This is an ongoing draft, first started here, about squat parties in London. Memories are hazy, but it's important to shape the future by recalling the past. These squat parties had an immense impact on me and how I see the world. I hope everyone gets to experience that sort of freedom in their lives at least at one point. Yes drugs were involved, but the locations, the music, the camaraderie were also important. Plus it's good to dance. Nowadays (2025) that's mostly in my kitchen.
[Music to listen along with - Lochi - Serious Tangent - Smitten1 - working 2025]I first started going to London squat parties when I moved there in 1995 to study at UCL, having just turned 18. I must have already had a vague yearning towards alternative culture since I knew about cooltan and wanted to visit, but then it was evicted. It's always easy to think there was a golden age that happened just before and I'm not really complaining because squat parties were incredible from 1996 to 2000, but it does feel a bit like in terms of squatted social centres and underground festivals at least, 1995 marked a downturn - impact of the CJA perhaps.
I was already into underground music and had been to some Exodus raves in Luton plus a few free festivals in London. There was the final Deptford Urban Free Festival, where I heard Zebedee DJing for the first time on a rig called Avinit Army, plus one on Clapham Common where the Revolutionary Dub Warriors played. And there was the last Hackney Homeless in Clissold Park, which ended up in a riot - all I really remember of that was being literally shoved out of the park by the Met and trying to stop them beating up a wheelchair user. [Hackney Homeless festival 1994 - link working 2025]
[Advance Party flyer - working 2025]
I picked up some Advance Party flyers at the festies, one pictured above. They were a group fighting back against the CJA. Once I was actually living in London I had a looot of places to explore, as well as going to the occasional lecture. I was going to clubs like Club UK, Shtonka and Eurobeat 2000, in fact I do recall getting the United Systems number (0181 9597525) in a chillout. Buying records at Ambient Soho meant meeting people who worked there like Chantal (Mira Calix, RiP) who took a shine to my friend Andy (and who wouldn't), Miss Pink, Aaron Liberator and Simon Freeform.
Back in those days I thought nothing of clubbing Thursday through Sunday (without drugs even! the very thought, I'm exhausted all the time nowadays, I guess I used up my energy back then). This was all before the internets and mobile phones of course, so people used to stand in the rain and flyer the clubbers leaving other parties. I remember getting flyers at the end of Megatripolis at Heaven for two different parties, one was Vox Populi [I didn't go and then they headed off to Europe] and the other one was Immersion. I really wanted to go to a Spiral Tribe party, but they had already left. I nervously called the infoline for Immersion and found myself at a squatted cinema in Turnpike Lane, where they were doing the classic nonsense of selling straws at the entry to get round licensing. I was on my own and I had never seen anything like it. I didn't know what to expect, but the quadrophonic sound was great and Gizelle played the classic Tesox track 'Go Ahead London', such a great bubbling acid line and of course a forerunner of the acid techno scene that was just about to explode.
Another early rave was the 1995/1996 NYE bash on the corner of Well Street and Mare Street in Hackney in an old cinema which later became an Iceland supermarket and presumably now got gentrified into a fucking yuppy tower. I went with a buddy from school [who moved to Edinburgh and got spiralized by Sativae] - we walked there from Highbury and Islington tube, which shows that despite living in London for a few months, I did not yet know my way around London very well at all!!
Another early rave which I persuaded people I was living with to go to was in Farringdon, near Mount Pleasant....
The Farringdon party (flyer above) was great, the guy on the door with a pierced lip said he thought Spiral Tribe were in Germany but he wasn't sure; I went to the loos and was terrified by a toilet full of turds. Our little hippy group sat in a corner as all these crusties (which in 6 months' time would be us) just kind of stood around and chatted, whilst an absolute racket played. I don't remember anyone dancing and I just couldn't process the music at all, it was a wall of noise. There's an excellent quote
from Simon Reynolds, I think it must be in his 1999 book 'Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture' where he says "one Spiral-affiliated outfit plays a set of undanceably fast, stiffly regimented, metallic beats that sounds like ball bearings rattling around in a concrete pipe". Sounds about right!
[Flyer for LSD / Jiba party - working 2025]
from Simon Reynolds, I think it must be in his 1999 book 'Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture' where he says "one Spiral-affiliated outfit plays a set of undanceably fast, stiffly regimented, metallic beats that sounds like ball bearings rattling around in a concrete pipe". Sounds about right!
It was a scary scene, I suppose in the same way every scene is when you are outside of it. And of course there was a whole heap of drugs going on, but at the same time most people were alright and nobody died [with a couple of exceptions - an old tramp once and then the guy who jumped off the hexagon building thinking he could fly]. Systems around at that time were Mainline, Virus, Oops, Insanity, Jiba, Mayhem. They were all playing seriously good underground tekno, a language I started to understand. On rigs like Immersion and also at parties like Club Alien and Kinky Techno (a semi-legal Immersion venture under KingsX station in what had been the Serious Road Trip building) acid trance was just getting going and that was great for a while before it stagnated.
I had been listening to pirate radio, that was of course another way to find out what was happening in an era before the internet and mobile phones. Zone FM played sick DnB (DJ Freebase!) and on Energy FM Marie Chantal and Callie were playing mad acid hardcore before the genres splintered into gabba, speedcore, happy hardcore and breakcore. It's funny to remember a time when playing drum n bass was controversial, like there being mutterings about dnb in the second room at Hellraiser lol. Luckily for a time there was all sorts at parties.
The Hackney Wick mashups in what were then old Victorian warehouses before they were demolished for the Olympics in 2012 - Dace Road, Carpenters Road, Waterden Road. At a benefit for Curley's family, I remember turning up late on acid, then taking K and forgetting I was on acid and getting eviscerated by Spiral Tribe's 'Going all the way'.
[Spiral Tribe - Going All the Way - working 2025]
The (Unsound-run) cinema in Wood Green was pretty awesome for a few weeks - one time we turned up fucked after Pride on Clapham Common (free in those days!) with these little flashing wands (it doesn't get much better than seeing the Pet Shop Boys do 'Go West' as thousands sing along and the sky explodes with fireworks).
The bullring at Waterloo was pretty funny - outside, in the place where the IMAX stands now, as a benefit for the homeless people who were being evicted. My fave memory of that party is a DJ whose name I almost remember playing this wicked Anticore track below - Demoiselle Douce Innocence– Moonbreaker. It samples Moonraker and the vibes were just right. We'd met Fred and the Toulouse hardcore crew at Czechtek, and he'd given me the record :) But I just looked up on discogs who made this track and it's Jörg Buchholz, which doesn't sound very French!
[Demoiselle Douce Innocence– Moonbreaker =Anticore 3 - working 2025]
Overall, so many good memories. Some of the flyers are here. Molly's book 'Out of Order' documents a lot of the places, even if I remember them slightly differently, since there was also joy as well as macho posturing. Maybe that's because we were friends but hung out with different systems. I started DJing on Headfuk and Panik sometimes, although I honestly cannot remember that much about it :) Two weeks in a row we got noise abatement orders when I was playing in the morning, so I must have been an unlucky charm. I would be playing spiral tekno back then, which seemed to divide the crowds between those who hated it and just wanted more acid techno,and those who loved it. This pushed my sets further and further into the morning...
And of course we were travelling out to Europe for teknivals when we could - for a few summers that was what summer meant. systems like metek, dstorm, lego, furious, foxtanz, heretik, total resistance, sound conspiracy, samovar, damage control all twatting out amazing music through electrical storms. Czechtek was always great - cheap booze and amazing weather; Dutchtek tended to feature loads of gabba and speedcore; Paristek 2000 was where I made a lot of good friends before my travels had even started in earnest. A previous French one I hadn't gone because I was finishing my course, but a carload went over with my then girlfriend and she came back completely traumatised :( something about being on acid and taking a leak then the strobe putting her pissing shadow all over a mountain.
We started a system called Xombie and did a night at the Dungeons then most people got absorbed into Headfuk. And suddenly things got fun in the UK again with festies like Tolworth (Indymedia report) and the travellers field at glastonbury (RiP) and great quarry raves in Wales and up on the Ridgeway. And we started Temporary Autonomous Art! That's a whole other caboodle to write about.
[Gak Foxtanz - Super Keuf - FXZ2 - working 2025]
Then it was time to travel. The truck was ready to roll and we went off, with the free diesel a bonus thanks to a French rascal. There was Slovtek, Poltek, picking up hitchhikers heading back to Berlin after the Genoa protests who took us to their wagenplatz at Kopi, a FrenchTek which I finally got to on the Monday heeh... The list goes on..
Whilst I was living in Europe I carried on raving, going to parties in and around Prague from rigs like Cirkus Alien, Komatsu, NSK and Vosa, but of course it's not quite the same when you are a visitor to a scene. By the time I ended up in NL, I preferred hibernation. There was still the desire to get out and party for NYE, and there was one good one at Villa Friekens, another time DJing VSnares in the morning in the killout at a ZMK rave in Enschede (?). But after a while even TDK and ZMK went quite silent, only surfacing every so often.
Back in the UK in 2013, it was hard to find a good party, although of course they still existed. People have met up under the stars to dance for many thousands of years - it's not a new phenomenon of course. It's what I like to think happened at stone circles. The new generation were no doubt doing it in their own way by that point now; the only London rigs I would bother with were IRD, NFA and Pokora.
Around that time there was an excellent NYE party in London - I was living in Brighton so drove up to somewhere below Brixton, got my bike out of the car and went to the prison solidarity demo at midnight which went off well since it was the first one for a while, then cycled into London for the party. I hadn't stopped to think whilst making this genious plan that central London would have just had a massive street party at midnight, and I had to carry my bike over whichever bridge I crossed to avoid all the broken glass. I eventually made it to the party which was an excellent Pokora party in a tiny former porn cinema in deepest Soho - the crew were delighting in turning away all the straight ppl at the door despite however much money they offered.
When in Brighton, I'd missed the boat for parties at Black Rock. There were still raves being organised but the infos came out after midnight and by 2am they had been busted, which seems amateur but the cops were getting better at shutting them down all the time.
In 2015 (ie ten years ago in 2025!?) I wrote an update which stayed a draft, so I'll add it here...
Since a while now I'm living in the Netherlands again and it's interesting how there aren't really so many squat parties anymore. I guess more than anything that is connected to the criminalisation of squatting, although also parties feel a bit tired, there's a lot of the same old tekno getting played over and over again, so maybe people can't be bothered to go out any more and the innovation is elsewhere. Older systems are still doing parties but there are also a fair amount of legal parties, also I suppose fashion changes, but I do hope the youth are experiencing freedom in other ways.
The only really good free party style stuff I've been to lately has been in Belgium, things are happening a bit more there. We went to Antwerp to see Killabomb play a massive hall, that was fun. As club nights go, PRSPCT in Rotterdam is still pretty rocking. With residents like Thrasher and DJ Hidden, it pioneered that distinctive snare heavy drum n bass style like 10 years ago (skullstep) and they are still rocking. Indeed, you can hear much harder sounds there than at a squat party which I find weird and acts like Limewax are actually innovating and are interesting to listen to, rather than a DJ banging out free party classics. I mean, if you like Crystal Distortion records great, so do I, but why not get him to play live instead? When I did make it to a squat party here in NL, Nimatek/#23/Oerocircus/Baeng, I heard the same Crystal Distortion three different rigs. They all had DJs just phoning it in, putting on one track after another with no emotion or plan to build the evening. Perhaps it was a missed opportunity in that Jigsore were on the lineup as well but didn't make it. Then again, the last squat party I went to in London (NFA, IRD, an acid techno rig) was also pretty rubbish. When the best music is someone playing a Venetian Snares tribute mix, by it's probably better to get on the bike and go home.
My last party was.... maybe the TAA building near Old Street. That was years ago. Did enjoy dancing on the street at Brussels Pride last year. And now for an update in 2025? When I'm living in Scotland? Well I shit you not, I have reconnected with old friends from travelling times who are doing a rave soon. The only thing I'd heard before up here was a midge death Scottek off Loch Ness two years ago.
The story continues....
Thanks for the comments on the previous draft, I always enjoy anonymity but I realise I prob would have heard more stories if I'd made myself more accessible. Feel free to leave a comment or hit me up on discogs - pijnappel.
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