Interview transcript that informed the feature ‘Breach the peace: the counter cultural energy of Spiral Tribe’ published on Minimal Collective in 2024.
Eleanor Bickers: Referencing a talk you did at Het Groene Veld in Amsterdam, you talk about the spiral philosophy celebrating part of what it is to be human. Can you explain what the spiral philosophy means to you, the collective, how it came about, and the idea behind the number 23?
Mark Angelo-Harrison: When you frame it like that, as if we had some sort of foreknowledge of going into things with a philosophy or with any idea of what we were doing, that would maybe give the wrong impression. We really were just a group of friends who had discovered the amazing equality that the rave scene, the acid house scene, the early techno scene immediately created. I was lucky enough to be there at the Hacienda in the late eighties when it all kicked off there. And that was deeply inspiring in that the Hacienda was a super club with an amazing sound system, but it wasn't run by business people. Anyone could get in and even if you had to pay, it was a fiver. They had no door policy. It was in the poorest part of one of the poorest cities in Britain. It was exactly what was needed.
Then of course, the empathy and collectivism that this new drug ecstasy provided, even if it was an artificially stimulated buzz, it gave people, particularly poor working class people and kids who'd grown up with zero opportunities, this sudden flash of what connectiveness, collectivity, and community could be. Up until that point, Britain had been a very violent, alcohol, sodden, hooligan kind of culture. You had to be prepared to fight or run to the taxi rank. It was barbaric.
Whether it's commercial clubs, commercial raves, or later the free parties, there were no superstar DJs. We weren't looking up to a stage. There was no pedestal. What was making it happen was the vibe on the dance floor between everybody integrating and meshing together. That's where the deep rooted almost spirituality came from, because it really touched on this part of what being human was that had been beaten out of us in our education system and in the authoritarianism of the people in charge of running things. A lot of my friends all went and joined the military because they had no other opportunities. When I was living in Manchester, all the young people I knew were into petty crime because there were no other opportunities. To have that lifted, and to have the peace and love thing brought back to the second summer of love by reflecting the politics of the 60s and 70s, was epic. But what did it all mean? Because you'd have that at the weekend, and then it would dissipate and you just couldn't wait until next weekend. I think we managed to squeeze a Wednesday, a Thursday, a Friday, and a Saturday out of it. It is so simple, it's so easy, but then when you came down again, and then had to go back to the nine to five grind on Monday, it just escaped you. Back then you didn't quite get it because it was all so new and so different.
In 1990 I moved down to London. We were going out to underground places, even the big commercial ones like Heaven, because this was all very new. But nothing lasted long enough. Clubs would close around 4am, so people would be in the car park dancing around the sound system. I think that's where there was this huge awakening, even if it was generated through a kind of a psychedelic enhancement, around the music, sound system, bass, and community: the actual physicality of the dance floor. Simon Reynolds puts it very well about pirate radio stations. ‘Big shout going out to the blah blah, massive’. There might only be a few people listening, but it didn't matter because it was this sense of connection that there was something else going on. It was a pirate signal, it was underground. This in itself started the mad enthusiasm for this space, this frame of mind, this realisation that something had been held back from us, that had been taught out of us by being integrated into this austere classist system. We'd been born into this old architecture and it was the only thing we knew, therefore it was very difficult to break out of that.
We were living in this empty community where the community itself was locked out of its own city. We reopened the doors, invited people in, and threw a party. We were guided by the vacuums, not only in the empty buildings, but also in society and the gaps in community.
So, when we got the sound system and we started opening up places in London, places that are being closed down in Westbourne Park by MP Shirley Porter, it turns out to have been criminal. She was the council leader of Westminster council, selling off all the public housing, splitting up families including single mothers. She was sending them up North which was awful behaviour as she was trying to get the labour-supporting poor community out of her neighborhood. We were living in this empty community where the community itself was locked out of its own city. We reopened the doors, invited people in, and threw a party. We were guided by the vacuums, not only in the empty buildings, but also in society and the gaps in community. I don't like the word spiritual, it's got too many other connotations, but this great energy for coming together and having a deeply connected sense with your fellow community. So we were shaped by these vacuums in a big warehouse, and all the people would come in. Relentlessly every weekend, we would go bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until it got so big.
We ended up going out into the countryside where we connected with the romance of the ancient lost Celtic world that never existed. It was a very powerful romance for the travelling scene. Our take on it wasn't necessarily Celtic or hippie; it was bringing the youth out of the locked down urban areas into the beautiful, deep and mystic green of the British countryside. Connecting nature with this highly energised enthusiasm for life, something really clicked. This was part of what had been denied to us as human beings as you have to be on the payroll to get the full benefit of society living in a city or a town, but in the countryside you're very limited as to what you can actually do there, whether it's partying or camping or rambling. So to connect directly with nature and the industrial scars on the landscape of this huge economy that had exploded in the Victorian period. We were on the crest of the wave of technology. We didn't have mobile phones yet or a personal computer, but it was foreshadowing and coming from this very deep place, almost as if it was coming up out of the ground, out of the old mines that we were partying on. This sense of connection with each other, and then with the history of the landscape, which of course was very abusive. So it was a double-edged sword. We discovered we could smelt the metal to build this techno dimension. But at the same time, the suffering of the people, of the workers, going all the way back to the slave trade and the rape and pillage of the world.
Going back to when we were first squatting in London, it's the same process, this kind of colonialization, abuse, manipulation, and privatization of people. So the philosophy grew by itself, if one can call it a philosophy, or the way we lived. That was amplified by going further away from the centers of control and when the police started paying attention and trying to close this down, this proved the point. What the hell were they doing there? What interest did they have in policing us and trying to stop us doing what we were doing? The ruling elite have been taking the piss for years and we've cottoned on. This is our awakening as young people growing up into adulthood.
I would hope that many people go through that. I think this might sound a little bit antiquated now, because I think once people like us had done that, and now free parties are more accepted, there is less of this force field. For example, they’re now trying to close down TikTok for radicalizing teenagers. Thank God, because I think the previous generation had fallen back into the trap of having to pay for social space to fit back in, and your identity or status in society was all about how you conformed. I really feel this new generation coming through is putting two and two together and has got access now to information and history. That’s another important reason for me to write the book, to get the people's history down.
Make of it what you will, take the lid off your belief system. Why should that ceiling be of your political beliefs or your religious beliefs or whatever belief system? How about they're not, they're just constructs? How about they're equally unreal?
The number 23 is a tricky one because it always defies explanation. For me as the person who introduced it unwittingly into the graphic design and the lexiconography of the whole spiral thing, it just felt right. And it was a complete enigma. It's being very mysterious and won't tell you much about what's going on. You think you might be going mad, but actually, it's probably just your brain. Just like with folklore and superstitions, you see a magpie and it wakes you up a little bit, even if you're not superstitious. The really important thing that I found with it is that it isn't political, it's not connected with any kind of religious cult and it has no meaning. Yet it has become very much a symbol of the underground of the free party movement. It is almost like our pirate flag in that it's an anti-icon that you fly the 23 and it is making this huge statement of 23-ness. Make of it what you will, take the lid off your belief system. Why should that ceiling be of your political beliefs or your religious beliefs or whatever belief system? How about they're not, they're just constructs? How about they're equally unreal?
I'm hesitant to use the word philosophy now based on the idea that there are not predetermined ideals or rules, but it's something that is formulated and carved out by people depending on how they wish to live their lives. And obviously there is a certain set of attitudes and beliefs that you'll probably have to hold such as alternative living and living outside the system.
EB: I like this idea of having it as a pirate flag. Because I always wondered if there was a historic narrative that was underlying against this, but I like that it's got this mysterious guise over it and is up to people's imagination; how they want to tell their own story. I think this is a nice segue into talking about your role in the design. Talking about these enigmatic, and mysterious style of graphics that were very statement, also with the monochrome colour scheme, there was this way of hiding from authorities to be able to exist outside the system. Can you talk around this and the blueprints behind your graphic work and how that also lent into the attitude of the collective and what you did as squatters?
MAH: Yeah, very interesting. It follows a similar path to throwing the doors open to the community in that we started off doing backdrops in fluorescent colours and doing lots of spirals and fractally psychedelic stuff. But practically, we'd get secondhand buses and trucks where the wheels had fallen off. We didn't have any intention to end up with a huge convoy of ex-Soviet, matte black military trucks. It developed as a practical thing, wearing black and combats because they're hard wearing, shaving our heads which was kind of zen, especially for the women. It wasn't really done with much intention. So the look was kind of organic. In the book, there is a chapter about how everything got painted matte black, this industrial rubberized matte black that somebody found in a skip outside. We had a week on our hands, so we just painted everything matte black.
That following weekend, we had some trouble with some local kids who decided to try and mug some of the ravers. I'd noticed that the ravers wore colourful face paint, white gloves, and maybe looked a bit too loved up and vulnerable to these local kids who just wanted some drugs or money off them. In that same week at King's Cross, Battlebridge Road, the site of the big battle with Boudicca, we got into this frame of mind that we should get rid of all the pink fluorescent stuff and paint everything matte black and silver with big silver flying winged pentagrams with the number 23 in it. Plus the terror strobes all across the top of the trucks. So you've got all these big ex-military trucks and this wall of shadow and darkness. The kids did come back again, but they were too busy on the dance floor having fun. I felt maybe rightly or wrongly that they now felt included because they were hardcore. It wasn't this ‘us and them’. There was a sense of this mystery, as you quite rightly pointed out, because of the shadow and playing with the light and the shade.
With the graphics and the flyers we didn't have much money. So we photocopied everything, we didn't use printers. Because we were doing parties every single weekend, we would get a pair of scissors and cannibalize the previous week's flyers. We would glue bits on to make a new flyer for the next weekend and then we would photocopy that. It was very much this punk looking ethic behind that. In the early days outside of Heaven, a lot of these huge commercial rave organisations would throw so much money at their flyers; triple gated A3 full gloss, full color flyers going around. They would employ youngsters to queue outside Heaven at 4am, so as the clubbers came out, there would be this avenue of 30 kids racking up these flyers. Then it'd be us at the end with this little A5 tatty photocopy of Spiral Tribe. You could see on their faces when they got to us and they took what we had to offer. Ah, this was real. You know, you could trust this. These other ones, you could be driving around all night or they could take your money and you'd never actually find the place. That also integrated itself by necessity and for practical reasons into the look. We were on an organic flow.
EB: This might be me inserting my own opinion into this too much, but because I know the use of pentagrams or the integration of military symbols and icons kind of hints towards this resistance to warfare - and this isn't the only time that this has been used across music subcultures, you know. Later on, it was used a lot in dubstep, before that, it was used in hardcore and punk. But was there any synergy between resistance of the military and patriarchy, versus what you were trying to do?
MAH: Yeah, very much so. Funnily enough, this same party was where Boudicca was supposed to be. And what's her name? The Harry Potter author, J.K. Rowling. She stole the idea of platform nine and three quarters from the Boudicca myth because there is a legend that she is buried on those platforms at King's Cross. We were right at the end of those platforms in this big freight warehouse on the railway. We were kind of pissed off that it was called King's Cross because it had a symbolism of the Crusaders broadsword where we were very sensitive to these things. St. George and killing the dragon. What? What were you talking about? He didn't kill the dragon, that's just obviously a lie. Symbolically, the dragon is nature and this beautiful life force. Then you have this geezer in his armor with his sword and his lance and he's killing the poor old dragon. So we were very aware of how these traditional myths that we'd grown up with resonated, because it just doesn't feel right. So there was this idea of resistance.
Eventually we got more high profile, so the media were writing their own fairy tales back at us. Suddenly, we were these techno-pagans, because we were dealing with these powerful symbols, regardless of how much belief you place on these symbols. They are archetypal. They do resonate within our society. There may not be any sort of esoteric power to them. That's not the point. To the community, the society that we were in, they did. So to kind of rework them or retell the fairy tales was very powerful. They were amplifying and building the legend, and we were reclaiming these symbols.
EB: I think that's really interesting. I like how you always have a historic overview, to not talk about what you're doing in isolation or within the vacuum of the rave. I mean, I know it's more rooted in free party culture, but it reminds me of when you did the talk at De School a year or so ago, discussing the history of the first protest that took place about the privatisation of land, and how far it goes back to these mid-century times. And how these political issues have been so inherent in our society for hundreds of years. It’s just history repeating itself with a different set of rules behind it. I guess a big part of Spiral Tribe’s legacy was this idea of living outside of the system. Could you define what this meant to the Tribe and maybe to free party culture as a whole?
The police were very curious as to what dimension we were in, where we really are in this kind of parallel universe. That's not drug induced. That's not fantasy or escapism. Actually, the neoliberal construct is a fucking construct and it's a shit one. It's fragile. It has to be enforced with violence.
MAH: I think there's an interview somewhere on YouTube with me where I still believed then, to get caught up in the political arena was this idea of fighting fire with fire. And it only gave more power to the two party single system that we have. I mean, that is true. But I think my politics have somewhat changed in that we do need the numbers to get anything going on. We decided, seeing as they were going to paint us as outlaws, that we would embrace that, rather than say we're innocent. As I was saying earlier, building the myth for us. Because we were getting so much attention we were on such a creative roll, we were so relentless weekend to weekend.
We could see very quickly that we were building something completely new that everybody loved. The police were very curious as to what dimension we were in, where we really are in this kind of parallel universe. That's not drug induced. That's not fantasy or escapism. Actually, the neoliberal construct is a fucking construct and it's a shit one. It's fragile. It has to be enforced with violence. It has to have all this maintenance just to keep the power balance or the status quo in place. It's destroying the planet, it's corrosive, it's eating itself. Just as soon as you can, remove those barriers and everyone can collaborate in a creative way and see what's possible immediately. But for sure they did have undercover people amongst us and messages were going back to wherever, so they realised it was time to put a lid on it for us.
EB: With living outside the system, organically, you're already doing something that is politicised, even if it's without intention, because you are a resistance body to neoliberalism, the system and the government. But how did you go about balancing it? I remember when I spoke to Ixy about her experience in Spiral Tribe and she mentioned there was a disconnect between people who saw the tribe as being politicised and those that didn't - those that just wanted to have a good time and experience something different. So how was art, creativity, and music balanced with politics within Spiral Tribe?
MAH: Well, I think what Ixy is saying is absolutely true. We were refusing to go into that arena. We insisted on creating our own space outside of that control. But as you quite rightly say as well, it's a bit of a paradox. Taking that space is in itself a political act, and there is no escape from it. We focused on creating the space, creating the vibe, creating the music, creating the community. That's as far as our political intention was. That was enough to be getting on with, building a whole new reality. Going back to the graphics, I would design new alphabets, not actual new language, but I would do my own fonts. I wanted to demonstrate we were making a clean break.
But as the government decided to put pressure on us, and if you want to experiment with collectivism, they will make life impossible for you and start radicalising you so that you're put into this position where you have to be more political. After the court case where they failed to get a guilty verdict on us because after all, what crimes had we committed? None apparently, according to the jury. They then decided to bring in the Criminal Justice bill. So we were very reluctant to have anything to do with that because that was a politicisation of what we were trying not to make political. In the sense when I'm using the word political, I'm only meaning the status quo, the established system that is in place. For us, it was much more important to experiment with creating our own. Every single country we had people run away and join Spiral Tribe, so we just got bigger and bigger in this direction of building the scene.
I was bouncing backwards and forwards between Europe and Britain, obviously very happy to have escaped prison and getting on with the creative side of things in Europe. Debbie Staunton, not to be confused with Debbie Spiral, was taking care of our info line. She saw the advantage of being the info line for all the free parties. Because by that point, everyone was at it. First, there was Spiral Tribe. Well, not first, but the big techno every weekend kind of sound systems. Spiral Tribe, then Bedlam, and then lots of others. And so. By 1994 when the Criminal Justice bill came in she saw the advantage of using the info line as a free internet network to join people from different sound systems. She was hooked up with a lot of the pirate radio stations as well and was much closer to the political core in London. I came up with the concept of the Advance Party, which was the political wing of Spiral Tribe that was going to fight the Criminal Justice bill. Now, we can't prove this, but it looks like that was instantly infiltrated by undercover police. And this was all around the time of the spy cops. I've had lots of discussions with many people, even at the time with Debbie Staunton, the people that took control of it were random strangers and came from nowhere. We've tried to trace them since and they just evaporated. So I just said, okay, rather than waste time with internal politics, let's just invent another one. Let's just fork it. Then I did the artwork for United Systems for Debbie.
It ended up in what's now become the famous demonstration in Trafalgar Square with Desert Storm Sound System doing a gorilla rig on the back of the truck. But the feeling that I had, and I feel a lot of the other spirals, many of them didn't come back from Europe. It had been hijacked by that feeling when you go to a demonstration and the socialist workers party have provided all the placards. It wasn't really what it was about. It was somehow disjointed, not connected with what we had been doing and what we had been building. So we didn't have a massive attention span for it. Especially after putting so much effort into creating this other political wing, then imploding on its own internal politics. That's just such a good strategy, isn't it? You know, just get everybody fighting amongst themselves.
We were in this weird shamanic, bleak, deprived state of absolute mania. We just had to go forward.
EB: What is it about Spiral Tribe specifically that you think left such a big impact on the free party scene? What specific contributions do you feel the tribe made?
MAH: It was one of the very first, if not the first to do it in that way. Yeah. Obviously massive respect to DIY Sound System.
It's still a mystery to me now as to why we felt so driven that we had to do it every single weekend? It just escapes me now. I just can't tune back into that. We were in this weird shamanic, bleak, deprived state of absolute mania. We just had to go forward. When the odds are completely against you, and you are doomed to failure, if you've got faith above and beyond all of that, you can still manage to pull off a party at the weekend for no reason other than faith in the vibe, whatever that is. So we were hugely driven from that.
There was another thing going on as well, as we were the people's sound system. If you came down with your records you would get a play. So it was open to all the youngsters. Everybody did want to be a DJ just as they want to be a DJ now, but there were less of them and there was less music. So if you managed to get through the police roadblocks and across the muddy fields and you turned up with your record box then you would get a play. We were right on the cutting edge, whereas other sound systems were specifically house music, like with DIY, which to us was fantastic. We all grew up with that and it was close to our hearts and a deep inspiration. But at the same time, we refused people that wanted to play anything that was nostalgic. This was the only platform there was apart from pirate radio and perhaps some other underground parties. So we were at the cutting edge of that.
Historically, it was the proto jungle and drum and bass, because this was in the era where we didn't really have those genres. We called it techno, but then you had the UK breakbeat thing going on, which became something called happy hardcore later, but another fork of it became jungle and drum and bass. You had this fantastic meshing together of different kids from different backgrounds and different cultures, all feeling included. And not many people did that. I know Bedlam did do that as well, but they came a bit later. Context wise with the BBC radio silence on all things techno or drum and bass, they did nothing for years. If you were lucky John Peel played a couple of our tracks. That was the extent of that. It was only the pirate radios and people like Spiral Tribe who were giving it any airtime at all.
When we were in Europe and we had our community studio, that's how we were making a living. We were pressing records all the time and doing collaborations with everybody we met. We were really walking the talk, and being massively creative, not just by taking space and filling that space with music, but also with the community studio. We really were the owners of our means of production.
EB: And this sound that I love so fondly and have been digging for quite a while now, this sound that became known as free tekno, originally stemmed from this influence of pirate radio and the proto-jungle era, but it really navigated into this harsh brutal sound. I'm always fascinated as to how it spawned and how it developed into this really brutal yeah spirally type sound I guess?
MAH: From my own experience, an interesting thing happened very quickly after the first few teknivals. The teknivals were like little techno picnics, where small sound systems came together out in nature. Within a few months people would wake up to the fact of like, oh, well, we could get a sound system or we could hire an even bigger rig. We could play louder music, we could play harder music, we could dominate the space. There was definitely a shift away from a teknival being this open sharing where you'd share food, you'd share ideas, you'd share your record, share equipment. Everybody was that motivated to make the event happen, to a more individualistic thing, whereby it shifted away from that into a sound clash. Who had the biggest rig, the biggest trucks and the toughest noise? That just escalated to monster teknivals really quickly. It just went nuts. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It was just different. In France it became hugely fashionable, the shaved heads, combats etc. What is very odd about all of this is how marginalised that is, this huge movement in history. It's certainly never celebrated in mainstream culture, considering what a huge impact it had on a whole generation.
Harry Harrison in his book, Dreaming in Yellow, about the DIY sound system, he always cites Spiral Tribe as playing nosebleed techno. You know, that never happened. I was the one that was into the really experimental industrial hard stuff. I was very disappointed with the direction that gabber went. Early gabber in Rotterdam had this great fat 909 sound, and in the early days of techno, the infinite possibilities of sampling technology was astounding. This can go in so many directions and it didn't, it got so formulated and so cheesy. I call it bubblegum gabber, it's bouncy and it's just not tough enough. As time went on, we had been known to our fan base of having a very wide spectrum of vibes and styles. We took that early Northern European harder techno and developed it in things like Stormcore and Rabbit City Records. That toughness was missing that people could really relate to, which had this kind of resistance to the overly psychedelic stuff.
Then of course, there's breakcore, which Spiral Tribe in itself didn't really get into, but I did when we went our different directions a little later. I have to mention people like Head Cleaner and Praxis Records, who were really experimenting with this complete destruction of anything that resembled the old status quo. It's a very interesting space where it was just about noise. Christoph Fringeli’s zine Datacide, it's subtitled Noise and Politics, describes the events that he organised.
The Mover. I've always just been a great fan of The Mover. That darker style, not necessarily faster, is still very close to my heart. I still love that more exploratory, deeper kind of thing.
EB: Thank you for dissecting that for me. Another part of this feature is a little bit centered around future relevancy of Spiral Tribe’s legacy, what you have learned and what you can see that is happening now in the free party space. What similarities and differences can you identify in the free party scene then versus now?
MAH: I would hope the legacy is nothing more than the DIY ethos, that we did break down the walls just enough to get a glimpse that if individuals get engaged in what's going on, connect with their creativity, and collectively activate, then all things are possible. I think that's one of the most powerful things that we did. The Spiral Tribe story, I think, is something kind of universal that people can relate to. The sort of struggle that we went through, people can identify with it because youngsters who want to get a little rig and want to go up to an abandoned area and have a party where they're free to play their style and they don't have the financial or the social pressures to fit a particular template of behaviour, they can go there and they can do whatever.
I’m in contact with little pockets of resistance in Britain. Two or three years ago, there was a huge free party at David Stowe Airport in Cornwall with many sound systems. It was all over the mainstream news and the vibe was very much alive. To see a whole new generation, people that weren't actually born then, still very inspired, plus homages to Spiral Tribe. One sound system did a whole reworking of my artwork as their stage scenery and I was very touched.
Going back to the politics and the situation, we were there at the awakening of our generation's realisation that we were being oppressed. As time goes by, the veil has been lifted, and there is no denying what the agenda is. Therefore, the struggle continues. But I really do get a sense, that with the availability of information, the falling away of the old system of propaganda that people have seen through now. People are making their own propaganda and inhabiting these online worlds where they're experimenting with projecting the good side of themselves. You can't fool people as effectively as say my generation and before. I'm optimistic that there will be a moment pretty soon where there will be an even greater resistance and rejection of the system that has damaged and exploited so much of the world and the greater possibility of us being together as humans and stewarding this planet in a responsible way. But I don't know if that change is going to be easy. It's fighting an entire system which is not something that can be solved by grassroots collectives in isolation.
The free party is something that offers that positive energy in a very constructive way. It's not about escapism or to me has never been about escapism. It's always been about struggle and always been about the sheer force of determination to hold the community together.
EB: Often, the thing I find when the right gets stronger, it can be easier to fragment the left, which we're seeing in Britain already. But going back specifically to free party culture, do you think we can truly live outside of the system?
MAH: I do think that crisis does enable change. I mean, this is a question that a couple of different journalists have asked me - ‘were we influenced by cyberpunk’ - and my answer, is well, cyber punk is fiction, and we were too busy living that apocalyptic reality to actually read stories about it. And it's a slow apocalypse that we're witnessing going on around us. The behaviour of the right, the arrogance they feel that they can flaunt this kind of violence against civilians and get away with it. It's the secrecy that has enabled so many of these groups to actually hold control behind closed doors, which is the lie of democracy.
Also, I heard a very interesting statistic. I don't know if I'm remembering it exactly right, but it's kind of like this. The boomers outnumber the new generation. What generation Z is it? I don't know. Outnumber the youth by 80%. So it doesn't matter how we vote in a decent government that will actually do something about global warming and equality and workers' rights and all the great things that we clearly need to do. There's one of you and 80 of them. As people get older and more conservative, they’re desperate to cling on to what's theirs. We've got to wait until they all die. It's quite an interesting statistic, but I'd have to research that actually a little bit more. Luckily, we could be coming to that tipping point.
To go back to your original question, the free party is something that offers that positive energy in a very constructive way. It's not about escapism or to me has never been about escapism. It's always been about struggle and always been about the sheer force of determination to hold the community together, rather than a resignation and buying into the leisure industry.
EB: This makes me think about how rave culture has been totally glamorised by the media. Obviously there's been some amazing photography that came to light in the back end of the last decade. And it's depicted as a hedonistic, lovely lifestyle. Whereas, I guess the reality is probably that it takes an awful lot of commitment, determination, and brutal living conditions to strive towards this purpose of alternative living and doing something different against the system. What are your opinions on that?
I don’t know which photographs you mean. There was a book, which I will not mention by name, that came out many years ago which depicted a lot of people on ketamine lying around in the morning whenever the author remembered they had a camera and that it was light enough. It was documenting a very late stage European teknival scene showing the messiness of those people very well. But it made me very angry because in the weeks preceding that teknival, a huge amount of creativity and work had gone into making it amazing. And just because that person didn't have a particularly good lens or camera, none of that was caught on camera and didn't get documented and didn't get accepted into the V&A. So that's the other side of the coin from what you were saying.
Personally, I have no problem if something becomes fashionable and it has a positive effect and inspires people. I feel that fashion, the clothes one wears, the way one presents oneself, the identity that you embrace, are all very powerful things, all very creative and very relevant and shouldn't be ignored. For example, the fact that it went so huge and viral in France across a whole generation and became very fashionable so that most of the kids were actually going out and organizing their own teknivals across a period of years, would have been the thing that really disturbed the status quo and felt that this kind of brutal action was required to repress it because it actually did threaten to shift the power balance. I'm just saying that as a measure of how powerful fashion can be. But again, once that has then been co-opted and marketed, then obviously it can be very quickly diffused.
That's another very interesting point about the free party scene, is the opposition to that. We have to tread very carefully because we'd spent many years of our lives dedicated to giving people free parties. I like to say we gifted them because we paid for them. We generated all the energy and funding and whatever that was necessary to make those things happen. Yet we still get people moaning on our social media, saying that we're doing a commercial event where we want our artists to get paid. It's quite twisted politics that some people seem to feel that to operate 100% outside of the system is the only way to do anything. And if you take any wage for your work that you do, you somehow break the authenticity, which of course is absolute bullshit. It should be the other way around. The workers should be fully compensated for the labour that they put in. The profit driven part of the economy is what's at fault here, not the actual equality in the workplace.
EB: How do you think today free party collectives or free space collectives can remain authentic in today's climate?
That's the real issue here, with hedonism and escapism, to almost pretend that you are somehow autonomous and independent. When in fact, you're hiding away from the problems and not really building anything alternative.
Just talking about the groups that I know, here, they don't really have any trouble remaining authentic, because they are living the life. All of them are very creative people. It is a magnet for that part of ourselves, and an inspiration for that part of ourselves, because everyone can help do something. There's a huge range of talents and jobs necessary. The organisational skill is creative. The maintenance of the sound system, the building of the sound system is very creative. The presentation, the decor, the lighting, the publicity, the vibe, as I say, the fashion, all of it is very, it's fantastic. And every every collective that I know are all very switched onto that. Whether they're doing it for free, because there's a lot of very beautiful, big abandoned industrial places around here, but also in associations, there's lots of very good community associations. So they might be doing it for a small amount of money to help pay for something or do benefits for various good causes, including themselves.
I think we've escaped that kind of misguided political view that you somehow have to be a drug dealer to be outside of the system and to pay for things, or you're not authentic. That's basically what the problem was. Some people took it as a badge of honor that they’re 100% out of the system. But the truth is, regardless of our internal belief system or politics, we are all completely insulated within a matrix of supply lines that are run by the capitalist system. So good luck with organising your whole distribution network of co-ops and collectives. I'm totally up for networking with people who are like-minded in that way and I do what I can. But that's the real issue here, with hedonism and escapism, to almost pretend that you are somehow autonomous and independent. When in fact, you're hiding away from the problems and not really building anything alternative.
EB: I think that's a wonderful statement. And maybe I'm getting too abstract or conceptual here, but what kind of best practices or design techniques did you have that helps to visually convey these sort of messages?
Funny you should mention that. We are organising something called Graphics Clash, which is an accessible workshop space teaching design, graphics and technique for people to be able to express their connection or their relationship to the free party scene. All the attention generally is on the loud music, the loud speakers and sadly, very often it goes back to the focus on the DJ. But of course, as our conversation here has pointed out, it's a much bigger cultural thing. So for me as the graphic artist, who had a lot to do with creating those graphic shortcuts to that place that is so difficult to attain like the pirate flags. That side of things is very powerful and does open up other levels of uncharted areas, where there are other possibilities for building alternative societies or communities, economics, politics. There's many areas which are fertile for the imagination. Graphics is a very easy one to demonstrate. Music is one, and it's great that technology is now more accessible to more people to explore. Graphics, a little bit less so, because people feel they need more skill and practice.
This connection between the imagination and the physical self through a pencil onto the paper to express those ideas, to make those notes, to make those sketches, to then develop the ideas, to manifest them, is key.
Screen printing is very easy for anybody to get a good idea for a t-shirt or a poster and I can help you realise your ideas and show you technically how to achieve it. Which also begins to undermine branding and marketing and all these things which use the exact same techniques to persuade people that you need to buy into this idea of what is status and identity and everything that's connected with it. The idea is to have an exhibition of people who have created a poster for Graphics Clash, which is a representation of the scene and how they express that, which will also invite old school free party designers from across the last 30 years to also do a graphics clash poster. So we've got a real mix of people. We're going to be doing a whole series of different workshops around the central core of the pen to solve.
This continuation seems to be quite a central theme to everything we've been discussing really, sharing the knowledge and making sure that Spiral Tribe is still active in certain spaces and transmitting the message forward into other spaces, into other collectives, into other people's minds. I think that's really special. This connection between the imagination and the physical self through a pencil onto the paper to express those ideas, to make those notes, to make those sketches, to then develop the ideas, to manifest them, is key.
EB: One final question before we wrap up. It's quite a spiritual question maybe, but what is the key thing that being part of Spiral Tribe taught you?
MAH: Gosh, I mean, it's so much a part of me, I don't think I could say any one particular thing. But maybe themes that we've already discussed, things like the personal revelation of what a con the construct of neoliberal capitalism is and that awful colonial history. And to say that the veil has been lifted. Also around community organising as we had no organisation at all. I mean, if I had my time again, would we do it less chaotically? I don't think so. I don't think it would have happened if we hadn't - the chaos and the creativity go hand in hand, and have a very interesting way of self organising. There was a lot of trauma along the way, but hey, we pushed through.
The ability to construct an experiment with constructing other possibilities and empowering people through imagination. This kind of spirituality, imagination, human creativity, human intelligence, human perception, human connection through our senses with the world, is an amazing and complex subject. I would definitely expand that word out into something like that, rather than a single spiritual realm. But then at the same time, one has to be very careful of the esoteric, where it creeps into collectives, instead of actual democratic discussion, because I've been in many situations having worked with many different collectives whereby people have an alternative spiritual belief system of their own, which centers themselves and they're at the center of the universe. Where the democratic discussion is no longer necessary because they are justified in what they believe. That's very dangerous. The esoteric is often used as a cover for that selfish, egocentric, entitled way of thinking.
The main thing is the power of creativity and that we're all creative creatures and we just need to be given the opportunity, the space and the freedom to be able to do that. Those avenues are being rapidly closed down with super expensive education, marginalisation, identity politics, making squatting illegal. You have to be in full time employment just to afford to have the space to shelter and sleep, let alone a studio space to actually explore your own creativity. Something that really drives me is to share information, exchange ideas, because I'm still learning too. We're all on a path, always.