Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain

Product Information

Chaptered by theme rather than chronology, Party Lines can be a little repetitive. But Gillett’s research is thorough and thoughtful, particularly when debunking some of the myths around dance music and drugs. When, in 1995, 18-year-old Leah Betts died after taking ecstasy and then drinking 12 pints of water in just 90 minutes, causing her brain to swell to fatal proportions, the tabloid railed hysterically against drug taking and clubbing. And yet, reports Gillett, omitted from this coverage was the fact that Betts took the pill at home. The moral panic had no constructive effect anyway: between 1994 and 1996, self-reported Ecstasy use among 15-to-34-year-olds almost doubled. In 1971/72, I lived in a grotty flat on Westbourne Park Road, a couple of streets away from Island’s studios. We bought out veg on Portobello Road, saw films at the Electric Cinema, but rarely ventured further west to Ladbroke Grove or north past the motorway overpass to the nether reaches of the market. For a short while I sold Frendz on the streets - I was very bad at it - but that involved going to the office which was up that way. I recall seeing completely burnt-out saucepans for sale on a market stall, which puzzled me. All of which is to say that we didn’t have really any interaction with the West Indian community and I don’t recall any obvious presence on their part. The place was crammed with hippies and boarded up rows of houses, but squatting was not yet widespread, although there was talk of it. A traveller is arrested at the Battle of the Beanfield in Wiltshire, 1985. Photograph: PA Images/Alamy Then parents saw the bills — their kids had charged hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars worth of calls in the space of weeks.

Ecstasy - the drug that made British football hooligans stop fighting and start hugging each other.Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth Browsing through the Staten Island, NY telephone directory of January 1940, I found that certain phone numbers were printed with a suffix J, M, R or W. What do these mean? I've marked a few of them in the image below. It is quite correct to say this was done to make it easier for the human (mostly women by this time) operator. Transylvania-6 and -7 were NYC exchanges the most famous number was Transylvania-6-5000 used in the song by that name. (See note below.) That was before my time, but I remember it was the Hotel Pennsylvania near Madison Square Garden. (Its still there!) A passionately argued and intensively researched addition to the ever-evolving narrative of UK dance music culture. * Matthew Collin *

Ed Gillett: The first function of the police is to embody moral panics around dance music. Whether it’s M25 raves in 1989 or panics about knife crime in 2019, they have been a constant presence. 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. Getting one over the establishment, and doing something you’re not supposed to do, has always been part of the appeal. One of the things that really drove attendance to the Castlemorton Common Festival in 1992 – possibly the biggest illegal gathering in British history – was the police and media loudly urging people not to go.standard Youtube comments such as “typical leftie view” and “he doesn’t once mention football hooligans taking e!!!” On December 31 2000, the Millennium Dome hosted a 20,000-person, 24-hour rave promoted by the Ministry of Sound. It was a watershed moment for dance music in Britain. As journalist Ed Gillett writes in Party Lines, his fascinating and comprehensive history of Britain’s fraught relationship with the dance floor, “rave – and the countercultures which birthed it – had spent much of the 20th century harried by the police, targeted by politicians, and exiled to the fringes of polite society and urban space”. Now, a year into the 21st century, ravers were “clutched tight to the Government’s bosom”.

Meanwhile, the phone companies collected a share of income from each group phone call — about 60%, reported Newsday in 1988 . And virtually anyone with a few hundred dollars lying around could buy up a local number, advertise it, and if it caught on, start raking in cash. It was the 1980s entrepreneur’s dream, albeit a risky one. A fascinating deep dive into dance music's uneasy relationship with the establishment. * Jeremy Deller * Ed Gillett: There’s something inherently political about a group of people taking control of a space without necessarily having the approval of mainstream society. That could be a marginalised community finding a space of solace and peace for a night; it could mean mobilising 30,000 people to go and seize a piece of common land. The narrative thread that runs through the book is, the author explains, “a power struggle: between our collective urge to congregate and dance, to lose and find ourselves on the dance floor, and the political and economic authorities which seek to constrain or commodify those messy and unstable desires.” Swap “the road” for “the dance floor” and that sentence describes the essence of the battle for the heart and soul and freedom of Carnival.

Hard truths and rhythms collide as a controversial and erudite unravelling of UK dance culture, uncovers its secret social and political history. You are correct that these are party lines. The letters represent an additional digit dialed after the others in cases where automatic operations was implemented. This article goes into great depth all about how multi-party telephone lines worked, but as a short excerpt: 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”. From time to time, a narrative arrives so focused both aesthetically and politically that it’s impossible not to be pulled in by its narrative. In the introduction of his superb book ‘Party Lines’, author Ed Gillett lays out the vision for his exciting history, namely: ‘to deconstruct some of the myths around raves emergence and early years’ and further ‘to expand the narrative towards the present: where previous retellings tend to lose some of their urgency after the Criminal Justice Act is passed.’ One thing I found striking about the book is that it partly functions as a history of policing across the last four decades. What role has the police played in the history of dance music?

Fantasy is right. Some teens used the service to talk about sex, and later when moderators were added, used veiled language. “I listened in once, and I can’t even begin to tell you what they were talking about — with strangers!” a mother of three from Wellesley, Massachusetts, told People . Others defended the chats as preventative. “You can’t catch anything over the phone,” insisted chat line operator Betsy Superfon. Can't talk about New York (as I'm in Australia), but when I was a kid the Brisbane phone numbers had a one two digit alpha prefix, then a 4 digit number - eg my grandparents were J 2871, and my aunt LX 1710. These letters were merely mapped on to the dial (note that Australian phones go from 1 to 9 then zero): You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. 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. ABOUT USLouder Than War is a music, culture and media publication headed by The Membranes & Goldblade frontman John Robb. Online since 2010 it is one of the fastest-growing and most respected music-related publications on the net.The history of dance music has been hugely mythologised. Were there any particular cliches you wanted to avoid? Ed Gillett: In the book I talk about AI and climate change. The threats posed by AI to dance music are the same as with any other cultural pursuit. I guess the interpersonal nature of DJ’ing and the experience of being in a club might help certain sections hold out for longer. But we’re not far from the point that AI will be able to mimic basically any genre. Dance music is synthetic by its nature, it’s designed to be functional and often quite minimal in the elements it uses – there are very few fields of endeavour more suited to AI. A scheme widely used in the Bell Telephone System for four-party full selective lines (under both manual and automatic operation) used a suffix letter, generally from the set J, M, R, and W, to designate which of the four ringing signals applies to the station. These letters were chosen to not be easily mis-heard when spoken (with regard to manual operation). 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. One of the things I was hoping to do with this book was to re-examine some of that history, taking into account the changes in society and culture that have happened since then. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.