Defending repetitive beats

This weekend 6Music have been celebrating twenty years of rave. I do not like rave music. It took me a couple of decades to admit this to myself. You see I was politicised by the Major government's Criminal Justice Act. I'd been brought up in a left-wing family, had the right kind of ideas about things and had read the Usborne Guide To Politics. But the first time I did anything political was in response to the then Criminal Justice Bill.

In part this was because my then girlfriend was a bit of a hippy and cared deeply about hunt sabbing and roads protests, both threatened by the Act. Eager to impress, I followed her to meetings and lapped up leaflets condemning governmental attacks on things I dimly understood. Quite apart from this youthful romance, however, my own indignation was fired by the news that the Bill would effectively ban rave parties. I had no idea what a rave party was, but they sounded fun, and I was not going to allow the Tories to stop them.

As it turns out, I feel about rave music much as I do about repeatedly banging my head against a block of concrete. Add this to the list of my contrarian views about the music of the period. Yet this really isn't that important. There are plenty of things that I don't like, from Coldplay through to those disappointing wrapped up chocolate biscuits you get in Christmas assortment packs; I don't think the state should ban them. Not even Coldplay.

So I'm proud of my inept teenage activism. The CJA was a nasty, repressive piece of legislation, targeting not only partygoers, but protesters and travellers. It strengthened police powers - the power of arbitrary stop and search, racist in effect and too often in motivation, and the power to retain intimate body samples. For all the campaign against it was a failure, it brought together a wide range of people - from the music industry to grassroots campaigns, environmentalists, travellers' rights groups, and the organised left. Those at the present time who talk about transforming Corbyn's Labour into a social movement could learn a lot from it.