Party Vibe

I would no longer suggest putting any details of any unlicensed event on this forum. we were being investigated in 2005 and this forum (and myself personally) have been warned a number of times that advertising a illegal event on here will lead to further scrutiny, surveillance and action. These warnings have come from uniformed police (some who have even posted on the forums) as well as other cops I have encountered over the last 20 years (including a proportion of former ravers).

Even if you organise a licensed event on here, the cops will monitor it, check the size of your venue and might raise concerns that the international nature of this site could attract a larger crowd than the venue can safely handle, especially if you have one or two “name” Dj’s based in London or play any kind of “urban” music including Dubstep. (even somewhere like facebook tends to narrow peoples traffic down to their town and home areas, it is designed that way)

This could result in your venue manager shitting a brick and cancelling your event as its a commercial agreement and they think the costs outweigh the benefits (99% of the time this is a stupid move which merely costs them the money they could have made letting the event happen – and it is not the feds or council, it is the venue managers doing these things, and blaming the public authorities. Often the venue has something else they want to hide like sketchy electrics or health and safety issues they don’t want Councils to see and holding a dance event with a larger crowd might unearth these issues).

That said, it is not illegal for a group to have a benefit gig for anything from raising money for the music group itself to some forms of political campaigning, and its tolerated even with some pretty full on environment campaign groups (I would still expect CID surveillance of your event if you align yourselves with such things).

I would not explicitly say you are raising money to replace equipment that law enforcement authorities feel they have lawfully seized. Even the eco-warriors don’t do that so blatantly. Its also viewed that if you can afford to sacrifice high value items for your political cause that you might be linked with money laundering and even terrorism (which is what has happened to some hippies they have been busted hard).

the way we used to do it (which unfortunately isn’t as easy as mods are no longer living in the same regions or even in the UK) is if one of us knew the crew and their intentions and maybe venue size etc we’d clear a fundraiser to go into the parties section without having to pay. TBH if I still lived in Reading and had been to one of your events and found it to be fun and safe (which I’m sure it is!) I’d personally have cleared it.

Its more complex than it seems but we don’t have the rules to make money (it does help a little to keep the mp3 archives and radio going). They are there to protect everyone and stop people putting effort into promoting events only to get them locked off due to exaggerated paranoia.

@Dan Ooops! 476620 wrote:

Well said GL – the Ooops! Reunion last year was at a licensed venue. It was advertised on here, a psy forum (not sure which one) and FB – cops called the venue the day before and said “do you know that you are hosting an illegal rave!” [admittedly, this was not long after a ridgeway stand off/mini ruck with OB – nothing to do with us, but our “area”]. Fortunately, the venue were suss enough to tell them it was a private party (which essentially it was) and told us that they had had the conversation. And we were sensible enough to explain our history, background, average age, and crowd control skills.

TVP also repeatedly overflew the Junk-Chun 10 reunion with the helicopter, in 2004 – in spite of this being a small event on someones private garden in either North Reading or South Oxfordshire and that this crew had not done a unlicensed music event for a number of years.

All that said being older, and now living many miles away from SE England I can understand why TVP “bark up the wrong tree” and/or are slow to forgive and forget.

Looking back upon 20 years there was a lot of fun but also a great deal of collateral damage – both sides were stubborn. I remember a lot of our friends getting too deep into addiction and/or crime to fund their lifestyles, others suffering long term health problems. This must have had a horrendous impact on our parents. A lot of resources were stolen from local businesses to hold parties. I still remember printing off the first OOOPS! flier using the resources of a large financial services company based in town – in fact I found a set of the disk labels (with the same smiley faces and “disk!”) and telephone message sheets that were interleaved as cover cargo for the fliers just recently.

in this case they could handle it financially, what was less forgiveable was stuff like how a lot of the elderly folks pension funds of certain local businesses are completely fucked and inaccurate (to these folks financial loss) because the staff we so trashed on mondays none could count to ten straight let alone operate business critical computer systems. So I can understand why those who got caught up in the sidelines are judgemental. they have every right to be.

by the late 90s and even pre-economic depression until recently (especially in SE England) I think what happened is there was a lot of affluence, optimism and euphoria caused by the dotcom boom (from about 1997-2004) which meant wider society overlooked folk who were caning drugs provided they either had a job or didn’t rob off anyone else. Even the cops sort of let on “we have intelligence files on every one of you, but we know the bulk of you come from decent middle class families!

unfortunately I don’t have the disk with the flyer, it was abandoned with a group of boxes of which the contents mostly ended up as nesting material for yellow necked mice, as this was when my cat decided not to catch these himself but instead tell me where they were. (English Nature said these mice were rare and I was lucky to see them).

And I don’t think it had the label on it anyway, it was a normal 3.5″ disk label. and even if i had the file I’d really have to search around to find a DOS wordperfect machine!

from memory what I had was 3 documents. One was the OOOPS! flyer with the black and white smiley faces on it. The second printed out as a 3.5″ disk label, with the same smiley faces but “Disk!” instead of OOOPS!. The rest of the label was blank.

These were printed out onto label stock and used like any other label, the bulk of them in the office. I think some still existed when I left in the late 90s!. A 3rd document was a telephone message sheet in the same style and with a candlestick phone as an icon.

There was a big Xerox network printer in a communal area (then only available to big offices). So what I would do would be to introduce the “legit” documents at the head and tail of the print run (when managers would be looking), and put the OOOPS fliers in the middle. So the bosses praised our initiative for making the distinctive disk labels and telephone sheets, and the fliers went in the bag at home time.

I found some of the advance party newsletters scanned online (just as well as the mice would have had any paper copies). I’ve specifically put this page here as that was the telephone clipart on the telephone message sheet.

The other reason some of the stuff didn’t get a “☺ disk! ☻” label (this is roughly what they looked like) is that they were for 3.5″ disks and a lot of my earlier graphics stuff was done on 5.25″!!! (this was 1994 remember, PC’s were a lot more basic then and new ones way expensive. only coppers and big companies had them, we had to do with the leftovers. I was using original IBM PC at one point and when I upgraded to a 386 that was a massive step up…

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the reuse of the clipart at work documents was deliberate as at one time there was a fair few ravers/party heads in that company and it was like a coded signal to folk, a reminder of messy weekends to get round midweek comedowns.

not sure what became of the newer zines / stuff I did or whether I even kept them. Those actually had way more sophisticated graphics and DTP but for some reason I don’t think of them with as much nostalgia as the old ones – they weren’t any more exciting than the govt spin documents I used to design and process in the Civil Service and there they were well strict about design rules. I did manage to sneak in stuff like random cats into intranet documents…