Ravers raving at an outdoor rave. Photograph: Apenas Imagens 2/Marília Almeida on Flickr
The uneasy peace between Old Rave and New Rave was shattered this week - not by Klaxons' tragic death at the hands of dreadlocked assassins shouting "Hardcore will never die!" but instead by the rather more unlikely interloper of the Local Government Association. Unpersuaded by claims that New Rave is just something the NME made up to sell magazines, they're warning local councils that illegal countryside parties will return in force this summer.
What's odd is how the LGA's claims are half well-informed and half nonsense. Not inaccurately, they've "identified Klaxons, New Young Pony Club, Shitdisco, Trash Fashion and Hot Chip as leading exponents of nu-rave, described by a council spokeswoman as 'punk meets disco'." But they also insist that young people will flee to the fields because their beloved New Rave is "not available at established clubs and festivals". Has nobody mentioned that Klaxons are actually at eight different UK festivals this summer? Or that if any east London club was to go a whole night without playing a Hot Chip remix, angry punters would probably burn the place down?
You might find New Rave at a semi-legal urban warehouse party - Shit Disco, for example, used to run nights in a Glasgow tenement - but never in the countryside. Think what all that mud would do to all those implausible fringes! Real raves tend to play fatally unfashionable music like psy-trance and drum'n'bass. The link is pure fiction. Is there really no one at the LGA with a teenage child who could have told them all this? Or did they already know, but decide to perk up their press release anyway?
Last summer we also read that raves were back in fashion, and indeed Norfolk police, for example, did detect 51 raves in 2006. But, inconveniently for the trend-spotters, that was only one more than in 2004. Rave can't come back because it never went away. The only thing that really upsets the Old Rave scene - apart, I expect, from journalists inventing phrases like "Old Rave" - is attention: so last year they were angry at the Guardian, when this article (so it was rumoured) provoked a nationwide crackdown, and this year they'll be angry at New Rave, for justifying this spurious little media coup by the LGA.
Duck and cover: this could be the start of the Rave Wars.
