It is definitely the morning of my twenty-third birthday, the year is almost certainly 2000, though it may not be, some stuff in there is a little blurry.

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I am walking home with friends over the Iron Age settlement of Wandlebury in Cambridgeshire. We have been in a rural warehouse at a night that was probably legal. Those nights were amazing, the perfect blend of small, wild and slightly daring. They were as close as I ever came to how I think it must have felt in the late 80s. Refreshingly diverse and non-commercial. Small enough that you might meet the same people if you kept going regularly. I entered into a ritual of a much more modern variety, of wonderful hedonism and repetitive beats.

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The dawn, the spangled wonderment, the feeling that my limbs could take me forever if the music never stopped.

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And I remembered something. Just one of a menagerie of colourful childhood memories, for I was blessed with slightly eccentric parents. I remember on this hill, that my dad had taken me to dance with the morris dancers at dawn, on May Day. This would have happened in 1987/88, somewhere round there.

And this bizarre seeming ancient ritual, that probably isn’t that old, although some bits of it certainly are. The thought struck me, I have thought a lot (even back then) about the history of traditional music, it is something closely connected to me and my self-identity, this idea of legacy.

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But right then, in 1987 was the BIRTH of this remarkable social phenomenon I had just engaged in — rave.

We can see its history, all of it. Yet the origins of morris dancing are hidden, in truth unknown and contested by those that delve into it.