20 Years of Rave

Image from PYMCA

I'm absolutely loving PYMCA (Photographic Youth Music Culture Archive) at the moment. As well as an excellent image library to use and peruse, it has had two cracking exhibition's on recently. This was England and more recently Pills, Stills and Bellyaches - 20 years of rave. Rave was probably the first musical subculture that influenced me and my circle of friends. Living near Brighton, the South Downs became an area rife with raves (and still is by the looks of things here). As organisers looked for larger spaces to hold bigger gatherings and keep events under the radar, the countryside close to London was perfect.

At the time there wasn't really any interesting subcultures to identify with. It was the point of transition from the 80s to the 90s where not much was really happening. It was unclear who was who and who was into what. Clubs and pubs were pretty uninteresting. There wasn't much live music, they weren't playing the music that certain people wanted to listen to because of its association with drugs and they had strict dress codes to supposedly keep the 'riff-raff' out, but essentially made everyone look the same. I guess you could call it a relatively boring middle England at the time.

This meant rave spilled out into warehouses and open spaces where people were free from the restrictions placed on them by mainstream culture and that's when it really took off. It became a real herd movement I suppose. The obvious illegal element attracted rebellious young people who loved the secrecy surrounding many raves. It was fuelled by unstructured mass gatherings that my generation at least had no experience of. It wasn't just about the music, in fact I prefer more of the genres it inspired rather than rave as it was back then. It was more about the social side of it, it was the feeling and the atmosphere that the music created among huge groups of people and to be honest I don't ever recall there being much trouble at raves.

On top of the music, the atmosphere, going to Sterns, hassling older mates to give us a lift and traipsing about fields, there was the whole interaction between each other that also united our group of friends. We used to spend hours of an evening copying each others tapes and weekends were spent going round the record shops listening to vinyl and getting all the latest flyers that would decorate our bedrooms. Some of which would become quite rare. So much so, people were even buying and trading them, they were a bit of a social currency. You would then have to keep the flyers of the rave and cut front covers out of them for your cassettes. Man, talking about cassettes and flyers makes me feel old.

After emerging from the acid house movement in the 80s, rave culture's association with drug fuelled space cadets with glow sticks and whistles overshadows the influence it has had on a number of other genres such as hardcore, jungle, drum and bass as well as more recognisable bands such as Happy Mondays, Primal Scream, New Order and The Stones Roses. Bands you could arguably say have then gone on to influence the likes of Oasis and Kasabian.