'Get yourself to Northampton, mate, and ring us from there'

10.48pm London: At six o'clock this evening I had one telephone number in my pocket and now I have 11. Finding out where the rave is going to take place is a treasure hunt of vague information that always begins by finding a phone box, ends with a lot of heartfelt "Cheers, mates" and involves writing down at least three more numbers on the back of your hand. To get to a party like this doesn't just take a few tinnies and a packet of Pringles, but tenacious organisation, a phonecard and a head for motorways. Getting through on my fourth number the voice says: "Things still gotta get sorted, but go north. Right, mate?" As instructed we drive up through suburbia, following those fairytale signs "To the North".

11.15pm Neasden: Phone again: "Head to Northampton, get yourself up here, and ring us later - yeah?", and then "Cheers!" is all I can hear before her mobile crackles off. The barman overhears. "You going to a rave? I was going to them in 1989. Brilliant, man. Although one time I came down off my E halfway through, and I suddenly thought, what is everyone doing here in the middle of this field? I almost cried."

12.36am M1, Toddington service station: A coachload of sunburnt kids stuff chips up their noses in Burger King while a man with a pair of Union Jack shorts looks at them longingly through the glass. Phone again: "Head to Corby, north of Corby" - "How far north of Corby?" - "Not that far, and", she adds, sensing the mounting hysteria in my voice, "don't give up now! Cheers!". Before we leave, the Union Jack-shorted man taps on the car window: "Either of you fancy a gangbang by any chance?"

1.04am A43: Turn on some rave music to try to fuel our near-exhausted hopes of arriving. Identify some fellow rave seekers by their ropey cars, silly hats, and the way the driver is hunched forward toward the windscreen, banging his torso up and down on the steering wheel. Realise we're doing this ourselves and have to turn the music off.

2.24am Corby: Finally we reach Corby to find the streets filled with aggressively drunk, red-faced lads rutting outside the disco. We eventually locate Corby's only call box next to some lads stripped to their knickers. They attempt to throw up on the car as we roll through our long stash of telephone numbers. Four are now registered "non-operational". Finally, one works: "Yeah, take the Al5 to Sleaford, second turning on the left after Cranwell, track on the left-hand side. But watch your back, mate, as the place is already crawling with the pigs - oh and hide your gear too - sorted!"

2.56am Cranwell: Depressingly, the sky is beginning to look lighter and more watery, the colour of service-station coffee. A policeman flags us down, stuffs his head in the car window: "You wouldn't be going to that rave now, would you?". "Er, might be." "Well, you'll be very disappointed," he says cheerily. "Police have blocked all routes."

3.10am: Our car is the only moving object in the middle of desolate Lincolnshire fields, until suddenly we come across a buzzing knot of fluorescent yellow anoraks. The police guard the entrance to a track, looking very jolly and chuffed with themselves. "You can't go down there. No. Site's closed. It's no good you asking any more 'cos we don't know." In the next lay- by are parked four dodgy motors with sleeping people in them, looking eerily lifeless in the grey light. One of them is stirring, cursing the police: "We was gutted as we came all the way from London. I'd do it again, though, 'cos it'd be worth it in the end." As we grimly point the car southwards it is some consolation that so many others were prepared to make this journey, half way up England, in a night that wasn't so much the raving as the getting there.