The other house ingredient was drugs and the stimulant of choice was MDMA, commonly known as Ecstasy. The relationship of rock’n’roll with drugs was as time honoured as it was with
sex, but while drug-taking was standard procedure for pop stars it was not necessarily a prerequisite for listening to their work. Of course it was perfectly possible to spend hours on end dancing
in the required trance-like state with arms exultantly raised in the air to the repetitive beats of house without taking drugs, but taking Ecstasy both kept up the energy levels and made the
experience more explicable. Though some MDMA users suffered unpleasant side effects, it mostly produced the euphoric state that gave it its Ecstasy soubriquet. In particular, it was perceived as a
‘happy drug’, which encouraged a state of togetherness and human empathy among the dancers, moving to the beat as a mass of joyful individuals, rather than encouraging the proprietorial
exclusivity of pairing into couples. Although MDMA had been a ‘class A’ illegal substance in the United Kingdom since 1977 – a full decade before it became widely available
– its users believed it to be harmless, or at least no more harmful than legal stimulants like alcohol and tobacco. ‘Popping an E’ was as simple as swallowing a paracetamol tablet
and involved none of the off-putting needles and other paraphernalia of hard drugs like heroin. During 1987, house became increasingly referred to as ‘acid house’ or ‘rave’
(terms that were technically sub-genres) as its association with Ecstasy became more overt and the drug’s suppliers raced to meet a demand running into the millions for an illegal product
which just three years earlier had been experienced in Britain by only a few West End bohemians. Not since the smell of marijuana had drifted from the hippie festivals of the late sixties had
law-breaking been so inextricably entwined with youthful expression and, like Woodstock’s
long-haired joint-smokers, acid-house ravers talked as if they too were
discovering, through ‘E’, a new age of Aquarius.
The sudden surge in Ecstasy use caught the forces of law and order off-guard. The government’s anti-drugs campaign, built around the ‘Heroin Screws You Up’ message and the
dangers of spreading Aids from sharing needles, had scarcely considered the potential appeal of MDMA. At first, the police had no idea how to react to hundreds – and then thousands – of
clubbers behaving peculiarly. When crowds spilled out on to the Charing Cross Road after a new acid-house club, The Trip at the Astoria, finished for the night at 3 a.m., they were still in a
euphoric state, continuing their partying by dancing on the roofs of parked cars. Police were at a loss how to move them on – for the blaring of police sirens captivated them into dancing to
their importunate beat. But the craze would soon claim casualties, pitching clubbers against coppers. The first Ecstasy fatality, in June 1988, could be put down to misadventure since the
21-year-old victim, Ian Larcombe, had been so incautious as to take eighteen pills at once. More disturbing was the death of Janet Mayes three months later after swallowing only two pills. By then,
the press had latched on to what they assumed was an especially dangerous youth trend. ‘You will hallucinate. For example, if you don’t like spiders you’ll start seeing giant
ones,’ cautioned
The Sun
’s medical correspondent, Vernon Coleman. ‘There’s a good chance you’ll end up in a mental hospital for life . . . If you’re young
enough there’s a good chance you’ll be sexually assaulted while under the influence. You may not even know until a few days or weeks later.’
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For the tens of thousands who had started using Ecstasy without experiencing the side effects of arachnophobia or vague recollections of having been raped, such hysterical
scaremongering seemed risible.
The reality was that neither Ecstasy’s users nor its critics really knew what they were talking about. The drug’s rise had been so sudden that there were no unimpeachable evaluations
of its more distant effects. Whether it might cause long-term brain damage – as a 1985 American study, based on laboratory animals, suggested – remained conjecture. The only clear
short-term consequence was the comedown, which induced in users feelings of listlessness and depression that could last into mid-week. The drug was not medically addictive, though repeated use
caused the body to acclimatize to its effects, thereby encouraging ever greater quantities to be consumed, sometimes topped up with other, far more risky, drugs. There was also the danger that as
large criminal syndicates moved in to meet the soaring demand so pure MDMA might be adulterated with other questionable substances. Another problem was that taking ‘E’ stimulated its
users to dance beyond their physical limits and could bring on the effects of heatstroke. This could be combated by drinking water, but some drank so much that they brought
on death by doing so. In these ways, Ecstasy risked leading users into genuine medical harm, but for most clubbers during the summer of 1988 the ratio of fatalities to pills popped
did not seem to suggest the dangers were excessive.
For the police, the greatest public order threat came not from the taking of a drug whose effect was generally to make its users less aggressive, but from the noise, nuisance and dangers to life
and limb caused by a craze that had quickly spread beyond licensed clubs to impromptu raves in disused warehouses, barns and even – as the summer weather took hold – fields in the
middle of the countryside. At least in licensed establishments there were restricted opening hours and a legally accountable management, but no such controls existed to contain the unlicensed
raves, with all the potential for trouble and calamity that this could entail. Some events were held in warehouses without proper fire-safety equipment or unbolted fire exits, and the possibility
of arson from criminal gangs over thwarted drug deals, as well as accidental mishaps, risked turning the covert venues into death-traps. Undaunted, promotors organized illegal events and launched
premium-rate phone lines and pirate radio stations to spread the word about where partygoers should assemble (often a motorway service station), from where they would be given the secret of the
rave’s real location. Typically, convoys of cars carrying young ravers circled the M25 (which had only been completed in 1986) following a series of directions to industrial estates or
distant fields which, despite the encroaching darkness, were surreally identified by an ethereal haze of light and an echoing thump-thump-thump-thump. Some farmers and warehouse owners were happy
to make a quick, cash-in-hand profit for lending out their underused property for a night’s revels. Others did so under false pretences, having been led to believe it was to be used for a
film-shoot, pop video or some other venture necessitating lorries, lights and stage equipment.
For rave organizers there were initially easy profits to be made from charging between £10 and £20 admission to several thousand partygoers in return for a relatively modest outlay
on a giant sound system, some colourful projections and an invariably inadequate number of portable loos. It was not difficult to paint these young men (as they predominantly were) as the
unacceptable face of Thatcherism – spivvish entrepreneurs indifferent to the law and to any consequences that might stand in the way of their rush to cash in on optimistic and perhaps naive
youngsters. The promoters came from a range of backgrounds, but the most prominent among them conformed to this caricature. Branded by the
Daily Mirror
the ‘Acid House King’,
Tony Colston-Hayter was a young, middle-class, comprehensive-school-educated entrepreneur and gambler. Establishing his rave empire under the title ‘Sunrise’, he ensured that its
profits went through its grandly named parent
company Transatlantic Corporation, which was registered in the tax haven of the Virgin Islands. Among the other leading rave
organizers were two public schoolboys, Quentin ‘Tintin’ Chambers and Jeremy Taylor, the latter of whom had been jointly running the ‘Gatecrasher Balls’ for school-age Sloane
Rangers since 1983. Progressing from helping privileged under-age children get smashed on fizz, Taylor’s shift to hosting raves for a drug-fuelled generation of clubbers showed his adeptness
at moving with the times. The suggestion that such young men were examples of what happened when Thatcherism ran riot gained further credence when Colston-Hayter appointed a 22-year-old libertarian
named Paul Staines as Sunrise’s public relations executive. Having been a Federation of Conservative Students activist while at Humberside College of Higher Education, Staines certainly had
unimpeachable credentials as an individualist. He combined his advocacy of illegal raves with work as a researcher for free-market think tanks, including the Adam Smith Institute and the Committee
for a Free Britain. The latter was run by David Hart, a maverick multi-millionaire on the outer reaches of Thatcher’s circle of admirers/advisers, who during 1984 had helped direct funds to
those trying to break the miners’ strike. Sharing Hart’s parallel causes of promoting liberty for entrepreneurs and combating the threat from global communism, Staines drew comparisons
between left-wing authoritarianism abroad and the refusal of the government to let its citizens do as they pleased at home. ‘My credibility was slowly going down in politics,’ he later
mused. ‘One minute I would be on News at One saying“there’s no drugs at these parties”, and the next minute I’m supposed to be talking about civil war in
Angola.’
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Such concerns were far removed from the essentially communitarian spirit animating young rave-goers. Acid-house music did not contain enough lyrics to convey a message, let alone a political
one, but the general mood replicated the disconnect from conventional society that had been at the core of the Woodstock generation’s outlook. First the middle months of 1988 and then those
of 1989 were referred to as a ‘second summer of love’. The chilled and funky ‘Pacific State’ by 808 State and Black Box’s altogether higher energy ‘Ride on
Time’ were the tracks most associated with that second summer, which – ideal for open-air raves – was unusually warm and balmy (May 1989 was the hottest for three hundred years).
The accompanying dress sense of baggy T-shirts and jeans or tracksuits and trainers could scarcely have been further removed from the sharp suits, primary colours and shoulder pads of corporate
Britain; the ravers’ logo of a smiley face in the shape of a little round pill was self-explanatory.
The illegal raves of the ‘second summer of love’ ranged from those resembling little more than a barn dance with drugs to the spectacular events laid on by Sunrise where twenty
thousand ticket-only fun-seekers were treated
to laser displays, enveloping puffs of artificial smoke, giant projection screens, bouncy castles, Ferris wheels and big
dippers. The overall effect was like a cross between a rock festival, a fun fair and a May ball at one of Cambridge’s less pretentious colleges. The police’s Pay Party Unit, established
to combat the craze, was led by Chief Superintendent Ken Tappenden, a veteran of law enforcement during the miners’ strike. He deployed two hundred officers across the country to gather
intelligence on where parties were being organized and by whom. This went as far as watching and tracking the movements of scaffolding contractors and private security firms used by the principal
event planners in the hope of identifying the location of their next job. Realizing they were being tailed, promoters responded by sending one convoy of lorries in one direction and, after the
police had headed off in pursuit, sending out a further convoy to the real party location. When the police successfully identified where a rave was being held, they set up roadblocks to prevent
those hoping to attend from doing so. On 1 July 1989, the police closed off a twenty-mile stretch of the M4 to frustrate those trying to get to the Energy party run by Taylor and Chambers in
Membury, Berkshire. Three weeks later, an effort to cordon off the whole area around Heston services in order to stop another Energy rave in a warehouse narrowly avoided causing loss of life when
the partygoers dodged the police cordon by parking their cars on the hard shoulder and running across a six-lane motorway to gain access to the event. The sheer weight of numbers made containment
extremely difficult, but the picture it created of drug-crazed teenagers so under the spell that they would leg it across a motorway to get their fix of acid house naturally alarmed those who found
the movement perplexing and disconcerting.
Worse was to follow. On 30 September, sixteen police officers were injured when their efforts to intervene at a rave in Reigate were rebuffed by the event’s security guards, who attacked
them with CS gas and Rottweilers. Eventually, more than fifty arrests were made, but the scenes – which were caught by television news cameras – of effectively a private army in combat
with the police further undermined the credibility of the event organizers as harmless purveyors of youth entertainment. The environment minister, Virginia Bottomley, responded by stating it was
‘intolerable that peaceful citizens should be terrorized’ by the noise, mess and disruption of raves and that the government was urgently looking to find ways of cracking down on their
organizers, including three-month jail sentences and confiscation of profits.
It was certainly proving difficult to bring rave organizers to book under existing laws. After Sunrise’s Colston-Hayter had been charged with organizing an illegal party, his lawyers
secured his acquittal by arguing that because he had issued membership cards with the tickets, his events were, in fact,
private parties. Lawyers also managed to undermine
the roadblock policy by challenging the right of police to prevent individuals from peacefully walking down certain lanes. For their part, the rave organizers were also unhappy with the law as it
stood since they believed it hindered their efforts to run a legitimate business. Better to make the case against outmoded licensing restrictions, Paul Staines set up Freedom to Party, a pressure
group backed by several of the main rave organizers. He launched it in October 1989 at the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool. Colston-Hayter chipped in with the observation: ‘Maggie
should be proud of us, we’re a product of enterprise culture.’
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Sadly for him, it was not the sort of enterprise that appealed to the
prime minister. Staines may have seen a parallel between young people being free to party wherever, whenever and however they liked and the protests simultaneously taking place in Eastern Europe.
There, communist citizens were showing they were no longer afraid of their authoritarian police states in a peaceful but nonetheless revolutionary movement which was about to shatter the Berlin
Wall. But the analogy seemed rather strained to those not immersed in rave culture: the television pictures of East Germans defying the Stasi and demanding the right to visit relations in West
Germany were of an altogether profounder nature than the preoccupation of British youth with getting high on Ecstasy and partying all night. Calling for stiffer penalties, the
Daily Mail
lectured that ‘acid house is a facade for dealing in drugs of the worst sort on a massive scale. It is a cynical attempt to trap young people into drug dependency under the guise of friendly
pop music events.’
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The Conservative and Labour front benches were united in their condemnation of raves and supported the private
member’s bill introduced by the Conservative MP Graham Bright which became law in July as the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act 1990. It sanctioned fines of up to £20,000 and six
months in prison for illegal rave organizers.