Or just fifteen thousand people standing in a field?
I found this footage online, ten minutes of videotape from the massive Sunrise Energy rave in 1989. It's a fascinating piece of social history, so many people dancing in an aircraft hanger and outdoors in broad daylight. The stars are the crowd- black and white, male and female, all of them dancing- all of them- a mass of colourful clothing and dry ice. At the end a couple of cars are on fire- no-one really seems to notice.
'You want to call your Mother and say ''Mother, I can never come home because I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire.''
Away from the utopian dream of a new rave based way of life the two men largely responsible for Sunrise Energy were Tony Colston-Hayter and Paul Staines. Colston-Hayter was a young Tory entrepreneur and named in the papers as 'Acid's Mr Big'. He claims he was an anarcho-capitalist. The Shoom crowd say he was regarded as a Hooray Henry, a 'loud dickhead and a laughing stock'. Last year he was jailed for five and a half years for masterminding the theft of £1.3 million from Barclays by hacking into bank accounts. Paul Staines is the unpleasant right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes. Nice one, top one, sorted.
