B.A.S.H. and Baby Bash: The 90s Raves We Put On in Preston

We started this shop because we went to parties. We liked parties. So around ’95, ’96, we started putting our own on. We called them B.A.S.H.

Most nights we’d do an under-18s session first, Baby Bash. Then we’d close for an hour, tidy up, and put the same DJ on for the over-18s. Occasionally we’d just do an under-18s, or just an over-18s.

The music was happy hardcore, hardcore techno and a bit of old school, but mostly very, very high BPM. High energy, in your face. The residents were Baby Lee, MC RKO and Jimmy Freestripe, and occasionally Jelly, who these days goes by Mark Kovich. He played for us again a couple of years back.

Putting parties on is hard work. Promoting them is hard work. Here are a few of the stories.

Dom’s Bar: pizza and hardcore

One of our first parties, I think around 1995, was at Dom’s Bar on Cannon Street. Dom’s was a pizza gaff, and back then if you served pizza you got a late licence. So there were loads of pizzas on the side, loads of hardcore techno, and nobody eating them in the main room, where they’d cleared all the tables. That was a cracking party.

The Caribbean Club: 200 kids on Kent Street

One of our first under-18s was at the Caribbean Club on Kent Street, which is gone now. They double-booked us, obviously, which caused a bit of mayhem. So I was outside trying to calm down the people who’d been kicked out, with two hundred kids stood on the street wanting to go mental.

When I walked back in, the whole place was bouncing, singing along at full voice to Technohead’s “I Wanna Be a Hippy”. I was laughing my head off. Typical of the DJs. I think they forgot they were playing to kids. But the kids didn’t mind. At that age it’s just cartoon to them.

The Mill on Aqueduct Street

Then we moved to the Mill on Aqueduct Street, which has been under loads of different names over the years. There were some good nights in there back in the day. And the usual nightmare with club owners and all that kind of carry-on.

We had Brisk on for the first one, and it was empty. Nobody believed us.

The kids didn’t really know how to dance, so we built some big dance boxes and put two cracking dancers on them, Lindsay and Neil. White outfits, a big white cannon light behind them so they were silhouetted. And all the kids would just stand in front of them bouncing up and down, blowing their whistles. We sold the whistles and glow sticks too, at the raves, in the shop and at festivals. Times have changed.

We had Dougal and Vibes on. We recreated old-school Kinetic sets with MC Connie, with Lee doing a Stu Allen set, because we couldn’t afford Stu Allen. Then we’d sell the mixtapes in the shop afterwards.

The best nights, and why we stopped

The first three or four weren’t really parties for me, because they were full of kids. But they were some of the highest-energy parties I’ve ever seen. Insane. The kids loved it and we had loads of good feedback.

Then once word got out that it was real and it was happening, it started going awry. People hanging around outside for a fight, local beefs, running battles up the street. It was just insane. So we stopped doing it. We stopped the adult ones as well. It was just too much like hard work. We moved on to other things.

The Baby Bash videos

We filmed some of them. Can you recognise yourself in the vids or the pics? Let us know.

The flyers

These are the ones we can still find. There are older ones somewhere, including Dom’s Bar. If you’ve got any, send them in.

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