THE SOLSTICE EXPERIMENT
The Free Festival Movement
A Global Movement
From Indymedia.org
Britain in the early eighties was in the grip of the Thatcherite revolution.
Enforced unemployment and battles with the Miners and trade unions were
smashing the traditional left, and the numbers of disaffected people looking
for ways to survive the onslaught were rising. Suddenly, 'bailing out of
concrete' and living in vehicles and caravans became an option. The
travellers prised open the doors opened by hippie culture. Peace camps
sprang
up around American bases, and those rejecting city living came to be known
collectively as the Peace Convoy. The Stonehenge Free festival was the place
where travellers converged and the highlight of their calendar.
By June
1984,
50,000 people were gathered at the Solstice Festival.
The festival was seen as a free space, a green city where travellers could
take drugs, listen to music and make the life they wanted without the
uptight
codes of straight society. Those attending in 1984 didn't realise that the
movement's success would be its downfall as later that year the state
started
moves to squash the travellers movement. The Nostell Priory free festival
was
attacked by riot police and the vehicles which served as people's homes were
sledgehammered. Then came the eviction of the Rainbow Village peace camp at
Molesworth. Government minister, Michael Heseltine donned a flak jacket and
led the attack. War had been declared and the travellers were unprepared for
it.
'The travellers had their own explanation for the severity of the
crackdown,'
said Matthew Collin in Altered State, The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid
House. - Their numbers were doubling yearly, they said, they were the pied
pipers leading Thatcher's children out of the inner cities and into
alternative lifestyles... the very name the Peace Convoy, implying active
links between nomadic dropouts and political activists, may have struck fear
into the sections of government that believed a travellers way of life
involved a rejection of and a threat to the system of property and land
rights on which Britain is based.
In 1985 a massive police operation was mounted to smash the Peace Convoy and
make sure the Stonehenge Free Festival didn't happen. Razor wire was erected
around the monument and the Assistant Chief Constable of Wiltshire ordered
his men to attack the Peace Convoy. Blocked from reaching the festival site,
travellers' vehicles were forced into a nearby beanfield, there they were
met
by cops in crash helmets and riot shields. Vehicles were smashed to pieces,
their occupants dragged through broken windshields and beaten by the police.
Journalist Nick Davies was at the scene of the carnage but his report of
police brutality was replaced by the cops version of events. TV footage of
events was replaced by a voice over and the BBC and ITN both showed a police
video instead of the impassioned reports shot at the time. The Battle of the
Beanfield was followed by a summer of evictions and harassments. Thatcher
publicly said she was 'only too delighted to do anything we can to make life
difficult for such things as hippie convoys.- In 1986 the Public Order Act
tried to outlaw the travellers' alternative lifestyle.
Despite government attempts to outlaw travellers, sites were still scattered
throughout Britain. 'After the Battle of the Beanfield, sections of a
downcast and disillusioned travelling community started to seek oblivion
through Special Brew superlager or even heroin as the hippie dream turned
sour. Festivals had lost their shine, and were plagued by marauding,
sometimes violent drunks, the crustie punks of the Brew Crew,' said Matthew
Collin.
As the eighties drew to a close, many travellers were highly politicised.
Battles with police, landowners and the law in conjunction with internal
struggles against the Brew Crew meant that some travellers had a high level
of political organisation. When Acid House and Ecstasy shot through Britain
in the late eighties, the travellers had the experience to turn the movement
into more than just drugs and commerce.
'In 1990 an alliance between travellers and ravers began to take shape,'
said
Matthew Collin. 'The travellers had the sites and the know-how to staff and
run an event that would run for days rather than just hours. The ravers had
the electronic sounds and the seductive, new synthetic ecstasy. It certainly
seemed a lot better than what either the Brew Crew or the increasingly dated
free festival rock stalwarts had to offer. And although ideological and
sartorial differences remained, both shared an interest in getting high and
dancing all night.'
The rave scene took Britain by storm. Although many promoters and dealers
saw
it as a way to make a quick buck, many of the DJ's and dancers wanted more.
Nottingham Sound system DIY were among those who took acid house away from
the entrepreneurs and towards a more egalitarian vision. Fed up with paying
for expensive raves (which half the time didn't happen) they linked up with
Salisbury travellers and began to throw their own free parties in the
Wiltshire and Somerset countryside. Their choice of name Do It Yourself,
sprang from their punk backgrounds and the course they felt the house scene
should take. In London, Spiral Tribe began squatting venues and throwing
free
techno parties. Once they started playing the free festival circuit they
found themselves on a mission: 'to make some fucking noise' and decided not
to return to the city.
'Like Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters on their historic bus trip across the
states in the sixties, the tribe grew constantly as it left a kaleidoscope
trail through the idyllic countryside of the south-west in its Luton van,'
said Matthew Collin.
While the media or the mainstream press remained unaware of the links
between
travellers and ravers, the police had been monitoring the actions of
travellers since the eighties. The cops began smashing up free festivals and
raves even though the legislation to back-up their actions wasn't fully in
place. When travellers and ravers began to mass at Castle Morton during the
May Day weekend of 1992 the police weren't prepared for the scale of the
gathering. 25,000 people entered the temporary autonomous zone of the free
festival and the sound systems blared out for over three days. When the
revellers dispersed the cops moved in and seized the Spiral Tribe with their
sound systems and vehicles. The ravers were charged with conspiracy in a
trial that would eventually cost the state over £4m. It was the British
equivilent of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial and the start of a summer of
arrests and harassment. Tory Prime Minister, John Major made clear that
dissenting voices and alternative lifestyles wouldnt be tolerated when he
said: 'New age travellers. Not in this age. Not in any age.'
Castle Morton had alerted the government and media to the scale of the free
festival scene, and their reaction was the Criminal Justice Bill (CJB).
Designed to wipe out mass gatherings and alternative lifestyles, the bill
banned 'repetitive beats and gatherings of more than three people.- There'd
been moral panics over youth culture before but this was the first time that
the state had felt so threatened by young people's music that they'd tried
to
legislate against it.
The CJB, and more specifically the anti-CJB campaign, unified a diverse
movement. Thousands of young people who just wanted to take E and dance all
night were being treated as if they were hardcore criminals by the state,
and
the experience politicised them. Some ravers were already consciously
political, Luton's Exodus Collective put on raves and channelled the
proceeds
into self-help projects, squatting local buildings and turning them into
community centres. The police reaction was harassment, eviction, seizure of
sound systems and beatings. After some of the Exodus collective were
arrested
in 1993, 4,000 Luton ravers gathered outside the police station and demanded
their release. 'Exodus's story demonstrates how any political manifestations
of Ecstasy culture were taken very seriously indeed, and dealt with
ruthlessly,' said Matthew Collin. 'Radical politics and drug culture was
still an explosive combination.'
The march against the CJB in 1993 attracted 60,000 and ended in a riot. The
Criminal Justice Act became law in 1994, but the authorities were reluctant
to try and implement it's unworkable ban on repetitive beats. It would be a
mistake to see the CJA as just an attack on dance music and free festival
lifestyles. The CJA is best seen as a bundle of prejudices, all the
favourite
scapegoats are attacked but its main target is anybody who dissents against
the logic of capitalism. Sections of the bill were drafted specifically with
road protesters in mind - a movement which has been shaped and influenced by
the lifestyles and ecological concerns of travellers and the emphatic and
collective experience of Ecstasy. The anti-road movement and Reclaim The
Streets both seek to drag physical spaces back from the control of
capitalism
but they take the line: many yeses, one no, which means that while thinking
globally they realise there's lots of different flights out of capitalism as
opposed to the state communist model. There is no party line. RTS has a
direct lineage back to the counter cultural politics of psychedelia and free
festivals but its far more politically sophisticated and theoretically
developed than previous movements.
When RTS linked up with the striking Liverpool dockers during the dispute,
the
alliance was forged from a mutual position of weakness which resulted in
strength. What's also interesting about the politics of RTS and latter day
anti capitalists is that they're influenced by events in India, Mexico and
Brazil. Self-obsessed, campaign based single issue politics have given way
to
a wider perspective. By seeing struggle as truly global, those in a position
of weakness have linked up to support each other and become powerful.
The J18 demonstration in London and the events in Seattle during the World
Trade Organisation (WTO) summit show the links between the politics of
hedonism and the struggle against capitalism. Simply by calling the protests
Carnival Against Capitalism the demonstrators have introduced the spirit of
pranksterism but combined it with real politics. In Britain the struggle has
progressed from trying to find free spaces for our own personal party, to
snatching the space to party and develop viable alternatives to capitalism,
poverty and wage labour. The joy and spontaneity of drug culture and free
parties have been combined with a deeper political purpose. We're in the
first stages of a truly global movement.
Thanks to Fee @ www.MercuryMoon.co.uk
for all her amazing help and patience in re-organising and re-designing this site
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