Furious Magic

Image credit: me

We crested the brow of the hill at dusk and saw the twinkling lights spread out between the vehicles and sound systems down on the common with an electrifying sense of anticipation. All talking at once, rolling fags, hanging out of the windows, we found a spot to park up off the B4208 on that evening in May 1992 and entered three days that would change the rest of our lives.

It wasn’t the first rave I’d been to – there were a lot of others (Stroud, Lechlade, Acton, names I can’t remember) – and it wasn’t my last, but immersed in Castlemorton and the spectacular weirdness of the Spiral Tribe sound system, partying all night to DIY DJ’s Digs & Woosh and Circus Warp with a nomadic, open, inclusive community of like-minded souls, my sense of belonging to a wild land beyond the urban normcore was cemented.

Being an old skool raver has been part of my identity for decades now, I admit it - I’m not sorry. I took it with me when I moved from Gloucestershire up to uni in Madchester and the club nights then on to the glory days of early noughties Brighton and that infamous Fat Boy Slim beach rave. But it wasn’t just the outdoor parties that made me feel part of the wild. It was the nights spent in the woods camping overnight with mates on the weekends, sneaking out of the house in the early hours to go walking in the fields and parks before dawn, the long nights at country pubs, the lakes and rivers where we paddled and swam, scooting along the current on tractor inner tubes. Sometimes it was mind-bendingly boring living in a rural area (some wonder we welcomed rave culture with open arms) but if you cut me in half like a stick of rock with a knife right now, I’ll bet you two rams and a pint of snakebite and black that Gloucestershire is written all the way through and I’m claiming it. With pride.  

I’m not much of a raver these days* but that connection to the land endures, the sense that I belong to a wild, weird, illicit space somehow bound to the seasons yet beyond the confines of linear, conventional timescales and the prim imaginings of the chocolate box Cotswolds. No doubt this spirit drives me now in my year-round outdoor swimming adventures – small slices of epic freedom in the domestic week and an act of reclamation by this female body which has forever been told the outdoors is not a ‘safe’ space to be. It has also driven my recent poetry practice exploring the potential of the hedgerow as a radical space/trope, the local waterways, rituals and goddess worship cults and a fascination with the folk revival to re-engage with – to ‘re-enchant’ – the land. To belong again. To create new stories and characters that articulate my relationship with the landscapes I inhabit. In part this is driven by a diy activist spirit in the face of climate emergency and an urge/urgency to re-present rural space as a frontline, a threshold, not a margin. A place where country’s revolutionary underside can be revealed in all its unhinged, disobliging, furious magic.

When a top flight contemporary poet (who, to be fair, I do love) suggested to me in a recent Zoom that the way to elevate the goddess poem I’d just shared in first draft would be to ‘urbanise’ it, make it more ‘gritty’ and by default ‘more interesting,’ I was pissed. Notwithstanding the fair point that there was work to be done to dial up tension in what Terrance Hayes calls the ‘panic room’ of the sonnet, that comment made me feel even more marginalised from the contemporary (yes urban, yes young) poetry scene than I already did. But more than that, it made me think hard about how staid and misconceived rural space still is by those who don’t live outside the metropolitan centres of this island nation. Implicit in that lazy throwaway comment is the belief that the rural experience of place and time is somehow invalid or irrelevant, dull, bucolic, backwater-ish, uneventful, wearisome, and … unproductive.

To many the ‘countryside,’ as townies have been known to call it, is still fetishized as a place of cream teas and village greens, steam trains and hay bales, Brexit voting deviants and hot tub porn addiction. But if you look more closely at the rural, order is being overthrown right now in the ways outsider artists, performers, writers and thinkers are reconsidering our relationship with the non-human and the ‘entangled lives’ of plants, animals and people; new folk traditions are being made by groups like the all-female Boss Morris side and in the ‘feral song writing’ of Angeline Morrison; the excoriating and hilarious satire of folk gnosticism and village politics in emerging writer Emma Kernahan’s Stroud Mythical Entities is proof there’s life and grit and tension in the spaces that exist outside the cityscape. Beyond the mainstream, a new aesthetic is bubbling under and resurfacing as a bolder, wilder, come-all, disobedient, bantering force. This is an energy I recognise. It’s always been there: rural by birth, experience and sentiment, progressive and oppositional in its – sometimes quiet - ambition. Rave is back, baby. Like it ever went away.

… more to follow on this soon…

*give me a dancefloor and I won’t be responsible for my actions