Scattered

On Saturday night Anders and I worked at a rave party called Scattered. This one was in the city, at the old Pitt Centre movie house in Pitt Street.
The night got off to a bad start when we saw the tiny cramped space we were gonna be working in. Also, my tooth had started pounding again from a beer I just had.
We got set up while a DJ started playing his records. The bass all of a sudden went right up and I felt the sound waves hit my stomach. Got a sense of nausea and turned to Anders with a horrified expression. He told me he got the same sick feeling in his stomach from those bass tones. It was uncomfortable but we couldn't just leave or move to another part of the room. That was our glowstick stall, all set up with tables and everything. We were stuck right there in front, getting BLASTED.
The night was really shaping up to be quite a miserable one for the professional glowstick salesmen.
Kids kept coming in and the place quickly filled up, the bodies in front of us absorbing most of the sound waves. The Nurofens I popped kicked in. The music the DJ was playing sounded not bad, pretty good, not bad.
It wasn't gonna be so horrible after all.
Everything was going smoothly and it was coming up to 1:00am when DJ Dean would start playing. He's a German DJ who plays what he calls *Tunnel Trance* - he was gonna play a three-hour set and I found myself looking forward to hearing his stuff.
Somebody came up and told me that a bunch of cops had arrived with a sniffer dog. Somebody else said there were 18 cops there, searching the kids for drugs.
DJ Dean came on and started playing his Tunnel Trance records. It sounded OK but nothing special, but that was only three tracks. Maybe he was only warming up.
The sound was cut halfway through the next track and the promoter jumped up next to DJ Dean and announced that the party was about to be shut down by the cops, but DJ Dean could play a couple more tracks. The music started up once more but was cut again after only a minute or two. A cop had reached over and ripped the needle off the record.
It was over.
There was DJ Dean and the promoter and two or three cops up on the stage. Some of the kids started yelling and abusing the cops. Bottles and glowsticks started flying towards the stage.
Most of the kids are mellow (*Candy Ravers*) but there are also the Hardcore brigade, *the Lads* who wear white baseball caps, those fiends who like Gabba, *Nosebleed* techno. Maybe they threw the bottles. I later heard that DJ Dean got hit in the head with a bottle. The kids were aiming at the cops of course.
I also heard that this was one of these Project Viking raids the cops do here every few months or whatever, where they move into a club or rave party in large numbers and shake down everybody for drugs.
Well, those cops were just doing their job I guess, but those duty-bound men and women of the NSW Police must live with the knowledge that on this night they deprived hundreds of bright-eyed raver kids of DJ Dean's Tunnel Trance.