RAVE TUNES

Today I am listening back to old rave tunes and thinking about what’s been lost since the day of the first free festivals.

Within pride there has become an effort to resist assimilation which has been brought along with the naming of Marsha P as the starter of the gay rights movement Within the drugs, class and land world this has not happened.

Festivals have gates and fences and police. Someone always has to have their life ruined for selling everyone drugs on site. Before this, I’m told, gangs made festivals a hostile environment. Everyone knows everyone is on drugs but will stand by while someone is hung out to dry to create the safety they could get from legalisation. This is the white method of safety. It’s arbitrary and random, like a shit game of musical chairs. We could have just decriminalized drugs?

I came from where your drug came from. I lived in your dealer’s house. As a child I saw your drugs cut and weighed. The police came and fucked up my home. And then a judge took it away. You weren’t there then. And when my life fell apart you disappeared. No one defended my dad.

When I hear Sweet Harmony I don’t think of a euphoric moment of everyone coming together, I feel like I’m gonna explode because there’s a child with complex adult feelings of loss that it can’t understand. The loss absorbed all that energy, hope and magic and it became an insincere promise. I suppose that’s a pinger summed up neatly. Drugs will never disappear but punishment for them will. It’s just a matter of time sadly.

Mostly I remember as a kid feeling like scum. That’s what I was called at school when people found out my dad was a dealer. But at the same time everyone wanted something from me too. Access to substances. So entitled. You feel like you have a right to free porn; you have a right to whatever drug you want. But have you ever thought about what happened to all the people that have supplied you with all those experiences? I hope one day dealers will become class conscious with sex workers and all outlaws. I dream of a united underclass, who rejects their grooming, low self esteem and no rights while providing a service.

I’ve been demoralized, humiliated and groomed by people with so much more power than me throughout my life and had nothing stable. I wasn’t allowed because I was dependent on someone who relied on illegal labour to survive. It didn’t have to be that way.

A Mansfield MP recently said we have to stop giving the free food vouchers because it ends up in brothels. That’s literally the point. I can’t imagine going through what I went through with an added pandemic. There were many times that we had no gas or leccy because of a drought. When things got worse, I had no home, no parents looking out for me, no phone, nothing. The only guarantee was that I’d get £1.50 a day of food at school. Without that I would have had to steal food. Without that hand out you’re denying people access to safe ways of getting their needs met.

I found several pictures of me laying asleep on the floor in various raves.. It’s all still a mess in my mind. I became that entitled person with my own drug habits. Around the time was the jubilee when the queen toured the UK and I saw her in real life, on the high street in Nottingham, while I was wonky on ketamine. I thought that Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, which I also remember seeing on ket, was a month later. Turns out it was over a year later. Which sez a lot about my 2013. I only left the house to go to free parties. I was banned from most places in Notts and became agoraphobic and incapable of fitting into the world whatsoever. Free parties felt like this place where I couldn’t make a mistake or get thrown out. I had been getting thrown out my whole life. Out of my home. Out of my family. Out of pubs and clubs. Over those years I remember multiple hospitalizations, X-Rays, drips, stitches, and making bad non-choices. All I did in those places was nap on the floor in the dirt.