Spit, Sawdust & Spirit
The Ingenious DIY Culture of Blackburns Acid House Parties
Alex Zawadzki and Jamie Holman | 02.02.23
It’s somewhere between 1989 and 1999, two men stand in a dilapidated mill space in Pennine Lancashire. One elevated on a wooden chair, teasing brittle wires around an electric breaker bar decked out in a floor length rubber raincoat, the second stands behind him, holding his coat-tails taut. As the wires go live, ‘man number 2’ whips the coat sharply; pulling man number 1 away from the voltage sparking through the crude electric circuit they’ve concocted, recharging the empty hollows of one of the North’s many forgotten industrial spaces.
This is Blackburn. And this coat and chair were essentials in the tool kit for Kreft and Klak on a weekly basis, who along with a disparate group of Northerners; pioneered, organised, mobilised and later paid the consequences for a short and intense moment of radicalism in a broken industrial town in the North.
Located close enough to Manchester’s warehouse club The Hacienda, at a time when their ‘Ibiza’ night was stirring up the popularity of an evolving Acid House music sounds.Blackburn’s Acid House parties became the grungy younger cousin to the infamous the club, as the after-party to a night at the Hac. A slow shape-shift occurred and through the growth and bold planning of Blackburn’s parties, the town became positioned as an unlikely epicentre of illegal gatherings and ingenuity. Blackburn’s young kicked back against Thatcherism, poverty, unemployment, local gang rivalries, entrenched racism, casual violence and the dull nightlife landscape which had no connection to the people inhabiting the architecture of Blackburn’s industrial cotton town residue.
Although Acid House, Rave culture and ‘the parties’ weren’t exclusive to Blackburn. Blackburn formed its own ident within its own scene, distinctive through a resourceful DIY feel over the scale and spectacle of the big city rave scene.
Gary Apsden who lived between Darwen and Manchester through this era says: ‘It was different than the Hacienda, because the Hacienda had all the kind of connection to Factory Records, to New Order...and you know these amazing interiors and amazing aesthetics with the graphics and the flyers and the posters. Where what was happening In Blackburn was much more kind of spit and sawdust really.’
While the infamous Genesis raves in London saw UV light tunnels, netting and canopies create a spectacle, Blackburn’s free-party goers report dancing under a single strobe light, next to fresh-laid wet cement and on-top of JCB’s. Blackburn parties grew in size from 100 to 10,000 ravers at it’s three year peak, when rising police tensions and local resistance forced the scene to implode; the downfall-led by a horseback police raid at the ultimate party. A finale likened to a scene from a Wild West film. Ironically a recent discovery, found that the first ever Western, Kidnapping By Indians was actually filmed in Blackburn in 1899 by pioneering working class, DIY film-makers Mitchell & Kenyon, with mill workers taking a turn as actors for the day. But that’s another story for another time.
A night out at a Blackburn party invariably involved scaling walls, fences or fire escapes, traversing waterways or window frames and then dancing in unlit dilapidated buildings, with a crowd producing heat emissions that were visible outside from the plumes of steam exiting the windows and doors. This was usually preceded by gathering at the infamous Sett End; a former strip club, now the unlikely command centre in a pub on a council estate on the edge of town. As the Sett End closed its doors for the night, part 2 of the evening involved jumping into, stealing, or commandeering vehicles and following 4-lane wide convoys, before abandoning cars in laybys, local gardens or curb-sides and making a run for it into the venue evading the pursuant police following the convoy. The dress code therefore, was low-key and functional. Rejecting the elitist door policies of local nightclubs, clothing snobbery was low on the agenda and Blackburn parties weren’t the place for smiley faced t-shirt swagger.
"A night out at a Blackburn party invariably involved scaling walls, fences or fire escapes, traversing waterways or window frames and then dancing in unlit dilapidated buildings, with a crowd producing heat emissions that were visible outside from the plumes of steam exiting the windows and doors."
Blackburn did and still does, report statistics that represent a struggling economy. Home to the country’s most economical deprived borough, lower than average health statistics and mortality rates, higher than average obesity statistics. But this town, up against these odds, continually reports higher than average statistics of entrepreneurialism and business growth. Blackburners possess a rebellious, fighting spirit that glowed in resourcefulness during the party era.
‘It was basically like saying, ‘right, we've had enough of this with no jobs with no money’. We're going to make our own entertainment. I think that it'll be remembered as like, punk was and you know do it yourself. DIY.’ says Paul, a regular raver from Blackburn during the era.
A guerilla network of young people mobilised itself from a mash-up of football casuals, new age travellers, scallies, and B-boys, Soulies & House lovers ready for the next big evolution of sound. Like the workings of a movie production, the stage was set with location finders, sound engineers, designers, logistics men, security as well convoy leaders, decoys drivers and DJs.
‘They say that the machine is bigger than its sum of parts. The sum of the parts.’ says party organiser Geordie. ‘One of the things I would suggest people do look at in 100 years time, is how a mixed up bunch of bastards came together to create something.
Everyone knew their role, and these rebels were organised, but they were cash poor and their growing reputation with the authorities and the locals blocked them from resources. Unable to hire PA systems from nervous hire companies, and repeatedly losing their own
sound systems to police raids; a novel DIY solution was set in motion to sneak out the speakers by the time the the crowds had died down and the police could enter the building without being overpowered by the mass of people inside:
Organiser Tommy Smith explains;
‘We'd get Joe Fossard who'd build the boxes and we'd fit the speakers in them. So in the morning we could then leave the box still booming up with a bass cone in it. But we could take out the high-end speakers and the costly equipment and sneak it out in our jackets. So by that time, the police were still hearing the music; they'd think it's still going on, but by the time they'd got in, there was only a cassette player there with some bass booming out and most of the equipment was gone because it was very difficult to get equipment, to hire cars, to hire vans as it went on... it got more difficult to get anything really.’
The unsung heroes of DIY were without a doubt, sound engineers like Joe Fossard and Klak who showed a wartime resourcefulness as they found ways to power the parties. Bringing skills from their day-jobs, they adapted to their environment, stripping wires from walls or setting timers to avoid electrocution as they wired up to nearby lamp-posts:
“I remember wiring up to a walk-in fridge….’ says Klak ‘It kept cutting out every time the fridge got cold enough the power would go off. I think it was wired to a compressor that was outside. I think we were all holding lighters up underneath it to warm it back up again so it kicked back in. Lamp-posts….running the entire sound and lights off a domestic cable that was running through a puddle of water with people dancing in it and keeping your fingers crossed!’
The ingenuity spread as the parties then drove DIY micro-economies and creatives. A local Acid House pirate radio station outlived the parties and hikes up Billinge Hill became a weekly event to set up a makeshift aerial rig, while ‘Ear to the Ground,’ a local rave zine, circulated stories and documented the widespread influence of Acid House. Articles on style, music, design or the latest parties sat alongside activism and civil rights pieces, highlighting the connectivity between the parties and politics. A working class manifesto with its own DIY aesthetic; reminiscent of the Black Panthers Newspapers distinctive in style due to Emory Douglas’ collage and print illustrations. A homemade DIY publication made with simple resources and radical messages and with a potential readership of thousands; the Zine was influential. Ear to the Ground’s visual language mirrored the aesthetics of the parties flyers and posters - a stylisation that evolved from the availability and scope of the equipment the organisers could access.
‘There was no such thing as colour copying in those days. You got red and you got black. So I used coloured paper and i'd put it through the photocopier once and copy one side with the black, and then I'd get the red and put that on the photocopier and load everything into the photocopier again. I’d have to get it lined up correctly and then you'd have a 2 or 3 colour copy by the time it went through the machine.’ Klak
These years of hustling inspired young Blackburners to start up audio hire companies, record shops and recording studios. 20 year old raver Charno started a ‘car-boot shop’ selling drinks, cigarette papers, A-Z maps and local papers to ravers waiting to follow the convoys at motorway service stations; 30 years on, aged 50, he runs record shops which he attributes to his time at the Blackburn parties.
‘What we learned from this is that anything we want to do with our life, we can do you know. So it's this attitude that you can do what you want, that you can fulfill your dreams. You can follow your dreams. It taught us how to be entrepreneurs and so many people had amazing careers after these parties because of the inspiration that they felt at the parties.’ says Wendy, a regular raver during the time.
And this is truly Blackburn’s Acid House legacy, 1000s of working class folks, left with the belief that anything is possible, despite the odds. That anything can be done with a bit of spit and sawdust and a lot of spirit.
‘The last word. The last breath. The last step. The last thing. Do everything like it's the last thing you're ever going to do... and life is gonna be easy.’ Geordie.
Spit, Sawdust and Spirit is informed by the Flashback project. A digital archive of Blackburn’s Acid House parties through 40 interviews and a collation of ephemera and visuals. Delivered by Uncultured Creatives, commissioned by the British Textile Biennial and funded by The Heritage Lottery Fund.
Jamie Holman & Alex Zawadzki produce work characterised by the exploration of divided histories, sensitive content and the unification of diverse community participants through shared experiences of culture, class and that which makes us human. We look for exciting connections and opportunities to research and celebrate working class culture and make visible, their unique histories. Our research proposes the emergence of culture through the celebration of topics and movements including subcultures, trade unions, folklore, mill workers, football, magick, labour and poetry.