Looking Back at the Legal Bill that Killed off British Rave Culture

In my hand are four of the most important pages of legislation ever passed in the United Kingdom; a kind of close-typed Rosetta Stone of rave, if you will. A document that has, in its own implicit way, governed my life. Or to be more specific about it, my nightlife. This sheath of paper, this woody wad, is the reason why I'm destined to be forever longing for a past I have no claim to. It is the agent of my deeply felt saudade, and the thing that's stopped my generation getting to spend the next 30 years telling anyone who'll listen about the golden days of E-tinged fantasias.

Much like  In Search of Lost Time,the  Communist Manifesto, or  Fifty Shades of Grey, most of us have probably made reference to the aforementioned document without having actually  read the fucking thing in any kind of detail at all. With that in mind, I decided to actually  read the oft-referenced but rarely-quoted  Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 (CJPOA), in an attempt to answer the following three questions: why was the act written, what it did, and how its impact is still being felt 23 years after being passed in the Houses of Parliament.

Via Flickr.

Club culture is built on a series of myths, the most pernicious of which is that everything really  was better back in the day. Here in the UK at least, the back in the day we find ourselves reading about on a, well, daily basis, is the stretch of time between 1987 and 1994, an era that takes in a Tory rollover and a few seismic shifts in what it meant to be young and British. We're talking, of course, about the heyday of rave, the period when, or so the flat-capped old blokes would have you believe, every field between Burnham Market and Bridlington was filled week in week out with teeming hordes of long haired and loved-up revellers who were determined to change the world through an incredible, and incredibly potent, blend of very loud music and very good drugs.

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