Scumoween
Nick Richardson
Last weekend, in the former Royal Mail West Central District sorting office, near LRB HQ, an illegal rave took place. It didn’t take long for the police to arrive: here you can see them trying to stop people getting into the building. As the comments below the video make clear, they failed. The ravers all got in, held their ground and the police withdrew. Perhaps they realised forcing a few hundred pilled-up party-goers onto the streets of Bloomsbury in the small hours was more trouble than it was worth – likewise, attempting to storm a building with a single, narrow exit.
Illegal raves have never gone away. But there can’t have been one as brazen as this – as brazenly central at least – since the 1980s. It would be crude to draw too many parallels between the present government and Thatcher’s, and the effects of their respective policies on the mood and temperature of the counter-culture. Still, the correlation’s there. Shame Centrepoint is no longer empty.
Comments
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10 November 2010
at
2:46pm
Jon Day
says:
I wonder if David Cameron was there?
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10 November 2010
at
3:21pm
Nick Richardson
says:
He must have been. The after-party's round his place: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11726822
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10 November 2010
at
3:40pm
outofdate
says:
Shame, more to the point, that one is no longer able to dance without the aid of a walking stick and the ingestion of MDMA and its cognates, or even the prospect of their ingestion, now produces an irresistible urge to void one's bowels and not much else. I take comfort from the male-female ratio of about 99:1, to say nothing of the stupid hats, that one would associate with 'dirty drum n bass' and that are evidently, in the words of Philip Larkin, for others undiminished somewhere.
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10 November 2010
at
3:42pm
outofdate
says:
@
outofdate
Yes, well, end italics after the 'n' in drum 'n' bass, obviously. Serve me right for sneering at one of the finest products of our dying civilisation.
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10 November 2010
at
3:51pm
jaspreetsinghboparai
says:
@
outofdate
Re. MDMA: perhaps you simply need to switch dealers? Unless you're getting yours in the form of those little chocolate tablets they sell at Boots. But yes, it's closing time in the gardens of the West, &c.
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11 November 2010
at
12:39am
outofdate
says:
@
jaspreetsinghboparai
Ach, probably, but the anticipation alone is more than my poor tachycardic heart can handle.
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11 November 2010
at
9:58am
jaspreetsinghboparai
says:
@
outofdate
Yes, I think Plato says something somewhere about the 'Heart-Rectum Continuum'. Or was it 'City-Soul Analogy'? No, 'Heart-Rectum' makes more medical sense. Anyway there's bound to be something on the subject in Sir Kenneth Dover's memoirs.
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11 November 2010
at
11:31am
outofdate
says:
@
jaspreetsinghboparai
Now that's just, like, gross.
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11 November 2010
at
12:19pm
jaspreetsinghboparai
says:
@
outofdate
I admit, Sir Kenneth Dover was probably out of line....
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11 November 2010
at
6:04pm
A.J.P. Crown
says:
@
jaspreetsinghboparai
If anyone has a spare copy of Sir Kenneth Dover's memoirs that they want to sell -- it's called something like "Marginal Notes" -- I'll buy it. The cheapest one on the internet is about £120, they call it a rare book.
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10 November 2010
at
3:41pm
jaspreetsinghboparai
says:
No wonder Ann Widdecombe grinds her teeth. All that dancing....
Read morehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/29/david-cameron-youtube-sunrise-party