Taking Liberties To Hull And Back
Hi there, and thanks for reading - I’m Ed Gillett, an author and journalist focusing on the points where politics, policing, communities and culture meet.
My first book, Party Lines, comes out in August. From the illicit reggae blues dances and acid-rock free festivals of the 1970s, through the ecstasy-fuelled Second Summer of Love in 1988, to the increasingly corporate dance music culture of the 21st century, Party Lines is a groundbreaking new history of UK dance music, exploring its pivotal role in the social, political and economic shifts on which modern Britain has been built.
In the lead-up to the book’s release, I’ll be sharing some of the fascinating material I’ve uncovered during the writing process, from weird rave ephemera to extended interviews with people who’ve been instrumental in the social and political evolution of UK dance music over the decades.
Hello! Before I get into things, here’s some very exciting news: we’re throwing a party on Thursday August 3rd at The Social in London to celebrate Party Lines’ publication. There will be books and talks and music: you should join us!
We’ll be announcing the lineup and ticket details very soon, but for the time being please mark the date in your diary and enjoy this extremely dumb facsimile of a 90s rave poster which I made on my lunch break. Because people have genuinely asked about this, I should be clear that there won’t actually be a funfair. Apologies.
I’m in the process of confirming a bunch of other speaking gigs around the UK for the coming months, so hopefully I’ll be passing through your part of the world soon to explain in person how Spiral Tribe inadvertently created today’s stop and search laws, or what Theodor Adorno can tell us about Kevin & Perry Go Large
If you’re interested in having me over for a talk or Q&A, or know someone who might be (whether your local library, music festival or pirate radio station) please do give me a shout on hello@edwardgillett.com
Right, with that out the way, let’s begin!
For any aspiring writer, there are few two-word phrases more tantalising than “research trip” - a proper chance to get your hands dirty, dig into the archives, unearth some long-forgotten piece of history and bring it into the light.
If you’re writing about dance music, that excitement is invariably heightened by the heady promise of late-night glamour and global adventure - for my friend Gabriel Szatan’s forthcoming book on Daft Punk, which you are absolutely going to want to read, it’s meant trips to the US and Paris to track down house music legends, obscure early-career acquaintances and various reclusive family members. For me, it meant getting a 6am train to Hull.
And yet this was as thrilling a journey as VIP access to Berghain or a free trip to Ibiza might be for others. Getting access to the Hull History Centre, and the little-known trove of rave-related materials housed within it, had been on my bucket list for years.
My first proper job out of university, and an experience which has informed much of my subsequent writing and thinking, involved working as a volunteer at the human rights charity Liberty: I answered the phones, made cups of tea for Shami Chakrabarti, helped write the odd bit of website content, and eventually stuck around long enough to be offered a paid role.
A decent chunk of my time was spent in a cramped basement boxing up huge stacks of letters, research papers, legal filings and other ephemera, covering topics from the Labour government’s plans for the 42-day detention of terrorism suspects to the prosecution of UN whistleblower Katherine Gun a few years earlier (Official Secrets, the 2019 thriller starring Keira Knightley as Gun, loses serious accuracy points for depicting Liberty’s offices as substantially less grubby than they actually were).
Like the final scene in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, these boxes of old Liberty materials were then shipped off to their final resting place in the modern history section of the University of Hull’s expansive archive, which includes papers dating back to the charity’s foundation as the National Council for Civil Liberties in 1934.
From the moment I started sketching out a structure for Party Lines in late 2020, I knew that its narrative was going to hinge on 1994’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. This huge and draconian piece of legislation, with its infamous proscriptions on “repetitive beats”, marks the historical dividing line between dance music as a countercultural and potentially disruptive mass movement, and its rehabilitation as a lucrative facet of the creative and leisure industries.
Liberty had been a key part of the popular campaign against the CJA, which united ravers with hunt saboteurs, environmental protestors, squatters and a collection of left-wing activists (including, with dreary inevitably and to the deep annoyance of others involved in the campaign, the fun-free sloganeering of the Socialist Workers Party).
When Autechre released their Anti EP in 1994, it featured a track called Flutter, whose shifting rhythmic patterns were designed to evade the proposed law on repetitive beats: listeners were advised to “"have a lawyer and a musicologist present at all times to confirm the non repetitive nature of the music in the event of police harassment". Warp Records donated the proceeds of the record to Liberty’s anti-CJA fighting fund.
My thoughts inexorably turned to that vast archive in Hull, and the Liberty volunteers employed a decade before me, whose job it would have been to box up stacks of rave-related materials in that dingy basement. As soon as Covid restrictions eased, I booked my trip.
To my surprise, the first folder I was handed by the archive clerk didn’t include documents, but photos from one of the three anti-CJA marches organised in central London over the course of 1994, probably the first of them in May of that year.
As far as I can tell, these images were captured by a Liberty staff member called Atiya Gourlay, and haven’t been seen publicly since. You’ll have to forgive the terrible quality of my attempts to capture them on my phone, but even in second-hand form they’re still fascinating and powerful.
Digging further into the archive unearthed other gems, like a letter from “Gaz & The Mental Elemental Crew” describing illegal raves in Leicester being shut down using new Criminal Justice Act powers over the course of 1995, recorded as part of Liberty’s post-CJA monitoring project.
Gaz and his mates, however, had found a loophole in the new law: the original wording of the CJA only covered events taking place “in the open air” which meant that warehouses were still fair game, and allowed Mental Elemental to successfully throw a party “in an empty building about 1/2 a mile from Leicester’s biggest police station.”
Other documents covered a case brought against free festival stalwart (and self-styled reincarnation of King Arthur) Arthur Pendragon over his attempted pilgrimage to Stonehenge for the summer solstice. With Liberty’s support, he was acquitted of “trespassory assembly” - a new offence introduced by the CJA - in the autumn of 1995.
I also found vital information about two anti-CJA activists who’d become semi-mythical within my research, and whom I’d already spent countless hours trying to track down.
According to several members of the “techno terrorist” soundsystem Spiral Tribe, these two people disappeared shortly after the CJA became law, never to be seen again, prompting suspicions that they were in fact deep-cover police officers or intelligence agents.
Liberty’s files included details of the solicitor who’d represented the pair when they’d been charged with drug possession and conspiracy to commit a breach of the peace (the charges were dropped before making it to court, another potential sign that all might not have been as it seemed). But a phone call to the lawyer in question simply raised more questions: they too couldn’t recall seeing or hearing about either activist after late 1994.
But perhaps my favourite piece of Liberty-related archive material wasn’t legal, political or rave-related at all: it was a Christmas card.
When I’d worked at Liberty in the late 2000s, one running joke around the office involved a huge stack of promotional tea towels, ordered by an enterprising but impulsive employee in the 90s. They’d been printed with the Liberty logo, a slogan declaring I WANT TO BREAK FREE and an endearingly naive cartoon depiction of Freddie Mercury in full onstage regalia, fist outstretched. Except no-one had thought to clear the lyrics or image with Mercury’s estate - a particularly glaring omission for a legal charity - rendering the tea towels unsellable, and leaving them boxed up in the basement for the next 15 years (they’re probably still there now, if they haven’t been sent to Hull).
Liberty’s fundraising Christmas card for 1994 had clearly been designed with the same irreverent sense of humour. It depicts the Three Wise Men on their camels, looking perplexedly at a line of armoured police blocking the road to Bethlehem. The caption reads “Stopped on suspicion of travelling to an illegal gathering.”
Not everyone found it funny. “I recently received a Christmas card which depicts the Three Wise Men being stopped by a number of uniform police officers.” thunders the outraged Chief Constable of Gloucestershire, in a letter which accompanies the card in Liberty’s archives:
“The clear implication from the card is that the police are oppressively using the powers enacted by Parliament in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act…
Consequently, I do not take the sentiments of your Christmas card lightly and find them somewhat offensive to the members of the Gloucestershire Constabulary…
It does not dignify your organisation by making somewhat cheap comments at a time of deep religious significance to many people by a generalised slur on the British Police Service.”
The letter is dated Christmas Eve, 1994. I can picture some poor junior police staffer or secretary tasked with typing it up, long after they should have left the office and gone home to their family: along with the free party ravers, squatters and hunt saboteurs, here was one final, previously undiscovered victim of the Criminal Justice Act.
Thanks for reading, and look out for the next issue of this newsletter coming soon!
All the best,
Ed