Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain

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You are correct that these are party lines. The letters represent an additional digit dialed after the others in cases where automatic operations was implemented. This article goes into great depth all about how multi-party telephone lines worked, but as a short excerpt: Ed Gillett: Dance music is desirable, it’s alluring, it has a cultural cachet, and I think it’s been very easy for successive generations to mistake that for genuine community. So there’s a risk of dance music becoming tokenistic in its politics. You get quite a lot of shallow, superficial feel-good semi-political activity and there isn’t always the space to have deeper conversations. There’s one festival (I won’t single them out) who were lauded in the press for having a 50/50 gender balance on its bill. That’s good in and of itself, but the festival is run by this huge corporate entity – it’s the same old white men.

Some chat lines attempted to appease parents by adding moderators who periodically reminded teens of the price per minute. A passionately argued and intensively researched addition to the ever-evolving narrative of UK dance music culture. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? One thing I found striking about the book is that it partly functions as a history of policing across the last four decades. What role has the police played in the history of dance music?Aug 2023 Party Lines: Ed Gillett in conversation with Fergal Kinney. Sorry, this event is now cancelled. Ed Gillett: In the book I talk about AI and climate change. The threats posed by AI to dance music are the same as with any other cultural pursuit. I guess the interpersonal nature of DJ’ing and the experience of being in a club might help certain sections hold out for longer. But we’re not far from the point that AI will be able to mimic basically any genre. Dance music is synthetic by its nature, it’s designed to be functional and often quite minimal in the elements it uses – there are very few fields of endeavour more suited to AI. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

Ed Gillett: There’s something inherently political about a group of people taking control of a space without necessarily having the approval of mainstream society. That could be a marginalised community finding a space of solace and peace for a night; it could mean mobilising 30,000 people to go and seize a piece of common land. Historically, some of these gatherings were domestic – a shebeen (essentially a house party organised by Caribbean immigrants unable to rent commercial spaces) was firebombed in the late 1950s; in 1981, speaking in the Commons, Conservative MP Jill Knight described them as “a seething mass of people, 99% of whom were of the Rastafarian type, who can look a little frightening”. If you’ve never owned a rotary dial telephone, then you’ve probably never seen a number card installed in the center of the dial plate. (Touch Tone phones had a slip of paper at the bottom of the keypad.) This enabled anyone who was using the phone to immediately know what number they were calling from. 6. Large Print Dial OverlaysOn December 31 2000, the Millennium Dome hosted a 20,000-person, 24-hour rave promoted by the Ministry of Sound. It was a watershed moment for dance music in Britain. As journalist Ed Gillett writes in Party Lines, his fascinating and comprehensive history of Britain’s fraught relationship with the dance floor, “rave – and the countercultures which birthed it – had spent much of the 20th century harried by the police, targeted by politicians, and exiled to the fringes of polite society and urban space”. Now, a year into the 21st century, ravers were “clutched tight to the Government’s bosom”. Hard truths and rhythms collide as a controversial and erudite unravelling of UK dance culture, uncovers its secret social and political history. Kids enjoy making up a new identity because on a phone you can be whoever you want to be,” Christopher Woods of the Friendship Network, a chat line company out of Los Angeles, told The Boston Globe. “Every guy on the line will say he drives a Porsche or some other exciting car. There’s a lot of fantasy involved.”

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. I don’t care,” she said. “If there was no phone, I wouldn’t be living right now. In my town, there’s nothing to do.” Dancing to music: what could be more joyful? Rhythm and sweat, release and abandon, feeling rather than thinking, being yourself and becoming someone – or something – other. Dancing gives us, however fleeting, a glimpse of freedom. It can tilt reality. This appalls puritans and fundamentalists. Too many young people “prefer the dark night to daylight”, complained James Anderton in the 1980s. “They dance like there is no tomorrow, and they spread the virus of drug abuse wherever they go. They are not of this world. They believe in very different things to you and I.”

17 Aug 2023

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.” Swap “the road” for “the dance floor” and that sentence describes the essence of the battle for the heart and soul and freedom of Carnival. I don't think this has much to do with the Morse code. The letter is the same as dialing the number. Look on your dial the numbers are still there. Later when the telephone number system was expanded, my number in NJ was through the Charter exchange; Ch-9-0979. C is 2 and H is 4. So you actually dialed 24-9-0979. This article was amended on 24 July 2023. An earlier version had misattributed to Ed Gillett the coining of the term “business techno”.

With regard to automatic operation, in metropolitan areas, the dials had most of the letters of the alphabet associated with digit values, and through that scheme J, M, R and W were associated with the digits 5, 6, 7, and 9. In other areas, when the dials did not have the full repertoire of letters, they nevertheless had J, M, R and W on the corresponding digits. Can't talk about New York (as I'm in Australia), but when I was a kid the Brisbane phone numbers had a one two digit alpha prefix, then a 4 digit number - eg my grandparents were J 2871, and my aunt LX 1710. These letters were merely mapped on to the dial (note that Australian phones go from 1 to 9 then zero): You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Ed Gillett: The first function of the police is to embody moral panics around dance music. Whether it’s M25 raves in 1989 or panics about knife crime in 2019, they have been a constant presence. Dance music is noisy, it’s seen as seedy and it is objectively connected to organised crime, so it’s always going to attract a certain amount of police attention, which in turn has shaped the culture itself. Getting one over the establishment, and doing something you’re not supposed to do, has always been part of the appeal. 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. Nevertheless, Party Lines ends on optimism – the founding spirit of the dance floor, after all. Gillett believes that we don’t need another revolutionary moment like the rave at Castlemorton, but rather “a patchwork of tiny gestures, each of them committed to serving a specific community, each small enough to evade censure, but… knitting together to form something of immense power.” Things, surely, can only get better.Ed Gillett is a writer, film-maker and communications professional from London, telling innovative and attention-grabbing stories about the points where politics, music, communities and technology meet. A scheme widely used in the Bell Telephone System for four-party full selective lines (under both manual and automatic operation) used a suffix letter, generally from the set J, M, R, and W, to designate which of the four ringing signals applies to the station. These letters were chosen to not be easily mis-heard when spoken (with regard to manual operation). Ed Gillett is a journalist and film-maker based in South London, who has written for The Guardian, Frieze, DJ Mag, The Quietus and Novara Media. His film and TV credits include Jeremy Deller’s acclaimed rave documentary Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984–1992 for BBC Four, and Four To The Floor, Channel 4’s award-winning music and factual strand . Party Lines is his first book.