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Spiral Tribe was a free party soundsystem which existed in the first half of the 1990s. The group originated in west London and later travelled across Europe and North America. According to one member, the name came to him when he was at work, staring at a poster of the inter-connecting spirals in an ammonite shell [1]. The group had a huge influence on the emerging free tekno subculture. Members of the collective released seminal records on their label, Network 23.

Spiral Tribe was responsible for numerous parties [2] in squatted locations in and around the South of England including:

October 1990 - first party organised by Spiral Tribe.

July 1991 - displaced Stonehenge Solstice Free festival at Longstock

August Bank holiday 1991 - a rave (the White Goddess festival) for 2 weeks on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, where they combined their sound system with Circus Normal (to achieve a sound system of over 25,000 watts RMS) receiving complaints from over 14 miles away. Despite police pressure they partied on until all of the partygoers went home. The event was organised along with a number of other soundsystems including Bedlam, Circus Warp and DIY.

Christmas and New Years Eve 1991 - The Camden Round House, North London.

February 1992 - Numbers Farm, Kings Langley, Hertfordshire. The Uni-Chem warehouse party Uxbridge - the police had to enter through the wall using a JCB digger as all the doors were locked at 9am Sunday morning to allow the party to continue for as long as possible. This was one of the stories contributing to their fame as a sound system.

May 1992 - Castlemorton Common Festival free party.

June 4 1992 - Party in Canada Square, next to Canary Wharf, London. About 1,000 people manage to dance for a little over an hour before 300 police seal off roads and move in to make arrests.

Twenty three members of the group were arrested immediately after the Castlemorton event and were subsequently charged under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. Their trial became one of the longest running and most expensive cases in legal history, lasting four months and costing the UK tax payer £4 million.

In March 1994, after being acquitted of all charges relating to Castlemorton, the group moved to Europe, doing parties in cities such as Rotterdam, Paris and Berlin. Over the next few year, the collective organised parties and teknivals throughout Europe, then it slowly dispersed with some members taking up residence in Germany and Holland and releasing work on Labworks and many other techno labels. Individual members of the collective joined other sound systems, did squat art events or pursued other interests.

From its inception, the group was obsessed by the number 23. Images for musical releases, posters, backdrops and flyers featured the number 23. Parties were often organised on the twenty third day of the month. Members sometimes recorded under the moniker of SP23 and of course the record label itself was called Network 23.

In 1992, some members of the collective signed to the major label Big Life, as a result of the publicity generated from their involvement in the organisation of the Castlemorton Common Festival. Three EPs were released and two albums, one merely a compilation of the tracks from the EPs, the other a full album entitledTekno Terra.

Members of Spiral Tribe also released records on their own highly influential label Network 23.

In 1997, Network 23 brokered a deal with Techno Import, a commercial distributor. A CD entitled Spiral Tribe The Sound of Teknival was advertised on television and sold at least 30,000 copies. This deal was not approved by members of Spiral Tribe, who made a statement which began F**k Techno Import and had to take quick action to ensure the name Spiral Tribe was not copyrighted by Techno Import.

A DVD has been released called World Traveller Adventures in an echo of a track (World Traveller Adventurer) on an early Spiral Tribe record, Forward the Revolution. One of the four films, 23 Minute Warning (the name again taken from an early Spiral Tribe record, this time Breach The Peace} features interviews with several members of the collective [5].

In 2005, the label Network 23 Repress was set up to rerelease sought-after and still-played tracks from the Spiral Tribe back catalogue. Six records have so far been brought out in the series.

The Spring of 2002 saw the 10th anniversary of the now legendary Castlemorton Free Festival, the biggest and most notorious free party ever to take place in the UK. The anniversary was celebrated on Jubilee weekend with a massive Teknival on Steart Beach in Somerset. At least 50 rigs and 10, 000 party people gathered on the beach for a five day party to commemorate the creativity and determination of the original sound systems and to celebrate 10-years of underground rave culture. At a time when most of the country was being bored shitless with television specials about the anniversary of the coronation, the Castlemorton anniversary was a powerful reminder that real culture grows from the ground up, and that to stay alive it has to constantly mutate.

It's important to remember Castlemorton because that was where the battle lines were drawn up for many of the struggles of the last decade. The government clampdown that followed the festival , which beagn with the arrest and prosecution of of members of Spiral Tribe for their involvement in the event and culminated in the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, made it clear that the authorities saw the emerging free party community not as just a nuisance but as a political threat. In the following article, one of the defendents in the Castlemorton trial explains the history, and the connection of the free party movement to other struggles to reclaim public space for public use.

Rightly or wrongly, the names Castlemorton Common and Spiral Tribe have become synonomous with the biggest illegal free party in Britain to date. But behind the outrage and the glamour of the front page headlines of the time, there was another, more important story unfolding. To understand what actually happened we must go back and take a look at events leading up to that weekend in May 1992.

Spiral Tribe were a ragtag collective of musicians, artists, rappers, DJs and cyber-punk types who bounced around the country in a convoy of black, jelly-moulded trucks, putting on free parties. They identified with the primordial, all connecting symbol of the spiral - a representation of the asymmetric shape of nature and the turbulance in it' fractual flow. With no door policy (and often no door), the parties set out to create, and maximise, free social space. Bringing into being a place of contact for all people - all tribes. Actively resisting the rightwing regime built upon violence, private ownership of land and profiteering, the Spirals aligned their artistic and musical spirit with a relentless campaign of events that for breif (yet intense) moments took back the land into the realms of common shared experience. [1]

In the decade immediately preceding the Spiral's whirlwind tour of the British Isles, it was buisness as usual with UK plc violently oppressing free gatherings, protests and nomadic life styles:

1981, 5th Sept: Peace Camp at the US base at Greenham Common starts, and survives several violent eviction attempts and serious abuse form troops.

1982: The meandering convoy of free festival types is named 'The Peace Convoy' after travelling from the Stonehenge Free Festival to join the peace camp at Greeenham Common.

1984: The last Stonehenge free festival before the English Heritage ban.

1984: Nostle Priory near Leeds. The violence against the Peace Convoy steps up.

1984-1985: The Miners Strike. Police use unprecedented violence and make 11,000 arrests.

1985 Feb: Rainbow Fields Village protest camp, Molesworth US base. Violent eviction involving over 2,000 troops and police.

1985, 1st June: Battle of the Beanfield. 140 vehicles smashed and the men, women (including pregnant women) and children are viciously attacked by 1,000 police officers following 'Operation daybreak'.

1986: New Public Order Act gives the police more control over public gatherings and greater powers to evict trespassers from land.

1986, June: Stoney Cross, authorities launch massive attack against travellers, impound all vehicles and attempt (unsuccessfully) to snatch 47 children from their parents [2].

1989: Chief Superintendent Ken Tappenden, of miners strike fame, starts national database on illegal parties and organisers.

1990, March 31st: The Poll Tax Riot.

1990: The introduction of the Bright Bill, which increased fines for throwing an unlicensed party from £2,000 to £20,000 and 6 months in prison. The Spirals staged their first party in October 1990. By June 1991 they had a mobile rig and had pulled off events at some of the most sensitive areas in the country - namely the displaced Stonehenge Solstice Free festival at Longstock and another at Stoney Cross. A flyer from the Tribe at the time read, 'We are here to re-connect the Earth.'

From then on the Spirals held an event every weekend (weekends that often overlapped into weeks) and by Febuary of 1992 they'd taken a string of cheeky, high profile venues. This helped to boost the morale of the festival scene, despite the jack-booted oppression it had suffered. To the Spirals, building a creative culture independent and out of the reach of the parasitic commercial cartels was of the utmost importance. ' The real energy in the rave scene comes from the illegal parties, the pirate radio stations and from white label 12 inch singles that by-pass the music industry altogether.' [3]. But the police and their paymasters were already well aware of this, '....cracking down on illegal raves while allowing night-clubs to stay open longer - was intended to undermine the basis of the scene' [4].

Undaunted, the Spirals beat the shamanic drums, liquefying the air with gurgling techno and skipping breakbeats. New life germinated in decaying urban voids. Inner city kids were teleported into the deep and mystic green of the British countryside. 'The Spirals understood [the countryside] as a politically charged environment. A historic arena for a clash between rebels and oppressors...that free parties were shamanic rites which could reconnect urban youth to the Earth with which it had lost contact, thus averting imminent ecological crisis.' [5]

But the contempt they displayed for authority and consumer culture was making a mockery of the bureaucrat's clampdown on unlicensed events. And, as is always the way when corrupt politicians run out of plausable argument, they resorted to violence. The Territorial Support Group were sent in - an anonymous paramilitary squad, their faces maskedand ID numbers removed.

The TSG surrounded the Spirals' crowded warehouse in Acton Lane, London, on Easter Monday. They beat everyone who tried to enter or leave. Panicked partygoers barricaded themselves into the building , but after a bloody two and a half hour siege the police breached the concrete walls and beat everyone inside to the ground, including a pregnant woman. One boy who had tried to escape onto the roof was thrown off by officers, breaking both his arms and legs. Outside victims were frog marched past three gloating fat-hats. Two were British; the third wore a US police chiefs uniform. he was heard to say 'In the states we would have cleared the building in twenty minutes' [6]. To this day there has been no explanantion as to who this man was and why he was there. The next day the Spiral's convoy was escorted out of London by a low flying police helicopter. There were no charges brought against them - it had been a terror attack, pure and simple.

Shaken and bruised with most of their equipment smashed, the attack had left the Spiral's with a strengthened resolve. The following weekends they staged huge gatherings on Chobham Common, Surrey (another Digger stronghold), Stroud Common and then the Cotswolds where, for Beltane, they teamed up with Bedlam to stage a 10,000-strong outdoor event at Lechlade. Then on again to party in Wales. But as the Spirals played in a honeycombe of ancient mines, another trap was being devised for them in the bowels of Whitehall.

After regaining some of their former strength, they decided to go and take it easy at someone else's party for a change. So the next morning they set off to the Avon Free Festival. On route there was a phone call. Avon had been quashed and JCB's had dug ditches around the site. Hundreds of vehicles were being moved off by police, but allwas not lost: the caller was a Bedlam scout just ahead of the evicted convoy (according to one of the Avon Free's organisers, it was, 'more like a 35 mile traffic jam' [7])., and the Bedlam crew had managed to get on to the Common at Castlemorton.

The Spirals cut across countryand by the afternoon they were approaching the common. Smiling policemen waved them onto a track that ran under the strangely abrubt slopes of the Malvern Hills, to the deep blue lake in a flooded quarry. On either side were beautiful expanses of flat springy turf - too perfect.

The Spirals swung their vehicles into a wide circle and joined the other systems and circuses that were already rigging up. Great heaps of speakers were dumped out of the trucks. The infamous instrument of G-force exhilaration, the Gyrocycle, was set up centre stage. Black flags and banners with silver designs of crop-circle circuitry were hoisted high. Terror-strobes strategically positioned. And still the convoy of travellers rumbled onto site.

Soon the music was on (from all directions) and the crew could relax in a summer haze of bassline vibrations. But for some there was an uncomfortable feeling about the place. It's difficult to say whether it was just a delayed reaction to the hammering they'd taken at Acton Lane, or a sense of impending doom triggered by the eerie sight of smiling policemen. But there was no turning back, the convoy was still pouring onto site - in fact it continued throughout the weekend, swelling the numbers to 50,000 plus.

The festival was cool - untold systems all putting on a great show, ravers, travellers, tourists, TV crews, a shed load of liberated battery hens, skinny dippers, daredevil divers, and even a few police (but they were too busy enjoying the sunshine and playing rounders to bother anyone). Military jets buzzd the site (why do they do that?) and a police helicopter filmed, in minute detail, every scrap of rubbish being picked up by the people below - evidence that was later used in the court case to prove how clean the site was kept. At the time a spiral type commented to the press: 'since we've been heresthere's been more taken out of the ozone layer by jets and helicopters than any damage we've done' [8].

By the end of the weekend everyone was exhausted, the rig was blown, the back drops in tatters, the vehicles' batteries flat. Time to go chill. No such luck. As the Spirals drove off site they were ambushed by police and arrested for conspiracy [9].

Everyone was locked up, along with some innocent bystanders who got caught in the swoop. Vehicles, equipment, money, personal effects - all were confiscated as evidence. After being formally charged and sent before a magistrate they were released awaiting trial. They walked out of the police station with nothing - so they camped on the station steps for almost two weeks.

In that time a man drove up to them in a large white Rover and handed them a piece of paper. On it was a pencil sketch of riot police kicking a pregnent woman who was lying on the ground, underneath was written 'oh my god what have we done?'[10].

Later, on the steps of the court of the committal proceedings, Superintendent Clift (the chap who's jurisdiction the Common was under) came up to the accussed and said, 'I just want you to know that I don't agree with what is happening to you here, this is a political stitch up'[11]. Evidence he later gave (from his hospital bed) was of great help to the defence. But the case would take two years to get to crown court.

In that time the Spirals wangled a small record deal to buy a recording studio, which they installed as a community resource in a converted showman's trailer. They got a rig and vehicles together and disappeared into Europe to start the Teknival movement and numerous independent record labels. When the case finally got to Crown Court it became one of the longest running and most expensive cases in legal history, lasting four months and costing the country £4 million. Before the end of the trial, the judge told the defendents that if they were found guilty, he would be giving them each two years in jail. But the jury (bless 'em) found everyone not 'guilty!'

Despite the vindication of the Spirals, the huge police investigation and court case finding nothing criminal about the Castlemorton gathering, UKplc, hell bent on protecting it's interests, went on to install the monstrous Criminal Justice Bill. An act that has not delivered the intending deathblow to the dissenting masses, but has instead catalysed a generation into action and inspired a blossoming of creative resistance.

RESPECT!!!

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