Party like it’s 1990! Raves are back, but with Gen Z vibes
From Somerset fields to exurban light industrial warehouses, free parties are back. Sally Howard speaks to the leading lights of the ‘field’, ‘factory’ and ‘woodland’ scenes
Five am on a July morning in 2021 and 16-year-old free party goer Hunter stands in a clearing in Somerset woodland. The scene — of bobbing bodies illuminated by the spectral light of a summer sunrise — is, in some senses, a timeless one: these could be 2,000 nutted 90s ravers with panda eyes, or a neolithic Druid congregation at nearby Stonehenge. In other ways, this is unmistakably the 2020s. There are bottles of buckfast doing the rounds, the caffeinated wine known to Scots as ‘wreck the hoose juice’, baby formula-cut MDMA that requires its users to top up their buzz every hour, plus mongy hits of ketamine. Yet to Hunter these few hours amid the trees feel like a spiritual casting off of privations of the plague years:
“There was this douf-douf coming out of the speakers and the sun was rising over thousands of partiers and I thought: ‘this is the space I have been given to be free and be myself and it’s beautiful’,” recalls Hunter of this, one of the tens of rural parties he has attended in the past few years. At 18, Hunter is a veteran of the Gen Z free party scene. “It’s meant everything to me these past years,” he says. “Which, let’s be honest, have been pretty much 100 percent shit for my generation.”
Catalysed by a generation who came of age through Covid lockdowns, free parties, which saw their zenith in London in the acid house days of the late 80s to early 90s (before the arrival of anti-party legislation in The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994) are resurgent, with epicentres in East Anglia, West Yorkshire and in the fields around Bristol. Events are advertised via word of mouth, whatsapp groups and, as in the London orbital days, pre-recorded messages on phone lines. Leading lights of the scene include Oddity and B-12, both rigs run by hobbyist 20-somethings who fund the parties with day jobs and donations.
“It’s existential,” Hunter muses of the feeling he gets from his forays into free partying. “[Free parties are] the only place I have space to stop and think about life and who I am and what I want to achieve.”
The press response to the new-generation free parties: which are typically country raves in fields and woodland with a ‘factory’ scene occupying disused commercial buildings, has bordered on the moral panic witnessed in the rave days (when The Sun claimed ravers ‘as young as 11’ were ‘raving for eight hours straight’ and, most bizarrely ‘biting the heads off pigeons’). In the Covid-19 summer of 2020 mobile phone footage of ‘secret plague raves’ did the rounds on social media, and were lubriciously reported by the British tabloids (‘reckless raves lead to viral surge!’). In June 2021 Sussex News reported on the ‘significant hostility’ encountered by police officers who attempted to break up a 2,000-strong free party on the South Downs with “a large volume of music equipment, including sound systems and speakers” seized by officers and 50 partygoers arrested, including an unfortunate youth from Redditch who collided, in his drugged-up state, with a police officer’s car. In April 2022, The Independent reported Dorset Police’s efforts to shut down an Easter Sunday rave at Lullworth, which took 21 hours due to the 1,000 plus unruly party-goers in attendance and the fact the site bordered military land. “Understandably, we have received a number of calls from concerned and upset residents who have had their sleep disturbed by the noise levels coming from the illegal event,” said Sam de Reya, Dorset deputy chief constable at the time.
“Covid? I need to get off my nut,” reported the Daily Mail, meanwhile, of the flurry of Covid era raves that led to Priti Patel announcing a new regime of fines for those hosting illegal parties. (In Mail-speak: ‘brazen drug parties’).
This depiction of a cat and mouse game between police and free party rig-owners is not one that’s recognised by Eddie, a sound engineer with Somerset free party soundsystem Barntek. Eddie, 21, believes the powers that be have a grudging respect for the scions of the free party scene. He illustrates this with two anecdotes from his own free parties. One incident was in 2021, when an West Country farmer — “a real Somerset cider drinker who was at least 50 and had this angry red face” — on whose land Barntek were throwing a field party, arrived at daybreak with a tractor and a giant bale of hay which said farmer gammon, in a dyspeptic fury, planned to deposit on Barntek’s ‘stack’ (decks).
“I just started spitballing him,” Eddie recalls of the 6am encounter. “I said: ‘mate, how much does that tractor cost? £15,000? Well this rig cost £30,000 and we bought it with our own money to make our friends happy.” There were 300 people at the Barntek party that morning and, when the farmer grudgingly conceded they could have another hour on his land, they cranked the soundstsem back up — a bone-rattling drum ’n’ bass track — and “everyone cheered and got on with the party”. The other incident was this past summer when a policeman, ‘evidently an old raver’, turned up at one of Barntek’s raves in a woodland clearing in Wiltshire and, involuntarily bobbing along to the baseline, entered into a lively conversation with Eddie about his soundsystem. “He said it was one of the best ones he’d ever heard,” Eddie laughs. “I reckon he was a frustrated DJ.”
Reading the tabloid’s moral panic around ‘plague raves’ in the summers of 2020 and 2021 Kirk Field, 61 and a former ‘raving reporter’ for 90s dance music bible Mixmag, experienced a jolt of recognition. “We have seen this moral panic time and again when it comes to kids and the underground party scene,” says Field, author of 2023 bestseller Rave New World: Confessions of a Raving Reporter (Nine Eight Books). “It usually happens when voting property owners get disturbed by the noise from parties and lose their shit. It happened with the sex pistols in the 70s, it happened with the acid house scene in the 90s. It will happen any time young people are getting together to party.” For all of the West Country’s sanguine coppers, the London Met took a dim view of the ‘Airbnb’ raves that sprang up in London from 2017 and which they muscularly policed. Pressure from the Met led the controversial accommodation platform to announce that anyone under the age of 25 who had fewer than three positive reviews would not be able to book whole properties on Airbnb that were located ‘outside of their local area’ from August 2020.
Paul, 64, has been part of the free party scene since the acid house days and is involved in occasional free parties hosted on the South Coast which he dubs ‘nostalgia raves’. In the late 80s Paul, then squatting across London, attended the seminal parties thrown by the likes of Mutoid Waste Company, a performance arts company influenced by techno-masculine comic Judge Dredd and Mad Max, which threw illegal psychedelic rock and dub reggae parties which then merged into the acid house scene before the sounsystem fled police crackdowns to the European mainland. “It was a mad time ’cus back then Canary Wharf was just all these abandoned warehouses that were perfect for parties,’ he recalls. Then, Paul’s weekend nights would begin sitting in a friend’s car in a car park outside a pub listening to pirate radio stations that advertised party locations. Armed with a location, Paul and his friends would set off to dilapidated boozers on the South Bank and at Kings Cross, to Canary Wharf or London’s outskirts, in Kent. When they drew near they’d navigate, Paul says, “by following the boom, boom, boom and the strobe.” The 80s scene’s magic for Paul, who now works for Sussex county council, was the breaking down of London’s rigid class hierarchies. Especially in the utopian days of the early acid house scene, when MDMA was arriving in quantity in the UK by boat from Amsterdam. “It was Millwall supporters, Chelsea girls, yuppies: all off their nuts and loving each other,” he explains of the quality E coursing through the UK.
Today, he adds, the raves he attends are typically staged as gestures of protest in buildings that are soon to be ceded to developers. Paul most recently attended a rave on a light industrial site in leftie Lewes, the zu Mycelium Party, which was charged at what seemed to this old-timer to be an eye-watering £22 rather than free. It was on the contested location of a planning battle between locals who want affordable housing and developers who want to maximise yield by building apartments only DFLs (down from Londoners) can afford. “There’s kids there and hippy mums dressed like butterflies [he says of the party] and old ravers like us — all anti-capitalists I s’pose.”
It’s for reasons to do with the rapacious march of capital that parties are thinner on the ground in London and the southeast, where premises that once throbbed with free party basslines are colonised by investment-vehicle residential developments.
I arrived in London in the early 2000s in what, I now know, was the last hurrah of urban squat parties, when we would head from pubs and clubs to parties in old commercial premises in east London, where the lack of mains power meant everything stank of the two-stroke oil used by the generators powering the soundsystem and posh kids mixed with bare-breasted hold-outs from the 90s Celtic rave scene and born-and-bred Londoners who scowled at anyone who stepped on their £200 trainers. The most memorable of these was in a derelict piano warehouse on Mare Street in 2001, where large and salivating dogs wound around ravers’ legs and variably talented graffiti artists scrawled legends suchs as ‘Whore’ and ‘Arzz’ on the sweat-moistened concrete walls. A few years later a friend bought a flat in that same building for £300,000. Another was in a paper factory on part of the site now occupied by the Westfield shopping centre in Stratford where one monged out friend spent six hours pretending to surf balanced precariously on top of the rollers of a 19th century paper winder and wearing only his underpants and a confused smile. Paul laments that one of his favourite late 80s free party haunts, a 1879 former fire station on Tooley Street at Southwark that once reverberated with ravers with blue dreadlocks and fire-breathing kits is today an ersatz bistro run by corporate multinational PricewaterhouseCoopers. “Fucking tragedy, that,” he sighs.
And we all know what happened to Canary Wharf.
Still time and tastes change and there are other reasons that Gez Z are more into getting their rocks off in rure. “At the factory end of the parties,” Eddie says of the exurbs raves, “the rig owners will fund them by selling ketamine on the side and they’ll leave the buildings in a right state.” Conversely, he points out, the field and woodland scenes are funded by the day jobs of the soundsytem owners themselves — “I can’t tell you how much money we hemorrhage” — and set themselves apart from mainstream festivals, that free partiers generally agree have been captured by the free market. “You go to a festival and it’s £10 for a felafel and it’s sponsored by a supermarket,” Hunter says of this point of view. “What’s all that about?”
True to the eco mainstreaming of Generation Z, country rigs make it a policy to leave no trace in the rural spots they pass through. “With field raves we’re trying to escape the dissociation of urban and online lives; this sort of scattiness that internet society has. We want to respect the countryside and make a community with people who are standing to us in real life rather than as some weird avatar online,” Eddie says. For this reason Barntek are considering ditching phonelines and whatsapp group advertising of their summer 2024 parties for word-of-mouth only. “Going totally offline,” he adds happily, “that’s the idea”.
As the sun sets on free parties in London, it rises on gurning faces in West Country fields. And perhaps it’s the simple action of being fully present with others that’s most radical about these free parties, though of course it’s nothing new. Phones off, hands in the air, partying like it’s 1999 (or 2,500 BC).
