London Weekend 11th-14th July: Gang Wars and a Party Under a Road

Politics:

As I dragged my luggage onto the tube from Heathrow, I flopped myself down onto one of the tube info-tainment papers. I picked it up for a browse and was greeted with huge bold headlines ‘five stabbed in one day‘. My mind flickered to the anxious face of my mum as she warned me to be careful before i left. She had just read the article on the horrific murders of the two french students Gabriel Ferez and Laurent Bonomo, which had happened only days before i was due to arrive in london. Apparently she had even more cause for concern: the words on everyones lips in London were that stabbings were becoming an ‘epidemic‘. Over the weekend I was searching for political scandal in the climate of a failing economy and an unpopular Prime Minister. The only headlines I saw were about stabbings.

This issue has come to dominate political dialogue, as parties and politicians compete with each other to offer a solution to the increasingly fearful british public. Apparently, so far, 21 teenagers have been killed this year in violent crime incidents, usually involving knives. One article claims that one in five london men have been threatened with a knife at some point. Hard liners demand harsher sentences and prison, police are demanding more powers, and lefties are examining the social causes. Government reponse has so far demonstrated a little bit of each, but mainly leans towards the hard line: Scotland Yard chief Sir Ian Blair revealed that more than 1,200 people had been arrested and 528 knives seized in a major operation launched six weeks ago. Home secretary Jacqui Smith has also revealed plans for government policies based on ‘shock tactics‘ where young offenders involved in violent crime are made to meet their victims, among other interventionist strategies that particularly target young people.

The government approach seems fairly confused and noncommittal. According to research done by the Manchester University school of law, evidence of causes and the structure of youth crime in the UK contradicts government policy (look up nick davies of the guardian for this article). Which I find unsurprising. Just from walking around london, you can see that there are alot of social problems which need to be addressed and the fact that they haven‘t been so far is indicative of government commitment. Perousing brick lane on a friday night, you see some fucked up people and a few gangs looking dubious here and there. At the psy trance gig we went to, in an industrial area, we were shocked when this girl who could not have been any older than 13 looking smacked out tried to sell us some k. However, you have to acknowledge too that it is alot of people in a small space which inevitably means more tension and more idiots, where living costs alot, and there is a culture of heavy drinking. In addition, there is an element of beat up in the whole knife crime thing: as pointed out in one article in the guardian, the number of stabbings is dwarfed by the number of people who die in car accidents. The really alarming thing is the increasing number of very young people involved in this sort of thing. It does get more and more complex. Well to Boris Johnson, mayor of London, good luck with this one, its a career breaker.

Rhythms:

So, before I had touched down in London, Annie had already been scouting out for some squat party or psytrance gig we could go to. She has already been spending her spare time exploring the psytrance scene in London which by all accounts sounds very healthy, although restriced as it is in aus by government restrictions and big club monopolies on legal venues. However, im unsure if legal restrictions are actually restrictive: in most situations, running illegal parties provides an element of freedom with venue and with the music, as well as with the drugs, that create an environment of experimentation and vibrance.


We headed out on saturday night, getting off the train in a desolate industrial area dominated by this highway that trampled through the landscape in attempts to connect parts of a city otherwise inhospitable to cars. Our little journey along this highway was interesting and beautiful in that particular form of industrial beauty that is both harsh and unintended, full of art that is not supposed to be art. For example, we passed an empty shopping complex where an enormous red digital sign that was supposed to say ‘sale‘ flickered dementedly in sections as though it had been driven insane by the contradictions of it's own logic.

Our walk eventually led us to this industrial site where there was already one trance warehouse party underway: not ours though, we wandered by, following a discreet path beside a canal, through the gate, and leading us to the venue: quite literally, the gap underneath the highway where it became a bridge to cross the canal. This interesting space consisted of sloping walls with an an avenue of concrete in the middle, blocked off at one end to form the dj booth. I loved it! This space was about as useless as spaces get: but just like the sale sign, it had inadvertently been transformed into art.

The beauty of London with its over 10 million inhabitents and culture of musical innovation is that talent is everywhere. The djs at this gig, (i can only remember two names: gus and dainty doll) were excellent: really good quality psytrance which was not too dark or too light, with a bit of a grimey kick that accentuated the bass lines, not too cheesy or too hardcore, all the djs complimented each other but made variations on the theme. Interestingly, almost everyone there was from a different country, unlike the sydney psytrance scene which is dominated by aussies. I guess this just reflects the fact that London is such a universal city. For the most part, the people at this gig were very nice, the organisers were generous and friendly, and i was generally impressed by the quality of the people (except for this small group of very weird muscle men who would occassionally strip off their shirts and go and grind their crotches on the speakers... apparently showing off¿¿ truly weird behaviour) This gig generally was highly organised with security at the gate, an entrance fee, a bar, a nos bar and an excellent sound system set up. I found out later that they even rented the space from the council to ensure that it would not get shut down by police: i found that really strange: renting out a building, or warehouse i can understand, but a gap between a highway and dirt?? I guess money talks.

This is where things get interesting, and politics and rhythms interlock: We found out that the reason for the careful preparation and security was that the gang warfare and violent crime that had so recently become the focus of media attention in London had seeped its way into the illegal party scene. The disadvantage to organising illegal parties is that people go there who want to go somewhere without restrictions so that they can behave badly.Of course, the organisers cannot call the police if something gets out of hand, unless it gets really out of hand, or the party gets shut down. So sometimes, you end up with a strange mix of devoted music lovers, teenagers and dodgy people generally. According to Bjorn, one of the organisers of this particular gig, someone who had organised a party at that venue the week before had run into trouble when a gang had shown up and started to steal shit and get violent. The organisers had been forced to physically remove these people: which of course is fucking risky if, as the papers say, everyone in London is carrying a knife these days. However, as I said before, it si a bit of a dilemma. Legalising parties tends to commercialise them and can potentially reduce innovation if it comes into conflict with the bottom dollar. In addition, London‘s club laws seriously restrict operating hours: as we discovered, most places shut at two!!! However making new music more accessible does tend to push mainstream music into more innovative directions: for example, the London based Sunrise group in the 1980s (who organised the first raves, and the biggest ever rave in history in 1989 outside surrey) contributed to the spread of acid house into the mainstream, laying the foundations of practically every genre of electronic music today. If psy became more accessible and more mainstream, i wonder how that might change the nature of music generally.....