The joy of an illegal rave

Every time I read that Britain’s anti-coronavirus measures are being jeopardised by a ‘small minority of senseless individuals’ holding illegal raves, my heart soars. Maybe there’s hope for the youth after all!

I’d been beginning to wonder. In my experience, kids of about university age have been priggish and obedient about the government’s rules during lockdown. ‘Why can’t they just get off their faces on drink, drugs and repetitive beats, like my generation did at that age?’ I’ve often mused.

Well, thank goodness that’s exactly what some of them are doing. Last month alone, the Metropolitan Police claim there were as many as 500 illegal raves across London. According to the government this represents a threat that deserves £10,000 fines for the organisers. But if you ask me, it’s about time we had a backlash to the grim authoritarianism of the past six months —especially a backlash motivated by pure hedonism rather than politics.

That’s what the rave movement was about, back in the day. Sure, some like to claim otherwise: that raves were political in the way that Black Lives Matter is political. But they weren’t. All that mattered was scoring the right pills, getting to the right location, and then dancing your tits off with a bunch of like-minded people till sunrise. The only political thing about it was that, after the infamous Castlemorton Common Festival of 1992, John Major’s government made such events illegal, so that all of a sudden, if you were young, partying became an act of defiance against state authority.

Though it borrowed from the gay clubs of Chicago and Detroit and from the proto–electronica of German bands like Kraftwerk, the rave scene was largely a British invention — the result of DJs coming back in the late 1980s from a stint in Ibiza under the influence of MDMA and trying to recreate the experience on a larger scale in the UK.