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.