In 1994, the government introduced a bill to tackle what it perceived as the menace of rave music. Against a backdrop of widespread protest, The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was eventually passed into law – Part 5 of which concerns ‘collective trespass and nuisance’ where it characterises rave music as: “…sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” The Act empowers authorities to stop a rave in the open air with a hundred or more people attending, or where two or more people are making preparations for a rave. In other words, police now had the power to shut down anything from the size of Castle Morton to this poor guy’s bbq.
