at all night raves all over the country, like those speeded-up films of sprouting seeds, they danced themselves out of their heads and back into their bodies and hearts till it felt like nothing at all could stop them growing to full bloom, and the whole world with them. a few, it's true, muttered that the scene was selling itself out, was becoming "strictly for the masses", and went back to dressing like successful soccer hooligans, but it was already obvious to anyone with an open heart that the Second Summer of Love was going to be ... loving! again! one spiral up! if the authorities could have nipped the whole thing in the bud during the First Summer (but they didn't know it was happening!), they could still maybe have clubbed it to death in the Second. but, for that, they'd have needed more than a few complaints about noise and rural traffic jams, and nobody could come up with anything. and, besides, even if they had, the plain fact was that the recent collapse of totalitarian governments in the east had put all governments on thier best behaviour. you couldn't repress people without very good reasons these days - and even then not for long. every day more people sensed the dawning in the Universal Mind of an inkling of the mess the authorites had been making of everybody's planet. "WE NEED THE PRESENT SYSTEM LIKE WE NEED A HOLE IN THE OZONE BELT" wasn't the hit t-shirt that summer for nothing. in late june EARTHUP! drew 15,000 people for all night and half the next day - and were rumoured to have grossed a cool quarter million. which, naturally enough, started to attract the media. now, what with all the post Cold War uncertainties, the nonstop horrific ecological news and the same boring old recession/inflation stories rearing their ugly heads once more, they were on desperate lookout for happy human stories to cheer people up and sell more newspapers. what better than LOCAL HERO MAKES GOOD, MAKES THOUSANDS HAPPY, MAKES MILLIONS? by mid july the "dance party king", as EARTHUP!s prime mover had become known, was hosting his own Breakfast Rave chat show, and it seemed like every teenybopper was rubbing her nascent boobs across the back of his t-shirt face. "Just back from an all-night rave, darlings, yo!" one tabloid tried for a while to stir up some "drug horror" scaremongering but demoted the campaign to page 4 when their new Bingo Thingo successfully addicted millions. anyway, as the Archbishop of Canterbury put it: you could close the BBC, the Foreign Office and every local government if finding some young people messing about with drugs was your yardstick. the police, anyway, had more than enough on their hands with the IRA, embittered poll tax rioters, foreign terrorists, demented animal liberationists and ZZZAP (Smashed Soccer Supporters Against Psychedelics) to bother. while not claiming that nobody had any misgivings about it, a whole new culture was clearly a'borning, and Britain had been steeped in individual enterprise philosophy long enough to appreciate a sound new business idea when it appeared. by mid july, when evolution^ broke the 30,000 for two days and nights barrier, the banks were throwing investment capital at anyone with a new idea for a rave - or even an old one. "Selling people what they really want at a profit the market will pay - anything wrong with that" as the prime minister herself memorably responded when her laissez fairte attiude was challenged in a tv interview. the first hippy-rave crossover brought the nearest the whole thing ever came to disaster. 16,000, a modest congregation by this time, showed up for a free "happening rave" within view of the royal palace in windsor park. and, more importantly, within hearing. (the queen had been invited, of course.) luckily, however, though this "free" development had been unanticipated, before civil war could break out a wise home secretary, recently humbled by hotly denied revelations of an extra marital affair with his public relations adviser, came up with a neat solution. a tract of "common land", originally granted by previous monarchs to the people in perpetuity, was re-scheduled for raving by simply applying the full rigours of the law to all the recent encroachments. the ravers happily moved. thus, "Green Rave" areas of forest, hill, valley and plain within a 50 mile radius of each urban centre (for the whole contry was now well into the activity) were made available, and few raves subsequently took place on private property. in the same bill the home secretary secured the unanimous respect of all by hugely increased the penalties for noise pollution. on the weekend of august 12th, no less than 7 raves of over 30,000 people occurred. nor was it any longer just young people; folks of all kind, who had long lost contact with nature, were beginning to check things out in increasing numbers. the most significant event that month, however, though not many realised it at the time, was when the Ecology Rave (billed as "The Rave To The Grave") continued beyond the weekend. though that small elite-feeling group of first Summer of Lovers who were still holding small parties on private land, attended by the cream of Britain's young aristocracy, were later to argue that these had been "hippies" and not "real ravers", the distinction was becoming daily more academic. the crucial sociological fact remained that some serious dwellings of the "bender" variety actually survived till the following weekend when two thousand ravers showed up, another free rave ensued with Ecology sending out their sound system again, and the first PPR (Permanent Peoples Rave) was declared. the Zippy leader is generally accepted as kicking off Phase Two when he swapped his rather large and not very efficient bender (above a waterfall a hundred yards from the 200K Ecology rig) with a Manchester rave magazine editor's appartment for the weekend. soon all freelancers, self employed and unemployed had semi-permanent homes at some PPR, and often two, and shops were starting to appear where a lady could buy a tampax. not about to miss such an opportunity, the newly privatised utility companies moved in sharpish. then richer folks, who had had toilets and saunas installed, found there was no way to lock or protect them, and ended up donating them to the community. soon every major "rave" (which now meant something like "new town" as in "the Sincerity Rave on Salisbury Plain") boasted tv rooms, hardware stores, laundromats and on-site medical facilities. to say nothing about Crystal Healing Spaces, and the like. half a million attended the revived Elephant Fayre that September, which lasted 5 weeks until the rain set in. things came to a sudden halt with the advent of winter. only the more hardened hippy types kept some kind of fireside ethnic rock music scene going. back in the cities millions of younger people watched youth tv stuff of Lady Diana raving, and listened to youth figures endlessly discussing whether raving should be freeform or have proper steps, how it was the very shamanic dancing that our "head-ruled" civilisation required, how it was the opening of "group mind" that psychologists had been calling for, and ideas and new behaviour patterns incubated for the following summer. nobody thought it was over, but many found little interest in the club scene, though it flourished in every hall and cranny of every city. the goverment, meanwhile, heavily committed as it was to teasing forth this very spirit of enterprise from the citizenry, were not about to let a little weather spoil what all its bright young business advisers was advising them was potentially britain's biggest export since the '60s. the Ministry of Health and Social Security announced that, during the Third Summer of Love, everyone willing to commit themselves to moving to the country for the summer would be paid a "social bonus" to free-up his house for the homeless. paid work might also be made available at some of the bigger PPRs. another direct result came in the Queens Xmas Honours. the five leading rave organisers, already teenage millionaires, were awarded MBEs, and her majesty spoke glowingly of "a flowering of the country's finest gift to the rest of the world - culture, in our music, in our fashion, in our rich blend of races and classes" while the Prince's Trust announced that scholarships in country lore and ecology training would be made available at selected wilderness raves the following summer. it is fascinating and worthy of a whole other article that even such hardy raves as those on the scottish islands were invariably accompanied by at least a 50K rig. nobody was to challenge that ritual for a very long time; indeed, when they did, it was to produce the first schism in the new religion, and gave birth to the Ambient House of Goddess. Wembley was covered in and weekend camping raves became a regular feature. and in football grounds all over the land, soccer became once again a game people played together in the afternnon before the music and dancing kicked off. but a government whose aim was to encourage and then facilitate the enterprise of its citizenry couldn't and didn't stop there. though EEC restrictions on funding national export companies were a problem, no thatcherite government was going to allow the very buccaneering creativity its ten year policy had now produced to be licensed out of existence by a ragbag of "socialist" enemy states. no way! with the covert help of our embassies abroad, British rave parties miraculously kicked off around the mediterranean, opened in most cases by our ambassador in full ceremonial rave gear designed specially by Crash of Oxford Street, with that superior hip blend of publicity only the British Foreign Service, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Rhythm Queen can deliver. going into the '90s, the prime minister headed a UK rave trade delegation to the US. drawing heavily on the "special relationship" and the Americans' instinctive deference to British "culture", she managed not only to charm a congressional committee into granting $30 million worth of "cultural development funding" to a consortium of British dance organisations, but also secured the president's enthusiastic agreement to a Best Of British Rave Symposium in the Grand Canyon. there, in ten thousand specially prepared tecno-tipis, fifty thousand geodesic domes and half a million free tents, 10 million Americans were introduced to British Green Raving (Get Out - in the open air. And Get Down - to earth!) the major tv networks carried the evening raves live, while commentators compared it to Woodstock, contrasting these "conscious Beatles of the '90s", and spoke of a return to the frontier community spirit of America's pioneer days which the planet so badly needed. the following summer every city in the western democracies was half emptied (and much more civilised because of it) and people were living simply in nature, connected by computer and fast travel links. the human race had regained its balance. a new age had dawned. the rest is Housetory. then i woke up - in jail.