TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Britainology 9: UK Rave Culture feat. UKRaveComments

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

Good lord, the Gen Xers of Britain are a special bunch. And man, do they love to reminisce in the YouTube comments. To discuss this phenomenon, and the culture surrounding it, we brought on TF techno expert Riley--as well as George, the creator of the UKRaveComments (@UKRaveComments) twitter account--to discuss. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *MILO ALERT* Check out some Milo live dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

We immediately before this recorded the eighth edition of Britannology and we decided that this numbering system is definitely correct. Unlike the numbering system for Balthasar Speedboat, which now is a matter of pride, will never be correct. It will always be a random number. And I'm Milo's, I'm joined as ever by my co-host, Nate Pathay. Hello, here again. And we're also joined by someone I'm sure you've never heard of, Riley. Hi, it's me again. Yeah, that guy. He lives here now. We can't get rid of him. He's everywhere.

I've worked my way off of the main podcast into Britannology. That's right. Yeah. Riley is slowly... And you're going to interrupt Milo doing the notes and stuff he wants to say now. Oh, there are no notes, Riley. Don't worry about that. These notes are very skeletal. I don't do notes. I love it. The more you interrupt me, the less I have to talk and that's great. So, this is a very special Britannology about a UK rave culture from the 90s. And to discuss that, we're joined by George, the owner, manager of the UK rave comments Twitter account. George, how you doing?

Hey, all good. Thanks. Great to be here. Finally the show. Oh, brilliant. Well, welcome. We have demanded to speak to the manager of UK rave. That's right. Yeah. We've all got the haircut with the fringe and the bun. Riley's proposes as an idea and I was really excited about it because even not even hardcore rave stuff, but just what I might describe as slightly tangential to it, I was watching old Happy Mondays videos on YouTube and the comments were incredible. Just incredible about like, can't take a pinger and fucking go out for four days

anymore, livers busted and I'm divorced. None of that bullshit. It was just everything, everything you could want. And then when I started following the UK rave comments Twitter account, I was like, man, there's so much of this stuff floating out there. Yeah, there's a lot of, I was, I did a comedy festival in Brighton a few years ago, which is just a fucking cursed place. And I was like in this house share, I was crashing on someone's sofa who I knew who was in a house. It was like really grimy house share. And like everyone in there was like, and they're like early 20s apart from one guy who was like in his 40s and he had a limp. Oh, that's unusual for a guy that I used to have a limp.

And it turned out that he'd had a, he'd had a stroke in his 30s because he'd done so many fucking pingers. Absolutely incredible. Living in a fucking dirty house share in Brighton. So George, I suppose we should ask how you came about the role you're in now and why rave reminiscences have so much cachet amongst a certain group of British people. Yeah, I'm not really sure why it has such an effect on British people. I think part of the reason is the drug culture that surrounds it, especially as an island, we have such a big sort of alcohol culture. And so that's why it's interesting to delve into this. And it's quite positive nostalgia that sort of tinged a lot by the ecstasy as part of that.

That's sort of interesting to read about. It's like a good vibes version of Trainspotting. I've heard people say that taking, under certain circumstances, taking ecstasy is like positive PTSD. It's like, it has, you have like, you have like, distracting, invasive memories of good things. You're like, God, it was so good. And like, it stops you dead in your tracks in the middle of your day and makes you want to comment on YouTube, I suppose. Yeah, you just get these like a hundred word comments on YouTube with no punctuation. They're just a sort of radiating ecstasy energy. They're just amazing to read. Yeah. Like what if James Joyce, but now, and just like absolutely addled by pingers?

Well, actually, George, I was just scrolling through the UK rave comments, Twitter feed, just to grab an example. And I just, I found a perfect one just now. I'm in there somewhere. I always remember ripping my t-shirt, getting through the window in the toilets, lol. I had the exact same G-Force trousers as the black guy on stage. Mad as fuck days. Good set list too. Love it. Hell yeah. Love the trousers. That's a vintage. I love it when they mention, yeah, the clothes. That's always fun. Yeah. So Riley, you wanted to talk about the overall culture of raving in the UK. And to me, as the person who originally Britain was getting explained to, the only thing I know about it is sort of like slightly related in the sense that,

I know about stuff like the Hacienda in Manchester and the two big things that I, obviously like that club and factory records and some of the acts that came about from that. And then also the late 80s, I think it was 1988 that they called the second summer of love and just like rave culture going mainstream in the UK. But it seems to me like it's very much an 80s thing. And so the people who would be the most invested in this sort of nostalgia are, and I'm asking Riley, but George, please feel free to jump into that this is a Gen X thing, like hardcore. All of this nostalgia is basically Gen X reminiscing about, you know, 30, 35 years ago. Yeah. What I was going to say is what I know about

this is I've seen the film 24 hour party people and I've met cursed fucking Gen Xs. That's like everything I know about UK rave is derived from those two things. One of my neighbors is from Northern Ireland and is probably in her fifties or early sixties. And she talks about taking ecstasy a lot and almost like it's just someone. Have you ever indulged in a disco basket? The paper of Ulster say yes to drugs. Yeah. I mean, it's basically that. Yeah. And so, but it's just, yeah, it strikes me as like a very, very Gen X phenomenon because this, the heyday, I mean, if I remember correctly, I remember reading, I think it was on Wikipedia that like in like 1991, the most applied to university in the entire UK was in University of

Manchester and they only surmised that the rave culture had something to do with that. It's fucking massive. That's basically what like Manchester and Leeds are still like. I can remember being at Sixth Form and then being like all the like really like self-consciously edgy kids who were like, yeah, I'm applying to Leeds because it's like fucking legendary party soon mate. Like it's just going to be like fucking lit the whole time. It's like whatever dude. You're going to get a degree in management. Well, I mean, so George, I don't know how this jives with your interpretation of rave culture, but I'd love to know more. I would say that lines up pretty well. Like that's the age group that I

look at from sort of, I guess, 88 to sort of 94. It's like the golden age of all this stuff. And yeah, that's the age group I tend to look at. I don't know if it comes across in the Twitter feed. A lot of people assume that I'm the age of these people I'm talking about. Obviously, I'm not. I'm in my mid-20s. And so I'm just sort of digging into other people's nostalgia, but that's the sort of age group I'm looking into. Yeah. It's also interesting to me because some of this stuff, not all of it, but some of it was actually very popular on the radio as well. I mean, the Happy Mondays were a big one, but also, I mean, obviously New Order had a ton of huge hits, Primal Screams, another one that did very well.

Level 46. You're always going to bring up Level 42, don't you? We're kind of blasting the Chinese way in Trafalgar Square. But it's just interesting because some of these bands did have some popularity in the US, for example, but nothing of the same degree. And it's just wild to me because in the same vein that we've talked about this in that same era, that you could have like a race track in Milton Keynes that seats 60,000 people sold out completely for an erasure concert. What was popular? None of those people were gay, and they made it very clear in the comment when they bought the ticket.

That's another story that I, as a long-suffering British sort of synth music fan, have trolled through the comments on erasure videos and invariably people like, I love this song, but I am not gay. You do realize that you could listen to, you don't have to, like no one, no, there's not like a screener on YouTube. Yep, there is. Serious. I was just too outrageous to turn me into a fucking raving bender, sucking knobs left, right, and center. What gets me about it is the, yeah, the reminiscences all seem to be for the rave culture

stuff all seem to be so tied up in, I was fucked up on drugs at the time. And like this is a drug taking ass country, like I was not prepared for that when I moved here. But yeah, it's just, it seems like that's how much it, that's what it's all tied into is I was young, the birds were great, and I was standing in the buds in here, is that right? And I was taking, I was taking ecstasy and just, you know, or reading stuff like the guys from the Happy Mondays talking about how like they would go to clothe, they would go to the Hacienda, but they lived in Salford and they were too broke to get the bus, they would just walk. And it was like 24 miles by foot or something like that to get from like where they live to the club. And they just did like fuck it. What

were we going to do? It was a Tuesday night. I was going to fucking walk. Like there's that to me as a profoundly British rave guy energy. Yeah. I mean, maybe George, maybe this would be a good point to talk about some of your like favorite rave comments and or anecdotes, because I think that's sort of a good way into this and the kind of stuff that we're talking about. Yeah, sure thing. I got a few of them together. What's his name? Sean fuck? What's his Sean Ryder and Bez? Bez. Oh, that is a man whose brain has been absolutely cooked by drugs. It's one of the best writers about the Happy Mondays as Simon Reynolds. Simon Reynolds is one

of the best sort of, you might say, sort of theoreticians and historians of them in particular. It's like in that Bez's role in the Happy Mondays was just to take drugs on stage. Pretty much just get fucking Maracas dance. He was basically a who's the guy from Outkast whose job was just to like there was a there was a similar guy who's just he was he was a hype man, but you think he was a public enemy to go with the clock. I'll play the flame. There was there was there was just two guys, but maybe they had another one. It'll come back to me. There was another guy who had like a sort of very British sort of a very sort of a self-consciously British sounding like British Fauntelroy sounding name. Well, in another Britonology

sort of crosscut to that, Bez was also on UK Pimp My Ride in the 2000, something which we've also featured on Britonology, where he had Tim Westford for him pimped out a London black cap. Bez then drove around in. I do sort of like like the idea that sort of they were so there was a generation of people that was so happy to be having a good time in this country as though the idea were just invented that then they got rid of it. It got rid of it like six years later. People were having too much fun that there was a guy in one of the biggest bands in the Happy Mondays of the time who was like like the stone roses. I think probably had more of an enduring appeal, but like of the time, you could not get more 80s Britain than a guy whose entire paid

job that made him famous was to get absolutely off his tits and shakes and maracas. Yeah. That was a whole industry then before Thatcher shot down. What gets me about it too is when you see these guys like there isn't any pretense. In the U.S., the way that people go about these stories of the drug use in the excess is always in the past tense. It's always sort of like, oh yeah, those were some dark days. Here it's different. I wouldn't necessarily say it's pro drugs, but it tends to just be more like, yeah, fucking ruled. Man, the drugs were so good back then. God, I wish I could do that. Shit, my liver is broken. You know that kind of a thing. In Bez's case, it was hilarious to me

as I don't know if you know this Riley, but he actually ran for parliament and he ran as a third party candidate in South... Wouldn't be the dumbest guy in there. ...Salford and Eccles constituency and the person he ran against who won was Rebecca Long-Bailey. It all comes full circle. Yeah, Salford and Eccles, if Bez had won. Am I right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Well, so, George, have you got any primo comments for it? Oh yeah, I do. I have my readings of these, Do Them Justice by me. Suitably dramatic, Tamara. So, I remember back at Helter Skelter in 92 when I took a dove mate. I was mashed.

Me and the lads couldn't find the gulf in the field after. Shit, me, man. Mental. Missed those dates. I'm working a nine to five now and I hate my son. This is like, this is like, what if like, me and Riley wrote one of these as a bit? In the end, I hate my son is too buff. I mean, what? Oh God, what I love about this though, right? Is that, okay, American hippies were kind of ruined by their summer of love and it ruined the boomer generation because they got that. But American Gen Xers didn't have a summer of love. British Gen Xers did. And so, they still hate their kids because of it, but they hate them with an entirely different tone and because of how much they miss listening to alternate.

I'm thinking about what was going on in the U.S. at the time. And I mean, I was obviously like way too young. I mean, I was alive in the late 80s, but not exactly consuming, fucking popular content. And but looking back on it, I just don't think that you had as much of this phenomenon. And the rave stuff, I think for one thing, because, well, the unfortunate legacy of with America is the fact that a lot of this stuff is not going to be as mass culture because electronic music in America was at the time primarily black music. And the crossover between that and let's say like your garden variety, suburban white kids like wasn't going to happen. Hilariously, the way that they sort of, I'm going to say gentrified, but the way that they sort of

like made it palatable for Americans was imported British dance music stuff. Like in the late 90s, you had this huge breakout moment where bands like the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers became very big in America. Like EDM, like because Americans have British people, blindness, they see like Keith Flint and they're like, wow, he must know the Queen. Yes. Yes, that's very, very true. So that stuff wasn't really going on. I mean, like hilariously, the biggest band in America in terms of like what would be the sort of epical graduated from high school teen band in 1988, for example, was Depeche Mode. Like flat out, when they made a documentary in, I think, 88 for about Depeche Mode, it was like a bunch of

high schoolers competed on MTV to like look cool enough to get on a tour bus. They would then film a documentary of them being on the tour bus, driving across America to go see Depeche Mode in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. It was a looking cool competition. Yeah, you had like go to a club and just look cool basically. It was like b-boying, but for pussies. Yeah, basically. And so like, yeah, you just didn't have, and the only, to my knowledge, the only, Happy Mondays had one of their songs. I can't remember which one it was. Off the top of my head, but it, I think it was Kinky Afro, was like a number one alt rock hit, but it wasn't, didn't really chart that much. But the only band of that era from Britain that

really did huge in America, and it was only for one song, was not the Stone Roses who were completely unknown in the US, but basically was Jesus Jones. Right here, right now is a fucking huge hit. And then EMF's Unbelievable was also a huge hit, but other than that. Unbelievable. These bands. I was on absolute radio the other day, and I was like, what, what a fucking song, just like absolute nonsense. Oh, it rules man, seriously. But that stuff genuinely didn't really have an impact. Like it was, it's, if you, if you talk about these bands now, like, unless people were either alive at the time and cared or like our nostalgia freaks, there was no impact whatsoever. So this was absolutely like a British phenomenon.

Yeah. And the British are riven with nostalgia for it. Yeah. Some people want to live in a painting. The other people want to live in a painting of a rave. Those are the two kinds of British. They want to live in a painting, but painted with glow paint. The problem is, is that if you, if you try to throw a UK 80s and 90s style rave in America, like you'll get arrested and go to prison for 30 years, because it's like the war on drugs thing was happening. As opposed to here, well, you'll just get a lucrative job. Get off at Schaaf and I'll leave off geezer. I was only trying to have a few pills. And we're like, this man is a charming British individual. We'll allow him to go.

Never return to the United States, sir. Should we, should we do another comment? Should we, yeah. Cool. So, so one, so this isn't from YouTube. One guy who sends me a lot of original car content is this guy called Carlos Manueli, who's original raver who lives in Wales. And he just has a way with words. I can't describe it. So this is the first thing he sent me unprompted. So a few of us lived on a farm in Amalford. We love the water from the upstairs bathroom so much. Used to bottle it and take it to the raves and offer it to people. Got famous in the race around Wales and people come to our van and ask for our upstairs bathroom water. That's like something from the Armando Unucci show. Like it's like that level of just like a

surreal skit about someone who believes, first of all, that the tap water in their upstairs bathroom tastes different from the tap water in the downstairs bathroom. And like second of all, is bottling it to that's also the plot of an only falls and horses episode where they work out that mineral water is a racket and that their tap water is unmetered because they live in a council flat. So they just start filling up bottles with their own tap water and calling it Peckham Spring. Fuck's sake. Well, I can just imagine buying, you know, refilled bod dodgy looking bottles of someone's tap water at the rave. And because you just happen to be on some good shit, you basically think it's the best tasting water you ever had in your life. It was the second summer of love.

People were very trusting. Yeah, man, we should just start. We should start podcasting, but where everyone's on ecstasy, because the reception would be great. Man, that's the best impression of a South African I've ever heard. But also it's like, I mean, my personally, I'm sort of interested to hear sort of other reflections on this. When I sort of, I sort of read the UK rave comments, which I do with regularity, because I find them very charming. I see is not just kind of reminiscence, but I see a combination of things is reminiscence of youth, like for youth, of people who might be sort of now getting on to their fifties, late fifties, even sixties.

And also sort of reminiscence for, maybe not even in an acknowledged way, reminiscence for a less wholly controlled and commercialized society is brought in by new labor. It's like a lot of these parties were sort of big and free. You'd live in a van and just go from party to party for like an entire summer. Now you can do that for $1,500 a month. Well, precisely. Yeah, it's a, now these, I get these experiences have been sort of recommodified and sold back to people and where the borders of them are now heavily patrolled by security, police, border guards, and so on and so on. So I see these as sort of this kind of nostalgia as for a confluence of all of those forces. And I kind of wanted to know what, from George, like because you were

such a scholar of this one strange corner of nostalgia, does that resonate with you? Or do you think it's sort of missing something? Is there something else there? I feel like it's true to an extent. I always think about the politics looking at the comments. It's a very mixed bag. Some of it can be quite reactionary. No way. Jen X is being reaction on YouTube comments. Especially like people very paranoid about if you go out nowadays, you'll get stabbed or there's way too many fat people, which seems to be a weird thing that comes up a line for rave comments that apparently there wasn't any fat people in the 90s.

You can get fat then you're all on drugs, mate. That's literally can't have a rave because all muzzos have come over here, won't let you do it. Yeah, I've seen people complaining about woke culture and shit like that, which is just bizarre to me. It's like you, like I live in Packham and there's illegal rave. There were illegal raves all summer and fucking in, what's it? I can't remember the name of the park that's the one park I go to, Burgess Park. Like there were a bunch of raves there over the summer. It's like, of course it's still happening. But the YouTube commenters are convinced that this isn't allowed anymore because the damn SJDubs have taken over. That's why I say it's sort of parallel to that

summer of love. It's this, it's reminiscent of this one generation that took a reactionary turn. And so you're saying, George, you see that stuff in the politics coming through? Yeah, it is a mixed bag. A lot of it, there is a lot of anti-new labor stuff. A lot of the videos I dig into are like around the criminal justice act that came in after the big Castle Morton free rave. So, and a lot of that's, it's also a mixed bag politically, because it's all against the police and against shutting down raves. And I mentioned this before, like notoriously, Paul Staines was quite involved in that, as well as on the other hand, like marches were coordinated by Jeremy Corbyn. So you've got a sort of, I guess, like a libertarian spectrum of people

who aren't very politically coordinated, but you get a lot of people coming together in a sort of weird way when that happened. Rave Jeremy Corbyn is such a powerful bit, just like him with a whistle and a fucking glow stick in a wife beat it, just like going at it. So what you said there was a, it was a big rave that led to a change in the laws. Could you talk a little bit about that? Oh, that, yeah, that was the Castle Morton free rave that let me just remind myself it happened in 1992 in the Castle Morton Common. It was a massive rave. There was a lot of notorious stuff about the police and everything. Apparently the free travellers and the hippies, this is the police words. They killed a lot of sheep, about 200 sheep with their dogs, which sounds strange, but

according to a lot of the comments, they're still arguing about the truth of that to this day. And just the arguments never end about that. And people, so I watched a documentary about it. There's a lot of interesting stuff about it. People say they found drug equipment and drug drug equipment seemed like a funny way of saying pills. But yeah, there's equipment for taking the pills like a little spoon or a grabber arm. Yeah, that's all right. And there was a lot of notorious stuff about police helicopters around the time. There's like comments. I've got one here. It's someone who says he was on acid and kept shouting at a police helicopter to stop looking down on him and kind of stuff like that.

Yeah, these police helicopters are really harshing my mellow. That would lead to a bad trip. Yeah. I was thinking about this, that it seems like that's a thing that gets brought up sometimes, specifically about Sean Ryder and Paul Ryder is the or Mark Ryder rather, the violence of the rave scene. And I don't know anything about it. But it seems like that had some sway in public opinion here and apparently enough to change the law. So did they make it harder to have raves or stiffen the penalties or something? Yeah, it was very harshly fined. I think it was the violence that brought up, especially the police. It was kind of militarized in the sort of fatua way, especially a lot of this is around sort of

the free traveler movement, sort of cracking down sort of hippies going around the country in caravans with big sound systems and just sort of confiscating all the equipment. And it led to a lot of big protests like a notorious one in Trafalgar Square, 94. Is that the freedom to party rally? Yes, which is the one led by Paul Stains, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually I was reading a bit about this and I found an amazing like three paragraph quote from someone who was there, which is just it is what Nate and I would call British voice. So I will do I'll try and do it justice in the reading. People were everywhere and standing on anything that give them a better view. They danced in empty fountains on top of

the lines that guard Nelson's column. A cheer went up as someone announced the arrival of a van carrying a generator, a group of people jumped from the platform rushing over to the Jenny closely followed by the old bill. A commotion around the van followed and eventually the driver had to scarper. At the same time, an MC, Chalky White, was being arrested. No one knew why, but it completely antagonized the old crowd. I spotted a posse of about 30 geezers rushing through the crowd to where Chalky was being held. I could see by the expressions on their faces, they were definitely going to start something with the police. I pointed out the firm to Jarvis and we quickly got down from the platform and edited them off before they reached the squad,

reasoning with them not to fuck all the work we've been doing. They calmed down before disappearing into the crowd. We didn't know why our power was being arrested, but we knew we couldn't win a physical battle with the law. See, if you had written that yourself and just made that up, I would believe you. But yeah, it's the point where I pointed out the firm to Jarvis. I just fucking lost it. Well, that's the thing, right? I mean, this stuff, similar things would happen in the US, but the idea of there being a huge protest against it wouldn't be... Maybe it's a bigger country. Maybe it's because these music cultures and fan cultures are more dissipated, but that is the idea of it being enough to create a huge or precipitate a big protest.

I just couldn't imagine that happening. There are a few factors to consider with that. Number one, it's the centralization of law enforcement in the English state in the home office as opposed to individual counties or states, which means that a movement that is based on doing something like this has to be dealt with at a national level. It's like if you can piss off the council by littering or whatever, but it's within the competence of the national government to begin to crack down on stuff that they consider to be antisocial behavior. Additionally, as we talked about, there has always been a real tension about different kinds of people who are of no fixed address in the UK and the government here, much more, I think, than in the US.

Finally, the difference is because of all the crackdowns on the clubs and because you was hard to start a club and clubs kept getting shut down. Even there was one around here that was quite famed. I think Shum was based around here. A lot of parties started to get hosted. Yeah, there were people doing free festivals. There were hippies that would set up generators outside their vans. It was also a lot of criminals. A lot of organized crime was involved in setting up all of the parties that would- Somebody say criminals. A lot of organized crime was involved in setting up all the parties that would spring up around the M25. It's a little bit like there were a bunch of mini ultimates because it would

be organized crime that was posting up all the flyers, that was giving you the phone number that you had to page in order to be told the location at the last minute, was selling the drugs, all that stuff. It was this sort of syncretic combination of DJs who were bringing back initially this music from America and Ibiza and stuff and playing it and playing it outside and the mafia basically that saw that it was an opportunity to profit. I defer to you, George. Am I missing something from the story? That rings completely true, obviously because drugs are a big part of the culture and it was so organized crime is always going to come into it. I know you once talked about the Hacienda, obviously notoriously a lot of big Merseyside gangs were running the

Hacienda, pretty much the security of that, especially these big free festivals. They were act as the security kind of like the Hell's Angels would at the Ultima Festival and stuff like that. Which is funny to me because yeah, you mentioned Ultima. To me, that's the first thing that came to mind was was there ever like an Ultima moment because that kind of ended a lot of that. It wasn't even necessarily that the guy got killed there because it was later determined that the guy was going for a gun or he had a gun and then the Hell's Angels stabbed him, but it's more that Ultima kind of represented the end of that in public consciousness like the sort of end of that, the free love festival kind of stuff that was happening in the U.S. and it never really came

back. Obviously, this was 25, 30 years later. This was all going on and I wasn't sure if there was ever like a breaking point, but I would also point out one other thing before you move on which is that something that I find really interesting is like a difference is when you look at some of the stuff from New Labor, like the way they did the targeted ads or the video spots about like, if you're cheating benefits, we'll find out like that kind of shit. Weirdly in America, they had the time they did less stuff like that because it was never addressed to you, it was always addressed to them. It was like, we're going to find those welfare cheats and we're going to get them, so your taxpayer dollars don't go, you know what I mean? Where's here the

idea of the state reminding you that it's watching you? That seemed more prevalent, that attitude was there, but also it seemed like they were relatively ineffectual at least for a time. Dave Courtney's benefit enforcement flat nose geezers were sent round to your house to reclaim post post new labor. A lot of this stuff changed and yeah, which is just which is just wild to me. So I feel like to move on, we should definitely get another good comment. Oh, absolutely. Sure thing. So let me see. Here's a nice slice of history. This one starts great memories of losing my mind in Spectrum Warrington Dove's line. Same year as the IRA bombing. Just connecting some pins on my board with red streamers just connecting dots

in his head. You can see it happening. It's quite fun. Well, it's very funny that his memory of the IRA bombing is just one of completely being blissed out. Any fucking day is anytime he hears a distorted voice on on on TV. He just goes the bomb went off. We thought it was a subwoofer. Well, this is basically basically making me feel as if you take enough acid, you can basically become the narrator from an Alfonso Corone movie. Like it's basically you to Mama Tambien, but about like taking drugs and IRA bombings in the same town. They were all brought together somehow. Yeah, if you take enough drugs, it makes you Adam Curtis. That's right. People were blissed out doing drugs and disco biscuits and the like at a rave,

but elsewhere with the IRA, something very different was happening. But one of the things I think it's it's sort of it is actually sort of worth bringing up, especially because like there's no getting away from the sort of collision of politics and music. I mean, in the states as well, I mean, obviously the same thing, especially dance music is there was is the the effort to kind of criminalize this, right? It wasn't it was they had they tried to target rave music specifically. And the thing is the UK has done this time and time again, not just with this kind of music. So they would say it's illegal to have a party outside if you have repetitive beats that are going to and the text of the law banned repetitive music that was

based on a repetitive beat played loudly through speakers. This was actually a quote I thought was very funny from the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which banned public gatherings wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats. The band, you know, Orteca, the sort of IDM band, so they released a single to try and get around this by doing a single that had 65 distinctive drum beats. And they said if you you're a DJ and you play this an illegal rave of a lawyer and a musicologist present to confirm the beats are not repetitive. I'm just imagining if this was like a longstanding tradition in British law enforcement, if you dig into the archives, you find there was like an anti skiffle task force or something like

that. Actually, there was because with it's actually this is more recent than back in 1920, we'd be out in the fields playing the washboard doing doing doing ether. It's um it's that what was it was the same year as the general strike. So it was Form 696, which was something you had to fill in to have a concert in London. The thing that when Matt Hancock accidentally made Grime Legal, it's exactly it. So they effectively it was if you wanted to have a concert, you had to fill in this form called Form 696 and you had to say what music you were playing and what the primary ethnic group that was coming was Jesus. And so if it was primarily black and you were playing music with beats, it wouldn't be allowed to go ahead. And that was scrapped after I moved

here. Jesus Christ. Yeah. So the UK has a history of again using its massive sort of overwhelming centralized power to crack down specifically on forms of music specifically that it considers to be detrimental to public order. It's like the, are you familiar with Mary White House? I'm not, no. I mean, there's a whole Britonology and Mary White House, but she was a George, you familiar with Mary White House? Contam. Okay, so this is interesting. I'm the source for Britonology. So it's a pretty big name. They named the White House after her. So she was a sort of public decency campaigner in the 1960s. She was the person who was leading the sort of count the counterculture revolution. That's again the, like the counter to the sexual revolution. She was

campaigning to make it so that it was illegal to show homosexual, the homosexual couple on TV and worried about the sort of decline of public order and public morals. And worried about the decline of a guardian column basically. That's right. She's British typical. Yeah. She was essentially British 60s, Tipper Gore. There was somebody in the 70s called Anita Bryant, who like became famous because I think her family was wealthy from Orange, choose hilariously. She was a campaigner in Florida and she similarly did a thing of like trying to ban, you know, representation of homosexuality or anything like that. But with Mary White House, right? She had all, she basically, if there was something that represented cultural change, she was against it. And I think there, there is a certain

sort of Mary White House ish attitude that the British state takes towards new kinds of music. And it always has, always. And I think rave, one of the reasons why it's so interesting to talk about is that rave was just like the most blatant, like it tried to do it with like radio licensing, saying back in the pirate radio days and all that, but UK, but rave music was the most blatant effort to be like, no, if it has repetitive beats, you cannot play it because it makes me feel old and weird. Yeah. But the people who are now old and weird are reminiscing about it. Yeah, YouTube comments, babe. Exactly. So now, George, we got to ask for yet another one. Here's one. So pink champagne was a real sweet form of whiz,

brackets, bass, billy, speed, whatever you wanted to call it. That pink specs through it was about 15 a G when the tunes were good, the drugs and people made both out of love, not profit. This is sort of talking about how people kind of thought drug dealers were sort of in it for the love of the game. Yeah, drug days was different then. They're just good lads. I think there is that perception. It's yeah, drug dealers were great. They were like, you know, our friends, they were like us. That's one of the like the intense bits of social conservatism that you get in like Gen X, bigger nostalgia. Fucking hell. It was interesting that you brought up pirate radio because I was thinking about that when I was making some very loose notes for this.

I mean, I grew up in like the late 90s, early 2000s, really. That was kind of like my formative memories. And that's obviously kind of like after this had gone off the boil. But I remember in the late 90s, there was like a huge pirate radio thing. Because I grew up in Essex, which had the UK garage scene kind of emerged out of there. And I remember that my sister had in the, she probably started dating this guy like maybe like 97 96 97. And he he was like a Guido Essex Italian. If you could imagine the equivalent of a New Jersey Italian American, but like a British version, he's like an Essex geezer. That was this guy. And he always had like some fucking beaten up golf GTI or equivalent car with like a ridiculous like neon lit Kenwood sound system in

it. And and he would always listen to this pirate radio station called sub jam, which I think there's a Peter Serifino which parody of it where he does Terry Wogan hosting a show as if it's on sub jam, but it would just be like constant drum and bass and jungle with the DJs periodically shouting over it going like shout out to someone like whatever. And then it would just be like more jungle. And the reception was always dreadful because it was like on a fucking boat or a tower somewhere. It's funny because in 2003. Yeah, 2003 end of 2003 beginning of 2004. I was my first year of university and Dizzy Rascals first album boy in the corner was very, very highly reviewed on pitchfork, which was like the biggest music blog at the time.

Goop on your grit. Yeah, exactly. Which is now, you know, pitchfork has become like basically a media company. But at the time was just a dude's blog. And there are references in Dizzy Rascals lyrics to stuff about pirate radio. And it's funny to me because like that concept just completely doesn't exist because for one, I mean, I think it's the size of the country. Like it would just be very, very difficult to achieve what you can do with pirate or the influence you can have with pirate radio or could at the time, you know, if you had a boat in the Thames somewhere or something like that, or like you said on a tower block versus a country as gigantic as the US, I think there might have been pirate radio stuff like that to some extent in the US, but also the US airwaves

like the radio stuff is under the purview of like the federal government. So obviously, like you can get a shitload of trouble for radio jamming and stuff like that. Oh, it's the same hit. Yeah, it's like, yeah. But hilariously, the closest analog I can think of to that stuff is so much older. It's like, it's like when you had that, like the way that hip hop music emerged in the US, a lot of it was basically illegal block parties. And the way that it would work in places like the Bronx and in Brooklyn is people would, they'd break into the control panel or the switch on a light pole in the city and pull out the wires to get power out of it to plug into a stereo system so they could run, you know, turntables and an amp and speakers,

a PA, stuff like that, and have a party. And that's like how a lot of that stuff happened. But that was in the late 70s, right? Like that stuff, for one, that music got kind of professionalized and like, you know, major labels got snapped up on it. But like the last time that I can think of that you had a scene like that where like it was that organic was literally 44 years ago. You know, like 1977 was like the big high point of that because hilariously, there was a huge blackout and then a bunch of looting in New York City. And all of a sudden, a lot of people had great sound systems they could fucking do block parties with because they stole them all, which is awesome. I mean, don't get me wrong. But yeah, like it just seems like some of this stuff

either happened earlier in the UK or it happened much later. And that's like, it's also differences in genres, right? So the Essex, the Essex, Garrett, the, okay, the pirate radio scene that's sort of based into that, that Garrish tradition and stuff, that's sort of much more like a within London, much more sort of like black music as well. Whereas the, and that was something that was happening in like the later 90s and 2000s, like sort of like, like Rince FM even started as a pirate station. And then with the, and then the rave scene, rather than sort of being about that kind of equipment was, and that, that at area, even that ethnicity, it was much more sort of again, like in those clubs initially, then very much outside London.

A lot of say a lot of it was in the north and a lot of it was extremely white, wasn't it? Well, that's definitely, that's definitely the vision I have of like a UK rave. I mean, again, there's someone who doesn't know much about it. It doesn't really, yeah, it strikes me as like quite a white thing. I mean, there were obviously like, there were like other things to go around. I was like, obviously there's always been like a kind of an Afro-Caribbean scene, but I think, I think of that as like a slightly separate thing. Georgia, I don't know if that's something you want to come in on actually. Yeah, I think that's true. I think a lot of the people who reminisce about the original rave and hardcore scene, they use, I guess what you would call euphemisms for

blackness when they say, when they sort of lost interest in the scene, like, oh, when it became jungle, it became a lot moodier. And there was a lot more violence. And it just seems like a lot of euphemism for the music got a lot blacker when it became jungle. And so that comes across. But it is interesting. A lot of it is sort of dotted across the north and Scotland, in sort of places where you wouldn't imagine of going for a night out nowadays. People are like really nostalgic about raving and like skedness and great Yarmouth and stuff like that. Yeah. Places you could have seen, Johannes, Onka, McClockheads, 10 years ago. They actually did do rave. Because I mean, what Brighton was another one of those, wasn't it? I mean, hilariously,

one of the, like I said, when they sanitized dance music in America, because obviously like the original techno was all black music from Detroit and Chicago, when it became popular in America, I mean, I was like a young teenager when like Fat Boy Slim became a huge thing. And if I remember, his whole thing was like beach concerts in Brighton, once he got big, like that was a huge thing down there too. So yeah, yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe this isn't just because my ex-girlfriend was from there, but I just, I do just find Brighton to be one of the worst cities in the United Kingdom. So it just like London prices now this like shitty and like full of people who will insist you until they're blue in the face that it's like the greatest city on earth. And

it's like, no, it's not. There's no fucking parking. Yeah. Milo actually really loves eSpawn. I'm a big eSpawn representative. That's why he hates Brighton so much. I'm really big into worthy actually. If you don't talk shit about worthy around me. I think like also part of, the story sort of also isn't complete without talking about like property developers and sort of entertainment company investors and sort of the transition of dance music in the, because like there's a million stories of dance music. There's a million stories of its evolution, its relationship with Northern Soul, the sort of its many trips back and forth across the Atlantic. One of the sort of most important things to talk about as

well is right, like as we lose the, as we lose raving from the countryside, who's the beneficiary? There are guys like Lord Palumbo, the Tory Peer who owns Ministry of Sound. Mr. Snorob of Colombo. Yes, Polumbo, who owns Ministry of Sound and the big companies that sort of, and property developers and so on, who managed to like, again, enclose this thing and sort of take it from its spirit of, I guess, quite sort of rough community and very complex and sort of contradictory spirit of community. But nevertheless, something that was not bound by or not nearly as bound by sort of capitalist realism or what have you. It was a, there was this process of enclosure

and it's some of the people who, and again, the biggest celebrities from these scenes, guys like Paul Oakenfold, who maybe you would have seen at these like, you know, big parties bringing their, and initially bringing that sound back from Ibiza, then there become the Residential Ministry of Sound, they become mega stars. And again, and the entire thing becomes sort of so much more enclosed and so much more shut down. And then if you move that just a little bit further on into the future then, all of the other clubs that open up because it's London and they're around Ministry of Sound, a lot of those have now closed. And a lot of the sort of the clubs in Leicester have now closed. The places, places that were in spot, even if

they didn't enclose it or inspired by this movement, they're all gone now. Yeah, like I'm from the Midlands, like all those, like there seems to be like legendary clubs in Coventry, Leicester, Milton Keynes, they've all disappeared. But I see so many comments, people crying that the big club Sanctuary, Milton Keynes is an Ikea now, and just middle age guys go there and feel sad, basically. And I still fucking go there. They're there for the meatballs, you know, all those meatballs. Drop it, drop in a pinger in the bedroom section just to feel some it. I mean, there's this real sense I get, right? And I get this sense very keenly when I look

at the sort of people's reminiscences of this period. It's the very last minutes of good fellas. It's we had everything and now the clubs in Ikea and I have to live like a regular schnook. Yeah, when I order spaghetti bolognese, I get egg noodles and ketchup or whatever. I'm no longer getting pangers. I'm middle-aged. The clubs and I- I hate my son. I hate my son, the clubs and Ikea. I'm eating dime. Yeah, and this, and I think, yeah, it's on one hand, the individual expression of that

nostalgia is often done in a very funny way, but sort of more broadly speaking, it is there is a real sense, I think, of the loss of something to the sort of brute ledger logic of the market. That is the story of Gen X in a nutshell, isn't it? The nightclub is now an Ikea because it has like the structure of our city has followed Gen X. Gen X like to moan, but like they want it to be an Ikea. That's the fucking Gen X energy. The difference with our generation is the nightclub never existed in the first place. It's always been an Ikea. Certainly not that one. I mean, I think about people that I know back in the States who have told me before, dude, you should absolutely, if you go to Manchester, go to the Hacienda,

it would be cool, even though it doesn't exist anymore, go to the old building, it would be cool to see it and stuff like that. And it's one of those things where it's like, it's wild to me that I'm from Indiana, that people because of a kind of mass, call it Indie culture or something like that, that was popular enough that I'm 36, growing up, that people were really into stuff that was popular in Britain in the early 80s, that like a club in Manchester, which is like a city that basically, I mean, most people in the US who have gone to the UK have only gone to London, like very few people are going to go there, like has enough cachet that like it's become this legendary thing that people would almost like make a pilgrimage to, you know what I mean? Like

in a way, how many L's in pilgrimage? Like that would, oh Jesus, Riley's just brought up the fact that the building the Hacienda's in is now a three flats, walk a flats, baby. Of course, I'm also laughing and I'm like, wow, a two bedroom for 1195. Jesus, that's fucking cheap. The Hacienda's closed now, I live in it. I mean, I talk about, you know, I'm a big Mark Fisher fan, as sort of anyone who listened to this show will know, and I sort of talk about sort of hauntology quite a bit, right? It's a shame that no one knows what it is to this day. It can't be defined.

And with something like turning the Hacienda into luxury flats, like the forces of capital have acknowledged and have now enclosed the hauntology itself. Yes, you're haunted by ghosts of futures that are unfulfilled. They're sucked off by Bobby Gillespie. Exactly. You're haunted by the ghosts of what could have been. And that emotion that you have is now being used to encourage you to buy like a help to buy flat in central Manchester. And so I think it's actually what I wanted to bring in is another concept from Mark Fisher as well, which is of, he called acid communism, which was essentially his whole idea was that part of sort of the political left and the cultural left, whatever you wanted to call it,

had to be based on breaking out of what existed and in creating something entirely new, no forms of existing together. That's why it was, you know, acid was sort of a glib way of saying that. And I mean, one of the reasons that sort of like Mark Fisher was sort of so, I mean, he was into, let's say, I think the more Dower and Dubby versions of British electronic music, but he nevertheless sort of loved this whole idea because for him, the rave represented a new way of coexisting with one another that was not based on, again, the ledger logic of the market. It was not based on people relating to one another, its consumers and individuals and producers. It was some other thing. And I mean, what I feel, what I feel is, is I feel a nostalgia

for a time I never experienced because this, there was more openness for this sort of acidic way to relate to one another. Good drugs, good vibes, simple as George, I've got a comment about there isn't a doors in a field. I wanted you to get a chance to react to what Riley said before. I wanted to bring something up along those lines, but I didn't want to cut you off if you had a response to that. I pretty much echo that. I feel as far as that goes, I'm a very haunted person, yeah, full of hauntology, because I'm basically borrowing all this rave nostalgia from other people. It's pretty lame to be one of those, I wish I was born in the, in a different generation kind of guide, but when that's a YouTube comment energy in and of itself, it really is. I have to

be self-aware about it, but when so much of this seems so feel good and so colorful, especially the language use and the pitches people paint in the comments, it's like, this is definitely a more interesting time in Britain to be living in than the age I am in. So it just seems like, yeah, full of nostalgia for something I haven't experienced. I feel the same way. I mean, I'm not going to say it's the direct link, but obviously like there's a certain extent to which that kind of, for me, that era, the coolness of a lot of the things that are being produced from the late 70s until the early 90s in Britain, like created enough of a cultural sort of notion for me that when I became aware of the fact that I could actually legally live here if I wanted to, because you

know, my mom had misunderstood how the law worked and she thought that I wasn't eligible for a passport, but it turns out I was and I could move here. I was like, man, moving to Britain would be fucking cool and I learned the hard way. But the thing I would say though is that, I mean, I felt the same way because I, maybe perhaps less so now, but at a time I was a really big fan of the Australian band Cut Copy and they put out an album in, I think 2012, 2013, that was very much influenced by, you know, the Balearic Islands dance music from the late 80s and second summer of Love Stuff. And out of curiosity from that, I just started Googling it and looking into and seeing these pictures from these house parties and raves and like in Spain or, you know,

on Ibiza or like here in the UK. And you're just like, God, it looks like so much fucking fun and the hair and the clothes are so weird. Like it's so wild. Like the really floppy fringe, you know what I'm talking about? Like just and just like people like dancing around a pool, like smoking, looking not at all fucking self-conscious at all. Like it's the wildest thing. It's like, you know, wait, there's a drug that makes British people happy and sociable. And so like in a way, that's why they had to ban it. Exactly. And so I feel it entirely, like I'm not even from here, but like when you see this stuff, you're like, wow, that was, it does look like it was really cool and really fun. And like you would feel nostalgic and want to reminisce about it if you'd

been there. Back when you were young, was this still alright, Robinson? I made the drugs lovely. So George, do you have any other comments that you want to highlight of good UK rave comments? We've got to close out on some bangers here, I think. Here's one that may be slightly disturbing. Me and my mate bought two glove puppets from Poundstretches to take to raves. He called his bill, so called my not bill. We used to take them to the chill out tent to try and cheer people up. We were on downers. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it made things a lot worse. Yeah, let's just, you know, we're the, we are the experimental drugs, drug induced psychosis come down squad. This is British MK Ultra. Yeah, British MK Ultra is you take a bad

ecstasy pill and some guy comes and talks to you with a hand puppet. Yeah. Explaining sexual abstinence to you by the medium of a hand puppet. There's actually, because I've been scrolling through your feet as well, and there's one I quite like here. I was the loneliest raver on the planet in 92, 11, 12 years old and going off my head in the bedroom. Used to get all the newest tapes of my older mate down the road, got my energy from nothing but sugar on my cornflakes. Great video. Heart, pray, flex. Oh, emojis. Just pure positivity a little bit. Yeah, pure positivity in that one. Just sounds like a very like Mackleroy style comment. I don't know. I mean, because I,

I've, I've for a long time, I listened to electronic music by myself, just like, just really, just really sort of viscerally enjoying it. Heart, pray, flex the Riley motto. I really, I really connected with this one. I was gonna say, no surprise that you found the most Canadian comment in the fucking feed and gravitated towards it. That's right. Oh yeah, I sure did love the rave scene. I was about 11, 12 years old there. Going out for a rip on the snowmobile, listening to some of those tunes on the Walkman. I didn't realize that everybody in, in Canada was from Scandinavia. That's right. That's where they're from. So, so I was gonna ask before we close out though, George, because there's the one thing that we haven't talked about

is that these are, you're pulling them from these videos, but I'm wondering like, I imagine if you didn't share an interest in the music itself, you wouldn't be trawling through these videos all the time. So I'm wondering like, do you have any recommendations for people who may not be familiar with this scene or with, with this genre or genre as a like artists or songs they might want to check out? Artists or songs. I feel like the main things I tend to look at is the big sort of recordings of DJ sets at the big rave, like there's one's called Fantasia, Helter Skelter, AWOL, and these probably really capture the energy of raves at the time, like the individual songs probably don't. So they're quite a lot of fun to listen to, as DJs like Slip Mat, Rat Pack,

and a Two Bad Mice, for example, which are fun to listen to. One thing that really spiked my interest a couple years ago was the Jeremy Della film, Everybody in the Place, which is quite an interesting look at the rave sort of history, includes a lot of the music like A to H State and a guy called Gerald. So I recommend checking that out. Okay. All right, sweet. Well, this is all cool. When the weather's good and actually makes me feel like happiness is possible in this country, I might get one of those sets and listen to it while. Illegal Trashutra rave out of your office. Dave Courtney, tier Patreon subscribers. And if anyone has the updated version of the LFO remix of Nightmares on Wax Aftermath, please do send that to any account associated with the

show. I've been looking for it for years. Well, and also please make sure to follow UK rave comments on Twitter. We will link to the bio link to the profile information about IRA bombings that have taken place in in line with music history up to the minute custody battle information from commenting and directions to the IKEA Milton Key. But George, thank you so much for making time to be on. This has been a lot of fun. It's been a pleasure. Learn some stuff too. So it's great. Thank you. No problem. Pleasure to be here. Cheers. Thanks a lot, George. All right, we're good. Cheers. And to all of our listeners, thank you for being Patreon subscribers. Thank you for enjoying yet another Britonology. It has been once again myself, Nate Pathay with

me, Milo Edwards. And thank you to Riley for joining as well. No, if there's going to be electronic music being talked about, I will be there. Otherwise, we'll just break down the wall like the Kool-Aid man. He'll be there.