Original_To:  BITNET%"allmusic@auvm"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.allmusic
Date:         Fri, 28 Aug 1992 10:52:00 EST
From:         MCINTYRE@MSUPA.BITNET
Subject:      British rave and music scene

forwarded without permission from nm-list.

From: coganman@ocf.Berkeley.EDU (Andrei Cogan)

        I saw the following article in the current (15-21 August 1992) issue
of "The Economist" magazine. It is a discuission of the rave and music
scenes in Britain, written in the usual humorous, understanding and still
slightly-paternalistic tone of pretty much the rest of the writing in this
magazine...

[reprinted _without_ permission]

The Economist
15-21 August 1992
p. 47

"The travellers' club"

        Britain's well-known love of liberty and tolerance of eccentricity
have their limits. People with dirty hair who refuse to buy houses clearly
overstep them. These "so-called travellers," said Lord Ferrers, the Home
Office minister with responsibility for the police, "are a direct assault on
the structure of social life in the country." After big festivals in
Herefordshire, Powys and Hampshire, the government is planning to curb their
freedom to cruise around the fringes of society by making it harder to
collect unemployment benefit and, possibly, by tightening up the already
stiff Public Order Act.

        Lord Ferrers has failed to notice the useful social functions that
travellers perform. They offer ideal newspaper copy in the slow summer
months. Their anarchistic vagrancy reignites in discontented
mortgage-holders a belief that property is the basis of social order. And
they give unheard-of ministers a chance to make silly statements.

        Every summer in the past 20 years, a couple of hundred free,
open-air music festivals have take place somewhere in the countryside. If
the festivals have grown in size, that s partly thanks to the behavious or
some police forces. The 20,000-strong festival at Castlemorton in
Herefordshire, for instance, was the result of Operation Nomad, conducted by
the Wiltshire, Avon & Somerset and Gloucestershire police, all determined
that no festival should take place on their beat. They swept up all the
travellers they could find and shoved them over the border, leaving the
unsuspecting West Mercia police to take care of the problem.

        The growing popularity of hippie-dom also swells the festivals. It
is not so much that all the country's youth is taking to the road, but that
new elements have been turning up at the festivals. These participants now
divide into three groups.

o NEW AGE TRAVELLERS,previously known as hippies. They have been around
since the late 1960s. Some of them have been on the road all their adult
lives; some have brought up children, now teenagers, on the road. Their
beliefs tend to include some sort of mysticism, a distaste for cities and
passive dislike of The System. Nobody really knows how many of them there
are, but a figure of 10,000 is bandied about. According to Don Aitken, of
the Travellers' Aid Trust, new recruits are either middle-class, educated
types who have come to view that this is the best way of life, or
working-class kids whose lives in the city offer less freedom than does
vagrant poverty on the road.

o THE BREW CREW, named after their favourite drink, Carlsberg Special Brew.
They wear singlets, boots reminiscent of the skinheads' Doc Martens and
facial expressions derived directly from the punks. Their trade-mark is a
small black dog on a string. They are largely urban types, who take to the
road for bits of the summer. THeir active nastiness has been a bit of a
problem for other travellers: the hippies' determined tolerance has forced
them to put up with vanloads of drunk anarchists who join their camps and
fail to bury their excrement. But they are few and, the hippies say,
becoming fewer.

o RAVERS: the tens of thousands of bored children of all classes who used to
go to acid-house parties before those were shut down by the police and new
legislation. They have turned en masse to the hippies' festivals.

        In one way, the hippies have benefited from the ravers' invasion.
They make a bit of money by selling the tourists vegan curries, nutburgers
and bottled water to quench drug-induced thirst. In another way, they are
horrified. Having dropped out of urban life to find peace in the
countryside, they now find that thousands of city kids are roaring down the
motorways to join them. With the kids have come vast mobile sound systems
run by outfits called things like Spiral Tribe, Rough Crew and Circus Warp.
THeir rave music drowns out the hippies' unamplified bongo drums and
tambourines.

        Hippies also tend to disapprove of the drugs ravers bring with them:
cannabis, of course, is fine, but city kids take Ectasy, or a mixture of
acid and speed, which loosens the bowels. Hippies tend to carry shovels with
them; ravers do not. On the subject of ravers and the Brew Crew, hippies can
sound remarkably blimpish. Of their music Mr Aitken says, "they seem to
regard it as their job to keep a very loud noise going."

        If tighter laws are introduced, the hippies may suffer as a
consequence of the ravers' invasion. It is hard enough already to live on
the road and not break the law. A traveller cannot simply rent a
weed-covered, set-aside field from a farmer for a couple of weeks: the
farmer will be charged with running an unlicensed caravan site. Nor can a
farmer rent travellers a field without getting a license; and councils tend
to demand prohibitive prices for licenses in order to drive the festivals
into somebody else's backyard.

        Trying to stop these things happening is pointless as well as
illiberal. They will go on, as their persistence over the years has shown;
and trying to suppress them means more expensive forms of conflict between
the police and already discontented kids. Some sensible policemen are
already thinking about other ways of dealing with the business. Leading a
delegation to see Lord Ferrers, Ron Hadfield, chief constable of the West
Midlands and head of the top police officers' public-order committee,
broached the possibility of setting up permanent sites for the festivals.


--------------

        -Andrei

--
Andrei Cogan (coganman@ocf.berkeley.edu)   ||| "When in doubt, panic."
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