The queue snaked round the block hidden by travellers vans. It was fifty pence on the door, up stairs so narrow you had to pass sideways. At the top, a bar fashioned out of a plank of wood across a doorway, behind us coats were thrown onto a mattress on the floor. We sold cheese and gave away booze to get around the licensing laws. The mushroom tea was free, ladled into plastic cups from a vast, hot vat; harvested ourselves from the fields we hadn’t bothered to pick out the grass and mud, England floated and sank amongst psychedelia. Nobody cared. Each room of that two-hundred-year-old factory was painted into its own party; a brick dungeon of techno, a psychedelic of trance, and deep in the belly through a maze of corridors a womb dressed in red velvet, where live cello made grown men weep. The building sweated and shook, through boarded up doors steam escaped into the night. I remember thinking if fire ignites or a stair collapses none of us are getting out but nothing bad happened; no blaze or crush, week after week the wildness contained in a pulsing building in Ealing, the House of Grow parties to raise money for a studio in the country. Everyone was welcome. We turned no one away no matter what they did, like Mick who was huge, an overhung forehead, sunken eyes. He liked crack and scaring hippies and pissing in the womb but Bach and poetry brought him to his knees and he’d tell us about his mother. The police left us alone. They said the streets of Ealing were quieter when we were around. We took care of all the lost boys and girls. We had five of these parties I think, it’s hard to remember because I was high and wild and dancing and serving mushroom tea and there is no record. On the day of the last one my angel-faced boyfriend discovered all the money we’d raised, that he’d stashed in a box, had been stolen. We didn’t ask who did it. We went ahead anyway with the last party, a stomping, sweating, wild affair and then we left that factory in Ealing and drove to a farm in the country.
Discussion about this post
No posts
I was at a warehouse party some years ago, I brought my little dog who absolutely loved it and everyone loved her. Anyway, this was a factory in Melbourne, friends lived there. Great party, finished the next day. Anyway, was in the train a few days later and was reading the paper and there had been a fire, and I said to my husband, isn't that our mate? Isn't that the warehouse? I guess it caught fire not long after we left. Man, I can't believe we spent so much time in place like that. They were expanding and dangerous all at once.
Still am. Just a different full 🐇🐓🦮🦮🦮