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.”
Anderton, subject of a Happy Mondays song called God’s Cop, was chief constable of Greater Manchester Police from 1976 to 1991, and believed dancing (or those kinds of it of which he disapproved) was deviant, contagious even. Plenty of lawmakers, before and after him, have thought so too, seeing the dancefloor as a battleground, a potentially countercultural space that, according to Ed Gillett, they have sought to “constrain or commodify”.
Party Lines is about the politics of dancing. It treats dance as resistance, as ritual, an unruly energy. A way to affirm life and to stick two fingers up to the world. Gillett is less interested in summer of love nostalgia or having-it-large anecdotes from superstar DJs than he is on the cycles of social panic generated by Notting Hill carnival-goers, free party travellers, even drill fans in the present day.
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”.
Queer spaces were targeted: in 1987, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in south London (later home to the club Duckie whose co-founder Amy Lamé went on to become the city’s “night czar”) was raided by police who, perhaps harbouring Anderton-style prejudices, wore blue rubber gloves as they bundled out patrons. Paul O’Grady, who was in charge of the late show that night, reached for a microphone: “Well, well, looks like we’ve got help with the washing up.”
Hackles were raised not just by urban clubs, but by those who wanted to assemble outside. The fear was that Arcadia would be breached and that real England would be sullied by manic hippies and unwashed ravers. Gillett recalls how, in 1975, the organisers of the Windsor free festival were jailed for a month for merely distributing flyers. In 1984, Yorkshire police arrested all 360 attenders of the tiny Nostell Priory festival.
In 1992, a week-long party at Castlemorton Common near Malvern attracted a 30,000-strong crowd, drew endless front-page howls from the middle-market tabloids, and led to the notorious Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which gave police power to halt events featuring music characterised by “repetitive beats”. If that seems absurd now, in 2018, the London drill outfit 1011 were banned from mentioning specific postcodes in their songs. (Drill, Gillett observes, is often taken off YouTube, but some of it reappears on Pornhub.)
Staging dance parties (or attempting to prevent them) involved cat-and-mouse, sometimes dirty tactics. Police damaged vehicles and burned the tents of ravers; they hid their ID numbers; they dredged up arcane laws to stop free movement. Many believe deep-cover officers were embedded in the party scene. Not in doubt is the fact that, in 2009, a record shop was set up in north-east London by undercover police officers who also wired up its back-room recording studio. Says Gillett: “Black music, and the coming together of Black men, is treated as an inherently suspicious incubator for criminality.”
Dance changed after Castlemorton. “The 1997 election was won by house music,” claims Gillett. New Labour embraced its youth, creativity and entrepreneurialism. It was attracted to superclubs such as Liverpool’s Cream that seemed to spearhead urban change. (James Palumbo, co-founder of London’s Ministry of Sound, lent his chauffeur-driven car to Peter Mandelson.) Property speculation and gentrification led to many old-school, “faintly sordid” clubs closing. 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.
Gillett co-produced Jeremy Deller’s terrific 2019 acid house documentary film Everybody in the Place. Party Lines is shrewd, both speculative and a deep dig, and very funny on the rise of “business techno” (such as DJs partnering with chefs “spinning a tastefully curated selection of tunes to accompany feats of molecular gastronomy”), or the 60-year-old veteran flown over from the United States for a two-hour set “combining the requisite number of familiar classics with newer tunes harvested and prescreened for him by a team of interns”.
Gillett might have put the voices of partygoers higher in the mix; ideas such as the “communal world-building of the dancefloor” deserve more grounding. A comparative element would have been helpful too: are the English angstier about collective revelry than people in other countries? Party Lines invites many perhaps unanswerable questions. Like its subject matter, it’s buzzing, restless, bolshily insurgent.
• Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain by Ed Gillett is published by Picador (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
