From Glasgow to Gloucester, Teesside to Tottenham, thousands migrate to nightclubs every weekend to move their bodies and commune with strangers. For many, a packed dancefloor, pounding house tunes and laserlike lights are part and parcel of a big night out. Dance music is so woven into the cultural fabric of Britain today that it’s hard to imagine a time before it.If you have more than a passing interest in rave, then you’ve seen the documentaries full of middle-aged blokes pontificating about pills, read the oral histories of happy hardcore, and lost hours listening to pirate radio from the early 90s on YouTube. The history of dance music in Blighty has been mythologized by artists, writers and filmmakers for decades now – from Jeremy Deller’s Acid Brass to Kevin and Perry Go Large. As with all enduring folk tales, though, some elements of the story have inevitably been embellished, exaggerated, misremembered or consciously ignored.
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That’s where Ed Gillett comes in. In his new book, Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain, the writer and filmmaker set out to challenge the accepted narratives, reexamine history, join different dots and retell the story of rave with fresh eyes. The book is a vivid pilgrimage, taking us from radical 17th Century political movements to the Windrush generation, gay liberation, psychedelic rock, the free party scene, acid house, the infamous “anti-rave” Criminal Justice Act, pirate radio, austerity, superclubs, gentrification, the lockdown rave scene and beyond.We got him to share the true history of British rave culture with us and explain how we got to where we are now.Ed Gillett: I think there's a tendency in some of the historical retellings, particularly of that 1987-1994 era, to treat rave as something unprecedented, strange, and alien that just erupted out of nowhere. But it is linked to far deeper, longer histories. The forces around illegal raves during lockdown, warehouse parties in 1989, Notting Hill Carnival in 1972, Elizabethan players in the 1500s and Druids gathering in the Woodlands in 2000 B.C., are all essentially part of the same thing. If I had to narrow it down or simplify it, I think it's a conflict between physical space being seen as a community resource – a communal good, free for anyone to occupy and use for pleasure or community expression without needing to seek permission – versus a model of the world in which everything has to be sanctioned.
The story actually begins hundreds of years ago.
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Black British culture is hugely important in the story of rave.
Queer culture is too.
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Hawkwind belongs in a rave hall of fame.
The “Ibiza Four” didn’t bring house music to the U.K.
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The Criminal Justice Act of 1994 wasn’t just an anti-rave bill.
Over the past 50 years, there's been a general shift from a society in which, unless it's been specifically prohibited in advance then, everything is permissible as long as the community around it understands and agrees to it, to a world in which everything is forbidden unless some kind of overarching power structure has granted permission. You see that in so many things, from the restrictions of the right to protest around Westminster to increasing powers for the government to snoop on your emails. There's a real encroachment on individual and communal liberties. I think the Criminal Justice Act is the fulcrum that all that revolves around.“British law and society have historically afforded space for those communal rituals, whether that's the bonfire night parade in Lewes or weird competitions chasing cheese down a hill.”
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It was an anti-rave bill, but it wasn't just an anti-rave bill. It limited the ability of protesters to operate, increased restrictions on squatting and made it easier to evict squatters. It made it so the prison officers couldn't go on strike. It created the first centralised laws around the use and retention of DNA data. It added additional powers by which the police could stop and search people without suspicion of them having committed a crime. So there are all these different fronts on which it was designed to kind of expand the powers of the state and restrict the actions of the individual.So, yeah, for me, it's not just about stopping people raving. It's about curtailing any kind of activity that doesn't fit with a narrow interpretation of what people should be doing across whole swathes of British life. Dance music was the figurehead, rather than the target.
The story of rave doesn’t end in 1994, though.
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At today’s big clubs, culture meets commoditization.
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The funding that Broadwick would get from developers is way more lucrative than just running a club or a music venue in any British city. Plus, when you do that, you’re often up against developers who want to take over the building. You're up against councils who want to limit that late-night disorder. You're up against residents who move into an area and then start filing noise complaints. You can sidestep all of them by finding a space that the developers want you to use and kind of doing a bit of a deal with the devil. When you buy a ticket for these spaces you are both a customer and part of what is being sold. Developers love young people, disposable income, creativity, culture. It's an effective tool for overwriting the identity and associations of a given area. So dance music can be an unwitting victim of gentrification – but dance music can be the perpetrator of those processes as well. There's a trade-off between needing cultural spaces to experience things communally, to share, to dance, to be messy, to be noisy. But if that ultimately serves to feed into the interests of groups that are homogenising and commodifying these urban spaces, where is the ethical trade-off? I don’t think it’s black-and-white that these clubs are cannibalising the market and crowding everyone else out, but they occupy an outsized space in terms of our attention and discussion. People’s disposable income is finite, so if you’re spending 60 quid going to Printworks, you’re not necessarily going to be spending 10 quid going to your local underground club every Saturday night preceding it. I read a tweet that said London doesn't need another 15,000-capacity club. What it needs is five 1,000-capacity clubs, ten 800-capacity clubs… It feels like now you’ve only got either the developer-funded alternative super clubs or tiny basement dives with like 50 capacity.
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COVID didn’t revive illegal raves. They never went anywhere.
Rave culture is political once again.
Ed Gillett’s book ‘Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain’ is out now via Pan Macmillan. He is speaking at Sound Affects in Brighton on August 13th alongside photographer Vinca Petersen.