PERHAPS the most striking thing about the explosion of ‘fake news’ in recent months – or rather, the cementing of that phrase in the English lexicon – is that very little about it feels especially new. The weaponising of both the phrase and the tactic has never been done out in the open like this, by the leader of the free world – that’s fair comment. Yet both baldly lying for propaganda purposes, denouncing rivals for supposedly doing the same and employing the media and the available technology of the age for your skulduggery – this dates back centuries, if not millennia.
If, though, I wished to suggest that a culture of fake news was infecting civilian conduct in 2017, trickling down from the highest echelons like so much Russian hotel piss, there are examples I could call on. Mundane and barely consequential examples, compared to the grotesque and perpetual abuse of America’s highest office, but that sort of thing is this column’s natural habitat.
In recent months I’ve become increasingly fascinated by events which are advertised, usually on social media, promising glorious hedonistic fun but in curiously undetailed terms. ‘Abandoned Warehouse Rave’ is a popular one: from city to city it goes, always trailed with the same photo of an empty, graffiti-strewn shed and often promising musical styles unlikely to actually feature at the same party (deep tech and psytrance, according to one apparently in “a remote Swansea location” in October). Illegal rave nostalgia does good business these days, not least among people who weren’t born in its heyday, so it’s unsurprising that it’d pique people’s interest.
The one small fly in the ointment is that all the advertised events are completely nonexistent: the company behind it advertise dozens of identical parties across the UK, generally getting thousands of people to click their interest (max respect to Huddersfield, which at the time of writing has precisely five people planning to attend its fake rave) and then turn the event page into something else, having harvested your personal info. So call in your children and tell them there’ll be no Abandoned Warehouse Rave this year.
Nor will there be a Project X House Party, a Huge Student Water Fight, a Prosecco & Percussion Festival (what even links those two things?), a Wine & Cheese Festival (featuring “our finest wines and our smelliest cheeses,” according to some abject copywriter with a preteen’s concept of gastronomy) or a Cardiff Cocktails Festival, to name some that I’ve found on my listings-compiling travels. Remember those Slip’N’Slide things from two years ago, where a huge waterslide was going to be constructed for the people of every last British town? Never got to go on it, did you? Yeah, that.
History, though, is not always the sober recital of the facts we might want it to be. Whether through power, privilege, Chinese whispers or universal false memory syndrome, much of our understandings of events is subject to distortions and fakery. In decades to come, your advancing age and the fumes in your brain will make this part of your life a fuzzy half-recollection. Did you ever actually go to that rave in the abandoned warehouse, or was that something else? No, you must have done – thousands of people were up for a party! Yes… what a night it was. This generation’s Woodstock, in the way that Pizzagate is this generation’s moon landing.
You can pretend you saw A PAGE OF PUNK (Castle Emporium, Cardiff, Wed 9 Aug), DEATH ANGEL and WARBRINGER (Hobos. Bridgend, Thurs 10), TV CRIME, ARTEFACT and HODAD (Cardiff Bus Transport Club, Fri 11), LATCHSTRING (Cathays Community Centre, Sat 12), LUMINOUS BODIES, WYLLT and BLACK SHAPE (The Moon, Sat 19), CJ RAMONE (Clwb Ifor Bach, Mon 28) and TRICOT (same venue, next day) as well.
words NOEL GARDNER