Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain

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The police have played a very active role in that, because nightclubs that are open every weekend are much more difficult and expensive to police. 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.

Policing strategies, Gillett argues, connect a seemingly disparate group of partyers, nomads, sound system DJs, queer space organisers, drill rappers and activists; pretty much anyone who has ever found themselves on the wrong side of a truncheon or punitive court case. With “Donald Trump-like smugness,” Widawsky was convinced his venture would allow him to retire to a Caribbean island. Twenty years on, those words still ring true: just glance at the pictures from London’s rap-focused festival, Wireless, earlier this month.Ed Gillett: The canonical texts on dance music were mostly mainly in the late 1990 and early 2000s, from the perspective of people who were there at the time. An irony: after Clerkenwell gay club Trade at Turnmills shut down in 2008, the venue was replaced by an office building with meeting spaces named after DJs – one is known as the Judge Jules Room. Recorded at Hive Mind Studios in Brooklyn, NY, with the help of producer/arrangers Mike Buckley and Vincent Chiarito (both members of Charles Bradley's Extraordinaires) and crack team of a-list musicians, his upcoming album blends heavy arrangements and introspective lyrics with sophistication, leaving the listener in a blissful wash of wonderment. I felt that football violence increasingly became more overtly linked to politics from around that point.

Transylvania-6 and -7 were NYC exchanges the most famous number was Transylvania-6-5000 used in the song by that name. It’s mind-boggling reading Gillet’s section on him that Anderton actually existed, never mind had the sort of power to influence an entire city. Over the last decade, there has been an increased focus on dance music’s roots in marginalised communities. In writing about Liverpools Cream Club and it’s owner James Barton, there are valuable insights to be had.And recently we learned that Hall had ‘liked’ a tweet that praised Enoch Powell and his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech about the dangers of non-white immigration to the UK. Just three years later, Tony Blair would come to power soundtracked by one of the biggest club anthems of the 1990s: D:Ream’s euphoric Things Can Only Get Better. My few visits back over the years did little to really fill me in on the finer details of what was going on and to read some first-hand accounts of particular experiences here is fascinating.

Staging dance parties (or attempting to prevent them) involved cat-and-mouse, sometimes dirty tactics. Back when exchange names were still in use, you could even tell what neighborhood a person lived in by the first two letters of their telephone number; for example, despite the name, the location that belonged to the telephone number PEnnsylvania 6-5000 was not in the Keystone State but rather in New York City, at a hotel near Penn Station.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. Further, in an unsettling chapter on the demonisation of black music in Britain, Gillett discusses how jungle and later garage and drill would be lambasted with the same racist stereotypes, not only by the media but also more disturbingly by a cross-section of the public who couldn’t picture a black man in the entertainment industry without imagining he carried a blade or a gun in real life too.