Senseless acts of beauty

At the recent Earth First! gathering in North Wales, an activist quipped that this book should be boycotted because of all the inaccuracies it is supposed to contain regarding recent road protests. This, I feel, had more to do with over-sensitivity on the part of those who have lived and breathed the events described, rather than excessive sloppiness on the part of the author.

Everyone has a different slant on any given situation. Mckay's task has been to steer as truthful a course as possible through the choppy waters of contradiction, exaggeration and ego, to link up three decades of underground culture. Drawing on fanzines, free papers, lyrics, interviews and diaries, Senseless Acts journeys from the free festival scene in the mid-seventies to Castlemorton's rave explosion in the early nineties. With punks, travellers, Molesworth, Teepee Valley, Twyford Down and the Criminal Justice Act providing the landmarks, this as a must buy/blag for anyone whose ever wafted the joss-stick of defiance under the nose of repression. The counter-culture is building its own library.

Neil Goodwin.