The Nights We Weren’t Supposed to Be There

Some of the sharpest memories from being young involve not knowing exactly where we were or whether we were supposed to be there at all. My friends Nele and Dani and I used to drive out past the city limits to some half-collapsed warehouse or forgotten industrial lot, pay whatever the door required, and dance for hours in rooms painted with murals no one commissioned. We knew it was technically trespassing. That knowledge sat pleasantly alongside the music and made everything taste better.

The timing was already strange in retrospect. Classic techno was dying by then—not gone, just gasping—and the floors split between hip-hop from one direction and drum and bass and its various electronic relatives from the other. The combination should have been chaotic. It was, and that was the point. At some point the parties got fewer and further between. People we only knew from those nights dissolved back into ordinary life and we never saw them again. The music moved indoors, behind proper doors, with proper licenses, and something changed.

In Britain the same pressure has been compounding for decades—noise complaints, development, the systematic dismantling of youth culture by people who never wanted it to exist in the first place. Most clubs are gone. The ones that remain are expensive and corporate and smell like liability insurance. And yet the illegal rave scene there is not dead. VICE went looking for the people who still organize and attend these events and found them unbowed—stubborn believers in the idea that music and a dark room are enough.

They’re right. I know because I remember what it felt like to stand in one of those rooms at 3am, completely unsure how the night would end, and feel like the music was the only honest thing in the world.