Andrew Hill

Acid House and Thatcherism: noise, the mob, and the English countryside

ABSTRACT This paper examines why the late 1980s youth subculture Acid House provoked a moral panic of the scale and intensity that it did. The subculture is conceived as presenting a disruptive presence to Thatcherism as an hegemonic project. The terms under which this occurred are examined through the themes of noise, the mob, and the disruption of bureaucratic authority. The presence of Acid House within the English countr yside, and in particular the Home Counties, is situated as enhancing the problematic status of the subculture. The scale of measures taken against Acid House is related to Thatcherisms authoritarian populism. Acid House is located in terms of a history of similar forms of popular cultural activity. The coverage of Acid House in The Sun and The Daily Mail, and the parliamentary debate around the second reading of the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act, are drawn upon throughout.

KEYWORDS: Moral panic; youth subculture; Thatcherism; noise; the mob; the countr yside

INTRODUCTION

From the 17 August 1988 when The Sun rst reported on drug taking at the London club Spectrum, a moral panic developed around the youth subculture Acid House. From nights held at a cluster of London clubs in autumn 1987, the practices of the subculture, centred upon the consumption of the drug ecstasy and dancing to House music, had by the summer of 1988 emerged on a national scale. Parties of up to twenty thousand people were held in venues ranging from lm studios, aircraft hangars and elds. Across 1989 and into 1990 other papers followed The Suns shocked coverage. A police Pay Party Unit was speci cally formed in September 1989 to act against the numerous unlicensed parties. And legislation in the form of the Entertainment (Increased Penalties) Act was passed in July 1990 to increase the punishment for party organizers, a move that was critical in reducing the number and scale of these events.
British Journal of Sociology Vol. No. 53 Issue No. 1 (March 2002) pp. 89105 2002 London School of Economics and Political Science ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online Published by Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of the LSE DOI: 10.1080/00071310120109348

90

Andrew Hill

The chronology of this panic has been well documented (Bussmann 1998; Collin 1997; Garratt 1998; Redhead 1993). Here the question of why Acid House produced this reaction is addressed through examining the disruptive presence the subculture presented within late-80s Britain. The relationship between Acid House and Thatcherism will in particular be drawn out. Thatcherism occupied a critical position across 80s Britain, extending out from the gure of Margaret Thatcher herself to present what has been conceived as an hegemonic project (Hall 1988),1 encompassing the support of much of the national press, the majority of the Conservative Party, and signi cant sections of the populace, as evident in Thatchers three election victories. At its most ambitious Thatcherism presented a vision of what Britain should become, to de ne what the nation is and who the people are (ibid.: 71), and to attempt to remake the nation in these terms. Thatcherisms commitment to this remaking is evident in its adversarialism. Thatcherism was repeatedly, as Thatcher herself put it in a speech given at the time of the miners strike, set against an enemy without (quoted in Young 1993: 372) such as the Soviet Union, the Argentines, the IRA or the EC, and the enemy within (ibid.: 372), such as the labour movement and consensus politics more generally. These confrontations were rendered more intense perhaps through the way in which Thatcherism situated itself in deeply moral terms (Hall 1988: 85; Letwin 1993; Young 1993); as a great moral drama (Young 1993: 353); as a con ict between good and evil (Thatcher quoted in Young 1993: 352); where the purpose of governing is to do the right thing (Letwin 1993: 30). Acid House can be situated as presenting a type of enemy within, not of course on the scale of the labour movement, but presenting a presence that did not t with Thatcherisms conception of Britain, where, as with conservative conceptions of the nation more generally the political unity of the nation can be seen to consist in a continual displacement of the anxiety of its irredeemably plural modern space (Bhabha 1994: 149). The reaction to Acid House from the right-wing tabloid press led by The Sun and The Daily Mail; the policing of the subculture co-ordinated by the Home Of ce; and the Entertainment Act, proposed by the Conservative MP Graham Bright, can all be situated as emanating from supporters of the Thatcherite project. Thatcherism made few engagements with popular culture (Grossberg 1992: 24950), but the reaction to Acid House can be seen to echo and re-stage the way in which, historically, forms of popular culture have presented a signi cant source of threats to order, governance and authority, and the way these have been acted against to maintain the social order. Indeed, the restriction and re-ordering of popular culture has been located as critical to the emergence and development of modernity and the regulation and ordering associated with this (Bauman 1987: 5167; Harris 1995; Underdown 1987: 4472, 23970). The reaction to Acid House then, can be situated in terms of how moral panics have featured as a way of asserting control over these threatening aspects of popular

Acid House and Thatcherism

91

culture. In late modernity, an era marked by the frequency of moral panics (Thompson 1998: 12; McRobbie 1994: 198, 202), popular culture has provided the source for numerous panics. This has included a succession of panics around youth subcultures, from the Teds on through to Acid House; with the clashes between Mods and Rockers in the mid-60s constituting the subject of the classic sociological study of a moral panic (Cohen 1980). The concept of a youth subculture has been the subject of an ongoing and wide-ranging debate that has intensi ed in recent years (Bennett 1999; Muggleton 2000; Thornton 1995). Much of this has centred upon challenging the conception of the youth subcultures of the postwar period, from the Teds through to Punk, presented in the highly in uential work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporar y Cultural Studies, in particular the collection Resistance Through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson 1976) and Hebdiges Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). This debate has raised a series of questions that are signi cant for assessing the organization and development of youth culture both prior to and since the publication of the Centres work, but these are, in the main, more marginal to the particular issues examined here in regard to Acid House. To point to one theme though that suggests that Acid House does not t easily within the Centres terms of analysis, the diversity of participants in Acid House (Garratt 1998: 123, 160), makes it dif cult to conceive of the subculture in the class based terms central to the Centres work. In referring here then to Acid House as a youth subculture, the concept is used in a perhaps quite basic sense that echoes earlier de nitions (Brake 1985: 1882), to denote an identi able set of practices participated in by youths, that were labelled and reacted to as deviant. These practices were centred upon dancing to House music at parties and club nights whilst taking ecstasy, and were regarded as deviant enough to provoke a moral panic of the scale examined here. Whether Acid House in Britain presents the last of the type of youth subculture that existed on a national scale and generated a signi cant moral panic, remains to be seen. One way of approaching the relationship between Acid House and Thatcherism would have been to examine the relationship between the subculture and certain core Thatcherite values, such as the work ethic, entrepreneurialism, discipline, and respectability.2 This would have pointed to instances of a double relationship between the subculture and Thatcherism that reaches beyond simple opposition. For example, the entrepreneurialism of party organizers and a perceived emphasis upon the individualistic pursuit of pleasure by participants in the subculture, have been pointed to as af nities between the two (Cosgrove 1989; Savage 1999). Here though, in seeking to explain the moral panic around the subculture, tensions between Acid House and Thatcherism are examined through the themes of noise, the mob, the presence of the subculture within the resonant setting of the English countr yside, and the disruption the subculture presented to bureaucratic authority. Approaching the

92

Andrew Hill

reaction to Acid House in such terms helps to reach beyond the expressions of humanitarian concern that were repeatedly articulated in this moral panic. The idea that youth as a group needs to be protected has repeatedly gured in moral panics around youth activity (Thompson 1998: 43) The need to protect young people from drugs, drug dealers and unsafe party venues was repeatedly enunciated in the panic around the subculture (Garratt and Taggart 1990: 38; Hansard 9 March 1990). In focusing upon the relationship between Acid House and Thatcherism the concerns of this discussion differ from that of Thorntons (1994, 1995: 11662) work, which apart from the chronological accounts cited above, presents the only other substantial engagement with this panic. The analysis presented there is concerned to emphasize the integral role the media played in the emergence of Acid House, and focuses upon the signi cance of this moral panic to the establishment and development of the subculture an issue that is returned to below.

NOISE

One signi cant focus of complaint about the subculture was the noise that it produced. Parties featured ampli ed music, dominated typically by the genre House with its repetitive bass lines and drum machine rhythms. The scale of many parties meant that a certain volume of music was required, especially as this music presented a focus for the dancing and drug taking that took place there. The problem of the subcultures noise was repeatedly emphasized in the debate around the second reading of the Entertainments Bill. Graham Bright noted how in his constituency of Luton, South Local residents endure disturbance and noise which can be intolerable. A party held last August beneath the yover at the junction of the A12 and the A130 produced hundreds of complaints to the police and local authorities about noise levels. One held the subsequent month on the A130 at Ben eet provoked more than 1,000 complaints. Some of those complaints were from people up to 10 miles away. This illustrates the impact of these events. The nuisance is intolerable (Hansard 9 March 1990: 1113). Stephen Norris also commented on this. There is also the problem of noise. The most recent Acid House party in my constituency [Epping Forest] was held in a perfectly normal residential street. . . . The party took place one night without notice and the noise was so appalling that several of the residents who complained had to leave their homes. They had to ring friends or relatives and say, Can I please come and stay with you as this is just unbearable? We cannot stay here. They had to leave because of the noise and the criminal damage and intimidation that occurred outside the party. (ibid.: 11312) In one sense this noise can simply be seen to pose a disturbance to nearby residents. But this can also be reached beyond to something more

Acid House and Thatcherism

93

complex. Attali, in the in uential Noise: A Political Economy of Music, explores the relationship between music and the social order, and situates noise as sound that presents a threat to this order. He points to the way in which under totalitarian regimes it has been necessar y to ban subversive noise because it betokens demands for cultural autonomy, support for differences or marginality (Attali 1992: 7), as evident in music policy under Stalin, the Nazis reaction to jazz (Mackay 1996: 164), and the censorship of music under Pinochet (Negus 1996: 2008). In regard to the latter regime, this censorship has been conceived in terms that to assert hegemony the state institutions were employed to break up cultural practices and their meaning (ibid.: 201). Whilst there is a need to distinguish between these regimes and Thatcherism, parallels in regard to this area can be pointed to (Mackay 1996: 164), with the noise of the subculture marking the presence of a group that did not t with Thatcherism as an hegemonic project, and needing therefore, as with other enemies within, to be acted against. This analysis can be extended to cover the Major government and the continuation of Thatcherite politics it in part presented. In 1994 this government brought in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, containing speci c clauses directed against the ampli cation of sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats (Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, Part V, section 63 (1)(b)), namely House music in the numerous subgenres it had by then developed into.3 The threat the music played at Acid House parties can be seen to pose to the social order echoes similar reactions to forms of popular music in postwar Britain, most clearly RocknRoll in 19567 and Punk in 19767 (Street 1992: 3048, 3136). These fears can also be situated in regard to longer running concerns in Western culture around the impact of certain forms of music (Gilbert and Pearson 1999: 14656), that reach back to The Republic (Plato 1998: 958), and the Dionysian rites in Greece and Rome, and to other cults originating in Asia Minor. Here, music is a locus of subversion, a transcendence of the body. At odds with the of cial religions and centres of power, these rites gathered marginals together in forest clearings and caves: women, slaves, expatriates (Attali 1992: 13). The identi cation of certain music as a source for experiences of abandonment, excess and disorder is perhaps most powerfully developed in Nietzches analysis of the Dionysiac (1993). The presence of music within Acid House can be located in similar terms through the notion of jouissance, an extreme experience of pleasure that induces a loss of self (Heath 1977: 9),4 that can be con gured as a modern reconception of the Dionysiac. In Acid House experiences of jouissance can be seen as being produced by the combined effects of House music, drug taking and extended periods of dancing, that took place at parties (Garratt 1998: 127; Gilbert and Pearson 1999: 647, 104; Plant 1999: 168). The strong, repetitive rhythms of House; the high degree of repetition evident in other aspects of this music, from chord progressions to the use of samples; the minimal lyrical content; and the

94

Andrew Hill

dominance of electronic technology in its production, have all been conceived as contributing to the loss of self associated with its reception (Middleton 1990: 28591; Reynolds and Old eld 1988: 39; Tagg 1994: 219). Situating the presence of House music in the subculture as noise, as presenting a threat to the social order, challenges the simplicity of the charge that House music was about pleasure and was apolitical (McRobbie1999: 133);5 serving as a reminder of the way in which pleasure intersects with, and cannot simply be separated from the political, and extending traditional conceptions of what constitutes political popular music (Pratt 1990). The sense of the problematics of this noise, and the disruption it presented can be seen to be enhanced by the location of many parties in the English countr yside.6 In the context of the observation that it is in the city that contemporar y popular culture . . . has its home (Chambers 1986: 17), the rural presence of the subculture constitutes something of an anomaly, a situation in part brought about by the need for the venues of parties to be hidden from the police, to be situated away from more noticeable locations in more densely populated urban areas. The values associated with the English countr yside have a complex histor y (Matless 1998). Notions of it constituting a rural idyll have persisted as a leading conception of this space across the twentieth century (Hetherington 2000: 201; Matless 1998; Sibley 1997). It has repeatedly been conceived as a site of tranquility, conservatism, order and respectability; intersecting associations enhanced in comparison with urban areas. The presence of the noise of Acid House in this rural setting can be conceived then as adding to the sense of disruption associated with the subculture, disturbing these associations. This disruption was perhaps further enhanced by the focus of this noise upon the night, that most quiet of rural times. In such terms the reaction to Acid House can be compared with the reaction to similar invasions of the countr yside. Calls for action against the disruption caused by the free pop festivals of the late 60s and 70s, and New Age Traveller convoys in the 90s, directly invoked their presence within rural areas (Hetherington 2000: 201; McKay 1996: 119, 2000: 35). Attention needs to be given though to the variation in conceptions of different regions of the English countr yside (Matless 1998: 1718). Whilst parties were held throughout England, and Britain, the Home Counties presented the setting for numerous parties, including some of the largest, and became the focus for much of The Sun and The Daily Mails reporting on the subculture. Participants were afforded easy access to these parties from London, and a series of orbital parties which made use of the M25 as a means of access, were identi ed by these papers: organisers nd a location somewhere near the M25, where people can get to quickly, and everyone races there late on a Saturday night (The Sun, 8 June 1989: 13). The disruption that the noise of the subculture presented can be seen as being still further enhanced by the presence of this noise within the Home Counties. This area has been con gured as a bedrock site of conservatism,

Acid House and Thatcherism

95

order and respectability, presenting what could be conceived as a core site of the values of Thatcherism and its conception of the nation. Issues of order will be addressed in a moment, but respectability can also be situated as a key tenet of Thatcherism (Brake and Hale 1992: 36, 89; Hall 1988: 90, 157). Thatcherisms attachment to respectability provided, as respectability has done more generally (Skeggs 1997: 13), one of the key mechanisms by which some groups were othered and pathologized (ibid.: 3), including within the 80s, dole scroungers, socialists and the subculture. Locating the subculture as disrespectable provided one means through which the respectability of Thatcherism could be con rmed and enhanced, presenting a more recent instance of the way in which governing groups have de ned popular cultural practices as disrespectable, used this to act against them, and to enhance their own respectability (Stallybrass and White 1986). The sense of the disruption brought by Acid House being enhanced by its presence within the countryside and the Home Counties, can be read in the coverage of the subculture in The Sun, where the disturbance caused by one party is contrasted with its setting in a pleasant and prosperous part of Surrey (3 October 1989: 6). However, The Daily Mails extensive reporting on 26 June 1989 on Britains biggest-ever Acid party (ibid.: 1) at White Waltham in Buckinghamshire is perhaps most evocative in regard to this. The convoy of participants making their way to the party is described as bearing down on an unsuspecting piece of gentle England (ibid.: 5), bringing 12 hours of ear-splitting Acid House music and dancing (ibid.: 5). The report continued, The residents of the village where the party was to be held were about to be confused and terri ed by their arrival (ibid.: 5). At one point the reporter, who was travelling with the convoy noted, we eased our way down a countr y lane passing beautiful houses, neat gardens, stables (ibid.: 5), evoking a sense of tranquility and order about to be shattered by the party, as anxious faces watched from house windows in the Berkshire village of White Waltham. A lone police car stood guard swamped by the number of arrivals (ibid.: 5).7 Such statements can be located as invoking a long-running sense of concern about the way in which, through increased mobility, the countr yside was being opened up to urban dwellers, who presented a noisy, invading force, insensitive to notions of the sanctity of this space (Sibley 1997: 220). Such concerns can be traced back to the 1920s stereotype of the Cockney on day-trips into the countr yside, and the disregard shown by this gure for rural values (Matless 1998: 6770). And, these statements can be read as invoking concerns about the presence of traf c within the countryside, that can be traced through instances as diverse as Mr Toads motoring in The Wind in the Willows (ibid.: 63), to the series of protests around road building in the 1990s.

96
THE MOB

Andrew Hill

If the panic around Acid House can in part be understood in regard to notions of noise, fears of the mob also marked this panic. Parties featured crowds of participants. The crowd, in its volatility and instability has historically been conceived as posing a potential threat to the social order (McClelland 1989). The experiences of jouissance associated with Acid House perhaps added to the fear of participants at parties forming particularly unpredictable and raucous crowds. The mob has been de ned as a crowd that has come to present a direct, rather than potential, challenge to law and order (ibid.: 1). The consumption of illegal drugs at parties that were themselves unlicensed, allowed participants to readily and directly be labelled as mobs, as they were in reports in The Sun (3 July 1989: 5, 25 September 1989: 4, 13 October 1990: 7) and The Daily Mail (26 June 1989: 6, 25 September 1989: 4). In coverage of confrontations between participants and the police, and of instances of theft and vandalism, the notion of the subculture forming a rampaging mob was perhaps especially easy to evoke. The report in The Sun on 25 September 1989 on a party in Essex described how Angr y locals said revellers TERRORISED them and RUINED their crops. One mob LOOTED a garage. Ten thousand partygoers who paid 20 a ticket, descended on a hangar at a World War Two air eld at Raydon near Colchester, Essex, at 3am yesterday. Seventy cops stood by but were powerless to halt them. One mob STOLE petrol and goods at the Allstop garage on the A12 at Ardleigh, near Colchester. Attendant Mark Pembroke, 19, said there were hundreds of them. Villagers were PRISONERS in their own homes. (ibid.: 4) And The Daily Mails editorial of 26 June 1989, noted how Wherever they descend, these Acid House parties not only disturb peoples rest and disrupt the traf c. They also often cause damage to property and induce fear among the people living round about (ibid.: 6). In such terms Acid House presents a more recent instance of popular culture offering a source for the mob and the challenges it presents to the social order, that can be traced back through the clashes between Mods and Rockers and the Teddy Boy riots of the postwar period, and on much further to the carnival (Bakhtin 1984; Burke 1978: 178204), and the plethora of festivals, revels, and sports, of early modern England (Underdown 1987: 4472, 23970). The illegality of aspects of Acid House, from drug use through to the outing of licensing laws and health and safety regulations, presented direct challenges to law and order, authority and governability. The extent and scale of these challenges should be emphasized. They involved thousands of people, took place on a national scale, and over an extended period of time, from their exposure in newspaper reports on the subculture in September 1988, on after the passing of the Entertainments Act in June 1990. They ranged from individual drug taking; to active work on

Acid House and Thatcherism

97

behalf of party organizers to outwit the police and local authorities; to the riots that occurred when police did raid parties; to security guards at parties ghting off and defeating the police (Collin 1997: 83120; Garratt 1998: 13993). The mass nature of instances of this illegality has been highlighted Faced with thousands of young people who ignored their authority, the police were often at a loss what to do. One night Keith Tappenden8 was policing a rave with 100 men under his command, when fty people simply got out of their cars and threw their keys into the bushes to stop police moving them on. It was dark. The of cers couldnt have found the keys even if theyd tried, let alone have matched them to the vehicles and then moved them. I felt absolutely helpless, says Tappenden. For us that was . . . it was another kind of policing. It was entrapment for us, almost. Wed never been subjected to that. Wed never been subjected to mass numbers you couldnt deal with. (Garratt 1998: 184) The clashes that broke out between the police and subcultural participants at some parties, especially as the policing of the subculture was extended across 1989 and into 1990, provided one focus for the articulation of particularly acute fears about the subculture taking the form of a mob. The Daily Mails frontpage story of 2 October 1989 on a party in Surrey, was headlined Acid guards rout police, it continued, The drugs crisis took a menacing twist yesterday when guards at an acid House party routed the police. A private army of security men attacked with baseball bats, CS gas and vicious dogs. They left 16 of cers injured. A superintendent fearing for the lives of his men, ordered a retreat and had to release two prisoners. At one stage there were fears about an of cer being taken hostage and the eld where the event was held became a no-go area, leaving more than 10,000 revellers free to shatter the peace of a suburban weekend. In commenting on another party in Surrey, The Suns editorial of 3 October 1989, evoked the notion of the Home Counties presented above. Suppose you had read ten years ago of a private army battling police. Suppose you had read of security men, armed with CS gas and baseball bats, unleashing vicious dogs on police of cers, 16 of whom were injured. We can guess your reaction. Either you would not have believed the reports. Or you would have imagined they had happened thousands of miles away in some backward land. But now they have happened in Britain, in 1989, in a pleasant and prosperous part of Surrey. (Ibid.: 6) As with the Mods and Rockers on their scooters and bikes (Cohen 1980: 1945), the ver y mobility of participants in Acid House perhaps enhanced the threat participants were seen to present. Travelling out to parties across Britain became an integral feature of participation for many, and the way in which the location of parties was often kept hidden from the

98

Andrew Hill

police, and could easily shift, made their control and containment more problematic. Whilst the youth subcultures of the postwar period have repeatedly been the subject of moral panics, the scale of the response that developed to Acid House and its mobs of participants needs to be understood in terms of what has been identi ed as Thatcherisms authoritarian populism (Hall 1988), its attempt to impose a new regime of social discipline and leadership from above (ibid.: 84). This can be traced in the circulation of a rhetoric of law and order in the press, through to enhancing the power of the police, and new tougher law and order legislation (Brake and Hale 1992; Gamble 1994), backed by the courting and achieving of a degree of popular consent for such measures. In part this authoritarian populism can be understood as a response to conservative anxieties around a perceived breakdown of law and order in the 60s and 70s, that Thatcherism in part emerged in response to, and again the integral role that popular culture was regarded as playing in this breakdown (Hall et al. 1978: 227323). The scale of the reaction to Acid House is evident in the policing of the subculture. The establishment of the Police Pay Unit in September 1989, to co-ordinate police action against the subculture on a national scale, stands as one example of this. The unit deployed signi cant resources, as head of the unit Keith Tappenden noted: After three months we had started twenty major investigations. The . . . database held 5725 names and 712 vehicles. We had monitored 4380 phone calls and made 258 arrests . . . At any one time we were running 200 intelligence of cers through the countr y (quoted in Collin 1997: 1012). And he added, The cost was colossal to the countr y and the government, we were spending money like water (quoted in ibid.: 118). Police deployed riot squads in raids on parties, along with roadblocks, stop-checks, petty arrests, and the dispersal of information about non-existent parties; at points, it has been argued, stretching the boundaries of legality (Collin 1997: 109; Garratt and Taggart 1990: 38). Government support for these contentious police tactics evokes the broader support the police received in similar circumstances across the 80s (Brake and Hale 1992: 3568). The authoritarianism of the reaction to the subculture is also evident in the passing of the Entertainments Act, legislation that presented a signi cant increase in the penalties for organizing parties, raising the existing nes for organizing unlicensed parties from a maximum of 2,000 to 20,000 plus six months imprisonment. Following the passing of the Act, on 22 July 1990 836 people were arrested in one of the biggest mass arrests in decades (The Independent, 23 July 1990: 1), at a party in Wake eld on the outskirts of Leeds. Out of the 836 people arrested, one was charged. Participants complained about the polices actions (The Daily Telegraph, 23 July 1990; The Guardian, 23 July 1990; The Independent 23 July 1991, 24 July 1990), for which some received damages (Garratt 1998: 228), and the civil liberty group Liberty, expressed disquiet at the scale of the Wake eld operation . . . A Liberty spokesman deplored the use of intimidatory

Acid House and Thatcherism

99

arrest to defer rather than deal with the commission of an offence (The Guardian, 23 July 1990: 1). As noted above, Thornton (1994, 1995: 11662) has emphasized the signi cance of this moral panic to the establishment and development of Acid House. In this work, participants are conceived as desiring a moral panic for the recognition and con rmation it provides of the underground status of subcultural practices, in so doing enhancing the subcultural capital9 (op. cit. 1995: 1014) to be derived from participation. Such an assessment is revealing, but a further issue needs to be raised here. The measures taken against the subculture, perhaps above all the raids by riotpolice, arrests and nes, came to be bitterly resented by participants (Collin 1997: 1646; Garratt 1998: 17692, 2219). This, and the way in which such measures effectively put an end to these types of parties, suggests that initial desires for a panic and the status it confers upon the subculture, exist in a certain tension with these later outcomes. The particular strength of the reaction to Acid House is emphasized in comparison with the reaction to other postwar youth subcultures. These subcultures have frequently been the subject of moral panics, with their members cast as folk devils, and a range of measures taken against them, with for example Teds banned from cinemas and dance-halls (Rock and Cohen 1970: 296, 305), Mods and Rockers subject to heavy nes and sentences (Cohen 1980: 1019), and Punk bands barred from playing venues (Savage 1992: 26773, 3356). The scale of police action against Acid House went beyond that directed towards these subcultures though, in, as outlined above, the extent of resources deployed, the use of riot police, and the scale of mass arrests. In addition, Acid House was exceptional amongst these subcultures in being the subject of legislation speci cally intended to limit its practices (McKay 1996: 1656), something that the free pop festivals of the late 60s and 70s, that caused very similar problems of disruption to Acid House parties, had also never been subject to (Clarke 1982). The absence in Britain of legislation surrounding these festivals, an absence unique in Western societies (ibid.: 187), has been closely associated with a liberal element in the political system and in government (ibid.: 188) in this period. In contrast, the strength of the measures taken against Acid House can be located in terms of the opposition to and reaction against liberal approaches to law and order that Thatcherism presented, with this liberalism in part blamed for the breakdown in discipline associated with the 60s and 70s (Hall et al. 1978). The sense that the particular strength of the reaction to Acid House can be related to the authoritarianism of Thatcherism, is also evident in the debate around the Entertainments Act and in the coverage of the subculture in The Sun and The Daily Mail. The principal two Labour members who spoke in the debate were noticeably more sympathetic to the subculture than the Conservative members, at points urging restraint in the measures taken against parties (Hansard 9 March 1990). The particular strength and intensity of the reaction of The Sun and The Daily Mail to

100

Andrew Hill

Acid House can be situated in terms of the intimate relationship of these papers to Thatcherism, positioning them as particularly signi cant sources for examining the relationship between Acid House and Thatcherism. The Sun was the rst paper to report on the subculture and that paper and The Daily Mail presented the most alarmed coverage of Acid House, and were most vociferous in their calls for action against the subculture. In contrast, broadsheets, including those identi ed as right-wing or conservative, included feature pieces on the subculture which sought to document and at points celebrate, rather than condemn it (The Daily Telegraph, 8 October 1990; The Sunday Telegraph, 2 July 1989; The Sunday Times, 30 October 1988). The Independent on 3 March 1990 gave room to the promoter of Acid House parties, Tony Colston-Hayter, to put the case for the subculture, providing an illustration of the assessment that where previously the subjects of moral panics have had little opportunity to contest the terms of the panic, more recently, in part through an increased public awareness about how to utilize the media, panics have become sites of contestation and debate (McRobbie 1994: 198218). Indeed, The Freedom to Party pressure group was formed in 1989, to challenge the planned legislation against the subculture (Collin 1997: 1157; Garratt 1998: 18993). The coverage of the subculture in The Sun and The Daily Mail can also be contrasted with that given in another tabloid paper, the Labour supporting The Daily Mirror. Despite a report headlined 12 trip to an evil night of ecstasy (7 November 1988), this paper went on to devote far less attention to the subculture than The Sun and The Daily Mail, and the repeated calls for action against the subculture that featured in these papers were absent from it.

DISRUPTING BUREAUCRATIC AUTHORITY

The subculture was seen then as presenting a direct threat to law and order. But it can also be con gured as disrupting Thatcherisms position of authority and governance in somewhat different terms, through the disregard it showed towards bureaucratic order and bureaucratic rationality, themselves both critical to the organization and administration of the social order and the nation-state in modernity (Weber 1983).10 As has been suggested in comments on crowds elsewhere (Clarke 1982: 312), the unstructured (ibid: 32) crowd that assembled at Acid House parties, presents a disruptive presence to bureaucratic notions of order. In addition, the relationship of the practices of Acid House to notions of the Dionysaic or jouissance, suggests a certain antipathy between the loss of self and vigorous pursuit of hedonism that marked participation in the subculture, and the regulatory demands and controls that indeed emerged in the panic around the subculture. The concern that parties persistently failed to comply with rules, regulations and laws was repeatedly expressed in the debate around the second

Acid House and Thatcherism

101

reading of the Entertainments Bill. This ranged from parties lacking the correct licences, to not meeting safety regulations, in regard to for example, re risks, overcrowding, the structure of buildings, number of exits, and electrical supplies (Hansard 9 March 1990: 111066). The Labour MP Stuart Randall emphasized the need for parties to be properly and ef ciently organized if they were to function well, pointing to the way in which the failure to organize in such a way would lead to disorder, and evoking the notion of the rampaging mob. Huge events can be a menace to local communities if they are not properly and ef ciently organised. There have been cases of severe damage to home and properties, noise nuisance, terri c traf c problems and bad behaviour, often resulting from alcohol and drugs. Those attending often move on leaving all their garbage and lth for others to clear up. The impact on communities is sometimes nothing short of disaster.11 (ibid.: 11345) These comments were added to by the Conservative MP for Gravesham, Jacques Arnold. Describing a party at Meopham he noted how sanitar y provisions at the event were totally inadequate. The revelers resorted to fouling the gardens of local residents (ibid.: 1154). By dawn debris was everywhere (ibid.: 1154). The references to garbage and lth, fouling and debris in these statements suggest perhaps a link between the perception of the subculture in such terms and the notion of rubbish as posing a threat to social order and respectability (Douglas 1984), where dirt is essentially disorder . . . Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organise the environment (ibid.: 2). The claim that this dirt included fouling, can also be read as invoking a particular distaste for and fear of human excrement, and the threat its misplacement is seen to pose to the social order (Bakhtin 1984: 1478). As with other polluters of the countryside, from the gure of the Cockney (Matless 1998: 6770), to pop festivals (Clarke 1982: 334), and New Age Travellers (Hetherington 2000: 1626), the presence of this dirt within a rural setting associated with the purity, sanctity and wholesomeness of nature, can be seen to intensify these concerns. The traf c problems caused by the subculture were also highlighted in the moral panic and form a different instance of the disruption the subculture presented to bureaucratic order. The subculture was identi ed as jeopardizing the centrality of, what has been termed the social organization of travel to modern experience (Lash and Urry 1994: 252) and the smooth functioning of society; a centrality evident in the disruption caused by the recent fuel protests. On the 26 June 1989 The Sun noted how More than 1,000 vehicles converged on White Waltham air eld near Maidenhead yesterday, and caused a THREE-MILE tailback (ibid.: 4). The Daily Mail of 23 October 1989 reported on how Hundreds of furious drivers were stranded for hours at a motorway services in the middle of the night by police trying to halt an Acid House party. Of cers set up

102

Andrew Hill

roadblocks out of Fleet services on the M3 in Hampshire after it became known that it was a staging point for acid fans on their way to a party at Andover. But they also trapped homegoing families, lorr y drivers and holiday coaches in a nightmare of noise as young party goers played music full-blast on their car stereos and others sounded their horns continuously (ibid.: 6). These concerns also appeared in the debate around the Entertainments Act. As Graham Bright highlighted, disregard for public safety can also be seen in the lack of proper access and exit arrangements at many venues. On some occasions highways have been blocked and whole communities, such as villages and residential areas have been isolated (Hansard 9 March 1990: 1112). A revealing parallel has been drawn between the way the police acted to limit the mobility of participants in Acid House and restrictions placed upon the movement of pickets in the 1984 miners strike (Hebdige 1990: 201). In both instances the limits placed upon mobility can be con gured as ways of controlling and restricting these activities and the threat they presented to Thatcherisms authority.

CONCLUSION

The panic around Acid House can then be seen to offer a series of perspectives that add to the standard terms in which Thatcherism has been assessed. These perspectives derive from the speci c issues this particular panic raises, but as has been suggested here, there exist a number of parallels between this panic and the reactions to earlier forms of popular cultural activity. The way in which popular culture has repeatedly been acted against and made subject to controls and restrictions offers a longrunning commentar y on British society. The moment of Acid House stands then as a further signi cant instance from which to examine the shifting intersections between politics, popular culture and the social order. (Date accepted: October 2001) Andrew Hill Department of Sociology University of Reading

NOTES

1 This assessment has been contested ( Jessop et al. 1984; Letwin 1993), but also received much support (Brake and Hale 1992; Gamble 1994). 2 This was an approach I have taken previously (Hill 2000).

3 This Act has itself been the focus of comments on the relationship between rave culture, as it came to be known, and conceptions of the English countr yside (McKay 2000: 35; Sibley 1997: 2215). 4 The concept of jouissance was

Acid House and Thatcherism

principally developed in Barthes (1976, 1977) and Lacans (1992: 184204, 1994: 1834) work. It has subsequently been applied in numerous different contexts. Heath (1977: 9) presents an useful overview of the notion. 5 McRobbie (1999: 113) points to how House has repeatedly been conceived in such terms, and the inadequacy of such conceptions, rather than asserting this herself. 6 The focus here is upon the presence of the subculture within the English countryside. Parties occurred throughout Britain, and Britain was used above in discussing Thatcherism to denote a political identity (Samuel 1989: xii). Samuel (1989: xiixiii) provides a brief, useful discussion on the relationship between and use of the terms England and Britain. 7 The way in which the anxious faces of local residents made sense of Acid House parties, and indeed the attitudes of the public more generally to the subculture, are uncertain beyond their depiction in newspaper reports, and in comments from MPs, with a lack of other data existing on this area. 8 Head of the police Pay Party Unit. 9 This is derived from Bourdieus (1984) work on cultural and other types of capital. 10 This is not to claim that Acid House intentionally set itself up as a movement to challenge these processes, rather this disruption came as a result of the activity of the subculture. 11 Whilst I have pointed above to the more sympathetic attitude of Labour MPs to the subculture, Randalls comments here can be read in terms of a commitment to bureaucratic authority associated with modern political systems generally.

103
1977 The grain of the voice, in R. Barthes Image, Music, Text, London: Fontana. Bauman, Z. 1987 Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-modernity and Intellectuals, Cambridge: Polity. Bennett, A. 1999 Subcultures or neotribes? Rethinking the relationship between youth, style and musical taste, Sociology 33(3): 599617. Bhabha, H. 1994 The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. 1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Brake, M. 1985 Comparative Youth Culture: The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures in America, Britain and Canada, London: Routledge. Brake, M. and Hale, C. 1992 Public Order and Private Lives: The Politics of Law and Order, London: Routledge. Burke, P. 1978 Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London: Temple Smith. Bussmann, J. 1998 Once In a Lifetime: The Crazy Days of Acid House and Afterwards, London: Virgin. Chambers, I. 1986 Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience, London: Methuen. Clarke, M. 1982 The Politics of Pop Festivals, London: Junction. Cohen, S. 1980 Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, Oxford: Martin Robertson. Collin, M. 1997 Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House, London: Serpents Tail. Cosgrove, S. 1989 Acid enterprise, in The New Statesman and Society, 13 October. Douglas, M. 1984 Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Ark. Gamble, A. 1994 The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Garratt, S. 1998 Adventures in Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture, London: Headline. Garratt, S. and Taggart, C. 1990 HM Government vs Acid House, in The Face Februar y. Gilbert, J. and Pearson, E. 1999 Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound, London: Routledge. Grossberg, L. 1992 We Gotta Get Out of This

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Attali, J. 1985 Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bakhtin, M. 1984 Rabelais and His World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barthes, R. 1976 The Pleasure of the Text, London: Cape.

104
Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture, London: Routledge. Hall, S. 1988 The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, London: Verso. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. 1978 Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, London: Macmillan. Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds) 1976 Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain, London: Hutchinson. Hansard Parliamentary Debates 1990 Commons; Of cial Report 6th Series, Vol. 168, 19891990, Februar y 26March 9. London: HMSO. Harris, T. 1995 Problematising popular culture, in T. Harris (ed.) Popular Culture in England c.15001850, London: Macmillan. Heath, S. 1977 Translators introduction, in R. Barthes Image, Music, Text, London: Fontana Press. Hebdige, D. 1979 Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1990 Fax to the future, in Marxism Today, Januar y. Hetherington, K. 2000 New Age Travellers: Vanloads of Uproarious Humanity, London: Cassell. Hill, A. 2000 Acid House: Youth and LateEighties Britain, unpublished PhD thesis, Manchester: University of Manchester. Jessop, B., Bonnett, K., Bromley, S. and Ling, T. 1984 Authoritarian populism, two nations and Thatcherism, in New Left Review, SeptemberOctober, 147. Lacan, J. 1992 The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge. 1994 crits: a Selection, London: Routledge. Lash, S. and Urry, J. 1994 Economies of Signs and Space, London: Sage. Letwin, S. 1993 The Anatomy of Thatcherism, New Brunswick: Transaction. Matless, D. 1998 Landscape and Englishness, London: Reaktion. McClelland, J. 1989 The Crowd and the Mob: from Plato to Canetti, London: Unwin Hyman. McKay, G. 1996 Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties, London: Verso.

Andrew Hill
2000 Glastonbur y: A Ver y English Fair, London: Victor Gollancz. McRobbie, A. 1994 Postmodernism and Popular Culture, London: Routledge. 1999 In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music, London: Routledge. Middleton, R. 1990 Studying Popular Music, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Muggleton, D. 2000 Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style, Oxford: Berg. Negus, K. 1996 Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction, Cambridge: Polity. Nietzsche, F. 1993 The Birth of Tragedy, London: Penguin. Plant, S. 1999 Writing on Drugs, London: Faber and Faber. Plato 1998 The Republic, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pratt, R. 1990 Rhythm and Resistance: Explorations in the Political Uses of Popular Music, London: Praeger. Redhead, S. 1993 The politics of ecstasy in S. Redhead (ed.) Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporar y Dance Culture, Aldershot: Avebury. Reynolds, S. and Old eld, P. 1988 Acid daze, in Melody Maker, 27th February. Rock, P. and Cohen, S. 1970 The Teddy Boy in V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky (eds) The Age of Af uence: 19511964, London: Macmillan. Samuel, R. 1989 Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity: Volume 1: History and Politics, London: Routledge. Savage, J. 1992 Englands Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, London: Faber and Faber. 1999 Why the 80s still matter in The Independent on Sunday, 12th September. Sibley, D. 1997 Endangering the sacred: nomads, youth cultures and the English countryside, in P. Cloke and J. Little (eds) Contested Countr yside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation and Rurality, London: Routledge. Skeggs, B. 1997 Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable, London: Sage. Stallybrass, P. and White, A. 1986 The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Street, J. 1992 Shock waves: the authoritative response to popular music, in D. Strinati and S. Wagg (eds) Come On Down?: Popular Media Culture in Post-war Britain, London: Routledge.

Acid House and Thatcherism

Tagg, P. 1994 From refrain to rave: the decline of gure and the rise of ground, Popular Music 13(2): 20922. Thompson, K. 1998 Moral Panics, London: Routledge. Thornton, S. 1994 Moral panic, the media and British rave culture in A. Ross and T. Rose (eds) Microphone Fiends: Youth music and Youth Culture, London: Routledge. 1995 Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Cambridge: Polity.

105
Underdown, D. 1987 Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 16031660, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, M. 1983 Max Weber: On Capitalism, Bureaucracy and Religion, London: Allen and Unwin. Young, H. 1993 One of Us, London: Pan.