Liberators - Free Party Crew

London’s best-known squat party crew the Liberators are hosting a 20 year birthday party in Brixton next weekend featuring only Chris, Aaron and Julian Liberator DJing all night.

The two room event (taking place at Jamm from 22.00 Saturday September 10) will feature all three Stay Up Forever stalwarts spinning new techno interspersed with acid techno classics and promises to provide a vibe that’s ‘still tuned in and dedicated to the pulse of the dispossessed’.

The trio first met on London’s squat scene of the early 90s putting on their first event at Julian’s semi-derelict squat in Stoke Newington on 14th and 15th September 1991. Attracting over 800 revellers, the party’s success encouraged them to do more and in 1992, they were one of the sound systems who made Castlemorton into one of the most infamous (and best) outdoor raves of the 90s.

Staying in London despite a ferocious police crackdown that forced fellow crews such as Spiral Tribe and Bedlam to flee the UK, they went on to loosely team up with the likes of D.A.V.E. The Drummer Dave D.D.R. Lawrie Immersion and Guy Geezer, going on to help create London’s infamously wild acid techno squat party scene.

Every weekend for most of the ensuing two decades, one or two or three of them would DJ at the numerous unlicensed parties taking place at abandoned office blocks and warehouses in London’s poorest areas, some of which attracted over 10,000 revellers via phone lines announcing their location at 1 or 2am on Saturday nights.

Despite the massive scale of the underground party scene, mainstream media attention remained minimal, a point Chris Liberator later admitted feeling ambiguous about in an interview with Skrufff in 2005.

“The 60s counter-culture still gets talked about as a revolutionary force, it did change people but they’re not saying that about what happened in the 90s, even now,” he noted, “History is already whitewashing over the rave scene, the drugs and the rest of it, and it’s being presented back as something else.”

“I think it was a revolutionary force when it started,” Chris continued.

“History is always written in retrospect and I think it’s been cruel on the acid house scene in general, already. There have been some good biographies written about it, yes, but I think the cultural phenomenon and its impact on society has been far greater than has been realised.

Its history has already been brushed over, such as the fact that all these massive illegal parties have happened, and still go on now, for example. There’s an underbelly of London that never gets written about,”

Liberator 20 Years: 3 DJs, 2 rooms, 1 night: Saturday 10th September 2011 @ Jamm, 261 Brixton rd, London.