This short film was commissioned by the Saatchi Gallery for their SWEET HARMONY RAVE | TODAY exhibition. I wanted to make explicit the links between the UK environmental protests of the 1990s and the explosion of activism Extinction Rebellion’s ascendency was again unleashing on British streets in 2018/19, and to show how dance music underpinned both movements. I’d partied at and chronicled so many of the key environmental protests led by Reclaim the Streets (RTS) in the 1990s, that when I joined the first Extinction Rebellion (XR) events, blocking five bridges in London in November 2018, it felt weirdly as if I was coming home. XR was something new, of course, more considered, and with greater mass appeal, but the movement’s roots, to me anyway, could be clearly traced back to those seminal 1990s protests.
Five months after they blocked the bridges and XR was back: shutting down the central junction of the world’s busiest shopping street, Oxford Circus, with a pink boat emblazoned with the iconic words, ‘Tell The Truth,’ unapologetically pumping out music. One tune, Zion Train’s ‘96 remix of Babylon is Burning, I hadn’t heard since those protests 22 years before. When the DJ played it, it stopped me in my tracks. The song is angry, but it’s also full of hope and hunger—for change, for the alternative. In that moment it felt to me as if a baton had been passed, that the huge creative energy that characterised RTS but which had seemingly dissipated all those years ago, was being powerfully invoked and reborn in this crucial movement for our incredibly precarious present day. I hope the film has all gravitas, irreverence and energy that are the hallmarks of both movements, whether past or present.
My thanks to Zion Train for kindly letting me use their music.