Taking a camera into this environment proved an excellent training ground for every subsequent complex assignment I’ve shot. Long before the ubiquitous presence of mobile phone cameras, this was an utterly unselfconscious, but deeply underground and secretive scene.
#Acid cam the movie how to#
They were hard as nails, knew how to play a wild game of cat-and-mouse with the police-and most wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Mad Max movie or some psychedelic futurist script. Behind the parties were a motley bunch of characters, many of whom dedicated their lives to the scene. It took imagination, graft and grit to turn those spaces into temporary temples, caves and labyrinths of bliss. The parties would repeat for weeks, claiming section six until a court ordered an eviction, then the whole crazy circus would vanish like a magician’s conjuring trick till the next venue was found.
Decked with huge tarps of fluorescence, pagan and futuristic iconography, with massive post-apocalyptic speakers and mixing desks hauled in. As soon as the music started up, every corridor between sound-systems would be lined with dealers touting Ecstasy, LSD, Ketamine and amphetamine with all the coyness of a market-trader. These would be transformed into smokey, dreamy labyrinths. Most British city-centres in those days of long economic hardship, had a bunch of abandoned buildings party organisers could squat: empty schools, bingo halls, tenements, office blocks, sports centres and warehouses.
The parties sprang up as quick as weeds and in the same places of neglect.
But there was an ideological underpinning to the scene that made the gatherings even more electric: these weren’t ‘just parties’, they were congregations of leading nonconformists, contrarians and dissidents, and they were glorious, exuberant expressions of rebellion against unchecked capitalism and its discontents. The parties had it all: hedonism in spades, no laws, no rules, no dress code, a limitless supply of drugs and a soundtrack of pulsating Acid Techno. It was a raw, wild, and political scene, and one I was gleefully immersed in. London’s squat parties defined the counterculture of mid - late-90s and post-Thatcherite Britain.
0 kommentar(er)
