Free Party

It’s a long way from illegal British warehouse raves to hippies singing around the campfire, but in a field outside Glastonbury, England, the two subcultures collided one fateful day at the end of Thatcher’s grey decade. And so begins the story of the disruptive Free Party movement that took over British underground culture in the early 1990s with home-built speaker systems and rickety DJ booths. There were no fences around the festival grounds—everyone was welcome, everything was free, and the music never stopped. The Free Party movement was the first to believe in the party as a sweaty social utopia, which for the same reason ended up in the British Parliament, where an infamous law was passed banning “repetitive beats,” thus closing a wild and unruly chapter in the history of electronic music. A chapter that is now finally being told by those who lived it.