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Altered Perspectives: UK Rave Culture, Thatcherite Hegemony and the BBC Sam Bradpiece, University of Bristol Image 1: Boys Own Magazine (London), Spring 1988 1 Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………...……… 7 Chapter 1. The Rave as a Counter-Hegemonic Force: The Spatial Element…….…………….13 Chapter 2. The Rave as a Counter Hegemonic Force: Confirmation and Critique..…..…… 20 Chapter 3. The BBC and the Rave: An Agent of Moral Panic……………………………………..… 29 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….... 37 Appendices…………………………………………………………………………………………………………...... 39 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………...... 50 2 ‘You cannot break it! The bonding between the ravers is too strong! The police and councils will never tear us apart.’ In-ter-dance Magazine1 1 ‘Letters’, In-Ter-Dance (Worthing), Jul. 1993. 3 Introduction Rave culture arrived in Britain in the late 1980s, almost a decade into the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, and reached its zenith in the mid 1990s. Although academics contest the definition of the term 'rave’, Sheila Henderson’s characterization encapsulates the basic formula. She describes raves as having ‘larger than average venues’, ‘music with 120 beats per minute or more’, ‘ubiquitous drug use’, ‘distinctive dress codes’ and ‘extensive special effects’.2 Another significant ‘defining’ feature of the rave subculture was widespread consumption of the drug methylenedioxyphenethylamine (MDMA), otherwise known as Ecstasy.3 In 1996, the government suggested that over one million Ecstasy tablets were consumed every week.4 Nicholas Saunders claims that at the peak of the drug’s popularity, 10% of 16-25 year olds regularly consumed Ecstasy.5 The mass media has been instrumental in shaping popular understanding of this recent phenomenon. The ideological dominance of Thatcherism, in the 1980s and early 1990s, was reflected in the one-sided discourse presented by the British mass media. This work seeks to liberate the voices of the ravers themselves, from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ in order to provide a more complete historical conceptualisation of the phenomenon.6 As there is a limited amount of historiography surrounding UK rave culture, this paper draws extensively on sociological literature. According to Peter Catterall, History of the recent past must be attempted or ‘analysis of the contemporary will be left to journalists’.7 Summary of Events: The roots of the rave can be found in the club culture of Chicago. Phuture, a musical group, is credited with having composed the first ‘acid house’ track in 1985; acid house 2 S. Henderson, ‘Luv’dup and De-lited: Responses to Drug Use in the Second Decade’ in, P. Aggleton, P. Davis and g. Hart (eds.), AIDS: Facing the Second Decade (London: Falmer, 1993), 121. 3 J. Merchant and R. McDonald, ‘Youth and the Rave Culture, Ecstasy and Health’, Youth and Policy, 45 (1994), 18. 4 H. John, ‘UK Rave Culture and the Thatcherite Hegemony, 1988-94’, Cultural History, 4 (2015), 170. 5 N. Saunders and L. Heron, E is for Ecstasy (London: Self-published, 1993), 14. 6 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor gollancz, 1964), 12 7 P. Catterall, ‘What (if anything) is Distinctive about Contemporary History?’, Journal of Contemporary History, 32 (1997), 450. 4 became the predominant genre of early rave music.8 Chas Critcher claims that elements of rave culture, including experimentation with MDMA, began to infiltrate the ‘trendy Soho elite’, by 1986.9 By 1988, the rave had emerged as an identifiable subculture, taking place legally at nightclubs as well as illegally at warehouse parties and events in hidden rural locations. The size of the rave subculture can be measured economically: Sarah Thornton estimates that by 1993, the UK club market was worth £2 billion whilst the illegal rave market was valued at £1.8 billion.10 The early to mid 1990s saw diversification of rave music as the emergence of ‘garage, hardcore, psytrance and jungle music’ broke the dominance of acid house.11 Authoritarian reactions of the government and the mass media grew in parallel to the growth of the rave itself. Matthew Collin’s popular history of the rave, describes the ‘ritualized sequence of moral panic’ that surrounded it.12 Brian Osgerby elucidates that the tabloids presented the rave as ‘a barometer of social decline’.13 Various legislation was introduced by the Thatcher and Major governments in order to suppress rave culture. The Entertainments Act 1990, increased penalties for illegal rave organizers, raising the level of fines to up to £20,000 and introducing prison sentences of 6 months.14 Jason Merchant suggests that the act ‘heralded in quite draconian measures to quash the rave culture.’15 Although the government had already criminalized ‘a whole section of the youth population,’ it continued to target the ravers through the 1994 8 H. C. Rietveld, This Is Our House: House Music, Cultural Spaces and Technologies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 8. 9 C. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Mass Media (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003), 49. 10 S. Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1996), 14-5. 11 A. Fraser and N. Ettlinger, ‘Fragile Empowerment: The Dynamic Cultural Economy of British Drum and Bass Music’, Geoforum, 39 (2008), 1648. 12 M. Collin, Altered State:. The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998), 90. 13 B. Osgerby, Youth in Britain Since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell), 182. 14 C. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Mass Media, 51. 15 J. Merchant and R. MacDonald, ‘Youth and the Rave Culture’, 17. 5 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act.16 The act increased police powers to prevent the occurrence of raves, which they defined as ‘a gathering of a hundred or more persons, whether or not trespassers, at which music is played during the night’. The music was defined as ‘wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. 17 Osgerby described the act as ‘the most comprehensive and authoritarian’ set of ‘social and cultural controls’ since 1945.18 Over a thousand young people were arrested under the act within its first year.19 The authoritarian stance of the government drove the institutionalization of the rave, resulting in the growth of the club industry and the demise of illegal raves and free parties from 1994 onwards. Literature Review The relationship between rave culture and Thatcherism, the key focus of this analysis, has been explored in the sociological work of Andrew Hill and the cultural history of Henry John. 20 Scholarship surrounding rave culture is part of a wider academic discourse on youth and subcultures, which established itself in Britain upon the founding of Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), in 1964. The CCCS analysed style-based youth cultures such as Teddy Boys, mods and rockers, skinheads and punks. Major works of the CCCS such as Resistance Through Rituals, advanced the theory that subcultures were inherently deviant and that such deviance represented a collective reaction to structural changes in post-war British society.21 Phil Cohen claimed that the ‘latent function of the subculture’, was to ‘retrieve socially cohesive elements’, in reference to a sense of working-class community, ‘destroyed in the parent culture’.22 16 C. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Mass Media, 51. 17 ‘Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994’ quoted in C. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Mass Media, 51. 18 B. Osgerby, Youth in Britain Since 1945, 216. 19 C. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Mass Media, 51. 20 H. John, ‘UK Rave Culture’; A. Hill, ‘Acid House and Thatcherism: Contesting Spaces in Late 1980s Britain’, Space and Polity, 7 (2003). 21 S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds.), Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1976). 22 P. Cohen, ‘Subcultural Conflict and the Working Class Community’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 2 (University of Birmingham: 1972), 23. 6 Andy Bennet has criticized the contention of the CCCS that ‘styles were uniformly used by working-class youth in a strategy designed to resist the structural changes taking place around them’, instead stating that ‘post-war consumerism offered young people the opportunity to break away from their traditional class based identities’. Bennet critiques subcultures as a theoretical model through which to study youth, as the term implies rigid ‘lines of division and social categories which are very difficult to verify in empirical terms’. Instead, Bennet argues that youth culture identities are closer to Robert Shields’ ‘postmodern persona’, which has ‘multiple identifications’, and ‘can no longer be simplistically theorized or unified’.23 Jeffrey Paris and Michael Ault maintain that whilst the structuralist approach of the CCCS could be considered flawed, subcultures provide ‘a vital political critique and vision against a backdrop of expanding neoliberal institutions and free market processes’.24 John identified the rave as an entity similar to Hakim Bey’s ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’ acting to liberate areas before dissolving ‘to reform elsewhere.’25 Parallels have also been drawn between rave culture and Michel Foucault’s ‘heterotopias’ in which ‘real sites found within the parent culture’ are ‘inverted’; and Henri Lefebvre’s ‘representational spaces’, which exist, in ‘clear opposition to the homogenizing effects of the state, of the political power, of the world market and of the commodity world.’26 Methodology: This dissertation examines UK rave culture from 1988 to its apotheosis in 1994-5. It draws extensively from historical, sociological, spatial and political theory. Drawing, in a novel manner, from sources from within the movement itself, such as rave flyers and rave fanzines, this paper revises contemporary understanding of the rave through an 23 A. Bennet, ‘Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? Rethinking the Relationship Between Youth, Style and Musical Taste’, Sociology, 33 (1999), 601-5; R. Shields, Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption (London: Routledge, 1992), 16. 24 J. Paris and M.