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• Lost Baggage

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Picture the scene...

It’s a cold, damp Wednesday night in London. 13th October 1993 to be exact.

But despite the inclement weather and oppressive greyness pervading recession hit Britain, about 2,000 people are marching purposefully towards the Houses of Parliament shouting slogans, beating drums and generally making a hell of a racket.

A rainbow alliance of communists, squatters, travellers, punks and ravers are desperately trying to stop the Criminal Justice Act being passed by the right-wing Tory government. This piece of legislation faced massive opposition from many people, as it contained a raft of powers aimed at smashing the alternative culture of the day – travellers, squatters and other minority groups would be badly affected, but most controversially of  all ‘raves’ would be made totally illegal.

The popular term ‘rave’ now had a legal definition – at least in the government’s opinion. It was defined as a gathering of 100 people or more, at which amplified music 'wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats' is played which is likely to cause serious distress to the local community, in the open air and at night.

This was a sign of how popular ‘raving’ had become, with hundreds of thousands of people choosing the combination of ecstasy and dance music as their preferred form of weekend recreation and many changing their lifestyles and beliefs as a result.

So this wet Wednesday night was a last stand of opposition before the law was passed. There had been huge popular opposition to it, with many people in the legal profession and the media also expressing their dismay at the grave implications for freedom of speech.

The previous weekend had seen a huge demo in Hyde Park, with an estimated 100,000 people taking part and big sound systems, including Desert Storm and the cycle-powered Rinky Dink, pumping out techno to rally the colourful, baggy-clothed troops. Towards the end of the day things had turned violent when police moved in to try and break up the party - protest.

Due to the sheer weight of numbers and the determination of the raver-protestors, the police had to retreat and were in effect defeated by the crowd. Mounted police charged into the crowd, but were then surrounded and pelted with missiles by the crowd.

Later in the day one part of the crowd surged down Oxford Street, smashing up many shops and looting the goods within. The police fought back by indiscriminately beating anyone they could, but faced the shame of having lost the battle that day, with the protestors chanting “one – nil!” just to reinforce the point.

People who were there recall numerous creative forms of resistance from the demonstrators, including this example from one eye witness:

“When it first went off in Hyde Park and the mounted police started charging, a copper got unseated by his mount. Other coppers tried to get to the horse, but they were beaten by some crusty bloke who promptly jumped on the horse's back. And he proceeded to ride the thing around the park at full gallop, dreads flying.”

Other examples include a fire - breather who held some of the riot police at bay with arcs of flame from his mouth and some protestors breaking up park benches to use as staves to defend themselves against the batons of the riot police.

So, 3 days later, outside parliament, the police were out for revenge, plain and simple. As a 19 year old student and dance music lover on my first demonstration, I for one wasn’t ready for the level of police brutality that I witnessed that night. The police deliberately surrounded us in a small side street, with between 2 – 3 thousand officers in full riot gear. Then they set about mercilessly battering anyone they could, including defenceless women. Like many others in the front line that night I was arrested and thrown in the cells of Charing Cross police station for the night.

Luckily I managed to talk myself out of a beating in the back of the riot van, but all the other protestors I saw that had been arrested were bleeding and had been beaten to some extent.

For me and thousands of others like me the time of the CJA demonstrations was a defining moment. In a way it was the moment when the innocence of the original peace and love culture of the early UK rave scene was lost, when going to ‘illegal’ parties became a political statement in itself.

As Luke Harrison from Binary Finary, a DJ who has been involved in the scene since its early days put it:

 “When a new thing starts off it is at its most beautiful and radiant, but like night after day, the shadows come and darken the experience with the opposing forces of control, trying to make it fit a commercial model, making it something it is not. I find it ironic that the people that put control on one scene because it was deemed inappropriate now face much uglier situations like knife crime on the rise.”

The funny thing was that in the long run, Michael Howard (the vampire-like, right wing Home Secretary in Britain at the time) had actually done us a favour.

From that point on there was more unity between the disparate groups that were affected by the CJA than there had been before. There was an outpouring of creativity in opposing the fascistic attack on people’s freedom to live in their own individual ways and to enjoy themselves in whatever way they wished.

Direct action groups like Advance Party, Justice?, SCHnews, and Freedom Network that were formed to organize opposition to the law continued to organize events that challenged the new legislation and many ordinary ravers who were previously politically unaware now became radicalised and interested in other causes that they would otherwise never have been aware of.

(Howard pictured below)                                                                                     

As an open letter to Michael Howard from Justice said: 

“Your attempt to criminalise our culture has unified it like never before. Thanks to you we are now witnessing the largest grass roots movement of direct action in years. Your inspiration has made us work closer together: Networking is happening across the nation - Road Protesters and Ravers, Gay Rights Activists and Hunt Saboteurs, Travellers and Squatters and Many More, as we realise the strength of our numbers.”
  In London the free party scene got more popular and went from strength to strength. There was now hardly any difference between an underground rave and a demo, as both could well be called illegal and could be met with violent opposition from the police.

In the first year of the CJA, 545 people were arrested in the UK, but 90% of these defendants were acquitted and no-one was jailed under the law, although many party organisers saw their equipment seized or destroyed arbitrarily by heavy handed police action. It seemed that many lawyers and even some judges saw the law for what it was; a blatant attack on people’s fundamental rights of freedom of assembly and freedom of expression.

As for the music that formed the background for these events, acid trance (often with a Goan flavour) and the increasingly popular acid techno sound were the flavour of the day; pounding hypnotic rhythms that transported the dancer to other realms and other possibilities, breaking up the mundane patterns of grey old blighty.

Example of artists response to the CJA include The Prodigy’s single ‘Their Law’, and D-Note and Navigator MC’s brilliant Drum’n’Bass repost ‘Criminal Justice’.

Other artists set out to make tunes that didn’t feature any repetitive beats at all as a way of getting round the law!

Autechere’s ‘Anti EP’ stated that their tune ‘Flutter’: “ … has been programmed in such a way that no bars contain identical beats and can therefore be played under the proposed new law. However, we advise DJs to have a lawyer and a musicologist present at all times to confirm the non repetitive nature of the music in the event of police harassment.”
          
And Orbital’s  ‘Internal’ version of  ‘Are We Here?’ was titled "Criminal Justice Bill?" and  consisted of just four minutes of silence.

For me personally, my experience of the CJA demonstrations changed my perception forever. Seeing first hand how the forces of law and order could attack innocent people and then lie about what had happened was a real eye-opener. Many young people like me completely lost any trust they had in the police, who were now seen as the enemy by most of the generation that grew up at this time and in this musical culture.

For the free party scene it was the start of a more politicized era where parties and protests were interlinked. The spirit of freedom and anarchy was in the air and in the years to come this would feed into the huge anti-globalization demonstrations in London and see a huge body of excellent music made by DJ’s and producers inspired by this unified, vibrant and creative alternative culture.

Tom Evans