Block rockin’ Beats: how a new coming-of-age indie captures the spirit of illegal raves

Incredible as it seems now, in 1994, the British government attempted to outlaw dance music. Like a resentful preacher in a repressive small American town, John Major’s government imposed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (CJA), which sought to smite down upon the public menace known as “rave culture”. Triggered by the outbreak of peace, ecstasy and illegal partying that swept Britain in the late 1980s and early 90s, the CJA ushered in new curtailments of civil liberty, the most notorious being Section 63 (1) (b), which legally defined the troublesome music as that which “includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”

“It seemed mad at the time, but looking back on it now, it was absolutely bizarre,” says veteran DJ Keith McIvor, AKA JD Twitch, of the “repetitive beats” definition. McIvor has curated the soundtrack for a new movie, Beats, a Scottish coming-of-age indie that fondly revisits the halcyon days of illegal raving, 25 years on.

Few movies have succeeded in capturing the spirit of that age: Human Traffic, Trainspotting, er … Kevin and Perry Go Large? But Beats gets the mood right. The story follows two mates’ quest for a night of MDMA-enhanced hedonism in a field; a task that, in the pre-social media era, was unimaginably difficult. It gets the music right, too: LFO, Orbital, the Prodigy, Detroit techno, happy house, ambient chillout. There’s also a reference to Autechre’s protest track Flutter, expressly written to circumvent the CJA: no two bars had the same drum pattern. A sticker on the original EP advised DJs “to have a lawyer and a musicologist present at all times to confirm the non-repetitive nature of the music in the event of police harassment”.

Depressingly, the CJA succeeded in stamping out illegal raves but, McIvor points out, it wasn’t all bad. “The rave era was in many ways the most apathetic time I can remember,” he says. But the CJA was a turning point. “Where people hadn’t been political before, suddenly it was the topic of conversation. People were outraged and wanted to do something about it.” There were protests and “Kill the Bill” marches nationwide, including one on Downing Street in October 1994 that had to be broken up by mounted riot police. This was one of the worst times to be young in modern British history: 18 years of Conservative rule, recession, the poll tax, the miners’ strike. Tuning out would not spark change.

The CJA didn’t exactly sort out the “repetitive beats”, either. They went overground, into legal clubs, into pop, drum’n’bass, EDM, and even the trance-bleep banger that is the BBC News theme. If Paul Oakenfold had dropped that back in 1992 it would have been a hands-in-the-air moment. Possibly followed by the police confiscating his turntables.

Beats is released on Friday 17 May