Where creativity meets connection
When many people talk about the ‘good old days’, they’re actually referring to a time when they weren’t particularly good, usually weren’t very old and probably recalling the late nights. And that’s especially true when older folk get misty-eyed about rave culture.
During the late 80s / early 90s, it seemed like everyone was dancing to electronic music in a field or derelict warehouse, accompanied by various levels of legality. OK. Perhaps not everyone. But there were certainly enough people involved to call this phenomenon ‘a movement’.
“We're not blindly nostalgic about it,” says Lucy Robinson, an academic historian and Professor in Collaborative History at the University of Sussex. “I think there are lots of problems that exist within rave. It reproduces the world it's part of. Lots of students, for example, have been doing interesting dissertation work on women's experiences of rave. Where safety might not mean the same thing for a woman, or thinking about race and how that might intersect.”
She and her colleagues have been building a ‘Post-Rave Britain’ archive. A mix of historical investigation, memory bank, and storytelling, it explores thirty years of British culture, society and politics through the lens of good times and collective action.
Fitting neatly between art and history, the project has grown out of several different collaborations at the University of Sussex. “We’ve been teaching a module called Post Rave History to our third years. It used to be Post Punk History, but we wanted to move on from hang-ups about authenticity and old men telling us we were doing it wrong. It’s part history of subcultures, but also a kind of experiment in what history looks like if we did it like a rave?”
It's become part of the university’s in-house Festival of Ideas for the last three years, bringing new and different voices into their work. “Sussex is brilliant at thinking about how you can have conversations beyond the university. Students, post-graduates or anybody can pitch an idea for the festival. It’s really good at getting the university out into the city.” Previous years have seen Robinson running projects with Danbert Nobacon, showing I Get Knocked Down, the documentary on his band Chumbawamba, and hosting a post-screening Q&A. There’s also been plenty of collaborations with the Museum of Youth Culture, Towner Eastbourne and the Subcultures Network. “All of those conversations mean we never quite know where we're going, but it's always somewhere exciting.”
Antiques Roadshow meets ecstasy.
Now Robinson and her colleagues are bringing the project to Brighton Festival. On Thurs 8 May, The Green Door Store will host something she cheerily describes as “Antiques Roadshow meets ecstasy.” A range of their students have been trained in how to collect information and make sense of archival objects. “They're going to be scanning photos and objects, and collecting stories.” She’s confident of turning up a few interesting things and adding some more context to one of the most impactful (and least recorded) cultural movements in British history. “We're also really excited to see what people bring to us, and then all that will have a place in the Museum of Youth Culture archive. We're hoping to build a new archive of rave.”
You can understand how the project had roots in a previous work around punk culture. The two youth movements are closely entwined, in original spirit if not music styles. Both were fermented by dissatisfaction with what the establishment expected of young people, and a spirit which suggested anyone could have a go.
“They both changed our ways of working in teams. They changed our ways of thinking about how you get something together when you don't have many resources.” Robinson says she thinks about herself as a post-rave academic. Something fundamentally changed during that period, an impact felt across art, music and numerous aspects of business, fashion and entertainment.
The project has been working as a lens to examine what exactly changed in our society. But, as a social phenomenon, it hasn’t finished yet. Punk has certainly had its impact and retreated quietly to the heritage circuit. But clubbing, festivals, electronic music and free parties are still massive subcultures that constantly reinvent themselves.
“I don't think the driving force of punk was when you get old, you could tell young people they're a bit shit.”
“We found it difficult when the dominant narrative coming out of the punk ‘godfathers’ was them using their experience to slag off young people for not being ‘young people properly’. It's very contradictory. I don't think the driving force of punk was when you get old, you could tell young people they're a bit shit. There’s a sort of messiness around rave. Its tentacles are still everywhere, which means it's more useful as a way of thinking.”
Robinson’s work has predominantly centred around researching and contextualising the 80s. She recently wrote a book on the period, which offered a continuation of her academic work, examining an evolution in police training, crowd control and football violence, all of which feeds into the events around 1985’s Battle of the Beanfield. “The history of Britain is the history of rave and vice versa. Partly it all came out of my background in that.”
Chris Warren, her colleague on the Post-Rave Britain project, started out as a French specialist before becoming a historian and conducting a lot of work on counterculture magazines in France. Another collaborator is Ben Burbridge, who also works on the impact of rave upon British visual arts.
“Chris is a DJ himself, and so can really think about sound - and that's a key element of rave. Ben's amazing at understanding how art is produced and why it matters. We've come from three slightly different places, but we're all really interested in studying what rave did to the world, and we feel like it's still useful.”
Robinson says when she started working on subcultures in 2010, something was already in the air. There were student protests, and she’d written a report about illegal kettling crowd control tactics during these. “All of the evidence was showing young people were more engaged with politics, were more likely to fundraise for charity, all of that stuff. And yet the dominant narrative was still: ‘young people are just consumers, they're a bit selfish, individual and lazy.’ It wasn’t the world I saw.”
This was the starting point for an attempt to reclaim the sense of youth being transgressive, creative and radical - largely using history. Alongside her were criminologists and English literature specialists. “We wanted to revisit early academic work around resistance that grew out of the 70s. Maybe there's some ideas there about the creative potential of young people. I think that was a lot of the motivation. Ten years later, our subcultures network has published huge amounts of research.”
“People have been dancing there for years.”
Brighton and the surrounding countryside played its part in rave culture, whether that’s in the arches of the Zap Club, or on the pebbles at a free party. “One of the things we’ve thought about is the history in this ground. Whether you’re at a free party you’ve found in the woods near Stammer or at Black Rock, people have been dancing there for years. Hundreds and thousands of years. You can almost feel history under your feet when you're dancing in these places.”
She’s been doing projects with her students on the hills above Hangleton, where people have always gone to party, whether they were Victorians or Druids. “There's also a lovely, slightly hippy-dippy, witchy line of rave, with the ley lines and the vibes. There's a kind of spirituality which you probably couldn't say around punk.”
She tells me that her angle towards the material is to think about it in terms of bodies. These can either be individual or collective. Robinson is fascinated by what it’s like to have a large number of people sharing a common purpose. And perhaps having some fun along the way.
“We're not going to tell the whole history of rave. We're attempting a little bit of a thought experiment. What would it be like, and what would history be like, if it felt like a rave? History, as a discipline, is under attack at the moment. There's a lot of debate about what history should be taught. And there are certain histories which might help us make sense of that, and maybe help us find alternative ways of talking.”
Festival of Ideas: Post-Rave Britain Archive Roadshow comes to The Green Door Store on Thurs 8 May 2025, as part of Brighton Festival
www.sussex.ac.uk/schools/media-arts-humanities/festival-of-ideas
Main image by Steven Chandler
Stuart Rolt
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