Hope You Saved Your Glow Stick

from the new york times: (i previously mistakenly said the bbc)

TO most people in Britain, rave is a memory, and a blurry one at that. For four years at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Britain’s youth took to the fields, forests and warehouses, took Ecstasy, wore some of the silliest outfits ever devised — like cricket hats, white gloves and gas masks — and ushered out Thatcherism in a strobe-lighted haze of electronic music that shook the ground they danced on.

Then Parliament passed the Criminal Justice Act of 1994, which humorlessly characterized rave music as “the emission of a succession of repetitive beats,” and gave police the power to shut raves down. That swiftly put an end to the scene’s drug-induced violence — and to the scene itself.

But if you happen to be in London these days, there are signs that something like rave is stirring again.

“The first time around, rave really seeped into the mainstream,” said Carri Mundane, 26, a designer who was a child during the first rave scene but kept the fliers amassed by her older brother. “The music was in the charts, and everything just became a little bit more psychedelic.”

This time, it’s more insular. And it’s different in other ways, too: some of the music is rock, not electronica, and the scene is no longer as defined by the twin illegalities of drugs and trespassing.
Ms. Mundane, the designer, who wears brightly colored clothing that has made her an arbiter of rave fashion, said, “What I like about rave is the positivity of it, the fact that it is so utopian.”

… yeah, that’s exactly it, love…no way was it about doing stacks of drugs and just rollin’ yer tits off all night long, dancin’ to thumpin’, bangin’ beats with sweaty strangers, everyone smiling, cos’ they're all havin’ a fuckin great time, nobody caring, or giving a toss, an’ never any trouble, except for the wanker police.

"so utopian".....oh, and "the positivity" (hey!, do you think you could make mine a diet rave-light, please?...) positivity! that word didn't even exist then.