When Spiral Tribe fled England in 1992, they left behind an indelible mark on rave history. The itinerant sound system collective are best known for their involvement with Castlemorton Common festival, an unlicensed free party drawing more than 30,000 people and lasting nearly a week. After a drawn-out and notoriously expensive trial for public order offences, Spiral Tribe were acquitted of all charges.
They decided to drive their repurposed military caravans out of the UK and never look back. Their documented history often stops there. But little known is the fact that they then kicked off “the biggest illegal underground movement that Europe had ever seen”, says Spiral Tribe associate Sebastian Vaughan, AKA electronic musician 69db.
Many Spiral members, including Vaughan, settled throughout France after a warm response to the Spiral sound – a 160bpm sped-up version of hip-house with delayed kick drums, known as hardtek or tribe – and to the collective’s punk-rave aesthetic. Over the last three decades, their underground Teknival parties in France grew from about 1,000 attendees in 1993 to tens of thousands in 1995 and up to 100,000 people by the early 2000s, far exceeding the turnout at Castlemorton. French ravers, Vaughan says, “completely understood what the concept was, and they weren’t just following it, they were creating it themselves”.
He attributes Spiral’s underground appeal to the country’s likeminded appetite for resistance. But equally, “the French have always been very authoritarian and very brutal in their response to free parties”, says Mark Harrison, another Spiral Tribe founding member. He says he has witnessed the French riot police, known as Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS), descend on dancefloors armed with stun grenades and rubber bullets in events from the mid-90s onwards.
In 2019, a police raid caused revellers at a Fête de la Musique concert in Nantes to fall into the Loire river, and 24-year-old Steve Maia Caniço was found drowned. Two years later, the CRS raided a Teknival rave in Rendon held in Caniço’s memory armed with tear gas and sting ball GM2L grenades. There were no attempts beforehand at dialogue or de-escalation.
The violence resulted in a 22-year-old partygoer losing his hand. Another woman had her cheek pierced and teeth broken by a grenade fragment. Amnesty International France reported on the unnecessary use of force at the Rendon event as a human rights violation.
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