It’s easy to forget in this age of all night parties, after hour’s clubs and late licensing that there was once a time when all venues were shut by 2am. The early Eighties were a grim time for going out to party. Most discos were overpriced watering holes where entrance meant being scrutinized by door staff checking you looked respectable. For some reason white shoes were de rigueur. The first album I owned in the late Seventies, which I had listened to religiously on cassette tape, was the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. It introduced me to the concept of a glamorous nightlife where DJ’s mixed the beat and beautiful people danced the night away, this was something strictly lacking in the nightclubs of South East London at that time. There music was strictly soul boy jazz funk and sophisticated meant getting down on to the floor to do the rowing boat dance. Going out dancing in Woolwich on a Saturday night was more a case of surviving the beer boys and avoiding handbags strewn on the dance floor.
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The rise and repression of the free festival movement in the UK and some intersections with radical anti-politics.

This article is based on a series of talks held in Basel, Berlin, Graz and Rome in 2007, and has been revised for this issue of datacide.
It doesn’t attempt to present a definitive history, but follow some tracks of contamination and inspiration. Some readers will already be familiar with some of the described historical frames, others not at all. It was written in a way that should be accessible without prior knowledge in terms of the facts and factoids, but under the assumption of an understanding of the validity of counter cultures as possible antitheses to the capitalist culture industry.
It also leaves out many other strains that contributed to this antagonism, such as left communism, surrealism, lettrism, the situationists, communes, sexpol, anti-psychiatry, neoism etc, as it focusses on the festival.

“The festival is apt to end frantically in an orgy, a nocturnal debauch of sound and movement transformed into rhytm and dance by the crudest of instruments.” (Roger Caillois, 1938)
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towards an (anti-)history of rave

“The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar” (Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, 1940)

Introduction

We are all familiar with those superficial overviews of ‘popular culture’ in which the same clichéd images are used to denote entire social movements – a few naked hippies at Woodstock standing in for the 1960s counter-cultures, a couple of Mohicans for punk and some gurning ravers in smiley t-shirts for twenty years of electronic dance scenes from acid house to breakcore. In this way history affirms the status quo by suggesting that nothing fundamental ever changes, and the multiple possibilities of negation and creation opened up by these movements are denied.
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Controlled demolition of the World Trade Center towers, the absence of a plane at the Pentagon, the shooting down of Flight 93 over Pennsylvania and other theories advanced by the “9/11 truth movement” are false not only logically but contradict the material evidence at the sites and eyewitness accounts. The following are some useful resources that expose the bad science and reasoning behind these theories. People debunking the “truth movement” are not paid by anyone nor do they have a cottage industry bringing in cash via DVDs and speaking engagements like Alex Jones, David Ray Griffin and other conspirationists. Most of their efforts are distributed free on the Internet to combat misinformation about the attacks, and this is only a small selection of the resources available.
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ON CRISIS AND CONTINUITY IN THE 9/11 TRUTH MOVEMENT

How is it possible that increasingly elaborate conspiracy explanations for the events of September 11th 2001 continue to find appeal amongst a growing population of otherwise rational people, despite the day’s events being witnessed by millions and despite these theories being consistently debunked and embarrassed? Why are so many still convinced that the perpetrators of 9/11 were innocent of their greatest accomplishment: the mass murder of thousands for the sake of spectacular Jihad against the west? Why would the partisans of these theories repeat claims long proven false, even at the cost of their own reputations? [Read more →]