Raving, We’re Raving

Photos By Gavin Watson, Interview By Bruno Bayley

Raving ’89.

Vice: How did you get into the rave scene then?

Gavin Watson:

What was the atmosphere like at the parties when you first went?

They must have known there were drugs involved?

Were you as much a part of rave as you were the whole skinhead thing?

What was the downside?

is out this month published by DJhistory.com.

Gavin Watson: The guys who set up the parties were the wide-boy builders, the property developers, guys who had a bit of money and knew how to handle it but were rogues at the same time. One guy used to drive around in a Bentley, and just change the fucking number plate to whatever he wanted. He was a proper wide-boy who was in the right place at the right time. And that must have happened across the whole country, people who were doing dodgy deals anyway but saw the potential in this new scene and made the most of it.

I went to school with these guys. They had been really into the whole Rasta thing but it was a bit like the skinheads: everyone put aside their past loyalties and enjoyed themselves. The whole movement really exposed the fact that governments really do hate freedom or any form of expression of freedom. It was people dancing in a fucking field with no fucking alcohol, and the government just couldn’t take it, they didn’t know how to handle it. I think it was the fact that alcohol wasn’t involved that scared them the most.

These pills we were taking were £20 a go—there wasn’t any of this taking-80-pills-a-night shit. You took one powerful one and you were done. There were very few casualties, there weren’t people with arms falling off from bad heroin, or any of that shit. The newspapers at the time went absolutley insane over the parties. The best part was they got everything wrong. They were so desperate to get any facts they could that they were even reporting finding ecstasy wrappers. Needless to say, no one was taking acid at the “acid house” raves.

Most of the police on the ground thought these parties were a godsend. They emptied the town centres of trouble, so a lot of time they would tell us where the raves were, just to make sure we moved on and their villages weren’t clogged up with cars and lost people. But after time, the laws were changed, and they got the powers to confiscate equipment and so on. Still, any parties that were closed were always done so without violence. In general, the police had a rather apologetic approach in the early days.