THE FREE PARTIES
After things had been going good for a while we had built up a huge collection of equipment, props, banners, wall hangings, pa equipment, lights, camouflage netting so we could just put on a party whenever we wanted and became well known for our free partys, basically an event where there is music outdoors in a remote location, it got to the stage where we would have Sativa one week then be doing a free party the next it was a tough regime to keep up with. We started going to the Dunnichen festival and putting on a sound system and pumping techno, this is where Dave Tarrida honed his MC'n skills which he later became known for......
Dunnichen Hill 1996 the year it all went pear shaped! After doing the festival for a few years it always had quite a chilled out vibe. But 1996 changed it all, huge sound systems from England came and turned it into a chaotic 2 week party which ultimately brought an end to a really good festival which had been welcomed up to that point by the locals.
There was a few groups doing free parties at the time, there was Common Knowledge in Glasgow, Desert Storm, in Glasgow, Kaya Tribe from Paisley and Sativa in Edinburgh. We would help out at each others parties, the first free party we really went to was in an abandoned railway tunnel (which I think it was common knowledge that organised it) in Glasgow with ultimately got busted but there was a real buzz after the party at the anarchy involved.
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Gavy from Glasgow was a total legend and it was him who introduced us pretty much to the free party scene, he was always first to volunteer for all the dodgy jobs no one wanted to do! and what a guy a solid dj who had helped organise big legal parties, but that came to a bad end. So he moved into free parties and eventually moved abroad. Gavy played the main floor at Sativa a few times as well.
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Seeing the lights spinning round the cylindrical tunnel and the freedom from being outside of a club and listening to DJ's playing pounding beats had a profound effect on us all. There was about 30 of us huddled into a flat after the party was ended, which unfortunately was a common occurrence with parties usually being brought to an end by police at some point, with one I remember being ended before we had even arrived!!. The Kaya Tribe organised some parties on a farm near paisley, these were hardcore parties with pumping tunes and grizzly characters, but probably the best parties we went to. With DJ Hell being bundled into the back of a van and driven to one of these parties to DJ after playing at Sativa, it was an eye opener for him but he loved it. I remember I persuaded one of my friends to come to one of the farm parties, she wasn't really aware of what a free party was. Unfortunately she hated it and was stuck in paisley for 12 hours, that's the thing once u were there there was no going back
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All photos above from dunnichen 1993-1996
Always one sided reporting but it wasn't pretty