It isn't cool to rave about your own party, but the IT Rave-Up at the Roundhouse two Saturdays ago was such an event we decided it merited an IT report.

It was mainly atmospherics: two and half thousand people dancing about in that strange, giant round barn. Darkness, only flashing lights. People in masks, girls half-naked. Other people standing about wondering what the hell was going on. Pot smoke. Now and then the sound of a bottle breaking. Somebody looks as if he might get violent. There was a lot of tension about.

Plus the specifics:
- The Pink Floyd psychedelic pop group, did weird things to the feel of the event with their scary feedback sounds, slide projections playing on their skin (drops of paint run riot on the slides to produce outer space/prehistoric textures on the skin), spotlights flashing on them in time with a drum beat... more about them next issue.

- The Soft Machine, another group with new ideas, drove a motor bike into the place, in and around the pillars that held up that gallery we had been warned wasn't all that safe... more about them too.
- a large car (some said it was an Oldsmobile, others a Cadillac) in the middle of it all, painted bright pop art stripes and explosions, by Binder, Edwards and Vaughan, New-York Interior decorators who, someone said, put stripes over everything. Car was previously seen parked inside the Robert Fraser Gallery. Apparently the group has a juke box on show and in action in the Golden Egg on the Strand.

- Simon Postuma and Marujke Koger, the Amsterdam couple who are opening Karma (see Miles column last issue), designed an interesting cubicle with coloured screens and nets, and within the box one of them, in suitable dress, read palms and told fortunes.

- In another part of the Roundhouse, Bob Cobbing and the London Film Coop gave an all-night film show, featuring film like Scorpio Rising. Towers Open Fire, under the most difficult of conditions. The audience stood in front of the projectors, on top of Bob Cobbing. Yet the films went on. It may, though, have been just the right setting for those particular films. Burroughs inner space disappearance in Towers Open Fire somehow had more impact because of the vibrations from the "party".

- "famous people turned up : Antonioni and Monica Vitti, Paul McCartney disguised as an arab, Kenneth Rexroth, Peter Brook, Mickey Most and Tony Secunda. We also saw a well-known junkie, a notorious homosexual, and many happy people who were only know to their friends but who the hell cares in a scene like that anyay ?

Of course several things went strong. There was that narrow entrance for an unpleasant start. That communal toilet that ended up in flood. A giant jelly made in a bath for the party was unfortunately run over by a bicycle. How this happened, or what became of the remains of the jelly or the bicycle, no-one seems to know. After the party, the crowds caused a traffic jam in the streets outside. It should be said here that throughout the event the police were co-operative.

[Perhaps it was just relief that something has at last happened in the Round House. It was a good party, and just to prove that something really IS going on in London, another bigger, better one is currently being planned. details next issue.]