It is another year of speed psychosis, acid frenzies and ecstasy deliriums. I’m travelling on the magic bus like a crazed and all consuming dope fiend, trying to find a meaning to all the mayhem. It’s the time of finding THE MOTHER OF ALL RAVES. Or so the people say, whom I’m hanging out with, who let me come along for the whole ride, along with all the other dope fiends, ravers and anarchists.
We never find it, this ‘Mother Rave’ despite looking everywhere, meeting people on the way, who are either ‘on the bus’ or, ‘off the bus’ just like some Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters saga, but a few decades later - the spirit is there and so is someone calling himself ‘Speed Limit’ driving the bus, speeding his tits off, beyond the long drawn out chemical fueled journey across the British heartlands, along the epic road journey of life - with the ever lasting, never ending joint that gets passed around all the while.
THE MOTHER OF ALL RAVES is never going to happen! The pigs are everywhere! They are stopping everyone! - From gathering together to the sound of ‘repetitive beats’. Despite this, we still consume all the drugs we have, for the purpose of ‘journalist purity’ to at least experience the ‘feeling’ and euphoria… Well, that’s my excuse anyway.
It was all about the drugs anyway, getting high up to the sky; a chance to hang around with like-minded people, like we were all searching for something greater and we were NOW on the journey. Its the same with the rave scene, that we are all together as one, as a one massive saucepan eyed tribe, all loaded, all heavy consumers of mind altering substances - the jet fuel we need now. Sitting around the ‘brain machine’ in a total strangers house, watching the pretty girl with the maracas, whilst the bongo drums play, all together now along with the beat of the Mohawk man smoking Dunhill International.
The car with the scaffolding rammed into it on Claremont Road the next day, coming down from the acid… Is homage to the Poll Tax Riots a few years earlier; the road will be knocked down anyway soon, despite the mass protest, because the British government is involved and its been Tory time since 1979. This is the moment (I’ve heard on the radio) that ‘Brit Pop’ is gonna give birth - Meanwhile, plenty of Ganesha acid is going around, still… The intense looking girl whom I call Mountain Girl shown me girl power long before the pop charts ever will and she hands out Ganesha LSD like candy… “OK” she says looking stern, “We can be mates yeah?” When it all turns sour and nasty and brutal and violent there is a hole left in my soul and given the consumption of everything chemical I then decide to look for the Holy Grail instead. For what its worth, this is a journey into the darkness and madness to somehow come out of the other side and just say FAR OUT and Wow, that was pretty fucked up - Knowing you may have just been to the brink of insanity, or at least touched that feeling.
So I look at the pretty woman wearing her just her knickers on the wall where I often walk, all the information has been ripped away and just a swirly pattern frames her instead… Wednesday I worry about, as its the great middle of the week come down bummer day - I’ve been on this cosmic journey for a while now and I realise I may soon crash and burn… Get beyond that and all will be OK. Because I know the destination is further.