Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain

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As journalist Emma Warren emphasises: “Unless you tell your own stories then people who don’t share your lived experience – the material that underpins all culture – are likely to. The concept that in the end cold business acumen will always outweigh the creativity and innovation of the individual, who in reality is used for little more than cultural window dressing in the name of the ‘scene’. It’s no great leap to segue British social history of the early 80s into that of the late 80s, as Gillett often does here. For years, artistes and promoters have tried, and largely failed, to bring soca into the mainstream.

It began with the illicit “blues dances” of the 1960s, for black people excluded from licensed venues, then moved onto acid house, techno, jungle, garage, grime and drill.I realise that this is unlikely to shed any light on your question, but it reminded me of some very pleasant times in the Australian outback! Says Gillett: “Black music, and the coming together of Black men, is treated as an inherently suspicious incubator for criminality.

We got here, the author argues, by raiding Afro-Caribbean blues dances, sound systems and gay night clubs, by forcing travellers off the road – and by beating up miners and E’d-up kids. But when you look at those older, canonical book-length histories of dance music, they generally start in 1987 with people taking pills in Ibiza. Marketers knew it, and advertised party lines during after school television programs and in teen magazines. There are not only consumers today who have become so unaccustomed to being thwarted by the stentorian tones of a busy signal that they are temporarily flummoxed at the concept of having to hang up and dial again later, there are also younger users who have never heard a busy signal.

The fear was that Arcadia would be breached and that real England would be sullied by manic hippies and unwashed ravers. It’s bound to have played a part for some people, but various factors were in play around that time - several bad events in 1985 culminating in the Heysel disaster all conspired to dent the dubious glamour associated with the ‘firms’, and the resulting improvements in police tactics and marshalling, all-seater stadia, then Hillsborough in 89 all played their part.

The dial was a mechanical interrupter so the marks and spaces were the same length, as I remember it.

In retrospect, each swivelled-eyed pundit indignantly demanding that “something must be done” looks absurd, their histrionics about Carnival or some new manifestation of music and dance culture exaggerated and off-kilter.

The narrative thread that runs through the book is, the author explains, “a power struggle: between our collective urge to congregate and dance, to lose and find ourselves on the dance floor, and the political and economic authorities which seek to constrain or commodify those messy and unstable desires. One of the things that really drove attendance to the Castlemorton Common Festival in 1992 – possibly the biggest illegal gathering in British history – was the police and media loudly urging people not to go. Hard truths and rhythms collide as a controversial and erudite unravelling of UK dance culture, uncovers its secret social and political history. Picador Press, Blackwells Books and Manchester Libraries are excited to invite you to the book launch of Party Lines. One of the myths about rave is that it was a sudden explosion of culture that the police reacted to with unusual violence, aggression and fear.James Palumbo, co-founder of London’s Ministry of Sound, lent his chauffeur-driven car to Peter Mandelson. As Gillett explains, there is video footage that actually captures the moment from a Soul Control party in 1986, as the crowd starts jacking to Adonis ‘No Way Back’.