As the booming sub-bass of LFO rattled around an old Sony warehouse on the outskirts of Leeds in July 1990, the reverberating sound was enough to mute the buzz of police helicopters circling above. However, when their lights began to pierce through the glass windows, the 800-plus ravers at Love Decade knew something wasn’t right. “There was a dark, intense atmosphere,” recalls Jane Winterbottom. “I felt trapped, claustrophobic, and a wave of nausea came over me. I wanted to escape but I couldn’t. All the doors were shut and we were locked in.”
As word had spread that the building was surrounded by police, a young DJ who was on the decks at the time, Rob Tissera, decided to take action. “I got on the microphone, and very stupidly and regrettably, said: ‘If you want to keep the party going, we’re gonna have to fight the bastards.’” People did just that. “Everybody turned into bloody hooligans,” he says. “It ended in a three-hour siege and got pretty nasty.” A van was moved against the shutters to block police from coming in, and objects were thrown at them out of the windows, as the authorities even tried using a forklift truck to pry open the steel shutters. “It was a full-on riot,” says Winterbottom. Eventually the police got in and grabbed every single person, all 836 of them, resulting in one of the biggest mass arrests in UK history.
That day, 35 years ago, was a pivotal moment in UK dance music, and one that had perhaps been brewing for some time. This was the era after 1988’s “second summer of love”: house and techno were powering a grassroots rave scene that was outraging the tabloids and facing a crackdown from police.
Winterbottom had been part of a crew in Blackburn throwing illegal warehouse parties but, she says, “We couldn’t get one going there any more, the police were too heavy.” So they found a spot in Gildersome on an industrial estate. Tissera had been DJing a wedding earlier that evening in Manchester, where the father of the groom had given him a stern telling off for playing too much rave, and then he headed over. “There were hundreds of cars going from the north-west to Leeds, so I followed the convoy,” he recalls. Things had become so clandestine by this point that sound systems had to be built on-site to avoid detection, and decks were brought in covertly in ski holdalls.
Things began normally enough but soon there was a feeling something was off. It’s estimated there were about 2-3,000 ravers outside trying to get in but they had been stopped by a police operation involving roadblocks, dogs, searchlights and helicopters. Around 5am, after the hours-long standoff, police got in. “The crowd were running around the warehouse in sheer terror,” says Winterbottom, who also says she witnessed her female friend knocked unconscious by a police truncheon (West Yorkshire police did not offer comment for this piece). “The whole thing was so scary. It was such a violent confrontation. You couldn’t escape.”
The police pulled people outside in groups of about 20, put them into vans and sent them off to various stations to book them. Most were later sent home and back to their normal lives with just a caution, but not Tissera. “They did a dawn raid on my house and scooped me up,” he says. “They took me to Halifax police station and said, ‘We’ve got a video nasty that we want to play you.’” It turns out there was video footage that had captured his incendiary words to the crowd. “When I saw what it was: hands up, guilty as charged, there was no way around it.”
He thought he was going to get off. “My barrister said I was going to get a fine and a suspended sentence,” he says. “I was due to go to Corfu to DJ the following day. When the judge made me stand up for my punishment it was completely unexpected and it changed the course of my life. The verdict made my eyeballs shake. I almost fell over.” Tissera was sentenced to three months in prison for inciting a riot and the dishonest abstraction of electricity.
A new law had very recently been put into place by the MP Graham Bright. The Entertainment (Increased Penalties) Act of 1990 meant that organisers of unlicensed events could now be jailed for up to six months or fined heavily. With Bright himself present in court, Tissera feels he was made an example of. “And so it was off to Armley jail [now HMP Leeds],” he says. “It was proper Victorian: two bunk beds and a bucket. It was quite unpleasant – I saw people getting slashed in there.” Thankfully, an experienced and avuncular cellmate looked after him and he came out unscathed. If anything, it did his reputation the world of good and the DJ bookings came flying in. “It definitely helped,” he says. “It became a bit of a folklore thing that you were the guy who went to jail for acid house. It gave me credibility. However, I should never have said something so stupid.”
It was a line-in-the-sand moment for many when it came to illegal warehouse parties. “It was a sure sign that this was the end,” says Winterbottom. “You couldn’t get anything off the ground. Even a little party in the woods for 50 people would get busted.” Many people left that world altogether: some went legit as dance music moved into a new era of commercialism, while others joined forces with the traveller community and moved the free party scene outdoors. “That was the turning point,” says Tissera, who has become a career DJ. “That incident really shaped what came next.”
However, despite the fear, chaos and violence of that day, it has done nothing to taint the memories of that era and those wild, uninhabited raves when they were in full swing. “It was such an experience to live through all of it,” says Winterbottom, who is writing a book about Blackburn raves. “The parties were amazing, [they outweighed] the violence we suffered. I could never regret a moment of it.”