Sunrise: the parties that turned acid house into a national panic
A private members' club on paper, an unlicensed rave in practice, and the television coverage that turned a dance scene into a moral panic.
Private parties in name only
Sunrise was founded by Tony Colston-Hayter, who worked initially with Roger Goodman promoting club nights under names like Apocalypse Now - dressed up as private parties, membership cards and all, specifically to sidestep the licensing laws that would have applied to a public event. Colston-Hayter courted press coverage directly, contacting ITN himself to get the emerging acid house scene in front of a national audience.
Paul Staines co-founded Back to the Future alongside Sunrise - the same Paul Staines who later became known publicly as the political blogger Guido Fawkes, a very different second act to organising illegal raves in the late 1980s.
From press coverage to moral panic
By late 1988, the media narrative had turned hard against the scene: Granada's World in Action covered it as what the programme called a sinister and evil cult encouraging drug use. That coverage is a large part of why the parties moved out of central London and onto the M25 orbital raves that came to define the era - events too large and too mobile for the same licensing rules to catch easily.
In 1989, Colston-Hayter avoided imprisonment over Sunrise: A Midsummer Night's Dream, an unlicensed rave at White Waltham Airfield, by successfully arguing the membership card system made it a private event rather than a public one. He went on to appear on After Dark and on Jonathan Ross's chat show that same year, in an appearance remembered for him throwing water over journalist Paul Morley and handcuffing himself to Ross on air.
After the parties
Sunrise and the Weekend World nights that followed were directly involved in organising the Freedom to Party demonstrations against the licensing crackdown, connecting this scene to the same fight that, a few years later, produced the marches against the Criminal Justice Bill covered elsewhere in this section.
Colston-Hayter's own later life took him well outside music promotion: he was imprisoned in 2014 for hacking London banks and convicted again in 2018 on further fraud charges, receiving a 20 month sentence - public record, and a genuinely different story from the one he made his name on at Sunrise.