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Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain

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It usually goes like this: in 1987, a coterie of UK DJs went to Ibiza and came back transformed by Balearic dancefloor sounds and MDMA. However, since the 1980s and well into the 1990s the UK government has led a widescale crackdown on football related violence. 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. He also takes a scalpel to the controversial Boiler Room platform, who’s championing of cutting edge, underground talent has subtly diverted attention away from accusations of dodgy business practices and the alleged mistreatment of employees.

Police damaged vehicles and burned the tents of ravers; they hid their ID numbers; they dredged up arcane laws to stop free movement. Newspaper reports – and Party Lines has much to say about media coverage – are written by people who never set foot in Notting Hill on August bank holiday. But when you look at those older, canonical book-length histories of dance music, they generally start in 1987 with people taking pills in Ibiza. Party lines were usually assigned a distinctive ring pattern such as long-short-short (Morse code dash-dot-dot = “D”) or long-long-short-short (Morse code dash-dash-dot-dot = “Z”). The party at the Dome was especially surreal considering that, only a decade prior, the word “rave” had kicked off a nationwide moral panic.Online since 2010 it is one of the fastest-growing and most respected music-related publications on the net.

I noticed the book contains an image of a sound system playing out of the upper floor of the Mangrove Restaurant. It’s bound to have played a part for some people, but various factors were in play around that time - several bad events in 1985 culminating in the Heysel disaster all conspired to dent the dubious glamour associated with the ‘firms’, and the resulting improvements in police tactics and marshalling, all-seater stadia, then Hillsborough in 89 all played their part. 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.

From spy cops infiltrating Spiral Tribe to a constant barrage of police harassment, aimed to disrupt and create a sense of looming paranoia, which threatened to tip into full-scale, civil violence. In one of the best chapters in the book, Gillett does a brilliant job of tracing the history of both. Over the last few months he has disarmed packed rooms of rowdy concert goers, leaving them silent as they hold fast to every syllable sung.

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.

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.

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