Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain

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Parents organized town meetings and protests, and wrote in to telephone companies demanding the charges be reversed. Some teens used the service to talk about sex, and later when moderators were added, used veiled language. The infamous ‘blues’ parties for instance, in areas such as St Paul’s in Bristol and Hulme in Manchester laid the foundations for urban underground music being digested and nurtured behind closed doors whilst such events gradually drip-fed an essential diet of cutting-edge dance music to a wider, inquisitive audience. No longer confined to the margins, dance music became the soundtrack to Britain at its most confident and optimistic. After being summarily informed that there was no such number and that I must be joking, I stuck to my guns.

Four years before the release of Trainspotting, Boyle helmed an episode of Inspector Morse, in which the middle-aged detective plunges into an underworld of repetitive beats, nihilistic hedonism and villainous drug dealers praying on the innocent young. But in fact, there are so many parallels between the reaction to dance music and the moral panic which had emerged in the preceding years around late-night queer venues, particularly in relation to the AIDS crisis.Over the last decade, there has been an increased focus on dance music’s roots in marginalised communities. 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. I can honestly say i used to drink and then go raving with quite a few of the younger Exeter football lads and can remember being in Plymouth Warehouse with them one side of me and Plymouth TCE hoolies the other side of me and thinking if this was 5 or 6 hours ago they would be killing each other… Nights out were definitely less violent and I saw much less violence in pubs and in the street than in the 80s. In the home run of the book, Gillett at least offers some optimism for the destiny of UK dance culture, citing post covid the ‘re-establishment of club cultures roots in queer, trans, feminist, Black, Asian and other marginalised experiences and a recognition of its associated political power.

It was an anti-authoritarian, pleasure-seeking tendency now, 35 years later, corralled into “cultural economy” mega-clubs run by, and for, the more privileged. 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 . I'm entirely sympathetic, having similar tendencies in various directions, but it did catch my fancy! The fear was that Arcadia would be breached and that real England would be sullied by manic hippies and unwashed ravers. After the dial tone had timed out and a recording advising you to “Please hang up your telephone” played, a grating “howler” alarm would blast.

It’s yet again another example of the false floor of dance culture and what ‘Party Lines’ is so successful at in peeling back beyond the utopian ideal.

Café Royal’s books show close-up photographic evidence of parts of the UK - and the lives of its inhabitants - that I never saw in my own rather sheltered background. It would also come under the jurisdiction of one of the most bizarre authority figures in modern British history.From spy cops infiltrating Spiral Tribe to a constant barrage of police harassment, aimed to disrupt and create a sense of looming paranoia, which threatened to tip into full-scale, civil violence. It doesn’t cover any other countries, but he’s unearthed plenty of previously unseen information and documentation, particularly from college papers etc.