90s rave crew DiY Sound System: ‘We definitely sacrificed our sanity’

In 2014, one of the first and most celebrated sound systems of the UK’s rave era marked 25 years in the same way they had started. In a packed out marquee in the idyllic Derbyshire countryside, under the glint of a disco ball, DiY’s co-founders Harry Harrison, Rick “Digs” Down, Simon “DK” Smith and Pete “Woosh” Birch united under the groove of house music to throw their last free party together. “It went on and on through to Sunday,” says Harrison. “It was fantastic but very messy. The police turned up. It was proper DiY, like the old days.”

This quartet of inveterate ravers – and a wider party crew of around 100 active members – spent those old days creating dance music events that bridged two kindred yet separate worlds: the outdoor free parties that were much maligned by police and the press, and the new, named in honour of an audaciously trippy made by Smith and Birch, who died in 2020 after a five-year battle with cancer. “I’d known him since I was 15,” Harrison says. “We were the musical-theoretical-political duo at the heart of it all, really.”