The venue was sorted (a massive squat right next to the town hall), flyers had been printed and distributed, T was driving the van and I’d hustled up the money for the bar stock. But the most important bit of kit we’d picked up from Harmans at short notice, a 5K generator. We needed it because the night before our party, the squatters had let another promoter have an acid house party and the police, who had turned up too late to stop it, arrived in the morning with Seaboard and disconnected the power, figuring that would put a stop to any more party shenanigans.
I’d never been to an acid house party, but knew all about them. I’d spent the previous two years hanging out at all-night reggae blues parties, which ran as regular as clockwork in various Van Hoogstraten properties throughout Brighton & Hove. The police had generally left these parties alone, as long as there was no trouble in them, they could carry on unhindered.
Acid house changed the game almost overnight. Politicians, egged on by the press were frothing at the mouth about this new evil menace to the youth of Britain and the police had to be seen to be doing something, even though they didn’t really want to.
This sudden change of circumstances presented a bit of a problem for the reggae crews, and me in particular, having been the one to invest all my hard-earned money into this, my first illegal party. Prior to this I’d earned my stripes sweeping up after the parties, manning the door until I was eventually one of the DJs. This was the first time I’d been in charge of the whole shebang. Of course being only 18, I figured I was smarter than the police. After all, I’d been selling weed for the last few years and they had yet to pin anything on me, despite their best efforts. I was even on first name terms with most of the local drug squad.
I figured all we had to do was turn up at 5pm rather than 11pm, an hour before the party started (which was our usual modus operandi). I knew once we were in and the party was in full swing the police would be unable to stop it without causing a mini-riot. We just had to be one step ahead of them.
This probably would have worked had it not been for the fact that my nemeses, the local drug squad officers, had been following my every move for several weeks. So by the time we rocked up outside the venue, several plainclothes policemen had been sat in a Pizza Express opposite the venue for five hours, waiting for our arrival.
As soon as we all got out of the van the air was filled with the wail of police sirens and squad cars blocked off each end of the street. The undercover police rushed out of Pizza Express and shouted at us to stop right where we were. My heart sank, “For fuck’s sake,” I thought. “Why didn’t we come earlier?”
Back at the station, after the usual verbal abuse and good cop bad cop routine, it was obvious they only wanted to stop the party, not arrest us. In fact, we hadn’t actually done anything illegal so they couldn’t charge us with anything even if they’d wanted to (I’d managed to get rid of the tiny bit of pot I had on me before they could find it). In the end, they just kept us in the cells till they figured it was too late for us to get a party started, which was about 5am. They decided to keep the booze though, and it would be another three weeks before we managed to get it back, minus a crate or two.
Not long after this T died in a motorbike accident and, fed up with the attention from the police, I quit being a party organiser and instead became a party goer, immersing myself in this vibrant new subculture called acid house. The second Summer of Love was by now in full swing and it wouldn’t be long before I was organising my own acid house parties. Only this time I would be going head-to-head with the police for the next 10 years and literally fighting for my right to party.
WORDS BY DIZZY DREADLOCKS
PHOTO BY VINILOBCN ON FLICKR
