24-Hour Party People
2018; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/07402775-6894684
ISSN1936-0924
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
Resumo“Crusties,” we called them. You don’t see them around today as much as you did in the 1990s and early 2000s. Back then they were a familiar sight on the streets of Britain’s cities. The term evokes white, matted dreadlocks; drab combat fatigues; and a mangy-looking dog on a string traipsing behind. “Crusty” as in encrusted dirt, dirt as a deliberate embrace of grotesquerie, a statement of resistance against society, proof of nomadic hardship. You’d often see them begging in the centers of small cities, drinking, perhaps the more enterprising of them trying to earn a few quid doing street performances, selling woven bracelets, or giving henna tattoos to teenage German tourists. Substance abuse, homelessness, poverty, and trouble with the law were rife among members of the community. In the minds of mainstream society, they were simply a bunch of dropouts in need of a shower. But if you knew how to read the aesthetics of postwar British pop culture, their bashed-up army boots, their piercings, and the unnameable green-brown-grey hue of their clothes signaled that they were among the remaining members of what was once a vibrant subculture.Dial back the clock to the 1980s and 90s and “crusty” was just a pejorative term for those known as New Age Travelers, members of the “peace convoy,” eco-warriors. Going even further back to the 1970s, they were hippies, freaks, and long-hairs. New Age Travelers weren’t out begging on the streets, but roaming the British countryside in caravans of old double-decker buses, camper vans, and converted army ambulances. Their culture orbited around a jumble of leftist, anarchist, antiwar, and environmentalist causes. They would camp at the edges of small villages and at music festivals, or engage in direct-action protests against motorways tearing through greenbelt land. I remember one bright summer after-noon in 1986, when, as a 10-year-old on a family vacation in rural Dorset, we drove past what seemed to be an infinitely long convoy of travelers along the edge of the road. Vans and trucks were painted in colors that may once have been vivid but had been dulled by exhaust fumes and mud. Men and women who looked like refugees from a future apocalypse stood by their vehicles, uneasily watching the large numbers of police patrolling the road. The travelers belonged to a subculture that was routinely pushed around by heavy-handed law enforcement, and whose fate was directly shaped by the effects of public order and housing legislation.There is no clear originating moment in New Age Traveler history. They emerged slowly from the British underground of the 1970s, a period characterized by collective disappointment after the revolutions promised by the 1960s failed to materialize. As the 1973 recession pushed the country into economic trouble, leftist politics became more militant while support grew for the far right. Idealistic 1960s experiments in sex, drugs, and communal living—attempts to deprogram from mainstream society—were falling apart in some quarters and retrenching in others. It was the decade in which the Irish Republican Army bombing campaign reached the British mainland, a period of intense social unrest, industrial action, power shortages, and paranoia in the highest establishment circles about leftist threats to the country. The 70s also set a high watermark in British pop history; these were the years when David Bowie and glam rock initiated young minds into new androgynous identities, punk turned disaffection into a DIY revolution, and reggae cemented itself as a major influence on U.K. music. Young people were able to seek an identity in one of youth culture’s many tribes, and, in the process, discover new ideas about art, life, and how to live it.If you were to draw a thumbnail sketch of traveler DNA, one line could be traced back to the music festival circuit of the 1970s. In 1972, activists Ubi Dwyer and Sid Rawle organized the first of three “free festivals” in Windsor Great Park, near London, under the motto, “Bring what you expect to find.” The free festivals of the 70s were a reaction to the increasing commercialization of pop festivals, but they were also small-scale utopian social experiments. At the time, Dwyer and Rawle were deeply involved in anarchist and squatter politics in the United Kingdom. Rawle, a prominent campaigner for land-use rights, had formed the Hyde Park Diggers (named after a group that fought for land rights during England’s 17th-century civil war), which then became the anti-privatization Digger Action Movement. In many ways, their movement had been years in the making: The late 1960s had seen the rise of new social ideals that challenged conventional systems of property ownership and ways of living. This coincided with a major housing crisis in Britain, and activists used squatting as a way to both deal with the issue of homelessness and threaten the landlord class. As sociologist Kevin Hetherington wrote in his 2000 study New Age Travellers: Vanloads of Uproarious Humanity, the “politicization over squatting unused houses in towns was to extend to the idea of squatting unused fields . . . through the alternative of the free festival.” Although the Crown legally owned the land on which the first two Windsor gatherings were held, authorities tolerated the events, which only attracted a few hundred attendees. By 1974, however, word had spread. The numbers swelled to several thousand, up from 800 the year before, and police moved in to break up the gathering.That same summer, Philip Russell, aka Wally Hope—who was to mysteriously die the following year after an arrest for LSD possession—threw the first Stonehenge Free Festival among the iconic megaliths in the southern county of Wiltshire. The Stonehenge Festival would run annually until 1984, a syncretic blend of rock concert, druidic solstice celebration, and countercultural alignment with British radical traditions, and a mash-up of Digger philosophy, anarchism, commune culture, neo-paganism, underground pop, and whatever mystical origin story you wanted to read into the existence of the Stonehenge monument. These were relatively small gatherings of a few thousand people, temporary tent cities that served as a space for meeting like-minded radicals, communing with the Earth, or simply getting off your face on drugs. Stalwart hippie bands Hawkwind and Gong played the early years, and later the festival hosted performances from a wider range of musicians, from anarcho-punk groups such as Crass, through British reggae icons Misty in Roots, to pop stars Dexys Midnight Runners. The festival became a meeting point for those living by alternative political and spiritual creeds, who saw it as proof that better ways of organizing society were possible, and those just looking for a good time. As the festival grew bigger in the early 1980s, so did the diversity of the crowd, which expanded to include travelers, Hell’s Angels, skinheads, punks, and hippies—subcultural tribes bound by uneasy alliances or outright enmities. By the mid-70s, many free festivals had sprouted: Glastonbury in southwest England (later to become a multimillion-pound fixture on the British social calendar), the People’s Free Festival at Watchfield Airfield in Wiltshire, the Albion free festivals organized by environmentalists in the eastern counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, and a host of smaller folk festivals across the summer months. They became key incubators for New Age Traveler culture: self-policed events where ideas could be shared and experiments could play out in alternate ways of living.For some—especially those already a part of underground urban communes or participating in the burgeoning squatting movement of the 1970s—moving from one festival to another evolved into a permanent way to escape the pressures of urban existence, a new approach to life shaped by unconventional spiritual beliefs, hedonism, revolutionary utopianism, green politics, and anti-nuclear peace campaigning. It was a lifestyle that patched together principles and aesthetics borrowed from Romany gypsies, Rastafarianism, and anarcho-punk and circus communities. (Though the travelers romanticized the gypsy lifestyle, gypsies blamed travelers for exacerbating existing prejudices and hostility toward their nomadic way of life.) By the start of the 1980s, a “convoy” began to emerge: Reconditioned buses and colorfully painted caravans, trucks, and military vehicles would take travelers from festival to festival during the summer months, and in the winter they would take off in search of land where they could set up encampments of tipis, yurts, and bender tents.In 1984, some 30,000 people descended on Stonehenge for its solstice festival, and media and government began to voice concerns about damage to the monument, drug consumption, and public order. These were the stirrings of an establishment backlash against the convoy. The next year, under public pressure, the police established a 4.5-mile-radius cordon around Stonehenge. In New Age Travellers, Hetherington writes how the police used “road blocks, surveillance, and policing techniques that had been developed during the Miners Strike of 1984–85 to identify festival organizers and arrest travelers” along the main routes to the site in Wiltshire. To avoid arrest and the impounding of their vehicles, the convoy stopped in a beanfield off the A303 road, approximately 7 miles from Stonehenge. Following a standoff between 1,300 police officers and some 600 travelers, the authorities moved in, leading, according to Hetherington, “to the arrest of more than 500 people, the single largest civil arrest in British history.” What became known in traveler lore as “The Battle of the Beanfield” was a bloody incident. Journalist Nick Davies, writing for The Observer newspaper, reported:There was glass breaking, people screaming, black smoke towering out of burning caravans, and everywhere there seemed to be people being bashed and flattened and pulled by the hair . . . men, women, and children were led away, shivering, swearing, crying, bleeding, leaving their homes in pieces . . . Over the years I had seen all kinds of horrible and frightening things and always managed to grin and write it. But as I left the Beanfield, for the first time, I felt sick enough to cry.The Battle of the Beanfield marked a turning point in traveler culture. Travelers became the target of fierce attacks in the media, which represented them as violent hippies whose lifestyle posed a threat to the free-market ideology of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Their rural way of life trespassed on the symbolic importance that conservatives placed on the British countryside—“England’s green and pleasant land”—as a locus of middle- and upper-class moral standards. Indeed, the prime minister boasted that her government was “only too delighted to do anything we can to make life difficult for such things as hippie convoys,” and she used the confrontation as a pretext to introduce the 1986 Public Order Act, which gave police the power to break up gatherings of two or more people for trespassing. That same year, using this new law, the convoy was once again prevented from reaching Stonehenge and was ushered by the police through the counties of Wiltshire, Dorset, and Hampshire—ostensibly to avoid a repeat of the 1985 violence. Only now do I realize this was the convoy I saw through my parents’ car window as a child in Dorset.By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, partly as a result of post-Beanfield legislation, the traveler community had begun to atomize and diversify. The introduction of the Housing Act in 1980, which gave long-standing tenants the “right to buy” their council-owned properties, had contributed to land speculation and rising rents, compounding an already bad homelessness problem. It was just one reason behind the emergence of what sociologist Greg Martin has called “a less engaged and less politically active section of the traveler community.” In contrast to the older, more idealistically driven travelers of the 1970s and early 80s—some of whom were starting families or becoming involved in radical environmental protests against rural road and housing developments—the new generation had a different attitude toward nomadic life. “These generally younger travelers were ‘economic refugees,’ who moved onto the road to escape the ravages of Thatcherism—namely unemployment and homelessness,” Martin noted. Traveler communities now started to be made up of the marginalized, some battling problems with drink and drugs, or on the run from the law.A new and troubled chapter began in 1988, when the acid house phenomenon hit British youth culture. Acid house—which, by the early 1990s, was known as the rave scene—caused a seismic shift by bringing electronic dance music to the forefront of pop, and triggering new variations on the free festival. Often illegal events in squatted city warehouses or on disused airfields across the country brought together young people from across the class spectrum for all-night or multi-day dance parties fueled by Ecstasy and amphetamines. In keeping with a long-standing tradition of creating youth-oriented moral panics, the British media flipped out: “10,000 DRUG CRAZED YOUTHS” was one headline that appeared in The Sun tabloid newspaper in the summer of 1988. In the small town where I grew up, pamphlets were distributed to warn parents about the dangers of Ecstasy and the possibility that LSD was being distributed to children in the form of fake postage stamps. Yet, drugs aside, fears around raves were driven by the same anxieties that the free festivals of the 1970s and 80s had created around public order and trespassing. Only this time, the convoys driving through the British countryside weren’t made up of hippies living their lives on the road, but of carloads of working-class youths chasing rumors of parties in abandoned fields.All-night raves were common around the Oxfordshire countryside where I lived. One summer night in 1994 a friend threw a birthday party in a small copse on his family farm. We rigged speakers to trees and built platforms on branches where we could hang out. It was meant to be a small gathering, but word somehow got out that he was having was a rave. Within a few hours, a convoy of cars full of strangers in search of an all-night dance party stretched along the mile-long track from the road to our party. A police helicopter was dispatched to survey the scene and patrol cars arrived to investigate. We eventually managed to convince the police it was a private party, and they let us carry on, but the incident was indicative of how jumpy the authorities were around illegal raves, and how central they’d become to rural youth.By the early 90s, rave culture had come in contact with the traveler and squat scenes, which only exacerbated tensions with locals. (A small group of travelers camped on the edge of my hometown for a short while. Despite persistent rumors that they were about to stage an anarchic rave that would bring violence and lawlessness to our town, they largely kept to themselves, although local teenagers, wishing dearly that the travelers would throw a party to alleviate their boredom, would score pot from them.) Collectively run mobile sound systems—turntables hooked up to huge stacks of powerful speakers, set-ups borrowed from Jamaican dub and reggae music—became associated with a younger generation of travelers. And so, the “free festival” evolved into the “free party,” a fusion of traveler festival and rave. Protest and squat politics became entangled with the idea of “the right to party,” generating an unfocused rebellious energy that made hazy the distinctions between the fight for free assembly and the pursuit of hedonism. In 1992, the Spiral Tribe, Circus Warp, Bedlam, and DIY sound systems found themselves at the epicenter of a vast outdoor party in Castlemorton, Worcestershire, in the west of England, started by travelers who police had prevented from attending another free festival. Over the course of a week, an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people from across the country gathered to dance at Castlemorton, hearing about it through friends, answering-machine messages, and the media. (Pre-internet and pre-cellphone, information about illegal parties was often distributed via a telephone number: An answering machine message would provide a rendezvous point from which the convoy would drive to the secret location.) Castlemorton became a major news story, which arguably drove even more people to the event. While the free party became, for some, an iconic moment in the history of hedonistic British youth rebellion—Spiral Tribe even sampled the voices of the police chiefs who shut down the rave in their 1992 track “Breach the Peace”—Castlemorton locals felt threatened by the sudden invasion.The public and media outcry that followed provided John Major’s conservative government with an excuse for new legislation. The 1994 Criminal Justice Act (CJA) gave police new powers to curtail public gatherings and prevent trespassing. It also repealed the 1968 Caravan Sites Act, which required local authorities to provide campsites for gypsies and travelers. The CJA’s most infamous line of legislation, section 63(1)(b), made illegal any outdoor parties that played music which included “sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”—a lawmaker’s definition of techno. It triggered a wave of protests and the formation of loose activist coalitions with names such as Advance Party and Freedom Network. In July 1994, protest organizers estimated some 50,000 people marched from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square demanding that the government “Kill the Bill.”The CJA was ostensibly triggered by the travelers and Castlemorton, but it seemed to be responding to a variety of grass-roots movements involving factions of New Age traveler culture: the violent Poll Tax riots of 1990, which saw as many as 250,000 people turn out in London to protest Thatcher’s flat-rate taxes; the impromptu Critical Mass bicycle rallies of the early 1990s, and the direct action Twyford Down protests against the construction of the M3 motorway in 1992. Even after other kinds of demonstrations faded—that is, until Tony Blair decided to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003—environmental protests continued to make headlines. In 1997, for instance, a traveler nicknamed “Swampy” became an unlikely national hero for his determined efforts to protest the building of the A30 road extension at Fairmile, Devon, by digging a network of underground tunnels and evading police.Yet despite a persistent attachment to the idea that society could be organized in a completely different, fairer, and more ecologically responsible way, by the end of the 1990s a certain idealism began to drain out of British alternative culture. Its rebelliousness was co-opted and corporatized. Life became increasingly tough for the New Age Travelers. Many decamped to more tolerant countries in Europe; some gave up life on the road altogether. No longer the media folk devils they were made out to be in the 1980s and 90s, traveler communities still exist in the U.K., though mostly away from public view. Some third- and even fourth-generation families have even maintained their nomadic way of life by camping on unauthorized sites and finding seasonal or freelance work where they can. These are the survivors of a long history of radical utopianism in Britain, yet their story has been bulldozed from the record, reduced to a caricature of crusties drunk on extra-strength lager, scrounging money in city centers.
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