Police and Parties in England: November 2011

Dorset: 'Illegal Rave blocked by Police' (Bridport News, 1 December 2011)

'Lyme Regis police blocked an illegal rave that was set to attract hundreds of revellers after it was advertised on the internet. The party was publicised on social networking site Facebook as a public event with camping, fireworks and live music. Police in Lyme Regis received a tip-off about the event and discovered that various DJs were lined up to perform in a field from 8pm to 6am.

Community beat manager PC Richard Winward said: “We had no idea where it was so we made some inquiries and discovered who the organisers were. We discovered that it was going to happen on Saturday, November 19 in a field off the A35 at Wootton Fitzpaine. We realised of course that it must not go ahead because it was illegal and would have caused huge disruption to people living in the area.” The organisers were three 19-year-old men from Lyme Regis, Umborne in Devon, and Exeter.

"We told the organisers that they did not have permission and the rave would not take place, and if it did go ahead or if they made any more preparations they would be arrested We also told them that unless they removed the pallets and breeze blocks, which legally counts as preparing for a rave and if they didn’t put a notification on Facebook that it had been cancelled, they would also be arrested.”

PC Winward said the organisers agreed to postpone the rave until they obtained the correct licences and permissions. But some determined revellers still threatened to turn up at the field, so police were forced to blockade the area'.

Hampshire: 'Illegal rave in Andover stopped by police' (BBC, 21 November 2011)

'An illegal rave in a disused industrial unit in Hampshire has been shut down. Police officers followed social media websites to locate the site of the rave which was being set up at the Walworth Industrial Estate in Andover. About 70 officers broke up the gathering by dispersing people travelling to the music event on Saturday night. Three men, from Wales, Gloucester and Hampshire, were arrested and sound equipment was seized by police. A 36-year-old from Llanishen, Wales, and a 19-year-old from Alton, Hampshire, were both arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and using electricity without authority. A 37-year-old from Gloucester was arrested on suspicion of using electricity without authority'.

Norfolk (Lynn News, 28 November 2011)

'Police seized sound equipment and a vehicle used to transport it from those believed to be the organisers of an illegal rave shut down on Sunday in Feltwell. The unlicensed music event was held at a Fire Ride, between 4am and 1pm, where it is thought that around 200 people attended. Superintendent Dave Marshall said: “The Constabulary takes such incidents very seriously. “We will take action to deal with anyone intent on causing disruption and nuisance within our local communities. Such events are unsafe and we will continue to prosecute, seize and destroy the equipment of anyone found to be involved.”'

Buckinghamshire (Leighton Buzzard, 2 December 2011)

'Thames Valley Police has charged a 20-year-old man with public nuisance following a rave at Ivinghoe Beacon in October. [RB] of Haverhill, Sussex, was charged with the offence yesterday and is due to appear at Aylesbury Magistrates’ Court on December 19. The offence relates to an illegal rave attended by more than 600 people which took place in the early hours of October 2'.

Somerset: 'Seven arrested for illegal rave' (Somerset County Gazette, 18 November 2011)

'Police arrested seven people and seized sound equipment after breaking up an illegal rave at Nuctombe Bottom near Timberscombe recently. More than 600 people descended on the site without permission, prompting police to move in and break up the rave following complaints from angry residents. Police said the noise was so intense that it could be heard up to four miles away in Minehead'.

Lancashire: Police Scupper New Year's Eve Party (Burnley Citizen, 2 December 2011)

'Plans for a New Year’s Eve rave in Colne have been refused after strong objections by Lancashire Police. Promoters Small Trees wanted to stage the event at an industrial unit off Burnley Road, Primet Bridge but PC Mark Driver, Pennine policing division licensing officer, raised concerns on how an expected crowd of up to 500 could be managed. Further worries centred on internet promotional promises of £2 drinks for everything except spirits. The borough’s licensing committee issued a counter-notice against the event'.

Tolpuddle singer deported to Australia

The punitive UK immigration controls against musicians have been highlighted here before. A particularly poignant example this week, with an Australian singer prevented from singing at the Tolpuddle festival - which commemorates the deportation of workers to Australia for forming a union in the 1830s. Came across this at Bristol National Union of Journalists site:

'In a bizarre homage to governments gone by, the UK Borders Agency has deported an Australian trades unionist back to the colonies. Her crime? Singing.

If you’re heading to Tolpuddle next weekend for the annual union festival – a great mix of political debate, foot-tapping music and beer – spare a thought for Maureen Lum from Tasmania. The Australian trade unionist was due to take part in the annual rally to commemorate the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who were deported for forming a trade union – but has herself been deported.

Maureen arrived in the UK last Sunday for a long planned holiday and was due to sing with the Grassroots community choir at the festival in Dorset. However, immigration officials at Stanstead Airport deported her for not having a performers’ visa, despite the fact that she was not being paid to come or for her performance. The deportation has led some commentators to question whether grandmother trade unionists are more unwelcome than terrorists.

The Tasmanian Grassroots Union Choir is a group of music lovers dedicated to ensuring that workers’ songs, old and new, are being sung and heard in Tasmania. They were due to perform a special series of songs about one of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, George Loveless, who was exiled to Van Diemen’s Land, as Tasmania was then called.

Nigel Costley, South West TUC Regional Secretary, said: “You would have thought that after 170 years things might have moved on. The Tolpuddle Festival is more than a rally for trade union members; it is a celebration of working people’s culture. We were delighted when the Grassroots Union Choir agreed to come and perform. The petty and vindictive attitude of immigration officials might mean there is one less voice in the choir but the thousands of people attending the festival will sing out strongly in her place.”

Just to remind you what the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival is all about, in 1834 six Dorset farm workers were arrested and sentenced to seven years’ transportation for organising a trade union. Massive protests swept across the country and thousands of people marched through London; many more organised petitions and protest meetings to demand their freedom. Eventually they returned home in triumph. The festival takes places each July when thousands of people come to small Dorset village to celebrate trade unionism and to remember the sacrifice made by the six farm workers.

It’s a popular mix of political discussion and speeches, great music and the traditional procession of banners, wreath laying and Methodist service. This year’s Festival takes place from July 15-17 and the camping places have already sold out. For more information see: http://www.tolpuddlemartyrs.org.uk/'

Dorset, Dancing, Ecstasy and Dream

'It was a fine September evening, just before sunset, when yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines, and the atmosphere itself forms a prospect without aid from more solid objects, except the innumerable winged insects that dance in it. Through this low-lit mistiness Tess walked leisurely along...

Approaching the hay-trussers she could hear the fiddled notes of a reel proceeding from some building in the rear; but no sound of dancing was audible -an exceptional state of things for these parts, where as a rule the stamping drowned the music. The front door being open she could see straight through the house into the garden at the back as far as the shades of night would allow; and nobody appearing to her knock she traversed the dwelling and went up the path to the outhouse whence the sound had attracted her.

It was a windowless erection used for storage, and from the open door there floated into the obscurity a mist of yellow radiance, which at first Tess thought to be illuminated smoke. But on drawing nearer she perceived that it was a cloud of dust, lit by candles within the outhouse, whose beams upon the haze carried forward the outline of the doorway into the wide night of the garden.

When she came close and looked in she beheld indistinct forms racing up and down to the figure of the dance, the silence of their footfalls arising from their being overshoe in "scroff"--that is to say, the powdery residuum from the storage of peat and other products, the stirring of which by their turbulent feet created the nebulosity that involved the scene. Through this floating, fusty debris of peat and hay, mixed with the perspirations and warmth of the dancers, and forming together a sort of vegeto-human pollen, the muted fiddles feebly pushed their notes, in marked contrast to the spirit with which the measure was trodden out. They coughed as they danced, and laughed as they coughed. Of the rushing couples there could barely be discerned more than the high lights - the indistinctness shaping them to satyrs clasping nymphs - a multiplicity of Pans whirling a multiplicity of Syrinxes; Lotis attempting to elude Priapus, and always failing.
At intervals a couple would approach the doorway for air, and the haze no longer veiling their features, the demigods resolved themselves into the homely personalities of her own next-door neighbours. Could Trantridge in two or three short hours have metamorphosed itself thus madly!

She did not abhor dancing, but she was not going to dance here. The movement grew more passionate: the fiddlers behind the luminous pillar of cloud now and then varied the air by playing on the wrong side of the bridge or with the back of the bow. But it did not matter; the panting shapes spun onwards.

They did not vary their partners if their inclination were to stick to previous ones. Changing partners simply meant that a satisfactory choice had not as yet been arrived at by one or other of the pair, and by this time every couple had been suitable matched. It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin'.

(Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbevilles, 1891)

(Pictures - top, Nastassja Kinski in the 1979 film version of Tess; bottom, people dancing in a barn in Dorset 2008 by Caiusp at Flickr)

Dancing Ledge

Are there many dancing places in the landscape? Obviously there are many places where people have danced in the open air, but what about places that actually have a dance-related name? Dancing Ledge in Dorset is one such place. Situated on the Isle of Purbeck a couple of miles south of Langton Matravers, it is a place created by quarrying. The removal of stone has created a flat surface next to the sea likened to a ballroom dancefloor, hence the name.

Not sure how often people have actually danced there - it is a bit of a climb down the rocks - but in 'Old Swanage: Past and Present' (1910), W.M. Hardy mentions a picnic and dancing on the ledge with music from the Swanage Brass and Reed Band and 'a plentiful repast, consisting of lobster tea, salad and liquid refreshments'.

Derek Jarman was very fond of this place, calling his autobiography after it and filming parts of The Angelic Conversation and his punk movie Jubilee there. At the end of the latter, Queen Elizabeth I and John Dee walk at the Ledge, the queen declaring: 'All my heart rejoiceth at the roar of the surf on the shingles marvellous sweet music it is to my ears - what joy there is in the embrace of water and earth'.

More songs about flowers and owls

'There's something in this valley... it's owls and flowers, and it's dangerous'

(Alan Garner, The Owl Service)

'there was a new sound, very close, broken by the water, but he could hear it, and it went on and on - a voice, humming, mumbling, scarcely words, but it was a kind of song''

'It was almost a chant. "Come, apple-sweet murmurer; come, harp of my gladness;

come, summer, come."' (Alan Garner, The Owl Service)

As I mentioned in the previous post, when Goldfrapp played at last week's Lovebox festival the stage set included a pagan lite smorgasbord of wolf masks, antlers and dancing maidens. At one point, a group of dancers in brightly coloured feathery costumes entered the fray - apparently owls.

The most recent Goldfrapp album - Seventh Tree - includes owl imagery aplenty on its cover - with a photo of Alison Goldfrapp in a kind of owl costume and a drawing by her of an owl/woman.

Simon Reynolds has previously picked up on this and the link to the fantastic (in every sense) The Owl Service, a 1967 novel for children by Alan Garner.

I think there may also be another source - The White Goddess by Robert Graves, in which he reconstructs/imagines a Celtic 'Tree Alphabet'. According to Graves, in this alphabet 'The seventh tree is the oak'.

Like Garner in the Owl Service, Graves draws on the Welsh folk story of Blodeuwedd, a woman magically created from flowers who is later turned into an owl.

For both Garner and Graves, she is a flower/owl goddess with both creative and destructive aspects. For Graves too she is a form of the White Goddess, the poet's muse and source of truth: 'The poet is in love with the White Goddess, with Truth: his heart breaks with longing for her. She is the Flower-goddess Olwen or Blodeuwedd; but she is also Blodeuwedd the Owl, lamp-eyed, hooting dismally, with her foul nest in the hollow of a dead tree'.

Graves also links owls to the Greek myth of the Sirens, enticing sailors to their deaths with their songs: 'Their wings were perhaps owl-wings, since Hesychius mentions a variety of owl called the Siren'.

The Owl Service, and the film The Wicker Man, both embody a recurring urban fantasy: that the British countryside, particularly its Celtic regions, is the home to secret pagan cults surviving from the pre-Christian era (see also Peter Ackroyd's Dorset novel First Light).

The content of these imagined cults is usually a heady brew of sex and the kind of fertility sacrifice James Frazer wrote of in his enormously influential The Golden Bough (first published in 1890). Robert Graves' description of an orgiastic pagan ritual gives a sense of the mixture of fascination/revulsion/titillation wrapped up with this fantasy: 'No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly forward, with a monotonous chant of 'Kill! kill! kill!' and 'Blood! Blood! Blood!''

All of this is grist to the mill of much weird folk. Unlike the earlier folk revivals, there is little concern with the suspect notion of the authentic music of the folk. Instead there is more of an interest in folklore (and its contemporary cinematic retellings) as a repository of strange and uncanny images, myths and stories.

Goldfrapp have sourced their visual aesthetic from this pool more than the lyrical/musical content of their songs, although a track like Little Bird with its striking imagery of a crow 'with mouths for eyes' would sit along the slightly spookier sounds of Joanna Newsom or Bat for Lashes. But bats - as opposed to owls - that's a whole other post....

'She was tall. Her long hair fell to her waist, framing in gold her pale and lovely face. Her eyes were blue. She wore a loose gown of white cambric, embroidered with living green stems of broom and meadowsweet, and a wreath of green oak leaves in her hair'

(Alan Garner, The Owl Service)

Dancing Questionnaire 4: Sonic Truth

Our latest dancing questionnaire comes courtesy of Muz from Sonic Truth and Whorecull.

Can you remember your first experience of dancing?
Aside from school-era disco and slow dances and the occasional breakdancing burn (we had our own ‘crew’ but were really too young to be serious), the first moment to stay in the memory is of someone’s birthday party in a village hall nr Farnham, Surrey, where I went to school. It was standard fare until the two Inner City tracks of the time – Big Fun and Good Life – were aired and enjoyed so much that they were, er, rewound several times. All the rave-like expressive hand and arm motions were employed.

What’s the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?
Nothing really stands out other than the usual catalogue of uncanny-then but sketchy-now moments. I’ve always been someone to get 'locked into' the dance, riding the ebb and flow, and no doubt critiquing the dj’s performance in my head, a complement to the whoops and come-ons around me. I’m also someone who instinctively migrates to the back of the dance rather than the front.

What’s the best place you’ve ever danced in?
Probably the Glastonbury car park at dawn with my mates in 2000. After three heavy nights with my mates, set and setting combined and Squarepusher never sounded more appropriate.

You. Dancing. The best of times…
Never really found a parallel to the hardcore scene for a year and a half from 1991-92. Not every event can be characterised by brilliant highs, but the expectation building up to events and the buzz at them are hard to recapture, not least because I would never have that youthful zeal again. In fact, I was known to dance so enthusiastically during these times that one or two associates were known to take the piss out of my full-cycle motions!

Ironically, the best collective moment through dancing was not music-related as such, but came when I was celebrating my team City get promoted in 2000. The outside lobby of the central Manchester hotel the players were at was a sea of blues, dancing and chanting to a City mantra until it was genuinely ‘tribal’ in nature, disconnected from place or time. Sean ‘Feed the’ Goater came and saw us and it was all good thereafter. Like carnival but more extreme.

You. Dancing. The worst of times…Any time where circumstances and habits compel you to drink too much before the main club action, or when someone says something at the wrong time, exploding paranoia and putting me right off the rhythm. It’s happened a few times.

Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you’ve frequented?
Though I’d been listening to rave pretty much since it went overground, the first serious dancing was via the aforementioned hardcore rave scene. During this time, there would also be the occasional mosh-out to whatever noise-rock we liked that week. One of my mates once ended up in first aid due to getting caught up in the moshpit at a Ride gig at the Kentish Town T&C; I ended up in Dorset.

The rave places included sanitised home counties venues like the Park Prewett Mental Hospital in Basingstoke, Farnborough Recreation Centre, Reading Rivermead Centre, as well as in lots of fields round Surrey or Hampshire and London venues such as Labryinth, the Lazerdrome in Peckham and the Tasco Warehouse in Plumstead. Nights included Evolution, Yikes!, Zen, Desire, Innersense and loads more cheesy-sounding names.

From late 1992 I went to Leeds university, and there was a self-imposed hiatus from the harder side of dance music where narcotics might be required. It was broken only by acid jazz/latin/funk nights, where I learned to express myself in different ways with alcohol as an accompaniment, or the occasional house/techno shindig in one of the city’s “clubs of the year” (Vague, @ the Warehouse, Back to Basics/Up Yer Ronson at the Music Factory, the Orbit in Morley).

On return from Leeds, there was another lull as Britpop dominated before I moved to London in late 1996, where eventually there were enough connections to start going out dancing again, mainly to ‘deep’ house (Rob Mello, Kenny Hawkes and co), jungle (in a scene increasingly ruled by techsteppers like Ed Rush) and electro, with the occasional hip-hop gig. During these times up to the commitment of raising a family last year, I probably got closest to where my mind needed to be for continued dancing, rather than hanging around jerking on the periphery. The house scene around London was the mainstay, at nights like Wednesday’s Space @ Bar Rhumba and Derrick Carter’s bimonthlies at the End, with the occasional label-related do in warehouses around Hackney. That contributed a lot to the more digital/synthy side of house now. Also, all my flatshares had decks as the main entertainment focus so there could be long nights dancing at home.

When and where did you last dance?
At the party after the screening of the McClintock Factor.

You’re on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?
Too many to mention – so I’ll pick a few faves from some of the highlighted genres. Derrick May/It is What it Is; Joey Beltram/Energy Flash; Nookie/Love Is; DJ Krust/Warhead; Gang Starr/Dwyck; Technasia/Technasia; Isolee – Beau Mot Plage/, etc, etc.

Desire flyer reproduced from the amazing collection at Hardcore U Know the Score