When the police raided the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in 1987, during the height of scaremongering over Aids, the late television presenter and comedian Paul O’Grady noticed that the coppers were all wearing bright blue rubber gloves, as if mere contact with its mostly queer patrons represented a mortal threat of contamination. O’Grady grabbed a mic and joked to the crowd: “Well, well, looks like we’ve got help with the washing up.” This story, and countless other entertaining ones, appear in Ed Gillett’s Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain (Picador).
Gillett’s well-researched, meaty account of dance music in the UK, chronicles the Black roots of the “movement”, the anti-dance moralism of the Margaret Thatcher years, the Manchester/Hacienda scene, all the way through to the corporate club landscape of the 21st century. The chapter “Plague Raving” deals with some of the truths and myths about what happened with “illegal raves” during lockdown. Party Lines is an engrossing piece of modern social history.
Finally, after Pilcrow (2008) and Cedilla (2011), Adam Mars-Jones’s wonderful creation John Cromer gets a third outing in Caret (Faber), which displays the author’s usual wit and insight in a story set in the 1970s. Fans of the series will have plenty to chew on, incidentally, as this third instalment comes in at just under 750 pages. That decade is also the setting for large chunks of John Niven’s moving memoir O Brother (Canongate), about the effect of sibling suicide.
