What connects Adonis resident Grace Sands, the free party explosion of summer '91, Deleuzian dancefloor philosophy, and the annual Gloucestershire cheese-rolling competition?
It's this episode of No Tags, obviously, but the connecting tissue goes much deeper, we promise. The last third of the show contains our recent conversation with Grace Sands – house DJ, free party originator, icon of London's queer underground – live in Sheffield on 9th May. In a compact Q&A before a screening of Free Party: A Folk History hosted by No Tags and local heroes Gut Level, she set out some of the early ideals of a scene that changed the course of British dance music.
Leading up to the Q&A, we talk about our own reactions to the film, a superb documentary charting the UK’s free party movement in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, featuring members of soundsystems like Spiral Tribe, Bedlam and Grace's alma mater DiY.
Coincidentally, Free Party: A Folk History is finally getting its online premiere this Friday, 30th May. Sign up to watch it over the weekend and you'll be helping to license the film’s incredible music for a proper release. If you have even the slightest interest in dance music history, we implore you to watch it (and report back).
Before all that, for the first hour of the show we respond to some excellent listener feedback on recent pod topics, including who exactly goes to see Keinemusik and what makes the perfect night out. Inspired by one Taganista in particular, Chal expands her recent theory of rave with an important third axis from wiggy theorist Gilles Deleuze. Show us another podcast whose listeners write in about Plato and Love Island!
As ever, if you want to support what we’re doing on No Tags, please do drop us a like and follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Substack. You can also subscribe to our paid tier, which costs £5 per month. Planning, recording, editing and transcribing these regular podcasts is a pleasure but it’s also a lot of work, and your support truly does make a difference.
TL: In our last episode, we mulled over what makes a perfect night out – all the different factors that need to be in place, from the dynamic of the crowd to the warm-up DJ, the venue, the toilets, the drugs, whatever. Grace, as someone who’s been fighting in the rave wars for a long time now, what are the key factors for you in making a night out transcendent?
GS: Yeah, I’ve been partying for a long time. It’s a tricky one, isn’t it? We probably first all went to a house party. So what was good about the house party? The person you had a crush on, someone who nicked the drinks, the person you didn’t really like in the other corner. So it’s about the crowd that's there, isn’t it? The number one thing is the crowd that's there.
You’ve got to feel accepted. If you’re othered – like myself, I’m othered as trans. You may be a person of colour. So you might be othered, but you want to be accepted. You want it to be inclusive. It’s a little bit more formal now in London, they have welfare. It’s interesting: welfare is security who don’t tell you off, but they just do exactly the same thing. If you’re dribbling in a corner, they’re like ‘OK, you’re fine,’ rather than ‘do we need to call an ambulance?’ Welfare is the new way of dealing with that kind of thing. But it’s [about having] an inclusive crowd, and obviously the music as well.
TL: What makes a party free? We know why free parties are called free parties – they were literally free to attend. But at a club night like Adonis, there’s also an emphasis on freedom. As someone who’s been part of both, do you see shared characteristics between the two?
GS: The film you're going to see does a very good job of capturing the excitement [of the time]. It was a very naive time. Lots of young people are obsessed with the ‘90s, aren't they? Because it was a time – I think even Charli XCX said this – when you could go to free parties, it was pre-phones and all this, and you didn't know what was going on. Information was harder to find. So for the free parties themselves, what I always used to say was that you’ve just got to turn up with a good attitude. That’s all you need to bring. It was a free party, [but] you had to find someone to do it. Running it did cost money, but we had nightclubs and club nights running to pay for it.
What happened though, which I think you’re kind of hinting at, is that it drew lots of people together. The long-told story of football hooligans taking ecstasy and hugging each other. That’s a side story. But you did have football lads turning up. You had the travelling community – dreadlocks, you know, quite Victorian in the way they dressed at one point. You had us, the sort of city clubbers, but we were from an alternative background. We were into Nomeansno, Bad Brains, Butthole Surfers, all that music as well. So you had this uniting force because it was new and fresh. That’s one of the beautiful things, and you’ll see that in the film.
With Adonis, and what’s been happening in the queer club scene… well, Chapter 10 in London was the first one. It was actually a queer warehouse party. Then you’ve got Homobloc, which is slightly different, but if you go across to Manchester that’s a great night out, or day out. And Adonis is kind of the same. It was about 80% gay men at the start. Now it’s changed, it's about 65% gay men but then there’s trans, femme, non-binary, and obviously allies. And you’re quite welcome if you know how to carry yourself without gawping or being curious or just being a bit silly. So there is this gathering of the tribes. I think that’s the common factor.
CR: Thinking about the atmosphere that's created at a party like Adonis, I wanted to ask about how an atmosphere on the dance floor can be affected by what’s happening in the wider world. You played a week or two after the Supreme Court ruling about the supposed nature of biological sex. What happens to the dance floor in those moments? Do you notice feelings transmitted from the real world in that moment?
GS: The beautiful thing about Adonis is that [the ruling] doesn't matter because it’s all gender-neutral toilets. So you’re in a safe space. You don't have to worry. So for those of you who may not be aware – I’m sure you are, but [with] the Supreme Court, the ruling was that a trans woman is not a woman – she’s not even a trans woman, she's a man. Now, I do personally find that triggering. But we’re routinely listening to people on the radio saying, ‘This [man] was in the toilet with the women.’ And that’s my number one problem here. You could say, ‘The trans woman was in the toilet with me’ – but suddenly we’re all being reduced to our biological, natal – the good one now is natal man, natal woman. [The phrase] cis is a bit of a funny thing, I think. They say natal female. I’m a natal male. [I was a] boy when I was born, here I am. I’m good mates with my mum. Everything's fine.
What they’ve done is very reductive and it’s not progressive. I did want to talk about it. So it was [campaign group] For Women Scotland. What they actually had an issue with was trans women making up the female quota on boards of directors. That was where they started. I can kind of see their point in a way, but now it's all about the toilets. I'm going to say quickly two things. So one of the women from For Women Scotland, she accepted on [BBC radio show] Woman's Hour that there is a civic relationship. So if she sees me in the women's toilet, she knows what's going on. She's not going to cry about it. She herself said that.
[Former Labour MP] Rosie Duffield posts about trans men, because obviously what about trans men? No one ever talks about trans men. I think it’s a lot more likely if there's one trans man in the toilets with loads of blokes that something’s going to happen there. Rosie was called out. She said, ‘I didn’t really know about trans men.’ And now with all the sports stuff, it’s about litigation. So it’s very, very clumsy. We won’t mention who’s funded it because we won't give her the oxygen. [It’s… JK Rowling.]
CR: Tell me about the transference of emotion and whether the dance floor is a useful place or not to work through that feeling.
GS: With these spaces, it’s like we talked about before, the ingredients. You’ve got your pals there… you can share your stories. You have a good old dance. Here I am, I’ve got boobs, I’ve got a bum or whatever I’ve got. Who gives a fucking shit? I’m dancing to Grace Sands. So I think it’s a time of celebration and unity, isn’t it?
CR: Many familiar accounts of ‘90s rave tend to be framed around a sort of epiphany moment – it'll be, ‘I took a pill and my life changed. I used to be a football hooligan, now I go out every weekend.’ It’s often described as a sort of Big Bang moment, a very sudden shift. Did you have that epiphany? How did you get introduced to rave?
GS: The Haçienda was the first big club I went to. Me and my friends were already into music, mainly hip-hop at that time. The first club we went to was a hip-hop club, but back then house was new, and hip-hop and house, you went to both at the same time, really. So for me, discovering the Haçienda was like, ‘OK, this is a big, loud room full of people having fun, I like this.’
CR: And is that before acid house?
GS: That was ‘86, so that was like Chicago, Trax Records, labels like that. That was the new night, it was a stripped-down house night – Chicago house and a bit of New York stuff. Then I moved to Nottingham, and DiY [her sound system party] didn't happen straight away. It was a group of friends having a laugh. Ecstasy was actually quite expensive to start off with, it was £25 a pill. I guess that’s about £50 now, isn’t it? It’s quite a lot if you’re a young person, so we weren’t rushing out to buy it. We were taking trips, speed, all the rest of it. We had parties at homes in Nottingham and Mapperley, we’d rent places with big front rooms. Our community sort of developed through partying together.
Then we did a big party at the Marcus Garvey Centre. Funnily enough, LFO’s ‘LFO’ had come out that very week. We were called DiY because we were pissed off with the shit parties [that were happening] at the Marcus Garvey Centre. It was all these coaches from London that never actually came, and the parties were a bit rubbish, so we put our own one on. I guess our next epiphany was, ‘Oh, we put this party on and it was busy.' So then it was like ‘Oh, I’m part of this now.’ I was always a dancer. I still go out to enjoy myself.
With the free parties, [late DiY co-pilot] Pete Woosh always said, ‘We are changing people’s lives here.’ And we were, because people came and there was a whole inclusive beauty of it. You were included. We were creating this space. And people came. And there were loads of us to be friendly with everyone. We all want a community, don’t we?
CR: Did you have what you felt were a specific set of principles, an ethos guiding DiY?
GS: ‘Liberation through fun’ is Harry DiY’s [phrasing]. He's a great wordsmith. He’s still a wordsmith – you might have read his book, Dreaming in Yellow. But we were political. Me and Harry ran the student campaign for animal rights, and those organising skills were used to organise the parties. We were already supporting the miners, we’re left-wing people. We always were political, but we weren’t like the Socialist Workers' Party. If anyone is in it, it’s up to you, but when they would take over every demo, then they came to the Criminal Justice Bill meetings, it was just all about being a politician. We’re political with a small ‘p’, which is not really something I like, but we’re political people who aren’t trying to get up there by being political.
TL: Was DiY different to other free parties in that sense?
GS: All free parties are obviously breaking the law, so straight away that’s anti-establishment. But that’s just doing what everyone’s done for years. It’s nothing actually that new. People have gathered for centuries. Musically we were very different, that was the main thing. We were house, deep house, [there was a] US influence. Not techno, not banging. We were different in that sense. And at Castlemorton, we definitely were the only house sound system there.
TL: What was your specific role in terms of practically putting the parties together?
GS: There were about 30 of us doing it week in, week out. But sometimes we found that having many people in a meeting was quite complicated, so we chose to have four of us at the core, which wasn’t necessarily the most popular thing but it worked. For us it worked. Then, within all that, we had people who did the lights, people who did the sound. And I was in charge of the graphic design. So all the flyers, all the record sleeves I either did on my own or I worked with designers quite a lot.
TL: Where did that come from?
GS: I discovered QuarkXPress when I was about 18. And after that I thought, ‘I quite like this.’ So it just came from that. I had a visual eye, you know, I’m an art lover. I can’t draw, but I can design.
TL: So what became of DiY and the free party scene? I’m aware that DiY continue to run sporadic milestone events. But I'd love to hear in your words how that era ended?
GS: That is in the film so I won’t spoil it. But the film really is the golden years. It was a beautiful time where everyone’s lives were changed. We could do what we wanted. We were doing what we wanted. You could negotiate with the police. Again, the film will explain some of the reasons why that ended up not happening anymore. Then in some ways, [Sheffield free party crew] Smokescreen took the torch from us, then someone after took the torch from them. You know, you’re doing it week in, week out. It’s every Saturday. Putting on a free party, going to a cold field and putting it all up and down again, you can’t do that forever. So everyone has their eras.
But to bring it up to date, gradually some people moved away. Some people had kids. But we still do an annual [event], we call it the Weekend of the Dead, which is celebrating our lost crew, Pete and Simon particularly. So we’re doing that there, and we go to Ibiza. We’re kind of doing two things a year. There’s three dads and me, and I’m busy so we have Zoom calls, so you can piss yourself at that, yeah? We have Zoom calls just like everybody else. Sometimes they’re fraught, but most of the time it’s fine. So we’re still there. The friendships are never going to go. We might fall out over this or that, but ultimately you can’t say fuck off to people you’ve been friends with for that long. We all argue from time to time. But we’re still doing stuff.
CR: You mentioned a few things that had come up in your youth, like hip-hop and punk and animal rights. I always quite enjoy asking people: what were you like as a teenager?
GS: I was quite chilled as a teen. I’m a bit less chilled now. Well, it’s harder work being me than it used to be back then, so there you go. But I discovered going out, like the house party route, when I was 16, 17. I was into the great outdoors before that, so this love of the outdoors started young and then I discovered music. Mid-to-late teens I really started discovering myself, and then house parties, nightclubs, and having fun.
TL: How did you start DJing?
GS: Funnily enough, I moved to Nottingham to study there and I did audition for the [university] radio station but I was rejected. And then, hilariously, the guy that rejected me saw me DJing at a house party a couple of years later, and he came and said, ‘Hey, that was really good.’ I was like, ‘Yeah bitch, I’m the one you turned down.’ So that was quite funny. It was mainly hip-hop records I was playing then. My first ever gig was [supporting] MDC, who are an American thrash band, and I played my hip-hop records. But I didn’t realise you had to take your own headphones until I got there, so it was good that I knew my records. So that was the naivety again. And then Simon DK had decks, so I learned to mix on his decks in the summer of ‘89.
CR: Could you tell us a bit about the period in between the DiY moment and you as an Adonis resident? What were you up to in the years between? Did you ever stop DJing?
GS: Well, I never stopped. I mean, it wasn’t paying the bills for quite a long time. I left Nottingham kind of under a cloud. Nottingham was not ready for me to come out [as trans] at the age I did, 33. Now Nottingham understands, because here I am. But back then they’d go, ‘Well, this is a bit strange, because you’re 33 and we've seen you like this, and now you’ve changed to that.’ So unfortunately it was quite a negative experience. It was a bit rubbish. I was very isolated, and I left Nottingham because of that. I’m not blaming Nottingham, we’re still friends.
It was a funny time. The golden years had finished, and then some other things were happening. We lost the studio. Some of my friends were sitting at home staring at the wall – I won’t say anything more than that. There was a bit of a breakdown in my social network, so I left under a cloud and I went to London. London compared to Sheffield or Nottingham… you just double everything. You double all your expenses straight away, double rent, all this. But I like it down there, it’s great. I’ve been there 21 years. Whether I’ll be there forever, I don’t know.
I was doing every kind of job. I was always DJing still, I never stopped DJing. So Adonis came to me because I never stopped. Even though I was working in call centres and this and that, and I was a teacher for some time. Me and my friend used to laugh, we’d leave an Adonis after party at 11pm and be at school at 7:40am. You can do it, but you can’t do it forever.
I was putting on nights in London with friends and there was still some DiY stuff back in Nottingham. But you could say there were some wilderness years regarding being a professional DJ. I once did a party with a friend, I think 22 people came, and I ripped the arm off my Technics. And you say, ‘What the fuck am I doing this for?’. But at the end of the day, without sounding like Mary Magdalene or Joan of Arc, you’re doing it to bring you and your friends together. That’s why we were doing it. We didn’t make any money. We had a laugh. And funnily enough, the other week the same thing happened. I went to DJ for someone. Nobody went. But they’ve actually got the venue for free. We’re all thinking, ‘Oh, actually this is brilliant.’ You know what I mean? No one’s losing here. All the deep house queens were out. We just had a brilliant night, and it didn’t cost anything.
TL: You come from a sound system called DiY. Is the concept of DIY still a guiding principle in what you do?
GS: Good question. I mean, DIY is a punk thing, isn’t it? Anyone can do it. Three chords, you’re in a band. Sex Pistols, Joy Division, Buzzcocks. So OK, yes, because I run my own record label, I run my own party, Sands of Time. I run a CIC [Community Interest Company], a not-for-profit for young people. It’s queer-run, but inclusive. But I’ve always been like that.
There’s nothing to stop me doing anything really, which I know seems a bit glib and a bit fantastical. But I do a lot on my own. I know I have to work with people because I’m quite busy. But I think it’s very simple. If you want to do something, get on with it and do it. If you feel like doing something, that’s the driving force. I’m going to do it myself, or ourselves. So yeah, that’s part of how I live my life I think.
CR: And if you’ve got all that experience of making something from nothing – getting in a field, creating something, packing it away again – I guess you’ve got this sense that you can just make things happen.
GS: Well, exactly. When it boils down to it, it’s not that complicated, but it takes a lot of effort and organising and you have to have infrastructure and other people.
CR: We always end our podcast with the same question, and conveniently we’re at the cinema. What film would you recommend us?
GS: It's called Breaking Away. It’s a 1979 coming-of-age film. It’s not a queer film, but it’s about a young man who is different to his friends. It’s a cycling film, it’s about a kid who cycles. He’s obsessed with cycling and he wants to be a racing cyclist, but he’s tiny. And it’s also about kids – kids of that age, when you’re 17, 18. So some slightly cheesy tropes, but not a cheesy film at all.
CR: Interesting. That's not the kind of film I would expect you to choose.
GS: But you’ll see, it’s a film that makes you happy. We all like a feel-good film, right? I could’ve said Wim Wenders, Stranger Than Paradise, or Ex Machina, that’s a fucking brilliant film. However, you didn’t give me long enough to choose, so I’m going for a good feeling film. Not bitching, sorry!
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