ANTON *

In 1994, the Tory party government, led by John Major, passed The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 against raves.

The section on "Power over raves" introduced a ban on gatherings of hundred or more people listening to music together at night. Also paragraph two stated that if a police officer suddenly thought that two people were preparing a rave, or that ten or more were waiting for a rave, he had the right to disperse them all.

Forbidden music was defined as "music, which includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats". Any tabooing provokes a reaction: Autechre immediately released the album AntiEP with the track Flutter without any regular beat at all.

The new law was commented as coming out of "pure moral panic". Moral panic is a social phenomenon consisting in a confrontation between bourgeois society and youth culture. The power of the first taboos the second, triggering a reaction which leads not to the disappearance of youth culture but to its growth and institutionalisation.