COPS AND RAVERS: IT'S LIKE AN 80S REVIVAL

Something you might not have heard about for a while: a mass battle between police and ravers as the cops wade in to break up an illegal rave.

They do seem to have included some astonishingly stupid ravers amongst their numbers, as some of the crowd at Great Chesterford tried to cross the M11 on foot. Presumably saying "wow, it's like the lights are coming straight at you" as they did so.

The Essex rave was broken up by forces from Essex, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Hertfordshire - which seems like an awful lot of police to stop people from dancing.

Meanwhile, in Dudbridge, Gloucestershire, more police injuries (oddly, none of the reports mention if any of the ravers were injured) as a rave was disrupted on the Avocet Business Park; Farmers in Pembrokeshire have been put onto alert in case someone might attempt to play repetitive beats near their cowsheds and the citizens of Kent are being encouraged to report sightings on vans entering woods or people "moving sound systems about" - presumably to give us something to do on the bank holiday weekend when there's fewer benefit-claiming workers about to dob in.

Supt Joanna Young said: "It is very difficult for us to safely close a party involving hundreds of people in the pitch dark.

"To successfully deal with illegal raves we need to stop them becoming established using powers under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act."

She said people should look out for large numbers of cars and people on foot descending on a specific location.

People turning up in cars and on foot in the countryside? Just what is going on at those National Trust parklands, eh?

The interesting thing here, of course, is that as the likes of Ibizia and Creamfields start to turn more and more to rock, dance music is heading back underground.

music raves