{"id":17734,"date":"2024-03-31T18:52:56","date_gmt":"2024-03-31T18:52:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/?p=17734"},"modified":"2024-03-31T18:55:03","modified_gmt":"2024-03-31T18:55:03","slug":"how-diy-sound-system-blazed-a-trail-for-the-90s-free-party-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/archives\/17734","title":{"rendered":"How DiY Sound System blazed a trail for the ’90s free party movement"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Throughout the \u201990s, the DiY Sound System put on countless free events, ran a recording studio and two record labels, and took their hedonistic parties around the world. Here, Harold Heath speaks to co-founder Harry Harrison about his new book, Dreaming in Yellow: The Story of the DiY Sound System, and the collective’s trailblazing legacy in the free party movement.<\/strong><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The origins of DiY Sound System date back to a mid-\u201880s England that was a very different place to how it is in 2022. In many ways it was an England that was freer than today: you could still squat properties, still claim the dole while learning to play an instrument or put on parties, and the country was still host to a teeming underground of free festivals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the Conservative government had also brutally smashed the miners\u2019 strike, embarked on a post-colonial war in the Falklands and overseen record unemployment levels, while Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared that \u201cthere\u2019s no such thing as society\u201d. It was into this harsh political context that DiY was born: a high-impact collision between the British radical, anti-establishment culture of squatters, anarcho-punks, travellers and free-partiers and the birth of UK acid house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we chat over Zoom, DiY co-founder Harry Harrison, now a genial, laidback father of two living in Wales, is full of brilliant stories and joie de vivre as he happily recalls his role in some of the most revolutionary events in recent British cultural history. \u201cWe were in the right place at the right time,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was the end of the free festival scene, that last gasp of Stonehenge and anarcho-punk, when Glastonbury was lawless \u2014 the world was very different then. And I think we saw ourselves as promoting that lawlessness but using acid house as the perfect weapon.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The free festival scene Harrison refers to has largely disappeared, but throughout the \u201880s there was a calendar of outdoor free events, mainly attended by so-called \u2018new age\u2019 travellers, hippies, punks, post-punks, \u2018crusties\u2019, squatters and others on the fringes of society. It was a fiercely anti-establishment subculture and one that Harrison and co. soon came into contact with via the Nottingham squat and house party scene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe hung out with a load of anarcho-punks and they were hardcore, serious poly-drug users,\u201d he recalls. \u201cThey were messy as fuck, but they also organised loads of benefits for the miners. And we were into animal rights too, so we smashed a few butcher shop windows, went hunt-sabbing for a few years, all those kinds of anarcho-politics. Then we went to free festivals at 16, 17 and it just blew my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That punk ethos would feed directly into the character of DiY, creating a unique take on the rave template that put community, freedom and non-profit at the heart of what they did. \u201cThat\u2019s why we were called DiY,\u201d continues Harrison, \u201cit\u2019s a punk thing: it\u2019s don\u2019t listen, don\u2019t vote, don\u2019t take any shit, do it yourself, learn three chords and form a band, but instead of learn three chords it was buy some decks, get a soundsystem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harrison became an enthusiastic attendee of the free party scene. \u201cWe went to a festival near Blackburn in probably \u201983 and there was a chalk board that said \u2018Line of speed 50p, Line of coke a quid, Mushrooms \u00a32.50! We were like, \u2018Wow, when does the music stop?\u2019 and they were like, \u2018It never stops, it goes from Friday to Tuesday\u2019. Unfortunately, the music was a bit shit, it was Hawkwind and stuff, God bless them and all that but it wasn\u2019t happening. But then acid house crossed with the free festival movement, that was where we were at and we were instrumental in it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"DiY<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEveryone at our gigs got 75 quid with a 20 quid \u2018nipper bonus\u2019 if you had kids. Everyone got the same, the lighting guy, the sound guy, the DJs, and if they didn\u2019t like it they could fuck off and go and DJ somewhere else. We had our major DJs but they all lugged the gear at the end of the night\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time Harrison, along with Pete \u2018Woosh\u2019 Birch (who sadly passed away in 2020), Richard \u2018Digs\u2019 Down and Simon DK formed the DiY collective in 1989, they\u2019d already been into house music for a few years. \u201cThe one thing we had in Nottingham was DJ Graeme Park,\u201d says Harrison, \u201cwho was playing house at the Garage from \u201887 onwards. We started going there every Saturday, that was my first experience of house music.\u201d The DiY collective included engineers and sound crew as well as DJs, and they put together their own custom-built soundsystem and began putting on free parties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DiY\u2019s anti-establishment stance remained solid for as long as they functioned as a unit. While the mid-\u201890s saw the rise of the superclub and the gradual encroachment of capital into dance music, DiY remained resolutely underground, alternative, and committed to an egalitarian vision of the disco, one that was reflected in how they dealt with money. \u201cWhat I\u2019m most proud of is that we were a collective,\u201d says Harrison. \u201cEveryone at our gigs got 75 quid with a 20 quid \u2018nipper bonus\u2019 if you had kids. Everyone got the same, the lighting guy, the sound guy, the DJs, and if they didn\u2019t like it they could fuck off and go and DJ somewhere else. We had our major DJs but they all lugged the gear at the end of the night.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DiY\u2019s free parties began in summer 1990. They were mostly small affairs at first because, as Harrison recalls, most people on the free festival\/ traveller scene still weren\u2019t into house music at this point. Every weekend over winter 1990 the DiY crew were in the south-west of England, where the travellers were, putting on their free house music parties. Harrison remembers a particular event in the free festival calendar at Chipping Sodbury at the end of May 1991 as a major turning point. Up until then, soundsystems playing dance music were looked down upon by many of the traveller and crusty crew, but for the first time, the festival was all sound systems and no bands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was getting bigger and bigger, you could feel it growing,\u201d continues Harrison, \u201cand instead of sound systems getting shit, being told to fuck off into the corner because \u2018that\u2019s not proper music\u2019, suddenly there was this force of numbers, suddenly there were thousands of young people there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“The government were already a bit pissed off about raves, but Castlemorton really blew the gaff”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Momentum continued to grow over the winter of \u201991 and then came the first big event of 1992: the Avon Free Festival at Castlemorton common. It\u2019s difficult to imagine now, a five-day-long completely free festival\/rave, attended by tens of thousands of party-goers, with the authorities powerless to act against it. An estimated 20-50,000 attendees \u2014 nobody seems able to agree on the numbers \u2014 turned up to the biggest illegal rave in UK history in the shadows of the Malvern Hills and partied over a very long weekend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe sun shone for the entire five days,\u201d remembers Harrison, \u201cI\u2019ve never seen British weather like it. God was definitely on our side… And no one really organised it. There we no flyers, mobile phones, it just came together organically. You could never recreate it now, it was just unique, it was our generation\u2019s Woodstock. We set up on the Thursday night and we didn\u2019t finish till Tuesday.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Castlemorton is an event that has since gone down in history, its ripples felt for years afterwards. It marked the beginning of the end of the \u2018new age\u2019 traveller lifestyle and of illegal outdoor raves via the Tories\u2019 Criminal Justice Bill a couple of years later. As Harrison says, \u201cThe government were already a bit pissed off about raves, but Castlemorton really blew the gaff. That was May 1992 and at the Tory party conference in September, [senior Conservative] Michael Howard said he planned to introduce legislation to make things like raves illegal \u2014 and the Criminal Justice Act was made law in November \u201994.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DiY were unique among the soundsystems at Castlemorton in that they played deep house rather than the hard techno that was adopted by many other UK travelling sounds like Spiral Tribe. \u201cCastlemorton was nine soundsystems and I went to all of them and the music was just a nightmare!\u201d says Harrison. \u201cIt was just appalling, nosebleed techno, 160 beats per minute! As well as house, we played John Coltrane, Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy. People came to our tent and stayed for two days, it saved their sanity. Because we really believed in the music. I guess we really believed in the ecstasy as well but you can\u2019t really say that anymore… But there\u2019s something sacred that happens when you get the right people, the right music, the right drugs in the right place \u2014 it just doesn\u2019t get any better than that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"DiY<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe did some properly mad shit that makes me shudder when I look back, it was so reckless and lawless… I look back now in my mid-fifties and just think, \u2018Wow\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harrison\u2019s role in the collective, after an aborted attempt at DJing (\u201cI couldn\u2019t be arsed: too difficult, too expensive, too serious!\u201d) was as organiser, galvaniser and promoter. It\u2019s an essential job in the success of every UK underground party: the facilitator, that one mate with a big personality who by default ends up putting on events, the larger-than-life member of your crew who makes things happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was the brains!\u201d he laughs. \u201cThe gobshite! At the height of our fame around \u201993, \u201994 we had 13 or 14 DJs and my job was to herd the cats. I was the organiser. We were a collective but I also thought in a Stalinist way that if I don\u2019t DJ I can kind of control things. I guess I was the strategist, the organiser, promoter, gobshite and money launderer!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of their music policy, DiY were uniquely placed to take their free party ethos outside the traditional UK free festival circuit. As Harrison says, \u201cWe played Cafe Del Mar in Ibiza six weeks after Castlemorton, that was the unique thing about us. We were part of the Balearic scene, the crusty scene, the club scene, the soundsystem scene. There\u2019s no way Spiral Tribe are going to play at Cafe Del Mar and there\u2019s no way that Brandon Block is going to play at Castlemorton, so that was our unique selling point I guess.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DiY also ran their successful club night Bounce for five years till the late \u201890s. They toured the country and built a network of Bounce events in major UK cities, their legal endeavours partly subsidising the illegal parties. They also took their events to places like Paris, Ibiza and Amsterdam, to Atlanta, San Francisco and Dallas in the US and to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then there were the record labels. DiY put out a strong album in \u201993 on Warp Records called \u2018Strictly 4 Groovers\u2019 before launching their Strictly 4 Groovers label in the same year. It ran till \u201998 when it was replaced by DiY Discs. The Strictly 4 Groovers label featured beautiful mid-\u201890s deep house like Crime\u2019s \u2018Rhythm Graffiti\u2019 EP, To-Ka\u2019s \u2018Keep Pushing\u2019 and \u2018Good Together\u2019 by Charles Webster and Pippa Jones as South Central, as well as music from members of DiY. DiY Discs continued in a similar vein with a series of deep releases from artists including Plej, Atjazz, Rhythm Plate, Stacey Kidd and Digs, Woosh and Mr Ski, building a reputation for high-quality underground house music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, nothing is static, certainly not in the wild world of clubbing, DJing and promoting. Over the last few years, the crew have met up and put on occasional events, making it all the way to their 25th and then 30th anniversary celebrations, but by the late \u201890s, Harrison says the DiY collective was \u201cFluctuating \u2014 there was quite a lot of addiction, quite a lot of mess, quite a lot of people moving, raising kids and so on…\u201d Perhaps inevitably, real life had begun to infiltrate the dream world of the idealistic DiY. Gradually, parts of the collective moved on and went their separate ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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