Inside the Washing Machine
Have you ever been inside a particle accelerator?
On 13 July 1978, a Russian physicist named Anatoli Bugorski was checking a malfunction at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino when a safety mechanism failed. He leaned over the equipment and put his head directly into the path of a high-energy proton beam from the U-70 synchrotron.
Castlemorton was like that.
Bugorski received a localised dose of 200,000 to 300,000 roentgens - thousands of times above a fatal dose. Doctors expected him to die. He survived.
My injuries were stranger than his.
The bass hit my chest before my ears understood it. Then the heat - bodies, fog, ten thousand metabolisms burning in the midnight air. The smell came next: sweat and ozone and something sweet I couldn’t name. It might have been opium. Laser lights sliced the dark. I was already inside it, already too late to turn back.
Castlemorton Common, Worcestershire, late May 1992. Somewhere between twenty and forty thousand of us converged on a hillside for a week-long free rave - no licence, no planning permission, no plan.
The weather had been unusually hot - perhaps that was why there were so many people.
If I hadn’t been high on speed I would have been terrified. Instead, I started to dance.
The drugs and the music burned an E-shaped hole in my head.
What came next was a counterculture revolt, played out in the courts and in the fields. Thirteen members of the Spiral Tribe sound system were arrested. The trial lasted four months and cost the Crown £4 million. They were acquitted. The acquittal didn’t matter. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 specifically criminalised gatherings playing music characterised by “the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”
Parliament legislated against a rhythm.
The Spiral Tribe left England for France. Beauvais, 1993. Montpellier-le-Vieux, 1994. The first CzechTek, the same year. The culture didn’t die. It migrated.
Who won? Techno is everywhere. Raves happen in every city on earth. The music won.
I was part of it in a small way. I made friends - hard for an autistic boy. I danced. I promoted a club night. I named the characters in my novels after the people I met.
To borrow Ginsberg: “I’m an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas…”
I’m in Fremantle now. If I could do it again, I would. I’d do it today.