Warwickshire Avon – Slabbering Bibs and Slubber De Gullions

Ones love of receptive beats started a while back and still today, despite my age still managing to catch up with the DJ's I used to go and see during my clubbing days. November sees a trip to see Orbital do what they do and then all the Cream DJ's are congregating in early December where we will be attending for the whole weekend.

Those proper clubbing days latest a good 10 years or so and I lost count of the decent nights I had with the likeminded. That rave culture unlikely to be repeated and confined to the history books.

Over 25 years ago now the UK Government attempted to make rave culture illegal with a law that banned public performance of music “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”; essentially trying to criminalise electronic dance music itself.

No, the aforementioned is not some suggested public order from a septuagenarian who doesn’t her nightly knitting soundtracked by sick beats. Britain’s Parliament passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order act on November 3, 1994.

It granted police the power to confiscate sound systems, interfere with groups of people suspected of setting up raves, and turn back revellers who are within a mile radius of an offending site.

Now Another section of the act was Part V, ‘Public Order: Collective Trespass or Nuisance on Land’. It was essentially brought into place to give police the right to remove “squatters” in the midst of the “traveller” movement.

The Public Order was said to be sparked by a mass rave in 2002 when an estimated 20,000 party-goers took over Castlemorton Common for a six-day rave. 

Now known as “the rave that changed the law”, the invite was sent out via an answering machine message which said: “Right, listen up revellers. It’s happening now and for the rest of the weekend, so get yourself out of the house and on to Castlemorton Common… Be there, all weekend, hardcore.”

Now recently Extinction Rebellion (XR) has won a landmark legal challenge to an attempt by the Metropolitan Police to halt its Autumn Uprising protest in London.

During the second week of protests, the police imposed a new condition on the activists under Section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986, meaning that anyone who continued to protest after at 9pm on Monday 14th October could be arrested.

Apparently Lord Justice Dingemans and Justice Chamberlain ruled in favour of the activists, saying that the police had acted unlawfully because the wording of Section 14 is clear that there is no power to prohibit a gathering that has not yet begun, and that it could only be used to impose conditions.

Clearly LSD users back in the day because the Public Order Collective legislation could have been used surely Shirley. Maybe the police and those peruke wears that are meant to sense of formality and solemnity to proceedings like a good gathering to remind themselves of how it used to be.

There must be a way to stop these chaos causers like they did back in the day !!!!

Anyway back on track, now when I had money to burn and lead that single life I still look back on as a the decade I loved. 

The love of dance music turned in to DJ'ing, and part of that was I had a dedicated room to create dance tracks myself and also to create the Mick's Mix series that had rather risqué covers. A mix series that went from TDK Cassettes, progressed to CD's and then to tracks I created under the names Angybeats and Peakhour.

Dance music, decks and Cerwin Vega's, what's not to like !!!!

Anyway the mix series was supplied FOC to good friends who loved the culture and 120bpm's just as much as I did and often it was played in the car on-route to the next gathering of tinnitus sufferers.

So times have changed somewhat but with my Skullcandy crusher headphones and the Mixcloud app on my phone a week designing parts for a rather exciting electric car goes rather quickly indeed. A little like fishing I don't tend to think of much when I'm listening to music, those matters on the mind we all have banished to the back of the cortex till it sadly comes to the forefront again.

Barbel fishing for me can offer the solitude I need to seek as often as I can. For this short session I was in the swim a good friend Dave Roberts had winkled out a couple of good fish less than 24 hours earlier.

For me though the morning couldn't have been any more different, a hard overnight frost, air temperatures no bettering 4 or 5 degrees throughout the day, not a sausage !!!!

4 hours, two swims, the garlic spam and ramiz paste plug not doing it today sadly.

Shame as I'd have liked a picture of a Barbel in the morning mist that took an age to lift. But it was lovely to be out, I love conditions like this, the rods might be sat motionless but there are other distractions that keeps the mind in check.

So these blanks are getting a pain now, at least I've a belated birthday meal out with the lovely Mrs Newey later, ones resolve is not quite tested yet.