The acid house era was underway, and the illegal rave was born. As Wayne Anthony describes in his memoir Class of ’88, enterprising promoters such as his own outfit Genesis ran ‘pay parties’ in out of town places, such as disused warehouses, informing suspicious police that they were private parties or video-shoots for prominent pop stars. Promoters began to go deep into the home counties surrounding London, throwing, as writer Joshua Clover describes it, “ever more elaborate … parties in borrowed and rented fields, the odd warehouse or similarly vacant mega-structure”. According to the rave sociologist Beate Peter, “by leaving the city behind and producing meaning in the countryside, ravers became resistant bodies, refusing the division of life into opposites: day and night, work and leisure, us and them, or buying and selling”. This may have been so, but older landowners (and the media) were intent on holding on to these distinctions. Local councillor Scott Hopkins complained to The Times that an infamous party in an airfield hangar in Berkshire that attracted over 11,000 revellers, “was obviously a highly organised set-up with many youths coming from North London. They caused havoc and chaos in this quiet little town.”

In his 1973 book, The Country and the City, cultural theorist Raymond Williams wrote that “the contrast of the country and city is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society”. Williams probably wasn’t anticipating the events of some fifteen years later, but this contrast between the pastoral idyll of the countryside and the noisy, disruptive urban rhythms of house music became a key conflict of the late 1980s. Questions were asked in parliament about this “acid house cult”, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher even found herself became drawn into the row in August 1989, via Archie Hamilton MP forwarding a letter from his uncle, merchant banker Gerald Coke. Coke was objecting to a party near his home in Bentley, rural Hampshire, that had “started at 1.30am and went on until 7.30am … and was heard for more than a mile in all directions … Virtually everyone in the village rang the police at some stage”. Unsurprisingly, Thatcher sided with the views of Coke and his fellow villagers: “if this is a new ‘fashion’ we must be prepared for it and preferably prevent such things from lasting”. A specialist Pay Party Unit was established by September to deal with the now weekly disturbances. Remote rural locations were announced at the last minute, via pirate radio and party hotlines, as a game of whack-a-mole was played between police and promoters, who attempted to keep gatherings of several thousand young people secret until the very last minute. Partiers would travel to the location via convoy, often congregating at agreed meeting points at service stations off the M25.

Media reporting of these parties followed a familiar rubric, in which the countryside connoted ideals of “tranquillity, conservatism, order and respectability”, as the sociologist Andrew Hill put it in a 2003 article appositely titled ‘Acid House and Thatcherism: noise, the mob, and the English countryside’. Elsewhere Hill argued that newspaper coverage of acid house parties made “use of what the art historian [Erwin] Panofsky has termed a ‘paysage moralisé’”, or in other words, that aspects of the representation enforced moralising tendencies. In the tabloid press, the tranquillity of the rural location and its pastoral idyll were accentuated to draw attention to the disruptive, noisy and downright immoral nature of raves. A handful of well-publicised deaths of young people after taking ecstasy, albeit in urban nightclubs (including Manchester’s The Haçienda), helped this portrayal of acid house as “evil”. Conservative MP Graham Bright’s Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act of 1990 placed further obstructions in the way of young people looking for a good time in the countryside.

But unsurprisingly, this media portrayal didn’t tell the whole story, and the dividing line between city and country was a blurred one. Many farmers were perfectly happy to earn a little extra income by renting out a field for the night, even if it meant arrests for some, and the potential loss of ratings relief for others. Indeed, such collusions between promoters and agriculturalists would pave the way for later, highly lucrative ventures such as Creamfields (a trance and EDM festival that continues to this day). If Bright’s legislation dissuaded some, the genie was already out of the bottle. Whilst initially acid house had meant young people from the cities flocking to the country, these parties also began to inspire rural youth to throw their own raves. As the sampled voice of John Waite on BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours intones at the start of The Orb’s 1990 ambient house classic ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’: “Over the past few years, to the traditional sounds of the English summer, the drone of lawnmowers, the smack of leather on willow, has been added a new noise”.