Free Party: A Folk History

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Welcome to a party so wild that the British state had to rewrite the law to ban it, and that the electronic sound waves of the raging Free Party movement of the 1990s still resonate today.

It’s a long way from illegal British warehouse raves to hippies singing around the campfire, but in a field outside Glastonbury, England, the two subcultures collided one fateful day at the end of Margaret Thatcher’s grey decade. The two groups threw the acoustic guitar on the bonfire and agreed to believe in anarchy, dance and freedom. And so begins the story of the disruptive Free Party movement that took over British underground culture in the early 1990s with home-built speaker systems and rickety DJ booths. There were no fences around the festival grounds, everyone was welcome, everything was free and the music never stopped. The Free Party movement was the first to believe in the party as a sweaty social utopia and for the same reason ended up in the British Parliament, which passed an infamous law banning ‘repetitive beats’, thus ending a wild and unruly chapter in the history of electronic music. A chapter that is now finally being told by those who lived it.

Free Party: A Folk History is major new, independently made, feature documentary following the birth of the free party movement in the late 80s and early 90s and the impact it's had on our present times. The film follows the inception of the movement, a meeting between ravers and the new age travellers during Thatcher's last days in power, and the explosive years that followed, leading up the infamous Castlemorton free festival in 1992 - the largest ever illegal rave, which provoked the drastic change of the laws of trespass with the notorious introduction of the Criminal Justice Act in 1994.

Aaron Trinder says “This film is a unique look at a much underrepresented moment in cultural history, the last great unifying youth movement, before digital cameras and the internet, which really challenged the authorities, connected environmental awareness with music and questioned laws on land rights and trespass. Thematically its incredibly prescient to today, with new laws on trespass being proposed, illegal parties taking place post pandemic and 30 years since Castlemorton itself. I’ve got incredible access to unseen archive and grass-roots stories very seldom heard from the people who lived it”.