BANG FACE: A RETROSPECTIVE Holidays are momentous occasions. Burly and barreling, pushing past to sit on the face of what little work ethic remains. Summer came early this April, and with it whisperings of the hottest on record. Water shortages and melting pavements, the youth in revolt. And so it was that with our good sense still absent, we set off on one final jaunt. To shake out the last tremors of hedonism at the Bang Face Weekender, a celebration of modern rave culture. We would be spending our weekend at the Pontin's holiday park, a pastel anachronism shat onto the battered Sussex downs. Our chalet was cast in solid formica. A switch on the wall selected between the shower and the cooker. In the main hall Dave Benson Phillips, revered host of Get Your Own Back, kicked off the weekend by covering two vested youths in gunge. Someone lay down by the entrance, screwfaced, and began pointing at the sky. Paramedics ambled over, the local police searching every car that passed through the gate. Being at Bang Face wasn't so different from being at Churchill. Brutalist concrete housing blocks, grassy courts, the beach, acid house. The middle youth in pursuit, imagining a summer in April. And the tunes! Scattershot beats and wet mash baselines, acid music sets the brain dancing and is most certainly the finest music to strobe along to. We would take a stroll to the pub to see the foremost DJs of the genre. Head off to the beach and watch seagulls multiply. We marvelled at the jollity of it all, the sheer goodwill of our neighbours. We met Chaz on our first night, baggy trousered and wearing a jumper sewn from a hippy's least favourite rug. Collecting bubbles full of deodorant from a bowl full of washing up liquid, he invited us back to his chalet after a few rounds of setting his hands on fire. A scrawny and shaven headed youth took a straw poll for tea. On the TV, people our age were being green-screened out of existence while the DJ played breakcore in 7/4. Someone sat on the sofa, marvelling at a synthesiser made from foam. Chaz gave us a quick run down of his formative years: smoking weed by the age of twelve, taking speed at sixteen, DMT a few years later. Floating between planes, he'd decided he wasn't going to be an addict, and we agreed. By this time a Frenchman had started throwing his glowsticks around, and so Chaz asked him to leave. If things ever got too much, Chaz soothed, he had a stash of Valium we could dip into. The next morning we set off to the beach, making our way down Sea Road past bungalows and scampi bars. Sand caked every surface, whipped around our feet towards the holiday park, some grim magnetic ziggurat risen out of the beach. Mr Whippy in hand we sat and marvelled at the sand and sunshine, while back in Cambridge the snooze button was no longer an option, regrets grumbled into the sink. We found a pub, and settled down for a pint next to the Ceephax Acid Crew himself. On our other flank was a woman in her thirties, who told us of her raving past. She'd been there at the Prodigy's rise to fame, floated through the second summer of love to settle in a bungalow in Sussex. Married, she found herself with children and a brother-in-law to share a drink with. The sun hung above tufted dunes. Our glasses long since drained we thanked Ceephax for his set the night before, marvelled at his jumper, and promptly dropped. Years later, we found ourselves on the beach again, sorting stones into a pile. Seagulls filled the air and land, swooping too low to bear. The camera was full of sand, and refused to take any more pictures. Back at the chalet something wonderful was coming out of the television. One pint of Guinness and a shower later, I left to watch Ceephax play at the on-site pub. He stood totemic and gurning, bathed in red light behind speaker stacks and knob forests while Metallica left me stuck to the floor. I lurched back to the chalet with every sense in orgasm, bursting in and promptly bursting back out for a cigarette. Chaz was there (in some sense or another) with bubble-making equipment at the ready. We attracted another cohort of Frenchmen, and a fellow who'd hung up a storey-high poster of his gormless friend's face. Dragging ourselves over to where the beats were being churned out we were decimated by a relentless Venetian Snares, then lay down to marvel at the ceiling for a while. Waking up to the vibrations of a nearby reggae soundsystem, the morning paper, bread and butter. Sunday is an absolute. Battered by the wind, we retreated until the sun had set, and witnessed a resplendent performance by the Orb. By Monday morning our neighbours' hooting lunacy had evaporated into flat-cola sobriety. Three trains later and lectures to learn through. We had returned to normalcy, though galvanised by the memory of mash-pits and inflatables. Certainly, a trip to Bang Face is one that stays with you.