"Happy Hi NRG at it's BEST!" Yup, that's what the tape cover says. Nothing like a rave-related tape cover, flyer or 3D World article for a bevy of wayward apostrophes, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. To be fair it never was about the spelling...
I never made it to Free Love '95. It was somewhere like Blackmarket off memory. Being (and very much looking) underage at the time, I was just a little too paranoid I wouldn't be let in to a 'real' nightclub. Given 15-year old Anna Wood disastrously made it into Apache at The Phoenician a few months later I probably would have been fine, but how was I to know?
The Free Love parties just grew from there. I missed Free Love '96 as well, due to being struck by a nasty flu post-FOD4, which had occurred a week earlier. I did make it to Free Love '97 but by then I'd lost most of my raving mojo and don't remember being particularly impressed. That party was one of those massive Minto raves and, being free, was packed to the rafters and seemed to attract all sorts of bogans, bombers and general weirdos. I imagine Free Love '95 would have been the goods though - smallish, inner city and a little more underground than the juggernaut sequels that followed.
Field of Dreams 4. Quite possibly the peak of my raving career. Having missed the legendary FoD3 a year-and-a-bit beforehand, my posse and I were determined not to miss this one. And we were determined to make it a HUGE one. Extra shifts were taken at work, nights out for months beforehand cancelled to save as much money as possible. For a good eight weeks, the entire focus of life was preparing for this party. (Sadly, not for my HSC just a few weeks later.)
This Paul Holden tape, released a few weeks before the party, played a massive part in the pre-fOd gee-up, along with a staggering number of trinkets: stickers, keyrings, massive and elaborate flyers and posters... The ticket itself came in its own crisp white envelope filled with all sorts details about the fun you were going to have on the night, thick with the hippy-ish buzzwords of the day. ("Energy", "Experience", blah-di-blah. They all started with the same letter. Clever, huh?)
Paul Holden's mix indicates the direction of his (count'em) two mainroom sets that evening. UK-style bouncy happy-hard is the order of the day here, peppered with a little breakbeat. (Breakbeat? Just keep moving, junglists, this ain't your thing.) This tape also holds the dubious honour of introducing me to Dune's "Can't Stop Raving"....although, facing facts, I really quite enjoyed it at the time.
The night itself was a total blur. It was undoubtedly epic, but it just went by so fast, especially given the months of excitement leading up to it. My memories just don't seem to do it justice. The video above shows what was meant to be the peak of the night but the energy and scale of the evening is well and truly lost. The full video is online here and goes a little further towards revisiting the vibe.
To say I clearly remember Dynamix's set would be something akin to an outright lie. He played around 4 or 5am and my night was well and truly in the midst of 'blur' territory. Nevertheless, I eagerly picked up the tape to "relive" the experience the moment it was released. And it's a pretty darn fine example of hard-house-slash-hard-trance as it was at the time. There's a whole bunch of killer tracks here like "Rock tha House", "Higher State of Consciousness" and X-Cabs' "Neuro". It seems to sum up the kind of music that was playing around that point of the night and for the most part still has me happily bopping along today.
Got any more memories of the night you can use to help me fill in the blanks? Are there any more Field of Dreams 4 sets in existence? Leave a comment below....
This page exists, hopefully, to motivate me to digitise my collection of DJ tapes collected around the traps in Sydney between 1993 and 1999, and also to serve as a sharing point for friends and strangers alike who were part of those heady days.
The focus is on music that was big for me in the 90's. Earlier tapes will predominantly feature rave, hardcore and happy hardcore, morphing later into house, techno, trance and a little trip hop. Well, that's the plan. We'll see how we go, eh?
