The illegal free party scene has come back: the green fields of the West Country and Wales rock to the sound of a repetitive beat for days on end. How do the organisers defeat the police helicopters?
It had been some years since I’d last seen my friend, George. At school we were close, but he got kicked out a couple of weeks before our final term ended for fighting with one of the science teachers. When I got in touch with him, he told me that he didn’t really know all that much about the free party scene. It was sort of on the periphery of the stuff that he’s into, but he could probably, he thought, point me in the right direction.
When I get to the bar, George is standing there on the phone, having an animated conversation about a party in Germany. He is trying, he explains when he hangs up, to get a float to Berlin for Love Parade. The paperwork is proving difficult.
We order chicken, and when our food comes, George explains that what we’re seeing as a result of all these clubs being closed is a huge rise in illegal raves, in the woods and fields, and squat parties. ‘It’s only gonna become more and more of a problem and the government will wake up one day and realise, ‘Oh my God. We’ve got this huge issue on our hands again.’
In the 1990s, after the Criminal Justice Act effectively banned raves, the authorities started to feel like they had control. The act gave the police the ability to remove ‘persons on land in the open air’, listening to music ‘played during the night’, which is ‘wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. Although free parties never went away, the police, as a result of the act, gained far greater powers to stop parties like the Castlemorton Free Festival, which happened in late May 1992 and which was attended by some 40,000.
The thing about the party, according to George, is that it’s an almost organic thing that can’t be killed. What you end up with instead is a kind of strange fragmented scene that gets driven underground. Part of that is that DJs don’t make any money, but he also reckons that squat parties, which are one of the consequences of losing venues, can be pretty dangerous. Free parties in the countryside, he adds vaguely, are pretty safe, but ‘in London in the squat party scene, you got a lot of grooming going on. Like child prostitution and really dark horrible stuff. Kids find these places, these parties, and they get exposed to these worlds.’
After lunch, we lie outside on sun loungers, and George tells me there is one guy he knows of who has links to the free party scene, a guy called DJ Fu.
It takes me a while to track Fu down – for much of the summer, he says, when I finally do get him, he was in Africa, DJing out in the desert. He says he’ll speak because I’m a mate of ‘Georgie boy’ but at the same time, he’d rather not because as it happens, there are five books he’s thinking of writing himself and he doesn’t want to give all his stories away. What he’s sitting on, he tells me, is ‘bestseller stuff ’, and what he’s after is ‘a major publishing deal’.
In the 2000s, he was in a gang that raided 19 cannabis factories. ‘Listen brother,’ he tells me twice, ‘it’s not fiction.’ Some years after that, he flew to Cyprus, where they took over a radio station. ‘That story,’ he assures me, ‘would sell like wildfire.’
He won’t disclose what the third and fourth book would be about, but the fifth, he tells me, would be about the free party scene. In a strange way, Fu thinks the scene’s current appeal is partly due to free parties being a source of excitement in a world where excitement is hard to find. The way it works, he explains, is that beyond the people bringing the sound systems, nobody really knows where they’re going. You just get given a vague part of the country and a number to call on the day that will give you a meeting point. Generally, those organising free parties use a burner phone with a pre-recorded voicemail message. ‘Got to be a bit smart, brother. Party line, not on Facebook, not on socials.’
When I ask Fu if farmers or landowners ever turn up and whether they mind, he says, ‘Course they turn up, geezer.’ But again, he reminds me that kids need to be ‘a little bit smart’. The ideal scenario is that everyone keeps the phone number to themselves, gets in there when it’s dark, and by the time the police turn up the following morning, everyone’s done. ‘Bish bosh, we’re drinking tea, munching on our bacon sandwiches.’ Fu tells me that some parts of the UK have always been free party hotspots, such as the West Country and East Anglia, whereas there are other parts, such as Essex, where it’s not worth trying. I ask him why, and he says it just is what it is. ‘They just won’t have it. Free parties in Essex, forget about it.’
In recent years, Fu thinks they’ve really been clamping down hard on the scene. He doesn’t tell me why, except that he thinks those involved are perceived as outlaws. ‘Basically, we don’t consent, yeah. We don’t pay tax, we don’t live by the rules. Unless you’re kind of in it, it’s really hard to explain.’
What Fu thinks the authorities fail to see is that free parties in remote places are as safe as it comes. ‘We look after each other. Everyone knows everyone and if anyone bad comes in the circle, they get dealt with.’ He points to Frenchtek, a huge annual party, which happened in 2023 on 70 hectares near the usually quiet hamlet of Fouillereau, right in the middle of France. There, the ravers create their own culture of safety. There were, Fu tells me, two men who assaulted a girl and justice was served. The wheels were taken off their car, they were ‘slapped up’ in front of everyone, and were then marched out with everyone chanting ‘violeur’. It sounds a little odd, but the landowner reportedly felt that those partying behaved so well, including turning off the music for two hours each day to tidy up, that he decided not to bother pressing charges.
When I ask Fu who he can put me in touch with, he tells me he can’t put me in touch with anyone. ‘I don’t know you’, and if I hadn’t come through ‘Georgie boy’, he continues, he wouldn’t have spoken to me at all. But he tells me too that if I really want to understand, I’ve got to go to the parties. ‘Follow your nose, brother. Read between the lines.’
Throughout the summer, I do my best to find a way in. I contact Fortune Audio, Tree Hugging Crew, Descendant Audio, CroakTek, Rotten Noise and a whole host of other people running rigs, but none of them give me so much as a crumb. The consensus is that the police don’t care much about arresting people who go to illegal raves, but they will always try to confiscate rigs because without them, there’s no party. Consequently, the crews that build them and drive them across the country are cautious.
By early August, the closest I’ve got is being added to a Telegram group run by somebody in the West Country who is shifting industrial quantities of ketamine. Then just as summer is starting to run out, I hear back from a filmmaker called Elliot. He is trying to get a documentary made that compares the squat rave scene with the free party scene. He tells me, at length, about his understanding of how and why the two scenes differ. At squat parties, he thinks there’s always a chance that you’re going to get stabbed, but the further you go into the wild, the more the mood changes.
By the time we’ve finished talking, he’s texted a number through. It’s the line for ‘a massive two-day party’, with multiple crews, which is due to happen the following weekend somewhere in the West Country. ‘Obviously,’ he says again before he rings off, ‘don’t give it to anyone else, and no socials,’ but more than anything he wants me to speak afterwards. He wants me to tell him what I thought. He talks about it all as though he’s sending me on a trip to see something that will make me realise things I couldn’t have possibly known before.
We are buying beer at the petrol station just before the Hammersmith Flyover, heading west out of London, when the first location drops. The person reading the note sounds oddly like a small child: ‘Hello ravers and welcome to the south-west bank holiday free party hotline. Start getting down to the Bristol-Gloucester area. Please call back after six o’clock for directions to the main convoy meeting point, which you’ll need to be at by 9pm.’
The message rounds off by saying that the party location is sheltered but outdoors and adds, before breaking off into a jungle track, that anybody coming down should be prepared to stick it out for two nights.
My friend Jack, who is sitting next to me in the passenger seat, opens a can of beer and then pulls a map up on his phone and prods at the cracked screen with his index finger. It’s not, we both agree, very much to go on. ‘Whitminster, Dursley, Tetbury.’ Jack runs through various places on the map in between Bristol and Gloucester. ‘I guess we’ll be there for a bit’, he continues, looking at the clock on the dashboard, which at an hour fast, is reading 1.30pm. We decide, eventually, that Stroud would be a good place to find a pub to sit in for a bit, while we wait for the second location to be announced, and we head off down the M4, sitting in the slow lane while heavy drops of rain start to fall.
By the time we get to Cirencester, the weather has cleared, and because we’ve got so much time to kill we go to the Roman amphitheatre where we pick brambles, then sit at the top of one of the slopes, eating them and drinking beer in the sun. ‘It says here,’ Jack tells me, reading off his phone, ‘that after the Roman Empire collapsed, the amphitheatre became a rabbit warren then a place for bull baiting.’ A small black plane above us is flying sharply upwards, casting a white plume out behind it against the bright blue. It sweeps round, creating a circle, and then turns sharply inwards to add large eyes and a smiling mouth.
We head on to Stroud, where we spend two hours in an almost-empty pub garden, sitting under a wisteria, while waiting for the next message on the party line. When it drops, it’s late, and it seems we should have gone much further west. ‘Get to the Asda in Swansea by 9pm – convoy will be leaving there at 10pm so don’t be late to guarantee vehicle entry to the party. Park sensibly and do not attract attention.’
After an hour on the road, we stop at the Severn Bridge services to get coffee. There are families gathered round grubby tables at Burger King, and tired salesmen eating sad sandwiches but there are young people too, shaven-headed girls with neck tattoos, new age travellers piling out of old vans and bright-eyed kids in hatchbacks full of duvets. At an M48 motorway service station that in 2019 was voted Britain’s grimmest, there is a sense of anxiety and magic.
The tide is right out beneath the Severn Bridge and the mud is black. Cars tear past us, girls in bright pink fur and topless boys. By the time we get to Port Talbot, the last of the sun has gone down over the Atlantic and fumes from the steelworks are lit up purple and blue, drifting into the low clouds. At the Asda in Swansea, the car park is alive. Women in fishnets are doing laughing gas and people are sitting together on plastic camping chairs. I go inside and queue up for cigarettes. The lady at the till, pointing towards the aisles, asks the guy in front of me what we’re all doing. She has never, she says cheerfully, ‘seen anything quite like it’. He tells her, as though he has no idea what she’s talking about at all, that none of us are together. He’s just staying at the Travelodge across the car park ‘to visit family’.
By 9.45pm, three police cars roll into the car park, lights flashing. ‘So what happens now?’ I ask a toothless Bristolian in a Hawaiian shirt, who’s been telling me about keeping chickens in Portugal before his wife left him and took their dog. ‘We wait,’ he replies, ‘then we scramble.’ I head back to the car and the three police patrol cars drive round and round for 20 minutes while everyone hangs tight. The car park is still filling up and a red VW, with sun-bleached paint, pulls up next to us. ‘It’s the young ones,’ the driver explains to Jack. ‘It’s the kids. They draw attention. They can’t help themselves.’ At 10pm, the party line hasn’t been updated, but horns start going and people start pinging past us. We follow and end up one car park over, next to the petrol station. ‘We just spread out,’ a young northern guy tells us, ‘we spread right out and then we go.’ The police roll round in front of us and the officer in the passenger seat takes a picture of everyone’s licence plate.
The mood, by half-11, starts to hollow out, and it feels like people are drifting off. We ask three boys, who can’t be much older than 17, whether it matters that the police have come. ‘Nah, bro,’ one replies. ‘It’ll happen, brother. Trust me. This has happened so many times.’ At 11.45pm, the party line is updated but all it says is that everybody should hang tight. They are going to rush the sound systems up onto the mountain and then they’re going to drop the final location. Ten minutes later, the coordinates are released and a girl standing next to me, in a puffy camouflage dress, throws her joint onto the ground, jumps into the driver’s seat, and drives away. We fall in behind, the lights of the convoy stretch on ahead of us as far as we can see and the rain starts coming down hard. It has just gone Sunday, and we are all heading for Rhigos Mountain.
On the way there, five patrol cars pass, sirens wailing, seemingly trying to get ahead of us, and 40 minutes later, when we get to the mountain road, heading up into the Cynon Valley, it seems as though it’s over. They have all pulled across the entrance to the firetrack into the forest and there is a helicopter sweeping across the sky, a searchlight moving back and forth beneath it over the tops of the trees. ‘I don’t give a fuck,’ a boy behind us says in a Bristol accent, ‘we’ll leave the cars and walk if we have to. We’ll have a fucking riot. We’ve come to party.’
It’s a steep half-hour drive up the mountain and when we get to the top, the helicopter is hanging low in the rainy sky, hovering above a clearing in the pines where three crews are still setting up their rigs. It’s 2am and it seems like some of the crusties have been in situ for a while. A half-clothed girl is lying on a camp bed in a caravan, blowing plumes of smoke into the air and two women, who must be in their 50s and who look as though they’ve been on the road for some years, are slicing up limes for a cocktail. ‘It almost didn’t happen,’ one of the guys building the biggest of the rigs tells me when I pass, ‘but those are always the best parties.’ The crews themselves spend thousands on putting parties on – they have to buy the kit, maintain it, get it all there, run the generators, and they make nothing at all. Some people suggest that the crews should be paid for all of their efforts, but any money changing hands would undermine the whole philosophy of the movement. Illegal raves high in the mountains, complete with no car-parking charges, are one of the only truly free ways to enjoy rural Britain.
By 3am, the lights and projectors are going and Jack and I stand in front of a hypnotic video of a detached eyeball, with a large dilated pupil, rolling round and round with pink octopus tentacles meshing and unmeshing behind it. We watch for a couple of minutes, then we walk back to the car to get more beers. When we get there, some guy who has been locked in his van gets out and starts shouting at his girlfriend, then vomits. He tells her he was in there for an hour and she replies, through tears, that it was only ten minutes at the most and that she didn’t mean to lock him in there. He starts saying ‘you did’, over and over and moves towards her as though he might hit her then he vomits again, bent double in the mud, retching. ‘I’m not fucking doing this’, she cries, crouching with her face in her hands.
Back at the party, some new age travellers have got a hot water urn going and 15 of us, including a man with a dog, stand there in the rain drinking coffee. At 4am, all of the sound systems are going, all carefully positioned so that they don’t drown each other out. Jack and I stand among the crowd in front of a stack of speakers playing a jungle mashup of The Prodigy.
Raindrops, as they pour through blue and green beams, catch the fluorescence, and speckle the night. A man comes and stands next to us and asks if we have any 2C-B. ‘I’m sorry,’ I reply, ‘we don’t.’ He smiles and says ‘That is a pity,’ because nor does he. He talks for some time about Russia. ‘Does anybody ever tell you that you look Russian?’ He stares at me hard, then puts his arm around Jack. After a bit his sister appears and asks where we’re from. I tell her we’ve come from London and then I tell her we actually only came because I’m a writer. She smiles at me. ‘Nobody gives a fuck why you’re here. We’re all just here.’
Ten minutes later, the rain stops and light starts to seep into the sky, revealing heavy grey rain clouds, together with all the bodies and nitrous oxide canisters strewn across the mud. Jack and I pick our way through and stand where the ground drops away to forest. There must be ten of us looking across into the low-lying cloud. In the night it was impossible to see where we were, but at first light, the land starts to take shape. ‘It was a colliery,’ a boy to my left, who seems to be by himself, tells me. I ask him who owns the land now and he looks at me with big black pupils and tells me thoughtfully that nobody knows. Nobody seems to know and nobody seems to care. In the moment, the mountain belongs to us. We have made it ours, a place that had been mined and then planted up with commercial forestry.
We sleep for a couple of hours and then it takes a long while to get back down the mountain and we don’t say very much to each other. We’re going to get out of Wales and we’re going to get coffee. We drive past the broken gate and out onto the road, and then at the bottom of the hill we see the flashing lights. A police van and two patrol cars, as we were told would happen, have the road completely blocked off. I spin round and go back the other way. We drive right over the mountain and then when it looks like we’re away, we start talking again, I put the radio on, and Jack rolls a cigarette. Then we round a corner and drive straight into an almost identical roadblock.
The officer walks slowly towards the car and stoops so his head is almost inside the window. ‘Where’ve you come from then, boys?’ I tell him that we came from that party, but I was only there, I explain, because I’m writing a book on land access. He looks at Jack and then looks back at me. ‘Very interesting, boys.’ I try to get ahead of him. ‘It took me ages to get that party line.’ The officer cuts me off – ‘Well, it didn’t take us very long at all.’ He looks to his colleague with the van and then looks back at us. ‘You tell me this, boys, they say that they’re going to party till Wednesday. What do you reckon?’ Jack and I glance at each other, then tell him it would be some going and it seems unlikely. It rained all night, and there can’t be more than a thousand people up there. The officer looks at us, taps the roof of my car, then signals to his colleague, who reverses the van up onto the verge and we drive east to Merthyr Tydfil. That evening, I read that there were five arrests and one of the sound systems was impounded.
There is something hyper-modern about the free party scene – all those speakers and all that 2C-B, but it’s an ancient thing too. There is faith in the mountains. And George is right, the party is primitive and amorphous. It exists within us and it cannot die.
This is an edited and abridged excerpt from Patrick’s book, Uncommon Ground, which you can order here.
