by Lucy Finchett-Maddock
As I sat down
to write this piece on some of the less credited and understood sonorous movements
in the UK and their affecting encounters with law, snippets of David Cameron’s
pronouncements on ‘blitzing poverty’ and ‘bulldozing the UK’s worst sink
estates’ transmute my rainy January Sunday a few weeks ago, and immediately
there exists a ligature between the Tory government’s newscast, and the content
of this piece.
Occurring within the same week as the barely
scrutinised second reading of the most scandalous and violent piece of proposed
housing and planning legislation seen in recent years, Cameron suspiciously
justifies the knocking down of peoples’ homes, in the name of helping them, and
yet the real story is all too familiar. The extensive Housing and Planning Bill
is currently being pushed through Parliament with little time for consultation
by all parties concerned in the relevant sectors, set to marketise our housing
and planning framework disempowering communities and the vulnerable as never
before.1
But of course
this is the ethos of our times, it makes no business sense to open up planning
laws to make way for genuinelyaffordable homes, no!
Commercial acumen will tell you that selling off dated welfare property on high
yield land, combined with a futher liberalisation of planning laws (so that it
is nigh on impossible to oppose new developments), will mean more and more land
built upon, less supply, more demand, and prices will be pushed up further and
further, to line some already pretty replete pockets. Makes perfect sense to
the your common or garden neoliberal, and of course, why not?
Why not, indeed – let’s just get stuck in. This takes
me back to the excellently put description of unapologetic neoliberalism by Naomi Klein, as ‘extractivism’, “.. the wider mentality of making
profit without caring much for the consequences” (‘This Changes Everything:
Capitalism v Climate’, 2014).
Or as critical geographer Melanie Nowicki has recently
assimilated in her ‘resurrection and recasting’ (2014, 786) of Porteous and Smith’s (2001) domicide as
a fitting theoretical framework characterising the loss of homes as a result of
the UK housing crisis. Domicide was originally defined by the Canadian
geographers back in 2001 as “the planned, deliberate destruction of someone’s
home, causing suffering to the dweller”.
Funny how this rings so true as we
look to this new legislative draft and take a snap-shot of the way in which
individual property cuts through the spaces in which we exist, whether it be
our homes, or just purely places to which we can run and escape from its grasp.
Extractivism and domicide are synonymous with an age of commodification
now making it policy to re-enclose resources, like a once great artist
desperately clawing at anything as they sadly, and all too clearly, run out of
ideas.
And it is this re-enclosure of resources that we see not just in real
property, but also in the enclosing of forms of artistic and political
expression, from legislative decisions as to what is proper or improper art,
where you can and cannot protest, legal or illegal music, as a result of and in
addition to, the re-enclosure of real landed space and the ongoing iterative
commodification of resources.
This re-enclosing of the already enclosed marginalises
and mainstreams everything to the point where forms of opposition are co-opted,
and sold back to us. Gone are the days when we can disappear into the night,
disappear into and out of our minds, in and out of moments where we can
reproduce ourselves in a pure anticipation of innocent appreciation of life,
love and communality.
Which brings me nicely to the main focus of this
piece, the much maligned and misunderstood underground UK electronic music
scene, its dealings with, and oft outside of, legal frameworks – its
capitulation with the institution. As a result of a connection made through a
friend, I have had the fortune to make acquaintance with some of the voices
behind London soundsytem ‘ScumTek’, and seemingly at a time when their message
has become increasingly dampened and drowned out by the ‘mainstream’.
I have
chosen to use this term, it is not necessarily something that has been promulgated
by those I have spoken to – it just seems to me to befit all the neoliberal
standardisation of human experience, human space, property and expression so
perfectly – private property as the omnipresent instituting of normativity.
ScumTek are part of a long established tradition of
electronic music ‘soundsystems’ in the UK since the late eighties: collectives
of events organisers, music makers, sound and light technicians that put on
‘free parties’ either on their own or in collaboration with other soundsystems.2They
are, in their own words, are a “party collective holding free music events in
bankrupt, non-domestically credited properties (old Carpet Rite showrooms etc),
or privately sold ex-government buildings that are awaiting buy-out (Royal Mail
sorting offices for instance)”.
Their aim, in part, is to highlight the vast amount of
empty space in and around greater London “in contrast to the crippling rental
prices for pokey rooms, and exorbitant rates and draconian licencing
regulations for free mass gatherings”, through organising large scale free
electronic music events in abandoned and bankrupt spaces in London.
Theirs is a
two-fold critique of the commodification of space and the commodification of
artistic expression – the commercialisation of human experience and the
environment, and the “lack of real, live and authored electronic music in
London”.
Their concern for countering what they describe as,
“the media-industry’s superstar x-factor dj spectacle” through organising their
parties has an awareness of the pre-electronic musical era, being “far more
akin to a modern electrified version of an old English folk music and
barn-dance culture than it is a celeb DJ roadshow or a disco circuit”.
The
awareness extends further to the industrial mechanisms that exploit their
underlying musical activity of “fun with Pure sound”, and the obscurantist
techniques of branding and lifestyle-marketing that can make millions of people
believe the likes of Paris Hilton are consummate audio artists, and free music
parties are acts of domestic terrorism.
These events and the soundsystems are and remain as
much as possible, underground for good reason, as they traverse the law in many
directions, oft deliberately, but also as a result of a combination of
conservative anti-rave legislation back in the nineties outlawing free parties
as criminal trespass and the way live music events are regulated.3
Legality plays an interesting role in the ScumTek
story, their using law relating to squatting in order to allow the soundsystem
to gain access to the various sites of the parties, as something that brings
home the underbelly story of these raves, as well as the use of formal property
law in order to make way for some unofficial possession of abandoned space. Of
course, in recent years (since s.144 of the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment
of Offenders Act 2012), it has become an offence of criminal trespass to occupy
residential premises without permission, leaving only commercial properties
within the remit of lawful squatting.
It has been an offence to enter and squat
someone’s ‘home’ since Criminal Law Act 1977, and arguably prior to this
through Forcible Entry legislation, but it is now a criminal offence to squat
any residential building, whether already occupied or unoccupied. Raves and
free parties have not been acquiesced to images of permissibility, however it
is interesting to hear how ScumTek utilise specifically commercial spaces only
for their events, using as shelter before and after the parties, for those who
need it.
According to one of the members I spoke to, the buildings are
seized under section 6 of the Criminal Law Act 1977, “specifically by homeless
people under our direction. We then do our party and any money donated at the
door goes on a big takeaway for them the day after. The homeless then rest in
the property until court eviction”. This acknowledgement of squatting
laws allows the soundsystem the time to set up, as well as giving those who are
of no fixed abode to have some shelter, for some duration.
Whether or not
they would be ‘resting’ necessarily is another question, but there is most
certainly a mindset of ‘opening up’ of property, in their words, to “… use as a
resource for those that have very little but with something to offer, even if
all they have to offer is their own personal safety away from a spiked
doorway”. This element of ScumTek would never be discussed in the media,
given the property protection spiel that is so dominant, rave organisers and
protestors under the same rubric as terrorists, and a threat to a regime of
secure, unconscious lifestyle.4
The choice of term ‘Scum’ as their name relates back
to the role of property – ‘scummers’ are private property developers, mortgage
payers, holiday homers, second homers as well as bog standard homeowners, high
value venture capital property investors – the very chattals of neoliberal
capitalism that the Housing and Planning Bill 2016 is so impressed by, and
indeed is being legislated for.
Scum is therefore, whether intentionally or
otherwise, a critique of property relations and the chosen rhetoric of social
organisation that we are subjected to as a result of, and by, the instituting
of laws to govern these relations. These laws cut through music, just as they
cut through space and time. Indeed, as one of ScumTek relayed: “[Over]
the years … [we] have all [had] the opportunity and to take stock of the rest
of the world, none of us really liked what we saw going on. It´s not that
we have a political view to push, we just want to encourage the use of critical
thinking and a thirst for all sides of the story”.
Scum’s most remarkable ventures have been the
cataclysmically huge central London rave back in October 2010, ‘Scumoween’,
with up to forty-five rigs playing at the same time in an eight floor fifteen
year-long abandoned building pretty much on New Oxford Street, Holborn. Reports
were of a couple of thousand or so partygoers, both inside and outside the
building with police trying to close the party down early on, but finding their
attempts to be futile, the rave continuing for quite some time beyond the weekend.
Other parties have been cheekily entitled ‘Strictly Scum Dancing’, ‘Scumthing
for Your Mind’, as well as the establishment of a ScumTek Radio. The high
profile rave in Lambeth in October 2015, the ‘Squat Monster’s Ball 2015’,
again, with around the same in attendance, has triggered some very negative
attention from the media, as a result of the stand off with what Scum say to be
a deliberately heavy and provocative police presence, some attendees’ violent
damage to property has been denounced as contrary to the spirit of Scum, as per
their FB page: “Whenever you attend a party, no matter where you are or what
the situation, never allow the things we saw the other night to happen again,
don’t allow yourself to be caught up in mob mentality ..
Those that took things
to far … you have caused all who attended to be tarred with the same brush, so
many people who brought good energy, who caused at best a noise nuisance are
now affiliated with the madness outside”.
Unfortunately, and inevitably, ScumTek does get
tarred with the same brush, the way in which individual action can escalate,
especially given peoples’ ‘heightened senses’and the event’s open policy,
meaning no one and everyone can turn up and hopefully act respectfully, but
there may be a contingency who do not.
This is the risk that ScumTek takes each
time it puts on a party, to the point where a Health and Safety or
Environmental Health Officer would immediately have kittens upon arrival at
such a venue. But then of course they
would – raves are kept illegitimate with an incredible concoction of statutory
regulation and red tape from disparate (and nearly all) areas of law – noise
pollution nuisance, anti-social behaviour law, to large scale event
(un)licencing, public order policing, the possibility of criminal damage, and
the all pervasive, laws governing property and trespass on land.
The striating role of commodity and private property,
and the way this cuts through artistic and political expression (or just
expression in general) is a central feature of the story of ScumTek, and the
little known narrative that runs counter to their negative representation in
the media. The parties are certainly gritty and edgy (they are bound to be),
and the music is tough, just like its organisers. It is iterative, stapling
into the urban air with sound tangibly felt as abyssal vibration.
But the
spirit of the movement derives itself back to the free love era in the sixties,
beyond back in time to the Rabelaisan Carnival, the Upside-down-World, the
Situationistdétournement,
the political reclamation of space of the anti-roads movement (Reclaim the
Streets), through to present day ‘Teknivals’ and ‘Temporary Autonomous Art’ all
coming together as the conation of political ecstacy (whether participants were
so ware of the political bit or not).
A quote taken from a recent piece of
journalism where a Scum party-goer describes the sound of today’s party protest
as “the sound of the government getting fucked with a kick drum” (The Guardian,
2010). Arresting stuff, in my view, electronic music of this type, removing us
into the tribal memory of Westernised humanity – an inquisitive and creative
community, the cocophony of heartbeats we forget we actually are.
Sadly, through a combination of external peturbations
of fear and war cast to us in our daily newsfeeds, the likes of ScumTek have
been recast and repackaged to the masses as a threat to our security, a threat
to our property.
At times it is not surprising, given the few who damage the
image for the many, I myself have not always been such an admirer of the dark
aesthetic attached to ScumTek specifically, the apocalyptic skulls, the horror,
preferring the little fluffy clouds of parties of the past, but Scum don’t mess
around with trying to paint a pretty picture – and as a result they get
attention with their unembarrassed and courageous stance towards authority,
law, and indeed, private property.
Using the Squat Monster’s Ball as an
example. they do not get a representative hearing in the press, and hopefully
this piece may add another jigsaw of perspective for them, to a puzzle we are
all caught up in, whether we are aware of it or not.
Interestingly the scene has evolved from the outdoor
to the indoor, and there is no secret as to why. The history of the regulation
of ‘UMEs’ (Unlicenced Music Events), is reactive on the side of the law, with
little or no case law (to my knowledge at least, which of course is fallible)
coming up to the high courts to challenge the decision made by the
Superintendants and Constables at such events.
Why? Of course, the punishment
for involvement in mass unlicenced gatherings on someone else’s land is real
for those who organise them, imprisonment and fines, of varying degrees
dependent upon which statutory framework is being used, thus I imagine there is
little energy left to retaliate on a point of law, once the party is over.
The Criminal Justice Act and Public Order Act (CJA)
passed in 1994, and subsequent The Prodigy album ‘Music for a Jilted
Generation’, returned protest against the legislation from the dancefloor, to
the music, and back again to ravers and protestors alike.
A Conservative
political hot potato, the CJA was an opportunity to flex some ideological
muscles around the rave and alternative scene at the time (including travellers
and squatters), to the awe of its supporters, and the outrage of those
subjected to the force of the statute. S. 63 is considered by some as not only
one of the most draconian pieces of legislation in the England and Wales, but
humorous in its grey legal straightjacketing of a whole electronic underground,
that will always exceed quantification by law no matter how many definitions
conjured for Parliamentary amusement6.
Under section 63 (1), a rave was originally defined as
a gathering on land in the open air of 100 or more persons (whether or not
trespassers), until its amendment by Section 58 of the Anti Social Behaviour
Act 2003 to a gathering of 20 or more persons, and on land which is not in the
open air (i.e. within a building). Section 63 (1)(A) gives reference to the
amplification of music at night “(with or without intermissions),
which by reason of its loudness and the duration and time at which it is
played, is likely to cause serious distress to the inhabitants of the locality”.
Section 63 (1)(B) describes the music as that which “includes sounds wholly or
predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive
beats”.7
Section 63 would not apply, if an entertainments
licence had been sought under section 1(1) (c) of the Licensing Act 2003
(recorded music played for entertainment of members of the public and provided
for profit as a licensable activity and thus needing a licence under the above
provisions).
If the organisers happened to be the owners of the land on which
the event was being run, they were only playing live music (that does not need
a licence under 136(2)(d) Licencing Act 2003), not taking any money as proceeds
136 (1(1)(c), could prove they had invited everyone, then there may be a small
space of legality in which raves could exist.8 Note the due
understanding of licencing loopholes by our discerning electronic rebels of
ScumTek, all their music being created live at the scene, and not played back
in any form.9
Why can’t we party on into the obsidian sky? Can we
not ‘Reclaim the Night’ as the feminist protest group have propounded, whether
for partying or of course, reclaim the night from fear and dread? One word:
noise. According to Scum their party noise levels to people in the area were no
louder than road noise. However, the environment does of course decide which
way the wind blows, and sound travels easier at night (don’t ask me why), so
for a humungous rave in the middle of a city, this is going to be difficult to
soundproof.
Trying to tick all the legal boxes, however, is not
the point at all, it is about transgressing legal, spatial and temporal
boundaries, as music and party does so well, but also the wish that none of
this was necessary. As Sussex Police state in the online ‘Policy for Dealing with Raves‘,
“[Rave] organisers, particularly of the larger events, are determined and
imaginative people who should not be under estimated. They will go to great
lengths to identify new sites”. Yes, indeed they are, and yes indeed, they
will.
What about the legal frameworks in place for
organisers who feel their events have been hi-jacked by opportunist
heavy-handed policing, giving a useful spin to hand to the public, of what a
terrible group of thugs these ravers can be, as the inevitable extreme replies
from frustrated bacchants go viral, leaving the scene misreprented in the
media.
What about those who are actually mistreated at the hands of police at
these events? The Anti Social Behaviour Act 2003, amending the CJA, is deemed
to have been drafted in accordance with human rights, as does any proposed police
action at a rave have to be lawful, proportionate and necessary given the
situation, but how many judicial reviews ex parte underground soundystems do you see
making their way to the Administrative Court to defend the disproportionate
infringement of their rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression
under the Human Rights Act 1998?
Not many of course, and even just the
discussion of convention rights enshrined in our law brings us right back full
circle to the slicing role of private property, where rights to protest, rights
to express our views politically and creatively, and both, are increasingly
trumped by the right to peaceful enjoyment of property of landowners. A
displaced paper title owner’s rights to regain access to their land after a rave
has occurred in their squatted empty building, will take precedence over any
other.
***
It’s almost like the re-enclosure of the already
enclosed (such as, going back to the Housing and Planning Bill), the senseless
movements of the mainstream as it regurgitates continuously everything back
to itself, is a reminder of this legal/illegal divide that only seeks to reify
its own falsity, the lie of private property that is sold to the disempowered
masses. Why would you want your rave to be legal if it’s going to be like that
anyway?
Taken from the blog ‘History is Made at Night’,
comments on the rave scene relay how “The global spread of Electronic Dance
Music has generally been accompanied by the flashing blue light, the
siren, and that moment when the music is abruptly turned off and the order
given to clear the building.” It goes on to say that the element of illegality
is really part and parcel of the whole experience, “the frisson of … add[ing] a
pleasurable edge to partying – the thrill of overcoming official obstacles just
to get there, of getting one over on the authorities”.
And it is this
illegality that, as in any other underground scene, can also become normalised
and commercialised, just as punk got sold back to us, so has music emanating
from raves, as Chris Liberator (of Liberator DJs) commented in recent Vicearticle
on the rave scene and the CJA: “Without the rave and squat party scene,
festivals and club culture as we know it would be nothing”.
The machinations between legality and illegality,
underground and mainstream, might sound far removed from the extractivism and
domicide first mentioned in the opening of this piece, but it is on a
genealogical spectrum of commodification, and the evasion of such, just to be
left alone.
As in beats, there is a repetition in law, it iterates itself until
it is heard and convinces itself of its own existence purely through a system
of private property, held up by processes of institution, commodification, and
mainstreamism that you see even rave culture can be held victim to just as
easily as the buildings in which they happen.
ScumTek, its electronic spectacle, and its critique of
property, is a reminder of the pervasiveness of capital as it permeates and
coagulates human expression, decompartmentalises artistic creativity from
political desire, as though the two are separate, yet they are as one. It is hoped
this telling of the tale of just one collective of peoples who like their music
so much they’re willing to occupy vacant commercial housing stock, lonely,
empty walls and architectures almost welcoming them in.
Lucy Finchett-Maddock is lecturer in law at the University of Sussex.
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