Police encouraged the sound systems to head towards Castlemorton Common, a few square miles of public land just east of the Malvern Hills. "They were digging trenches, no one was able to go to the site," says Simone. This year, though, Avon and Somerset Police had other ideas.
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Deciding, as one member recalls, "to take it easy at someone else's party for a change", they headed for the Avon free festival, a regular May bank holiday gathering near Bristol. They acted completely out of fear."įollowing interim parties at Chobham Common and Stroud Common in Surrey and in the Cotswolds, where they rebuilt some of their equipment, the Spirals elected to seek refuge in numbers. People of all walks of life were coming together on the dancefloor. "Really, what were we doing that was so disastrously wrong? Occupying empty buildings, playing music and dancing. It felt like we had no way of telling anyone. What happened was kind of obscene, but it went unreported. We tried to call all the journalists we knew, and there was nothing. "At that point we realised the police were really on our case. The Spirals were used to run-ins with the law - "we'd had lines of police directing us across fields" - but nothing like this. People were being carted off to hospital." Imagine people who've been up for two or three days dancing you're a bit tripped out at this point. They smashed up the decks, just went to town basically. We'd just been dancing for a few days, we're in the middle of an industrial estate, not really affecting anybody else around, and then all of a sudden they started bashing the wall in. They had diggers, they were all in their riot gear, shields.
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(Like other Spirals I talked to, she didn't want me to use her full name.) "All of a sudden you peered out of a crack in the wall, and the place was surrounded by every kind of police vehicle you can imagine. "They were letting people in and not letting people out, then letting people out and not letting people in," she continues, talking from her current base in a Paris apartment. Being forced down on to muddy floors, being battered. Simone, one of the original Spiral Tribe members, who had fallen into the free party scene years before after working in a PA hire shop in north London, recalls: "Everyone who was there remembers exactly what happened. The next day a police helicopter escorted the Spiral Tribe convoy, 10 vehicles long, out of the London area. One man who tried to escape over the roof claimed to have been pushed he fell two storeys breaking both arms and legs. Scores of ravers later alleged they were beaten in the dark of the warehouse witnesses claim one pregnant woman was knocked to the ground. The Spirals and partygoers barricaded the doors, but after a 10-hour stand-off, the police revved up a JCB and broke through the outer wall. According to witnesses at Acton Lane, some TSG were masked and had their ID numbers covered.
Those who tried to enter or leave had to face the TSG (the same group responsible for heavy-handed policing of crowds in the recent G20 demonstrations). In the early hours, police officers from the Metropolitan Police's Territorial Support Group, a specialist division with duties including crowd control, surrounded the building. To a packed house, they partied through the night. O n 19 April 1992 - Easter Sunday - Spiral Tribe, a self-described "rag-tag sound system group who came together driven by the will to keep the party going", who had been running free raves with a mobile rig across the UK since 1990, set up in a warehouse in Acton Lane, west London.
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