Clink Street was the birth of rave culture
It is June 1988. In the cobbled streets of Bankside, between Southwark Cathedral and the nearby bridge, steam pours from every vent and gap in the walls of an old warehouse down Clink Street. It’s like a crazed pressure cooker. Outside, a queue snakes all the way down towards the cathedral, while the KLF’s US police car is parked surreptitiously by the kerb.
Inside: a cacophony. An assault on the senses, the smells, the din, the whistle posse in full flow, dry ice hanging in the air, sweat dripping from the ceiling – from everything, in fact. Tough Chicago house and Detroit wails bounce off the Victorian brick walls as bodies perform a robotic ritual, somewhere between communion, dance and mayhem.
“Amazing things happened,” Lu Vukovic told Matthew Collin. “like one morning the sun was rising and everyone was completely tripping on the energy and the emotion and the feeling of it all, someone shouted out, ‘Bring down the walls!’ and they all started jumping up, trying to take the room apart, to actually bring down the walls! No amount of words could describe that euphoria, that sense of belonging, that possibility.”
