Science Fiction-Music Interconnections: The Raving 90s

The rise of rave culture from the late 1980s to the early 1990s was a worldwide phenomenon which had a particular impact in the UK. Like many other youth subcultures, the emphasis on drugs and loud music, other worlds and altered states, brought notoriety to the rave scene. Rave was rife with science fiction imagery, from promotional flyers to the stylings of the music’s practitioners. Operating at the intersection of chill-out/eco/new age/techno and dance subcultures, rave reached the zenith of its popularity at the huge Castlemorton Common Festival of 1992, in Worcestershire’s Malvern Hills. This event, to borrow the terminology of the 60s, represented a ‘gathering of the tribes’ and saw rave as a unifying force among disparate groups; it was also the precursor to state intervention.

The connections with 60s/70s ‘alternative’ lifestyles (even the term ‘rave’) were inescapable, apparent in the tendencies toward escapism and hedonism and the trajectory from the underground to the mainstream. Antonio Melechi was among the commentators to note that “Not until the expansion of rave culture... has the counterculture so explicitly harked back to the sixties.” It was a ‘grass roots’ movement, building on the UK’s tradition of nationwide free festivals established in the wake of the huge gatherings at Woodstock and the Isle of Wight which marked the commercialisation of 60s rock. An anonymous pamphlet published at the end of the 1970s summarised the free festival ethos:

“Free festivals are practical demonstrations of what society could be like all the time; miniature Utopias of joy and communal awareness rising for a few days from grey morass of mundane, inhibited, paranoid and repressive everyday existence.”

George McKay, writing in Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties, recognised the tendency toward transformation; “One of the spaces of the dance scene side of rave – the club – is presented as libertarian utopian space, packed with transformative possibility.” As in the 60s, through the festivals, the subculture came to span both rural and urban environments, encompassing illicit rave parties in warehouses and the countryside, embracing both a ‘back to nature’ impulse and the modern technology of the music itself. Though rave styled itself as a movement without ‘stars’, stressing anonymity as central to the communality of the experience, artists such as Altern8, Orbital and the Prodigy became popular, together with the Orb and Steve Hillage on the ambient fringe, while Hawkwind, veterans of the counterculture and free festival circuit, incorporated dance elements and demonstrated the affinities with an earlier generation.

Undeniably central to rave’s appeal was Ecstasy, functioning like LSD decades earlier as both a catalyst and symbol of the movement, defining and enhancing the musical experience. This parallel was identified by Nicholas Saunders, one of the individuals to span both eras. Saunders was behind the 1970 publication of Alternative London, described as “a key text of the counterculture packed with information about subjects from health foods to communes to drugs.” As a rave enthusiast and the author of E is for Ecstasy (1993), Saunders described the affinities between the two eras, both culturally and in their respective choices of recreational chemicals: “I felt symptoms familiar from taking LSD in the sixties... A kind of uplifting religious experience of unity that I have only felt once before”.

With growing popularity came increasing attention from the press and public authorities; at this point, parallels with the free and easy 60s and 70s began to evaporate. While some debate took place around the medical effects of Ecstasy, the high-profile deaths of Leah Betts and Clare Layton fuelled media sensationalism and moral panic. The veteran investigative reporter Roger Cook used his Cook Report, broadcast nationally, for an episode entitled ‘Ecstasy Kills’ in 1992, which served as a prolonged broadside against the evils of drugs. The popular press followed suit. Criminalisation was in the offing, with the Castlemorton event, a week-long free festival, serving as the basis for the legislation which was enacted in the 1994 Criminal Justice Act. There was strong public opposition, with critics describing the provisions of the Act as “explicitly aimed at suppressing the activities of certain strands of alternative culture”, but it was duly passed. The widespread sceptical sentiments were echoed by author Jon Savage, who stated that the legislation was “about politicians making laws on the basis of judging people’s lifestyles, and that’s no way to make laws.” The Prodigy registered their disapproval with the themes and artwork of their 1994 album Music for the Jilted Generation.

Music for the Jilted Generation. Inner sleeve artwork by Les Edwards.

Previous governments had imposed certain restrictions on large-scale gatherings, notably The Isle of Wight County Council Act 1971, which contains provisions aimed at the control of overnight assemblies in the open, and gives the local authority powers to set conditions and to veto unsuitable sites. Whilst regulating, the authorities of that era remained open to the utopian possibilities of such free festivals, recognised by the government commission established in the wake of the Isle of Wight chaos of 1970. The Stevenson Committee’s 1973 Report to the Department of Environment states: “These young people have been expressing a need to get away from their immediate environment and the inhibitions and limitations of everyday life – particularly in our towns – to a situation in which they can experiment socially, come face to face with new ideals and concepts of life and decide for themselves what they wish to accept or reject.” The liberal attitude extended to ministerial level, with the Secretary of State for the Environment at the time, Geoffrey Rippon, commenting “The last thing the Government wants to do is to intervene in people’s reasonable pleasures”, in sharp contrast to the draconian provisions of the Criminal Justice Act, a bill passed in Parliament twenty years later aimed at doing exactly that.

Police Review, June 1992, in the wake of the Castlemorton Festival

While rave as a mass movement never recovered from the effects of the 1994 legislation, it reverted to an underground sub-culture, evolved into different forms, and enjoyed a surprisingly durable afterlife. For an experience predicated on transitory chemical pleasures and instant thrills, rave culture has left an extensive legacy of archive, ephemera and memorabilia – blogs, compilations, flyers, literature, some of it even collectable. As one of the last widespread pre-Internet phenomena, nostalgic ravers and inquisitive researchers can read reminiscences, browse galleries of retro-flyers and glimpse ecstatic states in their vivid other-worldly imagery, without popping a pill and setting out for warehouse or field.