THE lazy hum of cabin-cruiser engines cut through the squawking of ducks and the general hubbub of Bank Holiday-makers quaffing beer down by The Riverside pub as a fat old sun smiles benevolently upon the Cotswold town of Lechlade-on-Thames.

But what is that vague rumbling I can make out in the distance as I negotiate Halfpenny Bridge, from Wiltshire into Gloucestershire, and drive through this pleasantly olde worlde town centre past antique shops, restaurants and a towering 15th Century church?

It is, to quote a description that would later gain an infamy of sorts, “the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”

Nothing I wasn’t expecting on this particular Sunday afternoon in May. It is nevertheless, startlingly out-of-character in a town located on the Thames’ highest navigable point and, as such, is usually dominated by boating and other laidback river related pursuits.

Police vehicles, too, have converged here from three constabularies – Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Thames Valley – on what turns out to be a singular weekend in the history of Lechlade.

Swindon’s illegal rave last month, when around 300 party people descended on a Rodbourne warehouse, reminds me of the biggest event of its kind ever staged in the area when the rave craze shook the nation back in late Eighties/early Nineties.

For three to four days in 1992 the population of little Lechlade, just across the Thames from the Borough of Swindon, virtually quadrupled from around 3,000 to an estimated 10/15,000.

Or if you believe the figure later quoted in Parliament by North West Hampshire MP David Mitchell, the number of people in Lechlade that Early May Bank Holiday Weekend ballooned ten-fold to 30,000.

Anyone old enough will recall that staging raves involved locating a suitable site - maybe an empty factory or, as in Lechlade’s case, an exhausted quarry – spreading the word in hush-hush tones, setting-up your generators, speakers and turn-tables and having ball before the authorities got wind and broke it up.

By their very nature, raves were unlicensed and thus illegal. Fire regulations, noise disturbance, drug use, litter, general nuisance etc... no council in its right mind would rubberstamp such a jamboree.

They were free, too – it was part of the ethos – so there was never any question of cash being dished out for solicitors, licence fees, the hiring of sites etc.

As the popularity of raves spread from the Eighties into the Nineties the organisers had to exert increasing guile and sophistication to get their shows underway before the law arrived.

Bizarrely, Lechlade began not as a rave but with the arrival of some harmless looking hippies at an edge-of-town gravel pit a few days earlier.

Their intention? To celebrate the Festival of Beltane, a seasonal Gaelic affair that occurs between the spring equinox and the summer solstice.

The afternoon of Friday, May 1, however, saw a ramshackle conglomerate of around 300 caravans, jeeps, trucks and buses materialise on the disused gravel pit near the town’s trout farm. Mostly in their 30s to 60s, they were predominantly new agers, not ravers.

“We’re not here to hurt anyone. We’re just here to have a good time,” one of them told the Adver. “It is an invasion,” responded the chairman of Lechlade parish council, Arthur Chase.

“We have had them before but never as many as this. It is not pleasant to have this number on your doorstep,” he protested.

At some stage, over the Friday and Saturday, the New Age Beltane Festival morphed into the Lechlade Rave. The hippies’ pagan shindig had been hi-jacked by a younger, hungrier breed of party animal.

Casting around for somewhere to pitch their dance tents for the Bank Holiday, while being harassed by police whose intelligence gathering was making life increasingly difficult, the ravers latched onto the Beltane Festival at Lechlade and barged cheerfully onto the site.

“A fantastic atmosphere – but there was a little friction between the hippies and the ravers – heard a few expensively dressed ravers getting harangued by the crusties,” reminisced one attendee years later on the UK Parties and Free Festivals 1990-1994 website.

By Saturday around 10,000 to 15,000 all-night party people were contentedly ensconced in Lechlade, grooving to an assortment of sounds emanating from an assortment of marquees.

Some of the biggest hitters on the rave scene were on-site, each with their own circus-like tent, sound system and DJs…..Spiral Tribe, Bedlam, DIY and Circus Warp among them. “Hippie shaker” reported the Adver. “Village rocked by party-goers.”

Reporting on the proceedings, I ambled through the site on the Sunny Sunday Afternoon, impressed by the flags, the eye-catchingly decorated tents and the ultra-violet lighting….but maybe not the music.

Never did get that electro-house-trance stuff although it does contain some pleasing elements of Krautrock along with occasional splashes of Sixties psychedelia.

To the annoyance of some locals, the police, while out force, by and large kept away from the rave although they did pounce on the occasional dealer touting “rhubarb, custards” and the like.

The Gloucestershire Constabulary came clean and admitted they had been caught on the hop, having arrived after scores of vehicles were already on site.

By then there was little they could sensibly do without - as Assistant Chief Constable Nigel Burgess put it – “triggering extreme violence and potential repercussions for the people of Lechlade.”

The reaction of Lechlade folk was mixed. John Coxeter, who ran the Londis grocery store, was forced to shut up shop because “the shoplifting has been horrendous.”

A coffee house owner, rather distastefully in my view, declared that he also closed for the weekend otherwise the smell of the partygoers would permeate the premises for weeks.

Honest, you can actually see him say this on YouTube while being interviewed by regional TV. Another resident was compelled to comment: “The sooner they go the better. It’s such a row (the music) we keep our doors shut.”

However, a native of Lechlade told the Adver: “There are all sorts of people milling around but they are not doing anybody any harm. I always say live and let live.”

While Penny Warren, liberal-minded landlady of The Trout, commented: “Our sleepy little village isn’t sleepy any more. We have never seen so many people in one place at any one time.

“But they are not causing us any problems at all.”

Site is now blocked off with concrete

EVERY time I drive through Lechlade I glance by at the lasting legacy of the rave.

It is covered in brambles now but soon after the final party animal quit town, quarry firm ACR made the site “virtually impregnable” by erected some huge concrete blocks to thwart potential future intrusions.

These days Lechlade has its own May-time music festival – all legal and above board, naturally.

This year Status Quo will be giving the swans on the Thames something to think about when they headline the three-day event from May 22-24.

'Rave veteran' remembers “technofesty blowout”

ACCORDING to the Spiral Tribe entry on Wikipedia, 25,000 people attended the Lechlade Rave.

In Select magazine an un-named Lechlade Rave Veteran trawled through the recesses of his cranium to recall some fleeting moments from the “technofesty blowout.”

These included “loads of far out UV (ultra violet) stuff” dangling from the roof of Circus Warp’s blue and orange marquee, including bicycle wheels, while a Mad Max robot shuffled around.

He remembered “flinching at the sheer excessive volume of the beat coming from the Spiral system in the blazing sunlight on Sunday morning when we felt particularly fragile.”

And also: “A misty and gentle sunrise over one of the huge trout ponds (which, incidentally, contained huge trout.)”

Posted four years ago on the It’s All About the Flyers website, another recalled that “by Sunday everyone was turning up through word of mouth,” and that “the police were chilled and standing by the wooden fences just chatting with everyone.”

He added, by way of explaining why so many residents were so uptight: “Cars were strewn wherever they could find an empty spot including roundabouts and people's drives.”

Rave scene has tabloids in a frenzy

THE rave scene was at its zenith when the Lechlade Happening happened.

Later that month many of its prime-movers – Spiral Tribe, Circus Warp, Bedlam – hosted a hoe-down at Castlemorton in the Malverns attended by 20-40,000 ravers.

The tabloids had the proverbial field day. Such was the Establishment’s outrage that it paved the way for the controversial 1994 Criminal Justice Bill.

Section 63 gave police the power to remove people from events at which music “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” was being played.

The party was over...