I've traipsed through those fields near Pilton on many a year – enough to get PTSD whenever I hear the sound of torrential rain on tarpaulin – but the tale of this particular tune is based solely around the events of Glastonbury festival 2019.

Around January of that year, Seain mentioned to me that our old soundsystem could potentially be involved in a soundclash in the lower fields and that we would be up against the mighty Desert Storm, a formidable crew of hardcore ravers.
We would gather as many of our crew as we could sneak thru the gates and we would all play a tune each.
Traditional clash culture has it that the custom dub plates that you play should be tailored to the clash and allow you to take aural shots at your opponents, so I set about designing my own sonic weapon.

When you have been booked to play only 1 tune at Glastonbury, some rules come into play that I am not normally concerned with when composing music, namely that the track should clearly be recognisable as some form of music and also, preferably be a solid banger from start to finish.

So I set about designing my perfect rave tune.

Our band TR-33N had performed in a small tent there before on a big pile of hardware and in amongst the set was a remix of one of my favourite songs ever, Pressure Drop by Toots and the Maytals, who also played that year. I didn't feel like our mix had done it justice on samplers but an old UK hardcore version of the track still rattled around my head so I used that as a starting point. I surmised that playing a song that nigh-on everybody loves would set the required tone.
Announcing the drop would then be a homemade mentasm hoover from our mks50 and after that I would break the tune into a large monosyllabic bass tone that would shake the rig and everyone's bones.

Easy.

Desert Storm were no strangers to me.
They stood as pioneers of the free party culture and were the catalysts of some of the greatest parties I’ve ever attended whilst travelling with the Headfuk soundsystem out in Europe decades ago. The recent passing of their legendary force of nature, Keith, added an extra dimension of emotion when choosing how to clash them.

Scoraig93 is a magical gem of a track, released by Desert Storm around 1993 soon after their rave on the island of Scoraig and to me it captures a distilled energy of the UK free rave movement in its early form, the youthful naivety and uncompromising freedom of the time, combined with a raw electronic sound and the simple beauty of some hands-in-the-air synth pads perfect for when you stumble around a field with your mates, full of love.

I rekindled my love of this track when I heard the news of Keith's death. It made me weep for the past and the amazing memories of that time that will inevitably be lost one day. So I chopped out the synth part and slapped it in as a third movement in the track, with the sole aim of making Desert Storm cry at the majestic beauty of it all.

The tune was set.

I dragged my entire family, including the kids, across the country to prepare for the clash.

It was on Friday nite at 4am.
(Side note: it’s blur to getting up to this point – some other close friends had been outed by the Sunday Times for "calling for a Tory genocide" and subsequently banned from playing their slot at the festival the week before, but we finally got there.)

Ahead of the clash it was debated that we would win if we just "went in hard and just played loads of jungle" and, while this is undoubtedly true, the two clashing sound systems before us were doing exactly that.
Now I prefer to juxtapose tearing jungle with other forms of rave so I thought I would play my tune first as a palette cleanser and then we could move on to the jungle mixes with Neville Staple shouting out our name and cussing Desert Storm.

The tune was primed.

We waited patiently as the soundsystems before us drew battle with their Bristolian flavoured DnB and once they were done, we quickly swapped the decks out for our own so we could get started. It was 4am. There is a massive crowd. We are all pretty wavey. I pass my .wav to Luke Hekate to start the proceedings.

The tune goes on.

There is a very large bang as the first square wave hits the subs.

And then there is no sound.

This tune literally blew up the rig.

So much so that the tops had shifted several inches sideways.
And we still won the clash, as, once the rig got back on, the rest of the crew just rinsed out a load of jungle.

Fin.