David Clarke remembers walking through the doors of the Afterdark club in Morley, West Yorkshire, for the first time in 1988. “It stank,” he laughs. “It smelled like a pet shop. But it was a different world … Wow! You walked in and there were lasers bouncing all over, people with white gloves and whistles, people coming up to you with eyeballs in the back of their head. It was scary the first time. The music gave me a headache, until I got into it, but then bang! Awesome.”
This was the beginnings of rave culture in England, and it changed everything for Clarke, then 15, growing up in the mining village of Grimethorpe. Once a thriving community, it was crumbling in the wake of the miners’ strike, leaving teenagers like Clarke raging with pent-up frustration. “It was just a release,” he says of that night. “You’re not in the village no more, that dingy little place. You could let yourselves go.”
The arrival of the rave scene to West Yorkshire is the subject of Wasteland, a dance-theatre show by David’s younger brother, the choreographer Gary Clarke. Clarke junior has form when it comes to documenting local history: his award-winning piece Coal covered the realities of life for the pitmen of Grimethorpe. When Coal went on tour, the post-show discussions would regularly turn into raucous debates on the politics of the 1984-5 strike and the fate of the mining industry. One night a hand in the audience went up, and it was David’s. “What about us, Gary?” he asked. “What happened to the next generation?” And Gary immediately saw there was room for a sequel.
“When you look at what happened to the next generation in post-industrial Britain, the next big movement was rave culture,” Gary says, when we meet in the cafe at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, less than 10 miles from Grimethorpe but a world away.
If you’ve seen Jeremy Deller’s documentary Everybody in the Place, the connection between the social and political climate of the mid-80s and the rise of illegal ravers dancing in a field won’t be an alien idea. In Wasteland, Gary follows how that played out for one village at the centre of industrial decline. He describes how the miners’ strike broke spirits as well as faith in authority, and the decline and eventual closure of the pit, in 1993, left the village gutted, literally and metaphorically.
“It imploded,” says Gary. “There were four schools in the village and they all got burned to the ground, and we did it, the people of Grimethorpe. Drug use, violence, domestic violence, crime. People felt abandoned, emasculated, worthless.” There were no jobs, no prospects. “There was nowt,” says David. “No hope. I’m glad he called it Wasteland because that’s what it was like.”
“Our generation had to find a way of coping,” says Gary. The alternative to fighting or arson was getting your frustrations and anger out on the dancefloor. “It felt like there was an urgency and a need when the raves first started,” he says. Unlike clubbing now, “you weren’t just buying an experience, you were creating it.”
Finding out about them was all word of mouth, getting in a car and following someone else. “This lad bought an old transit van for 80 quid, no seats in or nowt, and had about 25 of us in the back,” says David. They’d go to Afterdark, to the Donny [Doncaster] Warehouse, and Hacienda – but not the Manchester Hacienda that everyone knows. “This Hacienda was in a field in Howden [in east Yorkshire],” says David. “I don’t think they had permission, they just put decks and speakers into a farmer’s field in the middle of nowhere. That was one of the best things I’ve ever been to.”
“It put a smile on our faces when we had nothing to smile about,” says David, who is currently unemployed and is an amateur boxer. “For those two days you’d be proper enjoying it, but you knew you’d still have to come back to this shithole. That’s why we went for days. Donny finished at 6am, Hacienda opened at 6, we just bounced from one to another.”
“If mam had found out we were doing all this she’d have killed me,” David adds. What did she think you were doing? “Fishing. Two days fishing.” And she wasn’t suspicious when they came back with no catch? “I just told her I was rubbish at fishing.”
To people such as David, the raves offered an escape that felt like salvation. “If it hadn’t been for that, there’d have been a lot of lads topping themselves,” David says. “But a lot did,” Gary interjects. “Grimethorpe cemetery is full of teenagers.” Raves led them to drugs, heroin took hold, addiction and suicide became rife. Also breaking up the party was the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 and heavy-handed police crackdowns, in which Gary sees parallels with the miners’ strikes a decade earlier.
All these themes go into Wasteland, which features archive footage of miners on their last shift, as well as films of the early raves that were discovered in someone’s garage. Some have called Gary’s work a dance documentary. “It’s explicitly political,” he says. “It’s not abstract, I don’t over-conceptualise it. I don’t want my audience to scratch their heads.”
When it came to making the rave part of the show, Gary watched endless videos of early raves on YouTube, much harder and darker in tone than the shiny commercial clubbing of the late 90s. “We looked at this idea of urgency and aggression, the dancers being like birds of prey in cages, trying to push their wings out.” Whereas illegal raves might have had 5,000 people in a field, Gary was working with only five dancers, so he had to find a way to give that feeling of “masses of bodies in a small space, the kaleidoscopic-ness. You don’t know whose limbs are whose”.
The dancers copied individual steps from the videos, which Gary then reorchestrated into something that appears spontaneous but is painstakingly put together. Thus the original material is authentic, just like the text in the show, all of which comes from interviews carried out by Gary. “The music, spoken word, movement, everything comes from a real source, it’s facts rather than fiction,” says Gary.
While making the show, Gary took his dancers to visit Grimethorpe. “They were shocked at how desolate it was,” he says. “It’s like a ghost village, there’s very little prospect there.” Nevertheless, after living in London, Gary has moved back home. “The people are just great, and the level of community is really strong.”
Rave didn’t solve Grimethorpe’s problems, but it did change Gary’s life. “Without that rave culture, I wouldn’t be sat here, the choreographer I am,” he says. It was through “thrashing around” to his brother’s tapes as a kid that Gary found the way he loved to express himself. “Then someone caught me dancing and said, ‘Oh my god, I think you’re a dancer’, and it grew from that. I was nurtured by these brilliant teachers. Otherwise I really believe I would’ve ended up going down the path some of my friends went down, burning cars, taking drugs and being destructive,” he says. “Dance did save me.”
• The Wasteland tour starts on 25 September at Northern Stage, Newcastle.
