The Guardian ·
‘Very authoritarian, very brutal’: three decades after the UK’s anti-rave crackdown, why is France doing the same?
With tear gas, grenades and a new law, French authorities are targeting unlicensed music gatherings. Those in the rave scene explore the parallels with the UK in the 90s
When Spiral Tribe fled England in 1992, they left behind an indelible mark on rave history. The itinerant sound system collective are best known for their involvement with Castlemorton Common festival, an unlicensed free party drawing more than 30,000 people and lasting nearly a week. After a drawn-out and notoriously expensive trial for public order offences, Spiral Tribe were acquitted of all charges. They decided to drive their repurposed military caravans out of the UK and never look back.
Their documented history often stops there. But little known is the fact that they then kicked off “the biggest illegal underground movement that Europe had ever seen”, says Spiral Tribe associate Sebastian Vaughan, AKA electronic musician 69db.
Many Spiral members, including Vaughan, settled throughout France after a warm response to the Spiral sound – a 160bpm sped-up version of hip-house with delayed kick drums, known as hardtek or tribe – and to the collective’s punk-rave aesthetic. Over the last three decades, their underground Teknival parties in France grew from about 1,000 attendees in 1993 to tens of thousands in 1995 and up to 100,000 people by the early 2000s, far exceeding the turnout at Castlemorton. French ravers, Vaughan says, “completely understood what the concept was, and they weren’t just following it, they were creating it themselves”. He attributes Spiral’s underground appeal to the country’s likeminded appetite for resistance.
