, and, according to Joe, track phones. “In the old days, the police had some advantages – they had radios and we didn’t. Now everyone has mobile phones. But it works both ways: it’s much easier for police to track people.”
Some sound systems have found a new kind of compromise. In 2001, Mutoid Waste returned to the UK. Joe Rush and co have parlayed their showmanship, honed across Europe, into events held under the name Trash City, whose giant installation shows, featuring robots, drag queens and cancan girls, are a regular feature at Glastonbury. Rush’s income now comes from these events, as well as sales of his sculptures. They’ve come to a more reasonable understanding with the authorities. “In the Thatcher years, the battle lines were drawn,” says Rush – an older punk now, with a weathered face and a worn leather jacket – in his warehouse studio in London’s Old Street. “You were either one of us or one of them. It’s more relaxed now. We’ve agreed: we have security, crowd control, health and safety … We toughened up. We grew up. It used to be we felt everyone should be like us, but we realised we were part of society, not an alternative society.” He’s not alone: Bedlam have capitalised upon their expertise with easily installable sound systems into Noise Control, a successful sound system speaker business.
Nonetheless, in Britain, legislation continues to eat into our freedom to gather and party. New security regulations for live performances include a long list of prohibitive restrictions, including the need for police checks on performers. It’s hard to see what motivates such control on the part of the state, except for fear. What is it about young people gathering together that provokes such a severe, sometimes brutal, response? Villages can have fetes, children can have fairs, but something about so much youth in one place scares someone. As Simone told me, “What was it that was so bad about what we were doing? We didn’t leave much damage. Castlemorton is still as beautiful as it ever was.”
In the tension between travelling sound systems and local landowners, it’s tempting to draw grand conclusions about a schism in our nature. Joe Rush does: he sees the conflict between free parties and the state as “an age-old tension between itinerants and homesteaders”. It’s also tempting to romanticise the itinerant life. Who hasn’t dreamed, if only in adolescence, of throwing aside commitments and living the life of the road with a surrogate family? Of course, dreams are what you wake up from, and life on the road is not all parties. Everyone I spoke to had faced problems on the road: violence, excessive drug use. Rush admits that ketamine and heroin interfered with the extrovert optimism that ecstasy had encouraged. He has a theory that the arc of a movement echoes the arc of that movement’s drug of choice. “Punk was speed, an angry, dizzy rush. With ecstasy, there’s a euphoric rush, then you’re monged out and down. That was how things were.” But the highs outweighed the lows. “The party is the best form of interaction there is,” says Rush. Mutoid’s solution to their troubles was to remain in motion. “We met people who were inspiring, and people who weren’t,” he adds. “The uninspiring people couldn’t keep up.” Like most of those I spoke with, Rush is still in motion. “I go wherever the work is: the UK, Japan… I live in the corner of my studio, or a friend’s flat, or the back of a truck.” Spiral’s Simone chose the life aged 17, and she hasn’t looked back. “At the time you don’t really think about it. It wasn’t a conscious thing. It just unfolded. I gave myself to it, which was mad, perhaps, but it’s definitely been worthwhile. We put our whole selves into it.”
In March, Mutoid Waste were part of Space Ritual ’09, a regulated event – they appeared inside the revamped Roundhouse in Camden Town, as invited guests. Back in the winter of 1991-92, over Christmas and new year, Spiral Tribe squatted that same building. “The Roundhouse was a big shift, coming back into London and occupying such a prominent landmark,” remembers Simone. She reckons 10,000 people passed through the doors. There were power cuts and door troubles, but for over a week the party went on. On that New Year’s Eve, I took my first pill – a white cap and then a red and black – and, along with a group of friends, saw in 1992 from the roof of the Roundhouse. It felt like something new to all of us; a breeze from outside our regular lives. Afterwards, I went home and told my cat over and over again that I loved him.
My own circle of friends fell into the orbit of the free party movement, and we loved it, then we moved on. Seduced by secure homes and shiny cars, we made our choice. Most of us, driven by some blend of risk-avoidance and ambition, chose to remain in this world of salaries and rent payments, a life drifting in and out of our vast field of office farms. We plumped for a more widely accepted definition of freedom: we picked freedom of acquisition over freedom of movement. The world we saw from the roof of the Roundhouse was a world we loved, but not enough. You choose and you lose. But we should remember to be grateful for those who choose otherwise – especially now, when we have a drought of alternatives at the very moment we might need them.
Sebastian sees the power of free parties to foster a collective feeling as almost religiously transformative. “Day-to-day life is difficult for people,” he says. “Going to work every day is all right for the few who have the job they wanted, but most people don’t. And that means they’re paying their taxes and paying their rent. One of the things that was good about the free party scene at the time was that you’d go out and get this incredibly good feeling from people. It’s the incredible power music has.”
Free party classics
Phuture, Acid Tracks (Trax, 1987) “Because without it, would any of this have happened?”
Bam Bam, Where’s Your Child? (Desire, 1988) “Talk about taking it out there!”
LFO, LFO (Warp, 1990) “Still the prototype for bleep house.”
4hero, Mr Kirk’s Nightmare (Reinforced, 1990) “The perfect balance of acid and breakbeats.”
Tim Guest died unexpectedly in his sleep at the age of 34. Initially, it was assumed her son had died of natural causes but a postmortem revealed that Tim Guest had suffered respiratory failure after taking a fatal morphine overdose.
There was no suggestion of suicide and his death appeared to be a mystery: Guest, although a recreational drug user, had seemed to be in a stable and happy frame of mind, both personally and professionally.
Intellectually precocious, Tim was challenged more by his shyness than by his school subjects. He attended Haverstock school, a comprehensive in Camden, north London, took A-levels at William Ellis school, also in Camden, and graduated with a BA in psychology from the University of Sussex in 1996. During university, Tim started to flirt with the notion of writing for a living; He was accepted at the University of East Anglia’s creative writing programme in Norwich, one of 13 out of a field of 3,000, where he studied with Andrew Motion and got his MA in 1998.
Timothy Paul Guest, writer, born 17 July 1975; died 1 August 2009
It is possible in the near future that attendance at a protest, or a ‘trespass’, might constitute an offence. It thus follows that the police would look for coroberating evidence to back up such a charge … and obviously surveillance is key to that. With the progress of the bill and it likely enactment, organisations are starting to think what’s what after it comes into force.
The Network for Police Monitoring NETPOL and Privacy International have produced a helpful guide. You may thing you are doing nothing wrong in just ‘being there’ … sorry, you would be wrong!
https://netpol.org/2021/06/29/free-to-protest
Jun 29, 2021
This is a guest post by Harmit Kambo, Campaigns Director, Privacy International
Imagine going to a peaceful protest and having to show your ID to the police before you can join it. Or having to fill out a form about why you are attending that particular protest.
Sounds absurd, right? Surely we should all be free to protest, without the police knowing who we are?
But high tech surveillance of protests is real, and it enables the police to identify, monitor and track protestors, indiscriminately and at scale.
For example, your face is increasingly becoming your ID card with the rapid development of facial recognition technology and its deployment at protests. But even if you cover your face, the way you walk can even reveal your identify through using gait recognition technology. As well as surveilling your face and body, the police can also surveil you through your phone. The police can access the data on your smartphone through mobile phone extraction and hacking, or intercept your messages by tricking it into connecting with a fake mobile phone mast. And they can even data mine social media posts about an upcoming protest to identify who will be attending. Combined with body worn video cameras, and drones fitted with cameras hovering in the sky above, the police now have access to awe-inspiring surveillance capabilities.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this is that you won’t know whether any, some or all of these technologies are being deployed when you attend a protest. This makes protests a modern panopticon, whereby even if you’re not actually being watched, you act as if you are being watched, and modify your behaviour accordingly. Indeed, perhaps you might think twice about even attending a protest because you don’t want to trade your right to protest with your right to privacy.
What is so concerning is that while the technology is incredibly intrusive and sophisticated, there is little if any transparency, accountability or regulation in most countries. The upshot of all of this, in simple and stark terms, is that you can’t go to a peaceful protest and be confident that you won’t end up on a watchlist (to be clear, we’re not saying you will end up on a watchlist, only that there is little if any regulation to prevent you being added to one). That’s an alarming point to have to make, but this is yet another aspect of the chilling effect on the right to protest.
The right to protest is facing threats across the world, even in democratic countries where it is supposed to be a bedrock of our essential freedoms.
And make no mistake, it’s not just about targeting people suspected of wrongdoing. In the UK, for example, people can find themselves labelled as ‘domestic extremists’ or more recently as ‘aggravated activists’ just for attending the ‘wrong’ kind of peaceful protest. The right to protest is facing threats across the world, even in democratic countries where it is supposed to be a bedrock of our essential freedoms.
Little information is currently publicly accessible about police surveillance at protests. This is why Privacy International have produced ‘Free to Protest: The Protester’s Guide to Surveillance and How To Avoid It‘. It’s a UK focused guide, but we are currently working with our partners to adapt and translate the guides to different national contexts.
It’s a wide ranging, but concise guide to policing surveillance capabilities that can be and are used at protests. The guide provides information about how you can try to protect your anonymity and better control access to the data stored on your phone. But it’s important to point out that because of the sophistication of the police’s surveillance capabilities, it’s extremely difficult (if not impossible) to totally evade it.
The guides are bite-sized and modular, which means that you can read them quickly, and in any order, and indeed you can just read those that you are interested in or most concerned about. Over time, we hope to add more guides to provide a more comprehensive overview of police surveillance capabilities at protests.
But Privacy International’s ‘Free to Protest’ work goes beyond providing information to protestors and protest organisers. We will shortly launch a new ‘protest surveillance tracker’, to monitor and show how police surveillance is impacting on people’s right to protest around the world.
And we will also be working with partners like Netpol around the world, to advocate for stronger regulation of police surveillance of protests, so that we can all be free to protest. Download the Guide
Posted in.|Taggedcastlemorton, observer, raves, subculture|Comments Off on Observer : Raves from the grave: lost 90s subculture is back in the spotlight
It is perhaps one of the most ignored subcultures in modern British history, but rave music and the free party movement of the early 90s is coming back into focus.
Trinder’s film will be released to coincide with the anniversary of the Castlemorton Common festival, a week-long free event that was a watershed in the battle between the government and what ministers called “new age” travellers and ravers.
“It was multiple different scenes and cultures that came together in one key moment,” said Trinder, who has interviewed dozens of people involved, including the organisers of sound systems and free parties such as Spiral Tribe, Bedlam and DiY. “That combination made it very immediate and special, and possibly scared the powers that be.”
Urban ravers had run out of places to go after the flurry of acid house parties in 1988 and 1989, which had been effectively shut down by the Pay Party Unit, a police taskforce, he said. In response, some set up illegal free parties in disused warehouses and squats that were harder to police – “empty spaces created by the post-Thatcherite death of industry”, Trinder said.
The key moment was the 1990 Glastonbury festival, when the free party sound systems encountered travellers, the inheritors of 1960s hippy culture, who would travel around the UK to free festivals. They too had seen their lifestyles criminalised. The low point for them was the notorious so-called Battle of the Beanfield in 1985 when about 1,300 police clashed violently with 600 travellers near Stonehenge.
“They all met at Glastonbury 1990 and it was a lightbulb going off,” Trinder said. “’You’ve got this amazing new music and excitement and mad new clothes and you’ve got nowhere to go. But we’ve got the tents, the countryside, and the guts to take a site in the middle of nowhere.”
A scene from the notorious week-long free festival at Castlemorton Common in Worcestershire in 1992 Photograph: Alan Tash Lodge
The flurry of free parties became the topic of a tabloid storm that culminated at Castlemorton Common in May 1992. Police in Wiltshire had refused to let the Spiral Tribe convoy stop in the county, so it continued into Worcestershire to Castlemorton.
“It was the high-water mark of the movement,” Trinder said. “The amazing thing is the incredible diversity – there is every colour, creed, race, age, subculture all in one field. City people, country people, travellers, punks, ravers, posh people from the fancy school down the road. It was probably the last unifying youth movement.”
Trinder, 49, was a DJ on the fringes of the free party movement before he became a film-maker. “I always thought ‘why does no one talk about that period when this was the lead on the Nine O’Clock News’,” he said.
Others agree. Tom Latchem, a former TalkSport presenter, launched ROAR: The Rave Channel last year to interview some of the DJs and music-makers at the heart of hardcore and jungle, from Fabio and Grooverider to Jumping Jack Frost and Luna-C.
“There wasn’t anything like it,” Latchem said. “Not many people were talking about it and I’ve spoken to DJs who had never really done any kind of interview at all. It was all at risk of being lost.” Now the podcast is being archived in the British Library. Other podcasts have sprung up in the past year, including Rave to the Grave by Vivian Host.
Matthew Smith, a photographer from Bristol who documented many of the free parties, has created an archive of photographs from the period. His new book Full On. Non-Stop. All Overis published tomorrow and looks at the post-rave club culture that emerged after Spiral Tribe and others were forced out of the UK.
“At the end of the day people love to go out and celebrate and be with each other,” he said. “I just wanted to remind people what it was like before smartphones took over.”
The Museum of Youth Culture will stage an exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry next summer. Rave and electronic music will be a major part of it, according to Jamie Brett, the museum’s creative projects manager. “Rave culture is our most well-covered collection, from 1988 to 1994,” he said. “Lockdown has made people very nostalgic – we’ve had 4,000 people … contribute material.”
Interest is not only coming from fortysomethings who are nostalgic for their youth, according to Latchem.
“It’s surprising how much is coming from people under 30,” he said. “There’s a lot of young producers making old school hardcore and jungle now, people like DJ Semah, who’s just 14 and got into hardcore after hearing a Prodigy track on a CD he found in his parents’ garage. Now he’s releasing his own tunes.” Illegal raves are being staged for the young, he added. “There’s a real groundswell happening.”
‘Maybe our leaders will catch up’ … Joe Rush with Mount Recyclemore, a sculpture made from discarded electronics installed at the G7 summit. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA
The punky master of outsider art was once a pariah, thrown out of Britain for his anarchist ways. Now, he’s a national treasure. Joe Rush relives 40 years of sticking it to the ‘straight world’
“They thought we were terrorists,” says Joe Rush, remembering the day not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall when he and a fellow anarchist took over a patch of no man’s land at the heart of the German capital. They filled it with military hardware: tanks and artillery and the like – along with a MiG-21 fighter jet that they pointed directly at the nearby Reichstag.
“The authorities were furious,” he says. And no wonder. The police feared that, just as the cold war was ending, another military face-off had begun. “They thought we were going to fire missiles into the Reichstag,” says Rush. “So we pointed the MiG into the ground to make it clear we weren’t.”
What the authorities didn’t realise is that Rush and his travelling band of outsider artists had come to Berlin not to make war but to create a peace garden. His Mutoid Waste Company (MWC) crafted a huge gateway out of Soviet assault vehicles and called it Tankhenge. This then provided the entrance to the garden, which was an outdoor exhibition of found objects, some worked up into sculptures by the team.
“We stole most of it,” says Rush, who gives the impression that there was military hardware just lying around Berlin at the time. “It was like we found the biggest salvage yard in the world.” The authorities lost interest in evicting MWC and turned instead to feuding over who was responsible for letting a bunch of British weirdos get their hands on a scarcely decommissioned cache of Soviet military might.
‘It was like the biggest salvage yard in the world’ … Rush in Berlin in 1989. Photograph: Courtesy of Guy Mayhew
Rush, now 60, has dedicated his life to recycling, at whatever level. I Am a Mutoid, a new film by Letmiya Sztalryd airing on BBC Four on Sunday, profiles this genial outsider artist who most recently hit the headlines with Mount Recyclemore, a sculpture depicting the G7 leaders in recycled metal and electronic components, positioned to face them as they met in Cornwall this month. That work was created by Rush and collaborator Alex Wreckage (possibly not his real surname) to indict the mountains of defunct computers and outmoded mobile phones slowly choking the planet. Does he think Johnson, Biden and the others will take heed? “Probably not,” he says, “but this is a ground-up movement. Ordinary people around the world seemed touched and inspired by it. Maybe our leaders will eventually catch up.”
Rush’s career as a salvage artist began one midsummer’s morning in the early 1980s when he was in the bath. He decided to shave off his hair. Once shorn, he went out on to Portobello Road in London, but he felt self-conscious so he came back in and glued a rabbit pelt to his bald head, then went out again. Later, he gussied the rabbit fur into a kind of Mohican and became something of a local character, looking like a figure from 2000AD, the British weekly comic he’d loved as a kid that featured a dystopian Mega-City. “You learn a lot from looking funny. Some people get scared, some angry. Sometimes you have to fight. And sometimes you find people who don’t feel threatened.”
He became obsessed with wheels, keeping motorbike spare parts and drip trays for oil in his bedroom. His hands were rarely clean. In London in 1984, he and a bunch of ex-punks formed the MWC. They put on parades down Portobello Road looking like cyberpunk comic book heroes or extras from the Mad Max franchise. They drove mutated motorbikes and flat-bed trucks from which flames rose into the sky, to soundtracks of snarling guitar and dub reggae. These events were a cross between theatre, circus, installation art and – as often as not – really bad traffic jams. “I had no desire to be taken over by society,” says Rush, “or be part of the straight world. I didn’t want to have roots. I wanted to keep on the move.”
The MWC at Glastonbury 1987. Photograph: Diane
He was inspired by his late father, the artist and single parent Peter Rush who, in the late 1960s and 70s, decided the family should hit the road. Peter bought a caravan, painted it jauntily and set off from Romney Marsh in Kent. They got as far as Salisbury, where Peter was knocked over by a car and injured so badly that life on the road came to an end. The MWC was, in part, a reprise of that alternative lifestyle: a collective of artists, musicians and disaffected Britons who creatively reinvented themselves as a tribe of human mutants living on the road, in squats, and – in Rush’s case at one point – a decommissioned Korean war helicopter sitting in a junkyard.
If you don’t mutate, you’re dead. That’s why I’m drawn to being on the road. My life has been about reclaiming the nomadic spirit
They were treated as pariahs by the early 1980s club scene in London, refused admission for looking too weird or potentially troublesome. So they created their own culture, a party scene in squats and abandoned warehouses that predated and inspired late 1980s rave culture. “The Thatcher years were really hard on us,” says Rush. “We became part of the traveller community who experienced persecution.” The culmination of that persecution, Rush tells me, was the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985. The Mutoid Waste Company joined about 140 vehicles known as the Peace Convoy, which headed to Stonehenge for a free festival. But English Heritage took out a last-minute injunction banning the festival and police arrested 537 people from the convoy after a bloody battle.
“That was it for us,” says Rush. “We were effectively driven out of the country.” He and his friends went into exile on the continent for a decade, only occasionally popping back. “In Europe, there wasn’t anything like a party scene or illegal warehouse parties. So we started putting on shows. We were mostly welcomed, unlike at home.” Why didn’t you just settle down? “That wouldn’t have been the mutoid way,” he laughs. But what is the mutoid way? “We’re mutating all the time. If you don’t mutate, you’re dead. That’s why we’re drawn to travellers and being on the road.”
Rush thinks humanity took a wrong turn when we became farmers and set aside the nomadic, hunter-gatherer existence that had characterised our species until then. “My life has been about reclaiming that nomadic spirit. All the festivals we’ve taken part in over the years are really just an echo of what happened when nomadic tribes came into the valleys in summer and partied.”
Rush in Italy in 1990. Photograph: Anne Marie Goodman
But he is not the refusenik outsider he used to be. “The key moment came when one of my sons got sick from Agent Orange or DDT or whatever it was left in Berlin’s no man’s land. He needed more serious treatment than dangleberries and herbal tea.” In 1995, after 10 years wandering Europe, he and the MWC returned to Britain, where his son got proper hospital treatment and Rush made his peace with straight society for the sake of his family.
Before Mount Recyclemore, he was probably best known for his long association with Glastonbury. In 1987, the mutoids were allocated a field at the festival site. There, the recyclers built Carhenge and surrounded it with what Rush calls “an apocalyptic Disneyland on acid”. There were sculptures, installations and dinosaurs assembled from scrap metal. Drums were omnipresent and festivalgoers at various levels of consciousness joined the mutoids in beating oil barrels, car wrecks and metal statues.
Ants made from motorbike fuel tanks are part of a Mutoid installation in south London. Photograph: Dave Rushen/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock
In later years, Rush’s pyrotechnical spectacles, animatronic robots, sculptures, stage shows and mutant parade of strange vehicles driven by even stranger humans have become key to Glastonbury’s ethos. Rush was behind such annual spectacles as Unfairground, Trash City, Joe Strummer’s Memorial Tree (made from exhaust pipes) and a giant mechanical phoenix that hung over the Pyramid Stage as the Rolling Stones headlined in 2013. Most recently, he built Glastonbury on Sea, a replica of a seaside pier which seemed to imagine the kind of architecture Somerset will need if sea levels rise thanks to the climate crisis.
In 2012, he was invited to art direct and perform the closing ceremony of the Paralympic Games in London. The pariah had become a national treasure. “We’d been hounded out of Britain and now we were representing Britain. The whole thing blew our minds.” During the ceremony, Prince Edward arrived in a mashup of a 1930s gangster car and an Afghan armoured vehicle, and then the MWC drove into the stadium in salvaged, pimped-up rides and put on a show that was as visually compelling as Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the Olympics earlier that summer.
‘We pointed the MiG into the ground to make it clear we weren’t going to fire missiles into the Reichstag’ … Berlin, 1989. Photograph: Courtesy of Guy Mayhew
Lockdown has given Rush the chance to concentrate on creating other things. Fossil-like works mostly, made from spanners and bike chains, as well as a sculpture consisting of all his dogs from over the years, their heads and bodies crafted from repurposed drills, carburettors and other detritus. It’s a touching memorial: pets reborn as trans-canine mutants.
Some of his work was recently on show at Fulham town hall in London, part of a show called Art in the Age of Now. Does this mean Rush is finally joining the art world, and moving from the street and field to the gallery? “I’ve never wanted to be part of the art world,” he says, “because that would involve cosying up to people I don’t really understand or like.”
While he is a contemporary of such YBAs as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, unlike them Rush never went to art school or had his oeuvre collected by Charles Saatchi. That said, he has worked with Banksy and Hirst. The latter gave him tips on how to make bronze versions of sculptures originally created from recycled aluminium.
When lockdown ends, he is hoping to return to his European travels – and put on exhibitions in museums. “I don’t want to be in galleries,” he says. “I want to be in museums like the V&A, Tate Modern and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.” What’s the distinction? “Private galleries own you and your art. I don’t want that. My principle has long been that if a child thinks a work of art is bollocks, it’s probably no good. Kids can see through nonsense. And I try to remain a child in that sense. Some people think you need to grow up. You don’t. You just need to learn how to keep playing. I’m lucky enough to be still doing that.”
Johnny Eastleigh looks at 500 years of attempts by parliament to create outlaws of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller population
People from northern India began to arrive in England during the 15th century but were presumed to have come from Egypt – and were therefore described as ‘Egyptian’, which became corrupted to ‘Gypsy’. As this Act demonstrates, they were viewed with suspicion and hostility. Source: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/citizenship/citizen_subject/docs/egyptians.htm
It’s no news to any of us anymore that Romany people were targets of the Egyptians Act 1530. The Act went through a couple of changes over the centuries, but the core threat stayed the same – anyone in England found to be Romany was punished with death by execution. It sounds extreme, but it’s a matter of history – you can find a copy of the Act and records of some of its victims with a quick Google search. What’s a little harder to find is the advice of the Privy Council in 1559, which ordered that lawmen specifically ‘target their heads of family and their chiefs’. This plan was cooked up to better terrorise grieving wives and children into obedience. The idea that was by losing their husbands or heads of family, those remaining would be forced to live ‘normally’. Since we’re all still around today, we can assume those wives and children were made of much stronger stuff than the Privy Council gave them credit for.
By 1743, the government had finally realised we weren’t so easily controlled. They upped their game. They introduced the Justices Commitment Act which, like the Egyptians Act, punished people for the sole act of being Romany. By this time they had likely included Irish Travellers, who had by then begun migrating to England. Unlike the Egyptians Act, this time it was enough to just look, act or seem like a Romany or Traveller to be prosecuted. So keen were they to control these ethnic groups that even being mistaken for one was grounds for prosecution – can you imagine being so afraid of such a small group of people?
It wasn’t successful. The Turnpike Road Act had to be introduced in 1822 (if you’ve ever wondered where the old slur comes from, ‘turnpiker’ is one of the leading theories). This Act forbade Romany and Traveller people from stopping on the turnpikes – it seems like they had at least learned by now that execution wasn’t effective, because the punishment in this Act was instead a very dear fine. The Egyptians Act was finally repealed in 1856, after more than 325 years of defiance, failure and frustration for those who thought it was the solution to their ‘Gypsy problem’.
The following 1900s were one long steady stream of Acts that specifically tried to control or knuckle under Romany and Traveller people, and scrape back some pride after 400 years’ of failed attempts. The forest compounds of Hampshire in the 1920s, their deconstruction in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act 1960 and the Caravan Sites Act 1968, which forbade the building of private sites, and the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act which removed the responsibility of local authorities to provide sites themselves. By removing private site provision and absolving themselves of responsibility to build any new ones, they seemed to think they could finally pull a fast one. ’94 was nearly thirty years ago now – yet we’re here stronger, more mobilised and more united than ever.
It seems like our entire history in this country has been one long list of legislation. Since we’ve been here, not a century has passed since at least one piece of legislation was passed that we might consider nowadays as a human rights violation. Eventually, you have to wonder if the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021 is all that new or inventive – or if it’s just the latest link in an old stumpchain that could never hold any horses in the first place.
That question remains open. Where the Police Powers Bill will end, if we don’t stand up to it, is an open question too – this time the tactic is to make our traditional ways of life outright illegal. It’s the most blatant attack on Romany and Traveller communities since they were hanging men on sight. If history has taught us anything, though, it’s that they’ve tried their damnedest and their hardest – and they haven’t managed to beat us yet.
The first demo of our ‘summer of discontent’ will be held in
I get a mention, under ‘AUXILIARY FREE PARTY SERVICES’ Cheers chaps xx Alan Lodge (Tash) -Free festival Photographer, free festivals these days are host to freeparty rigs https://alanlodge.co.uk
ENTER The HALL of FAME……………. OVER 30years of FREEPARTY RIGS The list is no doubt longer, more to come, I collected some at end and beginning of the century for the now archived nightstorm website The list has grown, I am still adding The list is no doubt longer, more to come, I collected some at end and beginning of the century for the now archived nightstorm website It Truly is a HALL of FAME, its no mean feat to put on a FREEPARTY. All these Rigs need a shout and lets not let them be forgotten. SOUND SYSTEM HALL OF FAME, Please help adding to it….. Aardvark ————————————————————- Abacus ————————————————————— Active Party Unite————————————-Surrey/Hamp Acme sounds ——————————————————– Acid Monkey ————————————London 2008 09? Adrenaline———————————Greater London 1992-94 Adrenalin—- OXFORDSHIRE start: JUNE99 Techno, D&B Advance Party————————————————London All Substance No Style – Nottingham, London, Hastings – 2000s An Be Proud Of Ur Rig —————————————— Annoy sound system———————————SW 93 to 2003 An Watt —————————————–were about in 2011 Aphrodisiac —— -Kent 90 -96? they had an off shoot, Aubergine Agro———————————————————-Reading Ardkore Soundsystem ——————————— Derbyshire Armada —————————————– kent then Bristol Armadillo ———————————————————– Armageddon ————————————————Reading Azma Sounds ——————————————————– Az1 ——————————————————————- Aggrav8————————————————————— Aura——————————————————————- Aura Orange———————————————Birmingham Audiophile —————————————- London early 00’s Acidic ———————————————————-Bristol Al B’hed ————————————————————- Alien Society Sounds ————————Norfolk 2002-2008ish Asbo —————————————————————– Assassins Sound System ———————————–suffolk ASYLUM ———————————————– Watford area Ascenzion ———————————————————— Aztek —Hampshire/Oxfordshire/Berks/Wilts/Bedfordshire ——————2004 and still going ———————— Babble Collective SoundSystem ——Leicester 1993 on going Barn —————————————————————– Backlash soundsystem ——————————————— back to basics ——————————————————- Bedlam—————–London1992 now Oz Music:Techno, Ragga Bedroom ————————————–Northwich, Cheshire Berserkers—————- were London based but very Glaswegia Belligerent ———————————————————– BDI——————————————South Oxfordshire 1994 B4 Polococta, —————————— London 2002 till present Blacksheep—————————————————London Black Moon———————————————–Derbyshire Blackkat sound———————————————NYC– ’96 Bpm ————————————————– Bournemouth Blue Room————————————————–Brighton Boing—————————————————————— Born from pulse sound system ————————————– Brainskan —————————————————–Norfolk Brainstorm turned into universe———————-Bath 1991 – 93 Brave Nu Cru ———————————————– Swindon Bridgwater Reggae Sound System ——————————— Brixton Hunt sabs and Travellers. —————————-Brixton Bust the Box———————————————————- Buckwild —————————————————— Norfolk Bitfo ———————————were about in the early 2000’s Bio hazard ————————————— devon. 2000-2005 Bioshock ————————————————————- Bio-Tech ———————————-East Anglia 2000-2004 Breaks from the norm. —————————————–BFTN BWPT———————————————————Leicester B12 ———————————————————- Norfolk Cafe del Squat————————————————London Camouflaged Disco —————————————- Sheffield. Chemically Driven ———————————————— Chem D (Chemical Disturbance) ——————————— Circus Warp———————————Bristol/Bath 1991 —-93 Circus Normal—————————————Bristol 1991 – 93 Circus Chaos———————————————————- Circus Irritant ———————Avon/Somerset early to mid 90s. Circus Lunatek. ————————–South London / site 91-’93 around 60 or 70 raves and festivals mostly London and Kent. Circle A Sounds —————————————————– Circosis -London & Europe. 91 onwards. House & Techno. DJ’s Marc & Ben Circosis. Joined forces with Turbo Unit midish 90’s Citricity—————————————————Birmingham Chemical warfare ————————————————- Chiba City—————————————————–London Children of Kaos ————————————Plymouth based. Chimaera———————————————-London Chaos Chillum Tribe —————————————————-Kent Clueless ————————————————- Cambridge Confusion, —————————-high Wycombe 2003 to 2005 Confiscated ——————————————————— Cosmic Carrot—————————————————Kent Culture Vibes club ————————South West in the 2000s Coming soon ———————————————— Norfolk Curfew —————————————————– Sheffield. Chronic sounds —————————————————- Class A ————————————————————— Crossbones—————————————————London Crowzone ———————————————————— Cybersounds—————————————- Leamington Spa Dagobah system ———————————————–Notts Darkstar Collective—————————————–Wiltshire Daylite Robbery (Manchester/toured) 2001still going but dormant. Defcom 1 ———————————————————— Dance conspiracy/eternity ——————————1990/1992 Desert Storm——————Nottingham, Glasgow, Manchester Destination——————————-Central Oxfordshire 1997 Deeper Understanding ———————————— London DEDsound. ———————————Berks/Ox/Bucks. 98-99 Dead dog disco —————————————————- Dekked ————————————————————– Deep Peace ——————————– Stroud area (early 90s) Deviant ——————-Newbury/Hungerford were about 2003 Deep Cartel—————————————————Devon Deeper Understanding ——————————————– DMT ——————————————————Bristol D.N.A. Destroy Negative Attitude ———————–North? Dole House Crew —————South London, 1989-about 1992 —— hired or other rigs used our venues.. Dossee Possee, ————————————- North Wales D.Storm —————————————began 91 in glasgow Digga Sounds ————————————- Exeter, Devon ? Definitive sounds ———————————-Bedfordshire Delirium ——————————————————— Diatribe SoundSystem —————————————- Ditch Licker ———————————————–Suffolk DirtCrunch/Fraktal —————————–Brighton 2010ish Digital Pollution ———————————— Portsmouth Digitaal Waste ————————————————- Disjunkt ——————————————— London 00s Dissident —————————————————Bristol ? Disciplines of Rhythm (D.O.R. Sound system)————20/5/93 Discobobulated —————————————————- Dimension ——————————————————— Dirty Squatters —————————————————- Disobey ————————————————– Norfolk Disorder, —————————————-East Anglia based Disturbance —————————————————– Distortex———————————————————– Disruption, ————————————–East Anglia based. Disruptive Audio ———————————– London 2000,s Dionisus—————————————-Bedfordshire Diversion —————————————————- Diverted, ———————————————————– D.I.Y.—————-1989 onwards Deep house —Nottingham, Dubious ——————————————— South London E-Coli ————————————————————— EckoTek ————————————————-Bedfordshire Elektrik Orgasm ————————————- Bristol 93 to 96 Entrobang ———————————————————- Energise————————————————————– Enfused Sounds —————————————————— Enlightenment————————————————-Brighton Enginearin —————————————————–Reading Elemental —————————————————-Leicester Elevate ————————————Leamington Spa mid 90s Equality Cohesion —————————————————- Esicume Noise——————————————————- Eternal Cru, ——————————————–Wales 1990’s Everyone Sound —————————————————— Evverescence —————————————————— Evolution ————————————————————- Excalibur————-(primarily reggae/dub but did nuff raves too). Exodus—————– Luton 1993 Jungle, D&B, techno, reggie Existential ———————————————————– E1S ——————————————————————- EZE love sound system ——————————-the south west Factual sounds ——————————————Bedfordshire FAF (Fluffy as Fuck)—————————————-Brighton Family Groove —————————————————– Faze One ———————————————————- Fear Teachers—————————————- oxfordshire F.O.C —————————————- Surrey 2000-2005 Fierce Sounds —————————————– Flatline Sound System ———— Wells Somerset 2009 ongoing Flux Capacitor Soundsystem ————————————- Fundamental——————————————-London 1991 Fuctnose ———————West Sussex/ London 2002 – 2011 FUBAR Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.- London, Hackey Wick ——-Josh Fubar’s — 2001 to 2008 ———– Fuk Around Sounds ———————————————– Fushion ———————————————————— Fraktal ————————————————————- FRS Free Range Sound.—————– London n beyond. 90s… Freakency———————————————————– Frequency Oblivion ——————–South West FREEBASS ———— Cardiff/South Wales early 90’s still going Free Dimension—————————————-Suffolk F.R.U. (Fucked Right Up) —————– Swansea, South Wales. GabbaWocky ——————————————– London ? Gateway Sound- ——————————–san francisco 94 Gangster Dolphin——————————————Bedford Gash collective ————————————— Manchester Genesis vibration ————————————-Bedfordshire G Force —————————————————————Glitter rig ———————————————————- Guillotine ———————————————————- Goodfellas ——————————————————— Good old boys —————————————————– Ground Zero–FaceBook —Free Party Sound Systems & Minters Who Love Them. still on the Road, ——Based in France ATM Grooveyard———————————————Peterbrough Groovatarium————————————- Lincoln H Zone—————————————————————— Hamster patrol ———————————————-Oxford Hanky Panky——————————————–Peterbough harmonise, ———————————————————– Hackney House Authority ————————- London 91 -94. Hardcore Conspiracy SS ——————————————- Hardcore Konsperancy ——————————–Multi Rigger Havok —————————————————————– HC7 or “HARDCORE 7”—end of 1991 to the summer of 1993— ——-we held free parties in & around Bedfordshire. ———- Hackney sounds —————————————————- hedonastick ——————————————————— Headfuk——————————————————-London Hectik ————————————————London 2000,s Hekate———————————————————London Hectate ————————————————————– Homegrown ———————————————————- Highly Addictive ———————————-Brighton 2010ish Hypnotwist ——————- Bristol hardcore/speedcore system Hybrid Tek ——————————————- Hertfordshire HP21 —————————————-Oxfordshire, 2000ish IFFY sounds ——–Reading 1994 moved to london: D&B, Jungle Infused sounds —————————————Bedfordshire iNfLuEnCe ———Oxford / Ridgeway Hard trance/acid tekno Intruder —————————————————– Norfolk Illicit Sounds ——————————————————– Ill Eagle / Ill Industries ———————–London mid-late 00’s Inkription ———————————————————- Innerfield—————————————————-Brighton Insanity——————————————————-London Inspyre ——————————————————suffolk ITS ————————————————Brighton 2010ish Inspiration. ———————————————————- Immersion ——————————Lawrie Immersion, London IRD Rig ———————————-West Sussex/London 2005 – Irritant Sounds—————-SW crew from later 90s/early 00s Itsy Bitsy ———————————————chill out cafe Itchy Fingers ————————————-Norfolk In House IRS —————————————— Circa 2000 Jah Tapey, ———————————————–Wiltshire J10 or Junk Chun 10 ————————————Reading J14 Junktion 14 ——————————–Buckinghamshire Jellyheads —————————————————– Jigsore —————————————– Somerset/Devon ? JFDI soundsystem ——————————————wales Jiba ———————————————London-based 90’s Kacchina —————————————————- Luton KAK —————————————————— London K D U. Kore Dispersal Unit —————————————- Ketwork 32. Reading and Europe. 98? Onwards. Reading 96ish. Kernal Panik —————————————————— Kevlar ————————————————————– KAMIKAZE 42! —————————————————— konglomera sound system.—————————————— Kollusus ————————————————————– koalition————————————————————– K-os sounds —————————-Norfolk/lincs 2002/2014 K-Otik, ———————————————–Manchester) Kinky movement Notts Kite High” —–Vic….Cambridge area Kinetik,———————————————————– King beat ————————reggae rig? late 90s early 00s K9KIMIV ——————————————-West Country Krysis. ————————————————–July 2012 Krunch…. ——————————Northants… 90s, early 00s Kreos/Revelation –Buckinghamshire (97-99ish) great Missenden K.U.N.T——–sound system UK Bristol, Wales and main land Europe under that name from 1998-2015————— KSS —————————————–Reading and London Lazy house ———————————Devon, Exmouth Large Salad Disco ————————————————— Legal Intentions —————————————————— Life4Land ———————————————————— Live wire —————————-Essex area1998 to 2007 ish Loony Choons ————————Devon and Cornwall 1992 Lorax ———————————————-Manchester) Lost ‘n’ sound——————————————- Sussex LoveLight .———-Bedfordshire Pose (from Dunstable)2000DS LOVEGUN ——– ‘summit mountaineering club, Snowdon Lowkey ——————————————–Hampshire/Surrey Lunar Collective. ——————————– East Anglia based. LSDiesel ———————————————–south london LWT Soundsystem (London Weekend Transmission)——London Mad Hatter Sounds originally tribe of gnome 97- 05ish Preston Mad big ups ——————————————————— Mainline ————————————————————— Masika —————————————– were about in 2003 Massai Warrior Sound System ————————————- MAYHEM ——————————————————Devon Mayhem—- London based hard acid rig till the early to mid2000’s Manik ————-Little Lee, Kris Fareye, Jamie, and Vince, London Malon Sounds —————————————————— Malfauteirs ———————————————-Samira Faraj Malfunktion ———————————————————- Maui waui ————————————————— Norfolk MDMF —————————————————————- MEOW Sound System, —Deep house,Techno Midlands 2000 Megabitch———————————————————– Merlins Gate ——————————————————– Messy sounds ————–Devon / London dnb rig early 2000’s Minimal effort sound system (mess)——————————- Mohican Trib—- 1993 Techno, Hardcore, Drum and Bass, Jungle Monolith ————————————————————- Monkeypuzzle.———————-Manchester 1997 – Still going Molotov ———————————–East Anglia 2000-2004 Mushroom————————————————–Hampshire Mutant Pollutant————————————–Oxfordshire 98 Mutant Dance——————————————–Bristol 1991 Mutoid Waste ——————————————————- Mission —————————————-high Wycombe way Mid life Krisis. ——————————————————– Militia, ———————————- South coast and beyond. MWD40 Sound System — Leicester 2000 to 2009’Deep House Funk Grooves — only small gigs now and again———————- Napalm – –Oxfordshire now Oxfordshire/Bristol – 2005 to present – ————-dnb, old skool, techno, hardcore——– Native Beats ———– Surrey circa 2000s -2003 dnb & jungle Negusa Negast,- Bishen (Bashment Bish) sound system – London – 1992 – : Bashment/Reggae/Roots/Hip-Hop/D&B/Jungle New era ———————————————————- Northern techno alliance—————————– multirigger? No nonsense ——————————————Bedfordshire No Fixed Abode ————————————————– Noise pollution, —————————-Bath/Bristol based Nut Nut Crew ———————————- Essex 2009-2014 Nusense, —————————————-Dorset 2000 NTA ——- Northern Techno Alliance (Sheffield and theNorth) Nine Bar ————————————————Guildford Network 23———————————————————– Oblivion ———————————————————— OBCT ————————————————————— OCB One cell brain ————————————————— OCM – Original Cuntry Munters ———————————– OCD —————————————————————— OCM —————————————————————- Oddessey– S.Oxfordshire Techno, hardcore, old skool- 1994 – 98 Odyssey sound system,, ————Suffolk 2008 to present Offshore State Circus Rig’ –S London. Jungle, extreme wierdness. Off yer face————————————————Norwich Ooops!——— Based Reading 1993 – Dan Treble O-ps Mayer: – D&B, jungle, Techno,we will travel anywhere for a party One Love ——————————————–Luton One Unity ———————————————-Bedfordshire Ontick. ————————–Owned by many London lostboys Original dirtysouth collective ———————————— Optimist Creed——————————————————— Oscillate———————————————–Birmingham Oxford Party Crew– 1991 – 93 Music: Hardcore, Techno–Oxford Off yer Trolley–“Party Animals”..————–…..cambridge area PANIK SOUND SYSTEM 1998 London and surrounding countyside. –Run by a collective with and open deck policy Panorama Elite ——————-Nottingham. Active in the 90s Paradox, Bournemouth and Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire 89-92 Party Possible ——————————————- Brighton Paranoia ———————————————————- Peaceful Promotions ———————————Wimbledon Pendulum——————————————————— Phantom Sounds ————— Oxfordshire/Bucks 2001-2004 Pitchless ————- London 00s played mostly noise and core Plan-B, ————————————— London and Prague Pineapple Tribe—————————————-Surrey 1995 Planet Grunt (Grunt)—————————— west Sussex 92 PRANK, (PIGS RIGSAND NAUGHTY KIDS) ———–Bristol Prove It———————————————————– Project Mayhem —————————————–Oxfordshire Proper Stuff” —————– run by two brothers, Cambridge area Primitive ————————————————————- Pod————Power of Dance ———–party all over —–1994 Positive Sounds——————————————————– Pokora Sound System —————————-London 2006 Public Nuisance ————————————————-Bristol Prime ——————————————-SOMERSET 91-94/5 Primal sounds —————————————————– Psychosis—————————————————- Surrey Pendragon—————————————— North Wales? PMT —————————————————————- Pulse—————————————————Nottingham Pulse8 ——————————————–Ipswich/Suffolk ? Pure FX, —————————————–Bracknell. 2010s PV Twist,—North Devon,North West Cornwall, 2006-2010. —–Buckinghamshire 2011-present for special occasions these days Quadrant———————————————-Nottingham UFO ————————————-Kent mid 90’s still going Underkonstruction ————————- London since 2006 Underground Sounds—— ——london Darren ( sick note) Underdog ——————————————————- Unknown ———————Wales/Bristol. Early 00’s onwards Unknown Project ——————————Bristol 2010ish United Sounds ————————————————— Unit-E —————————————————-Norfolk United Systems——————————————London Unhinged ————————————————-Wallingford Unstable Sounds —————————————-Basingstoke Unsound-Kings Cross ’88 –active and various beaches in between Uslot —————————————————————- Urban Warfare —————————————————— Urge ————————————————————- 89 Random Sounds ——————————————-London Ransack. ————————————London.. Gav Ransack Realeyes ————————————————-Suffolk Red eye ———————————————————— Resistrance—- ran for approx 10 years from 92 – 02-Bristol RJSS.————————– Ron Jon Surf Shack/sound system Reality Dub and Fairshare Unity-(big up Julian)at it since the 80’s Requiem ———–Basingstoke / Bristol, 2011 – Present Day Rere Kum Kum—————————————————– Respect all crew ————————————————— Reprobate —————————South West 2014 still going Ravenous ———————————————-Petersfield Revalation —————————————–luton 2000,s Remo ———————————————– Folkstone, Kent Reclaim the beach—————————– London 2001-2018 Reknaw.————————————————-London Punk Rebel Culture ———————————————– Rebel Lion ——————————————Norfolk Retox soundsystem.——————Devon 2003ish to nr present Re²³volution Sounds ——————————–Mason Garner… Restless Natives ———-Zebedee and Lawrence North London Rinky Dink—-The almighty bicycle powered sound system -Stroud Rig with no name —————————————————– Rotten Noise ———————————————————- RSNK red Shoes No Knickers ———————————– Ruckus. ———————————-London. 97 onwards. Jungle RUFF KREW ———————————————————- sativa syndicate —————————————————- Sabbatical———————————————-Guildford 1995 Samovar Soundsystem—————————– Nottingham Safe and Sound ————————————————- Scum like Us —————————————————- Scallywags———————————————-London Sensitive Sound————————————————London Semtex, ————-West Sussex/ London/ Spain 2005 -2010ish Sentient sounds ———————————————— Section 47————————————————–London Section 63———————————–Hampshire 2002-2010 Shell Shocked ————————–South coast and beyond. shindig ——————————————————– Essex Shit disco ———————————————————– Shit rig in the corner ———————————————–Shockwave ——————————————————— Sketch ——————————————-Burnham Somerset Skirmish ————————————————–Chertsey Sound Conspiracy————————————————- SoulDrop —————–Bedfordshire now Kent. 2010 ongoing soul 2 soul —————————————————–. SoundLab ———————————————————- SoundCrumpet —————————————————- Sound Clinique, ————————————————– Sokaid ——————————————about early 2000’s Sommatek ————————————–about early 2000’s Sonic ———————— Steve and Mikey Soviet —— Dorset Sorted Sounds ——————————–Notts 2002-2011ish Shuddervision—————————————————— SO SQUALID CREW —————————————Brighton Shrewd ————————————- Peterborough, Lincs ? Shtonka—————————————————-London Stonka—————–London mid-late 00s-French tekno guys SHAZAM! ——————————————————– Shhhh ———————————————————— Surge ————————————————-Oxfordshire Subtech ——————————————————— Subculture ———————————————Oxford Suspect Sound. —————————————–Surrey Silverscreen————————————————Reading Siren Sound System –S London, J. Siren-D,Siren 97-present day Silver Haze (became Subfactory) ——–Reading. Jungle. 94-96 Slack——————————————- Brighton, early 90s Slack Banter ——————————————————- Smokescreen————————————————-Sheffield SNAFU sound system —————————–by Dave the Rave Stinky Pink ——————————————————– STS ——————————————————-Herts Stumblefunk ——————–Manchester 2000 – Still going Spawnee Posse—————————————-Manchester Speakeasy ————————————————- Rachel Spiral Tribe——————————–London, USA, Europe.1991 Spoof Soundsystem—————————————Sheffield Specialneedsdisco, SPND CREW————————— London SS trout—————————————————-Brighton Spliff Riff — 1992 93Reggie, techno—Surrey/hampshire border Stable Sounds, ————————————————– S.T.S S.T.S (SQUATTERS ) ————————Bedfordshire STORM ———–: OXFORDSHIRE, all over 1998 STILL GOING– —-Music Techno, Trance, Hardcore, Drum and Bass, Jungle — Street Level——————————North Oxfordshire 1992 Stinky Pink——————————————————– Timbuktu ———————————————- Norfolk Subassault soundsystem:——– Yorkshire Techno: june 1999 Sugar Lump———————————————– London Survival–Oxfordshire all over 1996 Techno, Hardcore, —— ———————old Skool Sunshine Ravers—————- Sunnyside ———————————————————- S. W. A. T. Soundsystem ——————–Bath/Bristol based Sweat————————Farnham/surrey 1991- 93,Hardcore Swp ————————————————– Radstock System ATiT——————————————– Brighton* System Co-existence——————————–Surrey/Hamps System outlaw—————————————————- Tekno Travellers———————— Surrey 1991 – 93 Techno Technical ————————————————— Herts Teethout Productions —————————- Essex Teknikal disturbance ———————— Baldock area, 2000 Techtonic————————————————-London Tecnofobia —————————————————— Tek-d ———————————————————- Tekonta Sekta. ————————————–Midlands Teknonotice ————————————–Bournemouth Tek-Nologi, —–Portsmouth area based out of Sterns 89-93ish. Tek.No.Shit Sound System. ————————–West Sussex Tekno Kombat —————————————————– Tearout —————————————-Brighton 2010ish Thunder fox tribe ———————————————— TPK——————————————————–Reading. The Camouflaged Disco Sound System————–Sheffield The Countryside Alliance ————— ———-MultiRigger The Druids of Kaos,-all over from 2000 Moots of Kaos MultiRigger The Green monster Rig Brainfuel Crew ————out of Devizes The Matrix Project ——- Jan 2000 NRG Acid techno/trance www.thematrixproject.co.ukarea: Wolverhampton/Midlands Torment ———————————————————– TOSSERS. —————————————-Bristol later 90s Tomahawk ———————————————————– Totem Soundsystem —————————————-South Total Disturbance ————————————————– Total resistance.————————————–Mostly Europe.. Toytown ————————————————————- Toxic —————————————————————- TNT —————————— London Toby n Tim’s rig. -90s. Turbo Unit ————UK. Europe, parties, festivals, midish 90’s Tuk Sound System ———————————————- Tufty’s LSD rig. —————————————— London Tunnel Crew ————————————-High Wycombe Toothdust ——————————————– South Wales. Tibrium————————————————————– Timelock——————————————Manchester/Wales Tinker bell ——————————————-london 2000,s Tonka———————————————————–London Transmission————————————————-Leciester Tramps with amps ————————————————— Trailer trash ———————————————————- Tribal Energy ———————————————————Treehouse, ——————————Gwent valleys, South Wales Tribe of Frog ———————————————————– Tribe of Munt———————————————————– Tribe of Isis——————————-South Oxfordshire 1998 Tribe of Twats—————————————————-1993 Tribe of Locust ———Dorset 98 -2005 but do the odd reunion Trauma ———————————————————– Turbo twats ————————————————– Twisted sound system ————————– Surrey, Lee Ripley TVC ————————————————–Kent Valhalla 1999 Hard House, Deep house, Trance, Acid Tekno operate open deck policy as is reasonable. VEGA Sound System —————————————- Suffolk Vortex Sounds ————————————————— Void ————————————————————– Vox Populai ————————————-Big Alex rig London Vibe Tribe——————————————-Leicester early 90s Virus ——–from Cheltenham, London, early 90’s >> 2000’s—- ———–FB page,Virus sound system uk. —————- Viking Crew—————————————————— Verbal ————————————————- Leicester 96 ish Virus—————————————————–Jenny London Vision —————————————————————– WAC aka Wide Awake Club. Former Mr Noisy. Wastegash Soundsystem —————————————– Wattamess sounds. ——————————-Dorking 2010 Weekend Warriors —————————–Brighton 2010ish We Love Bass ——————————————-Suffolk WDA – Wessex dance association, ——Bournemouth 1990— WMD ——————————————West Country 1993 worth noting rig at torpedo town 91 with Spiral and sweat. Woodland pose——————— Cranleigh Surrey 1990 – 1992 Wellsbourn Travs——————————————-Wellsbourn Wrek Tek —————————————————Norfolk Wieselburger Soundz————————————————– Wireless Sound System————-midlands Derby crew. Ongoing Wibble ————————————————– Nottingham Wonky Sounds ——————————————— Radstock Wobbleberry———————————————-Hampshire Zero Gravity ———-London early 90s running legendry parties –for a year or so in the squatted Clock Shop in Farringdon! —– Zero Tolerance——– Brighton and surrounding area! August 99 Zulu ——————————————–Brighton 2010ish 2B3 ————————————————————– 2FaceBass ——————————————–Guildford 2000 DS ———————————————————— 23 For Life ——————————————————— 4BIDDEN SOUND SYSTEM — BRISTOL SOUTHWEST 2007-2017
6tems Anon. ———————————————- Scotland
AUXILIARY FREE PARTY SERVICES Jelly Tree Visuals ———————————– Guildford Surrey Alan Lodge(Tash) -Freefestival Photographer, freefestivals these days are host to freeparty rigs https://alanlodge.co.uk Free Party Radio ——————————————Oxfordshire. Ascot Free party radio ———————————————- united systems ———————————Freeparty phone line
Free Party Line ——-run by Debs and Ian back in the early 90s
SOUND SYSTEMS from other Countries Adrian’s Wall —————————————-Melbourne Acolytes — France, were always legends with KSS at Frenchtek Aestesis ———— france start: 1995 video body: – lots affilied with technokrat, infrabass in paris or britany www.aestesis.org AKA Sound System —— Melbourne circadian 2001-2004.. APA {Alien Pulse Agency},—————————— NL Dingoland —————————————————FR Drop In Caravan ——————————————–(FR) Epsylonn Otoktone —————————————–(FR) Insoumis ——————————————————FR Heretik ————————————————-France Kierweit —————————————————-NL Kraken —————————————————–(FR) K9KIMIV —————————————————– USA Les Nomads ———————————————– France Nonem ———————————————————FR Nawak ——————————————————–FR Plasmodio, ————————————————Rome. Furious, .————————————————-Paris Metek, ————————————————–France. APA (Alien pulse Agency), ——————————Berlin. Mononom, ————————————————NL. OQP, ————————————————Marseille. Teknocrats, .————————————————-Paris. Outlaw, .————————————————-Italy. K9, Den .————————————————- Haag. Subsound, .————————————————-Vienna. NTK————————————————Italy 🇮🇹 Sardinia Devasta noise ————————————-Italy 🇮🇹 Sardinia Bouch’Couzou, ——————————————– France RMS, —————————————————— France Messbass ———————————————- France Metro Sound Systems————————————-Czech Puzzle Soundsystem ———————————–(FR) Cirkus Alien, ————————————————–(CZ) Swamp, ——————————————————(CZ) FDM Freax —————————————————(CZ) Lego Soundsystem —————————————–(AU) Mononom/Gigabrol —————————————–NL Ocupa ————————————————— France SDC ( Sunday Dub Club) ————-Sydney. Dub Ska Reggae Sleepnot Soundsystem —————————–Romania Scooby Doo Crew———————————–Houston,texas S.P.A.Z. ———————————————San Francisco Virus —————————– Melbourne 1998 – still going Wicked ————-San Francisco, a splinter group from Tonka
Chris McDonagh is a Campaigns Officer at Friends, Families and Travellers. Chris is an Irish Traveller and grew up travelling around the United Kingdom. Here he writes on his personal experiences of growing up within the Travelling community, both good and bad.
Growing up as an Irish Traveller in England was difficult. From a young child I remember the hate and prejudice that was aimed at my family, just for being what others saw as “different”.
Some of my earliest memories are of being spat at or having our trailer attacked by people who had nothing better to do, while the men were away from the camp working, and I remember the fear and disgust I felt. I didn’t have a clue what we had done wrong. An innocent child should not have to feel like that. This was the early 90s.
I was around five years of age, when I wandered away from the camp. I remember I wanted to spend my pocket money (50p!) on some chewing gum which had the rub on tattoos inside the packet. I was walking for what must have been around 20 minutes before I realised, I was lost. I started to panic and I didn’t know where I was, or the way back to the camp, so I sat down on the kerbside and broke down in tears. I must have been crying for 10 minutes and worrying what I was going to do when some people approached me. It was a couple of boys from the local settled community and they all surrounded me. I was afraid as they were all older than me and I felt intimidated. They asked me my name and when I told them, one (with red hair) pushed me onto the ground whilst racially abusing me. Thankfully, someone passing in a car stopped and told them to leave me alone and took me back to the camp, but unfortunately I don’t remember her name. But I will always remember her face. She was a guardian angel sent to help me that day and I wish I could thank her now. She helped a lost child get back home.
Moving from camp to camp was a life I grew up in and it was a life I enjoyed. I enjoyed seeing new places and exploring new things with my brothers and cousins and we would make dens in the woods and forests, and pretend we were ‘cowboys and Indians’, eating berries and making bows using birch branches and a string. Life was simple but it was good.
We moved to a new camp in Manchester and the local children decided to come over and see what was going on. They were stood on the outskirts of the camp when myself and a few cousins walked over to greet them. After saying hello, they then asked were we ‘G*ppos’? Can you imagine walking up to somebody you’ve never met and them using insulting words to describe you, or your children? This behaviour is a learned trait and this word was obviously used to describe Travellers and Gypsies by somebody close to them. We had to grow a thick skin and learn to get on with things from a very young age, and I don’t think it is right for a child to have to do that. A child should be playing with their friends and learning about the world, but we were being taught how to handle racism and how we should expect this abuse from members of a ‘civilised’ society. We had to toughen up and grow up much quicker than members of the settled community. Not by choice, but by necessity.
In the mid-90s, we moved into a brick and mortar house due to a family member’s ill health, and the constant harassment by the police, local authorities and random members of society. By then, myself and my brothers started at a new school.
On my first day I remember walking into the classroom and introducing myself and immediately the inevitable whispers and looks started. I was seated at my own table and given a book to draw in. The rest of the class were taught whilst I was left to my own devices. Soon break time came, and we all went out into the school yard. Everyone went their own way, until I was left alone in the middle of the playground. My brothers were in a different part of the school as they were older. I looked around at everyone with friends and felt alone. A boy approached me who was in my class and introduced himself to me. We immediately became friends and he was the first person my age who helped me understand that not everyone was the same. He showed compassion and the hand of friendship at a time I felt alone and outcast. I realised that not everyone was the same, though I still had to put up with racism and abuse from students and teachers alike. We are still friends to this day.
Another day we were learning about our times tables, and the teacher told me to stand up and recite my 3 times table. When I did, he made me stand at the front of the classroom and told me I was speaking wrong, because I said ‘three’ different to him. I am an Irish Traveller and speak with an Irish accent, so of course I am going to sound different to an educated man from the settled community. He told me to repeat after him and speak the same way he did, and I remember looking at the floor and my face burning with shame whilst doing what he said. He didn’t attempt to stifle the laughter from the other children. I can still feel that shame today if I think about it.
The reason I have shared these few examples from my childhood is because despite the change in times and what is now deemed acceptable or appropriate, this type of behaviour is still happening. Children, who are so pure that they don’t have the sense to understand, and also adults from minority ethnic communities, are still experiencing this abuse and hate on a daily basis. The times have changed, and what was once deemed acceptable is now being challenged, but the hate that Traveller and Gypsy people receive is not. The media print stories that spread stereotypes, programme makers are making programmes that not only show us in a bad light, they spread blatantly untrue ‘facts’. The authorities that are supposed to protect us as members of society close down sites and reject our planning permissions when all we want is somewhere to live. We are under attack from all sides and it has always been this way. This is the way I have grown up. Outcasted and neglected, accused and denied basic human rights. The world has moved on and given people equal opportunities, but we are still left behind. We are still abused across the board. We have had over 500 years of prejudice and hardship, how much more must we endure? When will we finally be recognised for who we are? We are human beings too and we deserve equality. Our children deserve a chance to live without fear of being abused, and the opportunity to be whatever they want to be without stereotypes and hate following them. I fear I won’t be here when that day comes, and I have come to accept that. But for the sake of my children, I hope our time for acceptance comes soon.
I would like to make a personal request. As somebody who hopefully now has a better idea of the kind of suffering Travelling people endure, I hope you want to help us make a change. And you CAN help us. You can help us by spreading awareness of the easily remedied issues we face (there are many), you can challenge the anti-Traveller/Gypsy hate and rhetoric when you see it, whether it is online, on media sites, on your local MP’s manifesto. Help us campaign to get sites for us to live on. Help your children understand that we are people who have been trod on by society for over 500 years, and that treating us different because we are seen as ‘different’ is wrong. Because we are not different. We are people too. We have needs and aspirations. Feelings and fears. We are all people in this world and we should celebrate each other’s cultures. We should be celebrating each other as friends.
Nails painted RED today. In support of NHS and blood charities.
#TalkingRed
Guide To Getting Involved / Activities Hold a red themed event – cocktails or mocktails/cupcakes or traybakes! Paint it RED – your nails not the town! Why not use your special Talking Red nail polish and go red for the week with friends? Bake it RED – cakes with red icing, strawberry sundaes or a completely red dinner party – get creative with red foods and enjoy with friends and family! Big Red Quiz – download the full quiz to do for fun with friends
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
