Category Archives: Reviews

Book club: lost in the library special

Most of you reading this will be far too young to remember the original DjHistory site. Ask your gran. Back in the before-times we published snappy book reviews about 100 words each. Of classics we loved, and new releases we managed to blag from publishers. A team of restorers has been working night and day and has pieced together the following.

Spot-on acid house daftness

Once In A Lifetime: The Crazy Days of Acid House and Afterwards – Jane Bussman, 1998

Acid house told as sit-com. A hilarious scrapbook chronicle filled with snippets, quotes, memories, and stories. If you were there, every page revives priceless forgotten details; if not, this is the best book for soaking up the sheer lunacy of the time. Bussman captures those crazy, hazy days of the summer of love better than anyone.

Foremost acid house history

Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House – Matthew Collin, 1997

With Collin as editor, i-D magazine boasted the most insightful coverage of the ’80s emerging club cultures. Altered State was the first serious book about acid house, and for a ride through the social and cultural revolution that ecstasy and house music ignited, it remains the best. The 2006 update catches Tony Blair using an E anthem to get elected.

TV spin-off house history

Pump Up The Volume – Sean Bidder

The TV documentary was strong on the origins of house, then got a little cabbaged when it tried to stand up and go anywhere. This accompanying book is similarly disorganised, but worth having for its acres of extended quotes: a veritable oral history. It would be churlish to point out the debt it owes to our own little history book, but we’ll do it anyway.

On-the-ground house memoir

Adventures In Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture – Sheryl Garratt 1998

Former Face editor Garratt follows the arc of acid house from American origins to Clink Street, Shoom and the Hacienda, then along the M25 to raves, Ibiza and the Criminal Justice Bill, including interviews with all the major players. Having partied centre stage through it all she treads a bouncing line between history and memoir.

Scrappy happy house history

What Kind of House Party is This: History of a Music Revolution – Jonathan Fleming, 1995

When house was still in short trousers, champion raver Fleming self-published this psychedelic monster, took the pictures, did the interviews, wrote the theme tune, sang the theme tune, visited Detroit and Chicago, broke his leg, collected a load of flyers and a tall stack of his own photos, hosed it all into an stone-age version of Photoshop and hit the button marked ‘SWIRL!’

Precision-engineered rave chronicle

Energy Flash – Simon Reynolds

Step this way for ’ardkore… A rock fan bodysnatched by techno, Reynolds filters the UK dance explosion through grown-up music journalism, going deep with genre definitions and record-by-record analysis, but always coming up for air with rich writing and great musical descriptions. Dance music’s iconoclast. Published as ‘Generation Ecstasy’ in the US.

Chi-town originator stakes his claim

House Music: The Real Story, by Jesse Saunders, 2007

Though the name came from Knuckles’ disco edits and much of the musical spark from Italy, with ‘On & On’, Jesse was the very first to get Chicago’s home-grown minimalism onto vinyl, and here he stakes his claim as the originator of house music. A well-written, detailed and personal tale, evoking Chi-town’s teenage heroes and the music biz villains who stole their thunder (including a good old Tong-lashing).

Tooled up gangster house

Class Of 88: The True Acid House Experience, Wayne Anthony, 1998

‘Alright geez, hold this huge bag of money could you, I’ve just got to fix the smoke machine.’ While you were off your tits dancing in a cowshed, Wayne, founder of the Genesis raves, was coining it hand over fist, outsmarting the filth, facing down shooters, and generally living the life of smiley. Don’t worry, there’s no modesty to spoil the fun. The Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels of acid house.

US ’90s dance boom

Rave America: New School Dancescapes – Mireille Scott,1999

Written before ecstasy hysteria pretty much criminalised the flourishing US rave scene, Scott’s solid account of America’s dayglo dance teens feels like a first act in search of a climax. It chronicles NYC technophilia, west coast rave, including some great anti-Brit backlashery, and a trip to Sasha-loving Orlando, from whence emerged the cultural treasure we call breaks.

Southern deathbed rap

Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap – Nik Cohn, 2007

Old white music writer (a short story he wrote inspired Saturday Night Fever), dying with hepatitis, settles in New Orleans, city of his personal demons, and as a musical last rites tries to connect with local rappers. It’s all doomed; their styles are too local and they don’t want to be helped. Filled with scenes of poverty, struggle, hope, despair, and that’s even before Katrina hits. Beautiful in its futility.

Straight outta Compton

Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood – William Shaw, 2001

Compton high school yearbooks have full-page ads for funeral parlours. Brit William Shaw’s South Central travelogue brings you kids whose lives are shaped by gangs, riots, drive-bys and… hip hop. Demo tapes, sad talent shows, scraping a living putting up Alkoholics stickers. The characters and scenery are vivid enough for a novel. Plus chats with Cube, Tupac and others who made it.

Hip hop’s Rosetta stone.

Rap Attack: African Rap to Global Hip Hop – David Toop, 1984

The first great book about hip hop, written back when it was def, fly and fresh as a daisy. After talking roots – African poets, soul preachers and doo-wop groups – Toop grabs Flash, Bambaataa and the rest, adding some classic white-gloved, fat boombox B-boy pics to boot. Rap Attack is essential old school literature; updated editions leave the original text and photos intact.

20 years of Black culture

Buppies, B-boys, Baps and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture – Nelson George, 1993

So a black yuppie, KRS-1, a Black American Princess and a bohemian Fort Greene intellectual walk into a bar… A collection of George’s Village Voice column, collating the varied characters and concerns of ’90s black American culture, along a personal 20-year timeline that winds from the Muhammad-Frazier fight to the debut of Urkel, ‘the first hip black nerd in history’.

Hip hop’s pioneers tell their tales

Yes Yes Y’all: Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade – Jim Fricke & Charlie Ahearn, 2002

From the times when dinosaurs ruled the earth and Kool Herc rocked the Bronx. Back in the day – when it was fun, spelt F-U-N. Fricke and Ahearn (Wildstyle director) take us back, effortlessly, brilliantly, merging a barrage of photos and flyers with extended interviews starring a full cast of B-boys, MCs, graffiti writers and old school pioneer DJs. To the beat y’all, and it don’t stop.

DISCO

Love Saves The Day: A History of American Dance Culture 1970-1979

Tim Lawrence, 2003

A scrupulous historical document: Lawrence follows the New York disco underground with detail to suit a forensic scientist. Forget character sketches, here’s detailed biography; instead of snappy anecdotes you get careful reconstructions. There’s charm, wit and warmth here (and great photos), but the more casual reader might not hang around long enough to find it.

Painstaking NY disco history

Disco – Albert Goldman, 1978

Best-known for digging dirt on Elvis and Lennon, Goldman became fascinated with the disco underground after interviewing Francis Grasso for Penthouse. The result, an extended essay and photo album, is one of the classic texts of dance music (now an expensive collectors’ item), not least for the respect Goldman gave to a scene most people saw as a gimmick. Profound passionate and prophetic.

Revered disco timepiece

Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco – Peter Shapiro, 2005

Peter Shapiro’s forensic examination of disco is at its strongest in his early brilliant chapters detailing its genesis from Parisian speakeasies to New York bacchanals. He excels at socio-cultural theories while still managing to convey the excitement of the music and clubs he undresses. A genre history that lovingly redresses Mama Disco’s oft-maligned reputation.

Mama Disco gets the biography she deserves

The Last Party: Studio 54, disco and the culture of the night

Anthony Haden-Guest

Debonair Vanity Fair hack Haden-Guest details the monied world of upper-crust New York clubbing in a history that climaxes the day Bianca Jagger rode a horse into Studio 54. It’s the full saga of Studio itself, populated largely by people with titles, racehorses and Truman Capote’s phone number; then Palladium, Limelight and other gossipy spots. Best picture caption: “Andy Warhol is in the rear.”

New York club vulture

CLUBBING

The Manual – Ministry of Sound:

After a total of 148 years writing about dance music, Broughton and Brewster emptied their hard disks for the men from the Ministry, found some lovely photos and added some jokes. The result was this beautifully designed coffee table book, which laid the ground for their classic, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. A perfect present for tricky nephews. Doesn’t actually contain much Ministry.

ISBN 0747276366

Elegant clubland colourbox

Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital

Most sociology is just pub-level chat disguised in impenetrable jargon; this book is wonderfully different. Not only is it written in earth language, but it’s filled with proper research, interesting facts and provocative insight. American Thornton uses her experience as a UK clubber (plus a good deal of history) to examine why the hell we love to go out dancing.

Club sociology that isn’t wank

Night Fever: Club Writing in The Face 1980-1997 – Richard Benson (ed)

The Face and i-D were the first magazines to take clubbing seriously on a regular basis. This little time capsule fills your head with bygone dancefloors, including several classic articles that were first to shine light on a scene: Stuart Cosgrove’s ‘Seventh City Techno’, Sheryl Garrat’s Chicago House report and Steven Harvey’s 1983 NYC disco snapshot.

Classic style mag clublife articles

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Seduced And Abandoned: Essays on Gay Men and Popular Music – Richard Smith, 1995

‘Pop music’s a bit like boys. I mean, I just really, really love it.’ Smith’s enthusiasm makes for sharp insight that never forgets the cheeky fun of it all. From homo svengalis and closeted pop puppets, to fag hags, queercore and heavy metal’s gender confusion, a beautifully written account of a night in a gay club and a hilarious history of the penis in pop.

Cheeky smarts about music and gayness

The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Hackers, Punk Capitalists and Graffiti Millionaires are Remixing Culture – Matt Mason, 2008

Wonderful for spirited stories of rebellious creativity; infuriating for sloppy logic and wild overclaims (who knew graffiti ‘inspired amazing new technologies’?). Arguing for an open-source world, Mason flits from a WWII jetty with its own stamps, to tagging the president’s plane, to the DJ nun who inspired David Mancuso. Great fun, brimming with colour, but in need of a remix to bring home a serious argument about copyright.

IP plunder and copyrighting wrongs

Slumberland – Paul Beatty (2008)

DJ philosophising of a higher fidelity. Beatty cracks post-racial satire like no other, and his third novel does for music what ‘Perfume’ did for stink. Trying to erase notions of ‘negritude’, Los Angeles DJ Darky gets his blackness caressed as ‘jukebox sommelier’ in wall-time Berlin while tracking missing jazz ghost ‘the Schwa’, whose chops are destined to wail over his perfect beat.

beats-per-minute poetics

UK BASS

All Crews: Journeys Through Jungle/Drum & Bass Culture – Brian Belle-Fortune, 2004

Intensive care nurse Belle-Fortune whipped up this spirited junglist scrapbook after partying his way from acid house, through hardcore, to jungle and drum’n’bass. All Crews is the closest to a classic text on the scene, fat with snippets, interviews, quotes and an extensive overview of the players, pirates and producers, including some evocative recollections and captured moments.

Spirited junglist patchwork

State of Bass : Jungle, the Story So Far – Martin James, 1997

James follows the early years of jungle, from its origins as a dark force emerging from rave, through its evolution into drum’n’bass, enlisting A Guy Called Gerald for a rousing forward. Strong on historical details, but written a little early for much in the way of perspective. The book ends on a plea for unity as he watches the genre splinter into shards of argumentative sub-scenes.

Early jungle d’n’b history

Cut ‘N’ Mix: Culture Identity and Caribbean Music – Dick Hebdige, 1987

This classic cultural history follows Caribbean music from slavery days, through the birth of ska and reggae, up to pirate radio and Smiley Culture, and ending around the emergence of ragga. Excels on reggae’s UK collisions and evolutions, from punks and dreads in Ladbroke Grove to the Hackney birth of lovers’ rock and the Coventry melting pot of Two Tone.

UK reggae culture classic

The Two Tone Story – George Marshall, 1990

A fan’s gushing love affair with ‘a stylish little number decked out on black and white checks.’ It charts Jerry Dammers’ biography and the rise of the Coventry scene, then lovingly chronicles each Two Tone release, complete with discography, scrapbook pics and details only a spotter could love.

Loving spotters guide to Coventry

SIXTIES

Wonderland Avenue: Tales of Glamour and Excess – Danny Sugerman, 1991

It’s not widely known but the seventies were nearly cancelled due to a lack of drugs. This was because Danny Sugerman had taken them all. Classic rock craziness by the one-time manager of the Doors – groupies, overdoses and cars in swimming pools. Whenever you get used to the excess, a stripling Iggy Pop arrives with three girls and a family pack of angel dust to warm things up a bit.

Original rockstar behaviour

Give the Anarchist A Cigarette – Mick Farren, 2001

An angry punk let loose at the heart of London’s sixties psychedelic love-in. Farren’s memoir paints the decade (and after) with hard photographic detail where his peers have only managed glowing romantic impressionism. Rings hilariously true.

bit more

The muck-flinging sixties

NYC

Disco Bloodbath: The Story of Michael Alig, King of the Club Kids – James St James

He came, he partied, he killed. The true story of New York superfreak club promoter Michael Alig, who killed his drug dealer for being tacky, then hailed a yellow cab to take the corpse to the river. Elegantly written by co-freak St James, it pins down the candy-coloured drug-skewed ‘Club Kids’ scene of New York misfits in a surprisingly moral tale.

NYC killer club kid shocker

Downtown – Michael Musto, 1986

Village Voice clubs scribe Michael Musto sweeps you on a mid ’80s clubland safari, armed with an Andy Warhol cover quote no less, showing off New York’s post-Studio 54 places, faces and social graces. The arty be-seen scenes of Pyramid, Mudd Club, Danceteria and Palladium are the main stops on his tour; Paradise Garage doesn’t even merit a drive-past.

Eighties NYC nightlife safari

SOUL, FUNK

Nowhere To Run – Gerri Hirshey

Along with Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music, one of the greatest books ever written about soul music. Scores of original interviews, beautifully written and with rare passion, it will make you, like any good music book, want to own the songs it documents.

bit more

The In Crowd: The Story of Northern Soul and the Rare Soul Scene – Mike Ritson/Stuart Russell

The Northern soul scene is littered with well-meaning but rubbish books. The In Crowd is passionate, put together with style and a soul nut’s eye for detail. There’s only one book you need on Northern soul and this is it.

bit more

The Death of Rhythm and Blues – Nelson George, 1988

The classic account of how black music carved a place for itself in apartheid America, how ‘race records’ evolved into rhythm and blues, then soul and funk, helped by some wily entrepreneurs and the rapid social climb of the first black radio DJs. The ‘death in George’s story is when black music found white acceptance with the era of Motown pop.

Black music takes America

fashion style culture

Street Style – Ted Polhemus

The 1994 original was issued to Japanese fashion students at the UK border. Now this classic spotters’ guide to ye olde street tribes of England is repacked and beefed by the lovely folk at PYMCA. Insightful essays about the evolution and importance of street fashion, and stacks of brilliant pics. Thanks to Ted Polhemus Japanese cities have a shopping mall crew assigned to each chapter of the book.

tribal gathering

Leigh Bowery The Life and Times of an icon. Sue Tilley

I saw him ‘give birth’ at Heaven. Some Italian boys were so horrified they were flicking lit cigarettes at him. Now that’s what I call an impact. From Club Kids to nu-ravers, so many have fingered Bowery’s ideas, we lose sight of what a revolutionary he was. A fearless explorer, he did for dressing up what Picasso did for painting or the drum machine did for dance music. An affectionate revealing biog written by his best friend.

Life.

Garments as legend

Club Kids: From Speakeasies to Boombox and Beyond – Raven Smith (ed), 2008

A sparky volume on the club faces who’ve led pop’n’fashion, from ’20s flappers to nu-rave. A few lapses: Leigh Bowery ranks next to Duchamp as a revolutionary artist, so it’s a crime to give him less space than some of the cheeky Hoxton peacocks currently recycling his ideas. Still, this is their book and if they want to portray the history of clubbing as merely a lead-up to Boombox, fairy nuff.

Shoreditch crowns a century of clubbing

Skins & Punks: Lost Archives 1978-1985 – Gavin Watson, 2008

Subculture-liggers will grab this as an eye-spy style manual. In fact the skinhead thing is close to irrelevant; better to see these photos as tender and revealing portraits of a gang of mates tumbling through life together. A first tattoo, at the fairground, outside dad’s, after school at my house… The last pic shows the day the world changed thanks to acid house (Gavin’s next book!).

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The Look: New Romantics – Dave Rimmer, 2003

With their post-glam, post-punk love of Bowie, Roxy and Berlin, the New Romantics definitely did their bit for the European eyeliner mountain. The Blitz kids also launched eerie synth futurism, scads of proper pop and the self-transformational genius of Leigh Bowery. Rimmer’s clued-up account details the movement’s influences and influence to show the substance behind the foundation. Forgive the clumsy ’80s pastiche design and buckle that swash.

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MUSICOLOGY

The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography – Evan Eisenberg, 2005

Before recording, to hear your favourite tune took a special occasion and a roomful of musicians, and owning or collecting music was unimaginable. In this quirky and thought-provoking treasure Eisenberg muses on the culture-quake of records and the love affairs with music they made possible. Originally published in 1987, the new edition adds digital musings.

Our love affair with recorded music

Will Pop Eat Itself: Pop Music in the Soundbite Era – Jeremy J Beadle, 1993

The guy who invented the sampler laughed when someone suggested it might be the future of music. Written in the aftermath of the ’90s remix revolution, with a resolutely chart-based pop perspective, this chronicles the rise of post-modern musical recycling, from scratching, through Stars on 45 pop-medleys and Coldcut’s cut-and-paste collages to the rise of house and techno.

Soundbites and sampling in pop

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain – Oliver Sacks, 2007

What’s your problem? Fear of music? tunes cause you pain? it’s all just noise? Call Oliver – ‘My wife’s not a hat’ – Sacks, famous neurologist, to help and explain with odd tales of melodic malfunction. Sadly it’s all genteel case histories with a classical bent – he blithely ignores the millions of brains who’ve done their own weekend pharma-musico-neurological experiments.

Star neurologist on music

Big Bangs: The Story of Five Musical Discoveries That Changed Musical History – Howard Goodall, 2001

Not content with writing the Blackadder theme tune, Goodall is on a mission to educate the masses in the mysteries of classical music, focusing on five ‘big bangs’: the inventions of written music, the piano, opera, recording and some cleverness called equal temperament, the secret that keeps the world in tune. A fascinating intro to the principles behind all music.

The foundations of (classical) music

This Is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession – Daniel J. Levitin

Explain the unspeakable magic when rhythms enter a human. How can vibrating air build emotions to bring you to your knees? Did music come before language? Exciting questions with astonishing answers. And Levitin, a neuroscientist rock producer, is the man to give you them. But his writing travels like treacle, his explanations meander endlessly. Dejected, you lose interest and put some music on.

Music, language, rhythms and emotion

SOCIAL HISTORY

Satan In The Dance Hall: Rev. John Roach Straton, Social Dancing, and Morality in 1920s New York City – Ralph Giordano, 2008

Once they’d hoodwinked the country into banning alcohol, America’s fundamentalists targeted dancing. Lincoln Nebraska outlawed eye contact between dance partners, while many cities banned ‘animal’ (ie black) dances, like the scandalous Charleston. Forgive the lifeless academic prose, this is a book of amazing revelations, leaving no doubt that jazz culture was more threatening than punk.

the original dance revolution

Social Dancing in America vol 1 & 2 – Ralph G Giordano, 2006

The author’s passion is clear, so it’s a shame he’s written this truly epic two-volume history in a style so neutral it might be aimed at Vulcans (at one point he even stops to define ‘house party’). From 1607 up to the twist, it’s an unbeatable academic reference, packed with social context and cultural insight. There’s not much thread to pull you along however, and it creaks badly once it reaches disco.

academic history of dance

Swing Under The Nazis: Jazz as a Metaphor for Freedom – Mike Zwerin

Quiffs, platforms, cut-off zoot suits, sunglasses and pop-socks, set off with a Neville Chamberlain umbrella and a smirk: les Zazous of wartime Paris kick-started club culture with swing records in secret cellars. Along with jazz musicans across Europe they showed up the Nazis as the squarest, grouchiest daddios in history. A laid-back look from American Parisian Zwerin.

Jazz sticks it to Hitler

The Twist: The Story of the Song and Dance That Changed the World – Jim Dawson, 1995

Despite the cancer of Strictly Come Dancing, most of us shake it without worrying about the rules; we can thank the twist. A bum-wiggling transatlantic dance craze, it ushered in the shocking idea of dancing without a partner, showed the new power of youth culture and niftily de-coupled dancefloors forever. Along the way there’s racism, payola, mafia dons and a ton of great stories.

Screwy dance revolution

Teenage: The Creation of Youth – Jon Savage, 2007

The teenager is a post-war creation, but what were the ingredients? American industry spat out ‘juvenile delinquents’ as early as 1810, while in Victorian London gangs of hooligan scamps ran wild. WWI thinned a generation of dreamers and turned the survivors wild and weird, leaving the Hitler Youth to take advantage. When American swing and rock’n’roll turned up, the job was already done.

Glorious prehistory of the teenager

Low Life: Drinking, Drugging, Whoring, Murder, Corruption, Vice and Miscellaneous Mayhem in Old New York – Luc Sante, 1998

In 1860s New York, the poorest drank poisonous alcohol from rubber tubes and whole families lived in the cupboard under your stairs. ‘Suicide Saloons’ had hatches in the floor for the cleaners to drop bodies in the river, and warring fire brigades would leave buildings burning while they fought their rivals. The bare-knuckled reality of ‘Gangs of New York’-era Manhattan.

Wonderfully grim 1860s NYC

Out Of It; A Cultural History of Intoxication – Stuart Walton, 2001

Not enough drug books are written by wine writers. Walton’s thesis is that getting fucked up is a human right and a biological imperative, and he shows us piss-head hamsters and silver Edwardian ladies’ syringes to prove it. He treats legal and illegal drugs alike, arguing with a flawless objectivity that mainlining skag is not so far removed from necking too much Kenko.

A refreshing look at refreshments

Cocaine: A Definitive History – Dominic Streatfeild, 2002

Your gram of toot left an acre of virgin rainforest drowned in petrochemicals and made sure a peasant family can’t grow their own food. Sobering tales, smugglers adventures and a deal of hidden history to bore your mates with in this ripsnorting read about the devil’s dandruff. Not least, the truth about Coca-Cola’s central role in the worldwide trade in blow. Not to be sniffed at.

Full speed down the white line

TECH HISTORY

How to Wreck a nice beach: The Machine Speaks – Dave Tomkins

The Vocoder started life as a phone scrambler for Churchill – five tons of valves and some self-destruct double decks, went on via late funk, early electro, Kubrick, Stalin and the Muppets – and ended up as the autotune chip that powers X-Factor and wibbles out of every sodcaster’s mobile. A bonkers story, but an exhausting read – as if in tribute to his material Tomkins writes so obliquely you have to decode every sentence.

The amazing life of the Vocoder

Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music Paperback – Greg Milner, 2010

Is recorded music ever the real thing? Or always better? A mesmerising tale of man’s relationship with music, detailing the leaps of recording technology and the genius of producers who made the studio their artform. You learn how the industry’s obsession with volume prevented CDs reaching their potential, and is marching us into a world of over-compressed flatness. Curious, fascinating, poetic.

Curious history of recorded formats

The Long Player Goodbye – Travis Elborough, 2008

Wagnerian epics to triple concept albums: the LP brought it all home. A smart history of listening, from 33 triumphing over 78 in the speed wars, up to the iPod uprising. Great details – his charity shops theory of tastelessness, the scandalous first edit (an operatic high C), even the well-worn pop stories feel fresh. But Elborough don’t dance: DJ-mix albums, a key innovation, get no mention.

Charting the album

Old rare new: The Independent Record Shop,

In Lincoln’s ‘Rockabilly Shop’ Colin and Mary Chapman sold me battered James Brown albums. Here’s a book of people who measure their time on earth in dusty vinyl: collectors sleeping in warehouses, shopkeepers too attached to their stock, handmade signs, groaning shelves. Inspired by a US road trip (film to follow), and centred on a touching memoir from Bob Stanley. Lovely and loving.

The record shop has its day

TECHNO

Modulations: A history of electronic music – Peter Shapiro (ed), 2000

The least inviting book I own – actually a ‘multi-media exploration.’ If martians read this they’d think dance music was an industrial process done in vacuum chambers to rigorous health and safety standards by academics in white coats and Polyveldt shoes. There might be some interesting things in here: interviews with Robert Moog and Giorgio Moroder perhaps, but the layout is designed to appeal to barcode machines, so I have no idea.

electronic chronicle killed by design

Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk – Dan Sicko, 1999

The allure of Detroit to eggheads means most books on techno are written for cyborgs. Sicko’s sharpened pen cuts through the crap, with great humour and precision, finding the human stories behind all that Third Wave futurology. Later chapters spread thin into a global checklist of techno’s many tendrils, but his journeys through Detroit’s pre-techno scene are outstanding.

Fine Detroit techno primer

GENRES, sounds AND LABELS

Ninja Tune: 20 Years of Beats & Pieces – Stevie Chick and Peter Quicke, 2010

‘We are ninja, not geisha’. Ninjatune was always about stealthy insurrection more than anything else, as it snatched the hip hop aesthetic for the UK and took it into the future and beyond. From Coldcut to Scruff to Roots Manuva, the label’s big guns paved the way for legions of research mixologists. The best labels have an unmistakeable identity, and this jam-packed retrospective nails it beautifully.

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BLACK DOG COSMIC BOOK?

As definitive a book of long-haired German Kosmiche freaks as anyone could desire, packed with knowledgable essays and an abundance of information: band by band, label by label, plus enough tripped-out psychedelic artwork to set off most smoke alarms. Its only fault is a lack of discographies, but an ausgezeichnet Buch nonetheless. Worth buying alone for a shaggy shot of pre-haircut Kraftwerk.

Tangerine Dream posing by a wall of computers.

WAX POETICS ANTHOLOGY VOL 1, 2008

If DJhistory smoked bigger doobies, knew Pete Rock, lived in Fort Greene and did capoeira at the weekend it would be Wax Poetics. We’d be kicking back with Idris Muhammad, Bernard Purdie, the RZA, Prince Paul, cat’s like that. We’d have James Brown’s drummers, graffiti nostalgia, and acres record porn. The best of the studious magazine’s first six years. Fine, detailed, earnest and pure.

WAX POETICS ANTHOLOGY VOL 2, 2009

meets more powerhouse musicians who keep the samplers in business, plus the intense-looking beatmasters who’ve done the sampling. Scrupulous collector-stiffening pieces on Sun Ra, Deodato, Randy Muller and 90s A&R wunderkind Dante Ross, and much more. Danny Krivit picks out 12s, and DJ Premier confesses he’s a Smiths fan. Mind you, I still think ‘Wax Poetic’ would have been a cleverer name.

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The Sound of Philadelphia – Tony Cummings, 1975

With the march of an obsessive, and some friendly words from the musicians, Cummings traces Philly soul power from its gospel and doo-wop roots, up to Gamble and Huff, Sigma Sound Studios, the O’Jays and MFSB – ‘a rag-bag assortment of leather-capped soul brothers and near-sighted Jews, renegade jazzmen and moonlighting symphonians.’ With some less-than-household names for the spotters.

Dedicated Philly groove

Warp: Labels Unlimited – Rob Young, 2005

It was originally going to be called Warped records, trivia fans. A scrap-packed coffee-table compendium on the Sheffield label, from the bleep era, through the ‘intelligent’ techno rave-backlash, up to cutting edge filmmakers. Despite a section on Sheffield’s electronic prehistory, it’s fairly light on context. Lashings of Designers’ Republic artwork and a solid 1989-2005 discography though.

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1000 Songs to Change Your Life – Will Fulford-Jones (ed), 2008

The inevitable lists are well wrapped in engaging essays, as Time Out guidemaster Fulford-Jones collects music for goosebumps, adding smart top tens (Thatcher’s Britain, dance crazes, awkward time signatures…) and clips from the T.O. cupboard. Many of its 1,577 tracks will be old news to obsessives like you, but there are plenty of off-piste trails among them.

Bucket-list xxxxxxx

The Olivetti Chronicles: Three Decades of Life and Music – John Peel, 2008

When he died, a generation (or three) were as bereaved as if he were family, such was his place in our musical lives. So here’s another chance, via 30 years of his articles, to let the great man’s wearily mellow tones and life-affirming sarkiness infuse your evenings. All you need to complete the picture is a can of Tizer, some maths homework and your finger on a cassette-recorder pause button.

Keep it Peel

The Human League: Perfect Pop – Peter Nash, 1982

Written like an Ultravox video, every sentence swirls around in dry ice and contrast lighting, wearing a batwing blouse. Though clearly a chart-friendly cash-in there’s also a solid biog in here, including interviews with Oakey and the girls, quotes and clippings from the Heaven 17 half of the band, plus a decent discography and clever Martin Rushent telling production stories.

No longer working as a waitress

DJing

Danny Rampling

Why settle for just learning to DJ when you could learn the secrets of success and positive thinking at the same time? On the one hand this is a comprehensive DJ manual written by a spiritual figurehead of house music, filled with clear tutorials and solid insider advice. Turn to the second half and it’s a self-help programme written by The Danny Lama himself. Follow it to the letter and Mr Rampling will, ‘personally GUARANTEE your life will take on a whole new level of depth, happiness and success.’

DJ yourself into a brighter future

DJ Culture Ulf Poschardt

I was a wanker when I was a student; this book has much the same faults: it believes everything that it’s read on the subject, adds nothing new, regurgitates it with the best pseudo-intellectual vocabulary it can lay its hands on, and expects you to admire it for being original. Anyone who references Hegel and Descartes to explain DJing is not really at the same party as everyone else.

Scholarly guff with Nietzsche in the mix

superstar DJs Here we go

‘Yeah, I used to be a superstar DJ. Do you want fries with that?’ As Mixmag Editor through the ’90s, Dom had the beans to spill. A personal record-bags-to-riches-to-ditches journey, from the rise of Sasha, Cream and Ministry of Tescos, to Millennium Eve when things finally went all Paul Oakenfold. The icing on the cake is that since few jocks racked up any catalogue assets, most are destined to haunt Chinese superclubs until they die. Great, on their dosh, dirt, snort and skirt – Sasha mislaying a car, his mate Sparrow burying squillions in his gran’s garden, and the truth about how drugs actually keep Dave Beer alive.

Confessions of the superstar DJs

Last Night A DJ Saved My Life: The History of The Disc Jockey – Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton, 2006

Bill and Frank’s classic chronicle digs deep to find DJing started in 1906, the Nazis invented clubbing and Jimmy Savile be a hero to all should. Arguing that DJs not musicians are pop music’s true revolutionaries, it details with love all the scenes that matter. The new edition is beefed up with entirely new chapters covering techno, acid house, Ibiza, jungle, UK garage and cosmic disco

Extended remix of the classic dance history

How to DJ (Properly)

Best-selling DJing bible, fat like a car manual with pictures and diagrams, taking you from first day at school to beat-juggling and stadiums. Practical, no-bullshit advice with plenty of laughs. Bill and Frank instill a healthy attitude in the young and/or jaded, putting a love of music and personal taste above all. And who could miss ‘How to get into a helicopter without looking foolish’?

The Haynes manual of DJing

The Manual (How To Have A Number One The Easy Way) – Bill Drummond & Jimmy Cauty 1988

Back when number one was tops, this tiny book told you exactly how to get there – smash-by-hit. From those nice KLF boys, it’s a mash-up of devious cynicism, industry wisdom and gleeful Top-of-the-Pops-loving innocence. It’s also an uncannily accurate prediction of the sample-based no-experience-necessary future of music-making. I left a million quid on that table, anyone seen it?

KLF pranksters’ pop insurrection

Design After Dark: The Story of Dancefloor Style – Cynthia Rose, 1991

The story of the eighties club scene told through its visuals, from the early days of i-D and the Face’s influential Neville Brody right through to acid house and the post-house graphics of Trevor Jackson and Derek Yates. Filled with flyers, posters, record sleeves and magazine layouts, plus biographies of the era’s leading designers, it’s essential reading for fans of graphic art.

Nightlife on paper

PARTYING

Last Nights Party

“Yeah luv, it’s for a magazine/website/casting couch/really important wank – could you just get your knickers off, snog your friend and smear tequila on your boobies.” For Merlin Bronques it not only gets him laid, but thanks to lastnightsparty.com it’s made him famous, too. Erectile images of wasted kids and lurking slebs at slutty Williamsburg parties; with better tattoos, stronger drugs and skinnier, more expensive genes than you’ll ever fit into. All those times I took my camera to clubs, I knew I should have put some film in it.

EDIT

“Yeah, it’s for a magazine/website/really important wank – just get your knickers off, snog your friend and smear tequila on your boobies.” For Merlin Bronques it not only gets him laid, but thanks to lastnightsparty.com it’s made him famous. Slutty images of kids wasted at Williamsburg parties; with better tattoos, stronger drugs and skinnier, more expensive genes than you’ll ever fit into.

Happy Daze: A Personal Insight Into The Acid House Era – Samantha Williams

It’s great looking at pictures from your rave-past, great to make a personal album with flyers and stories. But to give it a 30 quid price tag? Sam runs RaveReunited.co.uk and this is her time capsule, mostly of the early ’90s free parties. It’s zigzaggy jpegs, and acres of average snaps. But though the images are flat the moments are timeless, and hey, isn’t that what it was all about?

Discombobulated: Dispatches From The Wrong Side – Simon Morrison (2010)

We were somewhere around Brighton on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. Morrison’s low-level international mayhem is not quite as out-there as he thinks. Still, he writes with real panache and the scenery flits by too fast for you to care. As he lurches between far-flung clubs and surreal celebs (Judith Chalmers) he turns a phrase like an intoxicated David Attenborough.

MANCHESTER

24-hour Party People – Tony Wilson,

Manchester’s slippery culture uncle traces the proud, daft idealism of Factory and the Haçienda – all the way to Sean Ryder selling Eddy Grant’s sofa for crack. No-one enjoys pricking Tony Wilson’s pompous Baudelaire-quoting ego more than Wilson himself, and for hilarity and detail his mythologised memoir outstrips even the glorious lunacy of the movie.

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The Haçienda Must Be Built – Jon Savage (ed), 1992

Despite the fact most of them were mooching around Rafters in dirty overcoats Rob Gretton was convinced Manchester kids needed a glossy New York disco. The rest is all hit and myth. A completist’s account, with joyous pics of the hallowed dancefloor, interviews with everyone involved, acres of Peter Saville flyers and complete event listings to May ’92.

The Haçienda

“We had a fookin’ blast, if only we’d known it was our own money.” Hooky manages to rewrite this sentence enough times to fill a whole book. There are solid anecdotes and much detail (a complete events list, including some DJ set lists). But as he sets the record straight, and you wade through talk of licensing boards, bar managers and operating costs, you realise you much preferred the legend.

Do Not Sell at Any Price – The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records

You’re not a true collector until you’ve battled a river for records. DJ Shadow tells a story about rescuing private press discs from a flooded basement while the Colorado river is coursing in. Amanda Petrusich goes a few steps deeper – her search for the world’s rarest records sees her scuba diving in the Milwaukee River, scrambling in its ‘brown and nearly opaque’ water for country blues records from the 1920s. History notes that Paramount Records, an offshoot of a furniture manufacturer (and no relation to the film company) once had a busy pressing plant on the riverbank. Paramount specialised in the street-level blues releases that are now most highly prized by collectors, and in 2013 someone paid $37,100 for Tommy Johnson’s ‘Alcohol and Jake Blues’, one of only two copies known to exist. Petrusich is risking life and limb in a wetsuit because there’s a chance she might strike gold. Apparently, when they closed the pressing plant in the 1940s, disgruntled Paramount employees spent their last day frisbeeing the remaining discs into the waves. She imagines these treasures, ‘deteriorating at the bottom of the Milwaukee, providing shelter for crawfish alongside crushed Schlitz cans and rusted car parts.’

On her mission to sequence the collecting gene, we visit record fairs, reissue labels and private listening rooms, meeting entertaining oddballs with immaculately organised shelving. Petrusich’s collectors are from the rarified world of 78s – those brittle shellac 10-inches that spun round at double speed (78rpm) and were phased out by the 1950s. Thanks to their age and fragility, they’re so rare that some copies are the only ones in existence.

While researching a story on the resurgence of vinyl, someone told her ‘I can introduce you to plenty of guys who are obsessed with LPs, but if you really want to talk to someone who’s totally bonkers, you need a 78 collector.’ This breed is so rooted in their well-bounded world, few are interested in any music after the ’40s. But they have stories, emotions and dilemmas any vinyl junkie will recognise. Why this and not this? Why the record and not just the recording? Are you a treasure hunter or a preservationist? What’s the difference between an archive and a hoard? When should you say no to an expensive purchase? Or as collector John Heneghan put it, ‘I knew it would be a financial burden beyond what any rational mind would consider a wise decision.’ Some are strange loners; others more communally minded: ‘I could not live with myself as a “collector” without at least one person I could share sounds with,’ says one. Do Not Sell At Any Price is a meditation on the soul of record collecting.

Aside from the nutters, collecting has serious implications – collectors’ subjective tastes are what have defined our view of past music styles: ‘The music that gets collected is also, by default, the music that is preserved and endures.’ She quotes blues historian Elijah Wald: ‘As white urbanites discovered the ‘race records’ of the 1920s and 1930s they reshaped the music to fit their own tastes and desires, creating a rich mythology that often bears little resemblance to the reality of the musicians they admired. The more records an artist had sold in 1928, the less he or she was valued in 1958.’

Immersed in pre-vinyl music, Petrusich brilliantly conjures the early days of the recording industry, a time when America was on the move, with south migrating north and country folk pouring into the cities, bringing the blues and countless other rural styles with them, with recent immigrants throwing global flavours into the mix. The first record companies made the most of this haphazard melting pot, sitting anyone with a guitar and fiddle – or a jug or a banjo, a balalaika or a laughing mule – down in the studio. This produced a wealth of oddities, and one of the great joys of the book is the stream of lovable obscurities it gives you.

The records she picks out are time capsules of human quirks. Wind up your Spotify and wallow in the utter lament of Geeshie Wiley’s ‘Last Kind Word Blues’. Or hear the sheer god-given urgency of Rev FW McGee in ‘Fifty Miles of Elbow Room’, as he and his choir belt out the good word fit to bust. Marvel at the strangeness of Arthur Miles’ ‘Lonely Cowboy’, which sounds conventional enough until Arthur spits bars of eery polyphonic throat-singing, as if he’s straight out of Mongolia. Like a flash of eye contact with a long-dead face in an old photo, these tracks give you human connections that dissolve a century. 1922’s ‘Okeh Laughing Song’ is one of the daftest things ever recorded – a couple of people cracking each other up for three life-affirming minutes. And you have to hear ‘Flat Wheel Train Blues’ from 1930, where Red Gay and Jack Wellman use their guitar and fiddle to create the steady beat and mournful whistle of a steam train. With their Appalachian drawls rambling over this locomotive rhythm track, it’s as as sparse and motorik as any Kraftwerk. Towards the end they spot a lonely mule who races the train, mewling at being left behind. ‘You’d holler too like that if you was to get left,’ says Jack.

As well as these gems she directs you to archivists and compilers who offer further treasures: like the Secret Museum of Mankind, or the Excavated Shellac and Dust to Digital websites. One delight was Opika Pende; Africa at 78rpm, a hundred recordings from 1909 to the ’60s. Do Not Sell At Any Price is a door into a wide world of long-gone music you’ve probably never bothered with, but that you’ll be grateful to have heard. They may be scratchy and trebly, but these selections have a humanity that deepens your feel for the early twentieth century. 78 collectors look down on the rest, suggesting it’s ‘comparable to collecting pebbles versus collecting diamonds’ By bringing you tunes filled with exuberance and life, Amanda Petrusich shows you there’s some truth in this.

And her adventures with the more bonkers end of the collecting spectrum are hilarious in any case, as these 78-hunters epitomise the mad optimism of the crate digger. To help her find those records in the depths of the Milwaukee River, she brings in someone with expert experience. ‘Steve worked part-time rescuing golf balls from the bottoms of nearby lakes; he knew a little about blindly digging around in mud.’ Frank Broughton

James Hamilton’s Disco Pages 1975-82

DJ and journalist James Hamilton was a force to be reckoned with, a 6’8″ giant of the British music press. His review columns for Record Mirror stitched together the community that became the UK dance industry. On his death in 1996, Eddie Gordon, head of A&R at Manifesto, underlined Hamilton’s importance: ‘He started a kind of national awareness among DJs. Via James’s columns people were able to find a link and find out what other DJs were playing.’ Paying similar tribute, Pete Tong praised the authority of his reviews. ‘He was drawing on such a wealth of knowledge that even if you didn’t agree with what he said, you had to respect his opinion.’ DMC founder Tony Prince simply reckoned, ‘The music business owes him a standing ovation.’

James Hamilton’s Disco Pages 1975-82, published by Greg Wilson’s SWS imprint, gathers seven years of Hamilton’s columns in a single volume. This labour of love was put together by Mike Atkinson, building on the amazing online resource jameshamiltonsdiscopage.com. Mike notes how the columns – along with Hamilton’s forceful personality – helped form the tastes of a generation of DJs, and actually drove the development of the craft in the UK. ‘He had a vision of how he wanted dance culture to be, and he willed that into being.’

Hamilton was a posh and imposing figure, a pedant and perfectionist. His DJ career began with a residency at the Kray Twins’ Knightsbridge club, Esmerelda’s Barn, and throughout his career his upper-class connections meant gigs playing debutante balls in country houses. In the mid-’60s he was in the States working for Seltaeb, promoting Beatles’ merchandise, but also indulging his love of soul and meeting stars including Sam Cook, Diana Ross and James Brown, whose first UK visit he helped arrange. On his return, as ‘Doctor Soul’ he was resident at famed mod spot The Scene, released a soul compilation on Guy Steven’s label Sue, started contributing expert black music reviews to Record Mirror, and set up as an early mobile DJ. But it was for his later 1979-84 residency at Gullivers, London’s premier funk and soul club, that his DJing is best remembered.

His greatest contribution was to popularise mixing among British DJs, a technique which was de rigeur in most American clubs by the mid ’70s, but which didn’t catch on in the UK until the rise of house. The well-financed Embassy club had brought American mixing DJ Greg James over in 1978, and he taught several Brits to mix, including northern soul star Ian Levine, who was evolving his sets towards disco. But with few exceptions, well into the ’80s, most British club DJs aspired to the slick patter of a radio jock, and talking between records was seen as an essential part of the job.

So, as a forceful evangelist of the wonders of mixing, it was James Hamilton who drove its development in the UK more than anyone. Already aware of the possibilities of beatmatching, his passion for ‘New York style mixing,’ was ignited after seeing Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage. Soon afterwards, in 1979, determined to bring UK DJs more in line with their US cousins, he organised a field trip to New York for UK jocks to experience the Garage and meet Levan. One pilgrim, DJ Froggy of the ‘Soul Mafia’ collective, declared himself a convert, and armed with the first Technics 1200s in the country, became a poster boy for the new style.

At the start of the same year Hamilton also began noting the tempo of all the tracks he reviewed, explaining the value of this in a piece titled ‘To BPM or not to BPM’. And while mixing remained contentious, with Neil Rushton documenting both sides of the argument in ‘Does the Talking Have to Stop?’ in Disco magazine, it was Hamilton’s dogged BPMing of records that inspired thousands of British DJs to give it a try. He offered mixing tips and even suggested mixable record combinations in his ‘Mixmaster’ playlists. And while Pete Waterman beat him by two weeks to be the first to publish BPMs, his were far more accurate. He was so scrupulous with his stopwatch he’d even note fluctuations in a record that might upset a mix, (certain jazz-funk tracks clocked up a dozen different BPMs).

It was because he wrote explicitly for DJs, reviewing records with a DJ’s understanding, and used his distinctive ‘squiggly, diddly, boppy writing style,’ (as Mixmag’s David Davies described it) to bring the music to life, that James Hamilton had so much influence. As dance music evolved, he was fiercely progressive, taking the right side of history as black music became more electronic, and introducing numerous new charts as the music he loved split into distinct genres, such as ‘Futurist’ reflecting the rise of synthpop, or ‘Boystown,’ charting the tastes of the UK’s gay clubs.

All this makes James Hamilton’s Disco Pages 1975-82 an essential chronicle of the British disco scene, filled with charts and reviews and nuggets of history with a similar richness of detail as Vince Aletti’s Disco Files. It’s taken five years to put together, with the reviews organised monthly, multiple indexes and a playlist for every month. Not to mention forewords by Norman Cook, and Greg Wilson, whose research has done so much to highlight Hamilton’s importance. There’ll be a second volume in a year’s time covering 1983-89.

Remembering James Hamilton – by Les Adams

Les Adams was a club DJ and DMC in-house remixer – and one half of dance hitmakers LA Mix – who helped James Hamilton splice together his renowned end-of-year megamixes on London’s Capital Radio every New Year through the ’80s. Les shared memories of his great friend on the DjHistory forum.

James was my best and dearest friend for many years and was best man at my first wedding. We produced the Capital Radio New Years Eve mix tapes together and were constant companions as judges on the DMC World Mixing Championships.

James’s role in promoting the use of BPM was invaluable and without him many DJs would have remained fumbling in the dark. A lot of people back then considered it cheating – but that’s like saying a motor mechanic doesn’t need to organise his tools in some sort of order and can have them all mixed up in a box. The best mechanic knows exactly where the 10mm spanner is so he doesn’t have to fumble around looking for it.

I used to teach mixing skills at The Academy of Contemporary Music. BPM was always the first lesson and those who bothered with it were the ones who got the best results. BPM is about being organized. Some rhythms can be deceptive and give the illusion of being faster or slower than they actually are, so the BPM is the only way to get an accurate measure of pace. BPM also suggests tunes that may mix together that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. For example, ‘Sweet Child of mine’ by Guns ‘n Roses is about 126bpm, the same as Dennis Ferrer’s ‘Hey Hey’. If I hadn’t calculated the BPM I would never have guessed the tempo is the same. Experimenting in this way could often lead to some very interesting possibilities, and it’s how James and I constructed the Capital Radio mixes, where we would mix everything from Kylie and Pet Shop Boys to Elvis Presley and the Clash, all seamlessly. We used the BPM to suggest tunes that just might mix together, all we had to do was try it and see.

The best mixes are those that follow the musical structure or use it correctly to make things happen at the right time. A good mix is when a bassline, vocal or break is timed to perfection. None of this happens by accident, it requires an understanding of the beat and bar structure of every tune, or it will go wrong. Excessive use of the varispeed is one of my pet hates. Or not following the 4/4 bar structure, mixing vocals over vocals and key clashes. Sometimes DJs forget that music has rules, just as a language has punctuation, sentences and paragraphs.

James’s home was a record library, every room was absolutely covered floor to ceiling with records in racks, shelving and crates. To make extra space for the records, he ripped out his kitchen appliances and cooked on a small stove in between racks of vinyl. His bedroom and half his bed were also covered in records. There was a record deck and a typewriter at the side of his bed where he used to write his reviews. He had a huge 13×2-inch letterbox cut in the front door so records would fit through it.

He was a keen photographer and had thousands of photos he took at music events. I don’t know what happened to them, but they alone could be made into a historical account of soul music and venues.

When James and I made the Capital FM house party mixes, he used to load his car up with countless boxes of records, both 7- and 12-inch, and arrive at the studio with every bit of space in his Nissan ZX crammed with vinyl.

Every sleeve was covered with his wonderful reviews and comments all over them. I’d tease him that writing all over the sleeves was going to devalue the records, but I wasn’t taking into account the value of his writing. He never intended to sell them in any case – what mattered to him was the music in the grooves. He said he needed a reminder of each record: ‘I’m buggered if I can remember what everything sounds like!’ So his reviews were as useful to him as they were to other DJs.

The New Year mixes were produced for Capital FM in London, although the last one we did together was for BBC Radio One. I did all the mixing with James making the track selections. He had great ears and a good understanding of which tracks would work together, especially when mixing cross genre.

We used his records as they were all mint and mine were well played in clubs. He passed me the tracks and I mixed them on two Technics SL1200s with Ortofon OM Pro styli, The mixer was a GLI 3990 and we recorded and edited on a Revox PR99 2 track open reel. We then dubbed to DAT for broadcast because the master tapes had hundreds of splices and we were worried one of them might come apart during playback! We used countless reels of Ampex 456 tape and ate a lot of food!

James was always late for everything. Even at his funeral, at his request, he arrived late. If you wanted him to be somewhere at 9pm, you’d tell him to be there at 5! I recall one occasion when he was due to be at my studio to work on a Capital mix at 3pm on a Friday… he eventually arrived at 9pm Sunday and proclaimed, ‘Sorry I’m Late! It’s too late to start working now and I’m hungry, let’s go and have dinner!’ The only thing he was ever on time for was his Record Mirror deadlines!

My most surreal memory of James was sitting with him and Flava Flav of Public Enemy after a DMC convention listening to them discuss doo-wop music! Two more different looking people you could not imagine, yet totally on the same musical wavelength with mutual and total respect for each other. At the end of the conversation, James peered at the huge clock the rapper used to wear on a chain round his neck and said, ‘So that’s how you know what time it is!’

James was a very honest, loyal and dedicated man who loved life, music, food, the countryside, and his wife Sally, who he married when they both knew he was dying of cancer. Sadly, she passed away shortly after him, I suspect of a broken heart.

He was forthright and often brutally honest in his views and could be infuriating at times, but nobody could wish for a better friend. Never one to give false praise, he was always the first person I went to for an opinion on my music, or anything else for that matter, knowing I would get an honest answer.

James was hugely admired by his colleagues and by most people in the music industry – except maybe those who got a less than favourable review in his column – but then they didn’t know the man behind the words. As much as he could be scathing in his remarks, he would also rave about a record he liked and most DJs and music fans would buy a record without hearing it, based only on his trusted word.

He was a big man in every way, stature and personality. I still miss being able to pick up the phone and chat to him about music, food or any other topic. He lived life to the full.

I loved him dearly and miss him to this day. If there is a funk heaven, my wish is to end up on the same cloud so we can once again sit and chat about music… and eat good food!

RIP my dear friend. Professionally and personally, nobody could ever replace you.

– Les Adams.

Welcome To The Club – The Life and Lessons of a Black Female DJ

This rollicking memoir takes you through unmarked doors vibrating with bass to celebrate a life lived to the full in dance music. For Paulette The Club is many things. It’s her escape from a too-young marriage. It’s Manchester’s Number One where she’s an extrovert dancer freaking out to Prince. It’s the Haçienda, where she’s resident DJ in a cast iron bikini at the stereotype-busting Flesh. It’s youth TV where she’s a shaven-headed face to reckon with. Later it’s the music biz club where she’s doing label press and A&R with Gilles P and Talking Loud, Black Market, Azuli, Defected. The Club is The Zap, Queer Nation, Venus, Vague, as she clocks up motorway miles guesting at the best queer nights in the land. And when she becomes Ministry of Sound’s special envoy, a globetrotting DJ with just one name, for Paulette The Club is the whole wide world.

But the title is also about The Club that keeps a tough guard on its velvet rope. This is a book about insiders and outsiders in an industry as riddled with inequalities as any other, but that until recently believed its own hype. For most of its history dance music thought of itself – if it thought much at all – as a diverse and inclusive rainbow nation. ‘Hand in hand… we’ll make it to the promised land.’ Paulette’s book questions this, loving the moments when she finds that it’s true, and calling it out with footnotes and statistics when it most patently isn’t. Who gets into the club, how long they stay there, how much they get paid and how well they are remembered – it’s not always fair and it’s often not even clear. Sex, race and gender are the filters she applies, and while her arguments hit home she avoids drowning you in academic abstractions.

With nine lives lived in Manchester, Ibiza, Paris and London, Paulette has plenty of tales to tell. She regales taking ‘lines of cocaine off the highly mirrored wedge heel of a now collectible Prada shoe that was passed under a toilet door.’ Or playing overtime because the DJ following her at the Terrace in Space is too spannered to see. Or grabbing her identical twin Paula to stand in for her because her head’s in bits from an ill-timed pill – then enduring the DJ frustration at hearing the crowd ebb away as her sister plays the same record three times in a row.

And she’s great on the grinding prep work of a committed DJ. The endless processing of music and the hours of listening to duff tunes in search of gold. She details the bad diet, grim rooms, cancelled flights and poorly arranged itineraries of the pro, with great images like ‘a travel iron with half the carpet melted onto it.’ The recent paralysis of lockdown is especially vivid. It was so destructive to freelancers in general, but especially to DJs, who saw their livelihoods cease overnight. Beset by covid-sponsored anxiety, Paulette suffers her own literal paralysis, then pulls out of it with strength of will and the support of a new community online.

Most of all, this is a survival manual – mentorship on the page. Paulette is a role model laid bare, offering an honest recounting of her career, full of wisdom, guidance and occasional rage, with tips and watch-outs for DJs of any sex or gender. She gives encouragement to be proudly difficult: in a great note of defiance she declares that she no longer tries to fit in, ‘with people or in places where I no longer fit.’

Her formative experiences chime with other foundational female voices in DJing’s history, most of whom say they weren’t aware of barriers to entry because they made their own way in a role that hadn’t yet gathered many rules. ‘In the beginning, “DJ” wasn’t a career ambition or goal for anyone (men included) so we women never saw our gender, race or sexuality as compromising it any further.’

Instead, she says she was largely self-propelled: ‘We did it for love. We did it for the party,’ she says. ‘We founded a new culture, a new way of life, then shared our love, vision, desire and the obsession that drives us generously with the world. With no one like us who we could model ourselves on, we became the influencers and influences of the future.’

In the back end of the book she rejoices in the latest incarnation of this club she’s helped build. Which like all the best spots is filling up with new faces, voices and energy. Paulette celebrates her new sisters with big-ups and shout-outs, paying it forward to the inheritors of the decks. ‘I love it. We all love it. I totally buzz off what I do. I am grateful every day that I can do what I do as a full-time job. There is nothing that matches that feeling of connection between myself and a crowd that’s as passionate, obsessive and excited about music as I am.’

Full disclosure here: Bill and I figure in the book somewhat – as ‘gatekeepers’ of the history, though, as we told her, we could never think of ourselves that way. If anything, we felt like chancers who’d struck lucky, surprised no-one more qualified had beaten us to it. We felt honoured to tell the story, detectives pressing record and putting the protagonists’ voices directly on the page. But of course, gatekeepers we were. Paulette’s book reminds us that with all the best intentions we made conscious and unconscious choices about who got our airtime.

We owe her a big hug of thanks for this; she was one of the people we turned to in 2021 to understand our own book better. In 23 years its place in the world had evolved. And if the meaning of a text changes with its reader, Paulette was one of the readers for whom it was now different. She helped us go deeper into the struggles women DJs have faced, detailing the wage inequality and barriers to recognition they still encounter. She was a big part of us refitting Last Night a DJ Saved My Life with the self-knowledge it needed to sit comfortably on the shelves again.

Her own volume enlarges on those same themes brilliantly. In graceful readable style it’s an account of the sexism, racism and ageism in thirty years of dance music, as well as the career moves, milestones and missteps of a black woman DJ not afraid to make her point. As history gets more granular it gets more true. And an eyewitness report from the global DJ booth like this is peak personal truth. It sits well with recent memoirs from Harold Heath and Emma Warren – soul-baring accounts of this living culture we’ve all been part of. Thankfully, with dance music narratives less of a rarity, the players no longer need gatekeepers to tell their stories.

Even fuller disclosure: let me also fess up that I may have helped set this book back as much as a decade by giving Paulette writerly ‘advice’ back when I was younger and way more stupid. Thankfully, my unhelpful help – about upping the drama and layering on the sensational – is now redundant. The intervening years have let her write a much better book than I think either of us imagined back then.

For one, she’s come to it stronger and more focused, fierce grey beehive to the fore. The last decade has been one of growth, setback and rebirth for her, as she’ll tell you elegantly on the page. And the terrible clarifying events of George Floyd’s murder, the Black Lives Matter movement and the #MeToo awakening have created a context into which it falls perfectly. This book is angrier, clearer, more timely. It has more of a mission, and it’s also more loving, more grateful, more evocative and personal. 2023 is different too. The narrative is richer, the machinery of culture more widely understood, the battles for visibility and recognition no longer so far behind the scenes.

‘My hope is that this book embarrasses the DJ boys’ club into throwing its doors wide open to admit, acknowledge, appreciate, embrace… the significant contribution made by women, people of colour and other marginalised communities who created this scene and continue to make it so varied and rich… We have more than earned our membership but we won’t beg for the space at the table.’

Though she’s a softie at heart, our Paulette doesn’t let anyone off the hook. In Welcome to the Club she cuts to the quick with her incisive Manc sarcasm, then, as you’re licking your wounds, there’s inclusive Manc love, wrapping you up in a cotton shawl with a mug of cocoa. With this heartfelt book, she’s joined another Club – that of the published author. And along the way she’s helped some of its earlier members better understand the privileges that offers. Thanks for both Miss P.

Frank Broughton

Party Lines: Dance Music & The Making Of Modern Britain

‘Forget about the myopic parochialism and performative nostalgia of Britpop, with which Blair and others are far more regularly and erroneously associated,’ he writes with timely precision, ‘the 1997 election was won by house music..’ While Steve Lamacq and others rewrite history, Gillett takes the era head on and offers a persuasive alternative view of not just ’90s, but a broad sweep of dance music history.

Lost in the glaze of flickering lights, dancing has often been delicately freighted between thoughtless hedonism and acts of resistance, but has probably more than any other human activity been frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted. Emma Warren’s recent book, Dance Your Way Home, was a clarion call for the act of dance-for-all, from Cecil Sharp House to Chicago footworkers and, in many ways, Ed Gillett’s Party Lines feels like a handy companion to Emma’s, with the duo’s aligned take on the both the politics and physiology of dancing. As he comments in our interview, ‘There’s something really powerful about moving in rhythm with other people.’

Over the years, there have been numerous attacks on the very notion of dancing together, whether via law and order, populist governments (who let’s face it, don’t like young people gathering in any form at all) or religious leaders, who clearly (often erroneously) see dancing as perilously close to that other forbidden activity, sex. Taking this power as a starting point, Gillett digs deep into the psychology of why; especially where it rubs up against figures of authority, whether that’s the biggest mass arrest in British history at a rave in Yorkshire or raiding one of London’s key gay entertainment hubs, the Market Tavern in Vauxhall, where Lily Savage was in residence (‘Well, well, looks like we’ve got help with the washing up,’ she acidly commented as they turned up in rubber gloves).

Gillett looks at how the music industry has sucked up, co-opted and frequently de-fanged areas of the dancefloor and partying, where capitalism has extinguished radical action. The initial impetus for Party Lines came from early essays he wrote for the Quietus on party organisations like the privileged house quartet Housekeeping, and their jarring relationship between their night-time hobby and contradictory daytime work as property developers (with aristocratic leanings, natch). He’s similarly merciless with companies like Boiler Room and Broadwick Live (while also acknowledging their importance in the industry’s culture).

There’s an impressive amount of original research in the book, the product perhaps of Gillett’s former employment, firstly, at campaigning organisation Liberty and then later, working as chief archivist on Jeremy Dellar’s Everybody In The Place documentary (Party Lines stands on the shoulders of Dellar’s work, but also, especially, Matthew Collin’s Altered State.) It’s particularly fierce on matters of marginalisation and demonstrates not just how far we’ve come but how we have so much further to travel. It’s a book brimming with ideas and indignation, but it’s written with such verve and zip he carries you along, panting in its slipstream. Sometimes it seems low on solutions, but it’s an incredibly worthy addition to the canon, as well as a manual for irreverent, insurrectionary party-throwing.

What was the initial impetus to writing the book? What got you started?
I guess the three things that I’ve always been most interested in throughout my life have been music and culture, politics and activism and grassroots social movements and physical space. And so, finding a niche to write about all those things, the politics of urban space and the way that dance music connects into, felt like an area that I could explore.

I worked on a film called Everybody in the Place, which was directed by Jeremy Deller. I got brought in to do the archive research, so to bring a sort of journalist-y dance music fan angle to it and track down old footage from the New Dance Show in Detroit of a bunch of Detroit techno dancers going wild to Kraftwerk in 1989, or old camcorder rave footage and work out who owned it and get it all licensed. And through that, I ended up helping out to develop the storyline. Obviously the way the film’s structured is it’s sort of a presentation of archive material, so the archive became really important to structuring the film’s narrative.

I’d known the basic history of dance music, but I wouldn’t say that it was an area that I was particularly expert in. My interests were all really about how it functioned in the present. Working on that film made me realise that a lot of these threads connect all the way back through into the past. I’d read books like Energy Flash and Altered State and Class of ’88 by Wayne Anthony, so I was familiar with the history, but I hadn’t really joined the dots until I worked on that film: oh, okay, it’s all part of the same continuum.

Then I wrote a piece in 2020 which looked at the role of a quartet called Housekeeping and two of them are corporate property developers. One ended up building this luxury apartment block in Aldgate, which got criticised very heavily for installing an entirely separate entrance for the council tenants that they were obliged to include in the developments. At night, they moonlighted as DJs and ran their own club nights. So anyway, I wrote a piece about them and the way that wealth and class quietly distorts the function and form of dance music. And that was really widely read. I got an email from an agent saying, “Have you ever thought about writing a book?“ I’m not the most self-confident of people. I hadn’t necessarily assumed that my writing would ever graduate into something more substantial until someone, my agent Charlie, voiced that idea and suggested that he had confidence in it. And that was a bit of a light bulb moment for me, where suddenly all of these things had been percolating for the previous few years coalesced into an idea for a book.

I’m wondering how you square the history of dance music in this country, which has always been both quite political, in a community or cooperative sense, but it’s also always been very entrepreneurial?
It’s an interesting thing, isn’t it? A lot of dance music throughout its history has not been overtly or deliberately political. Like, it’s not been about writing a manifesto and then starting a club as part of a coherent political ideology. But I interviewed Joey Wieczorek who ran Labyrinth, and he was describing being picked up by the police, and the first question he got asked was, “Is this political?“ And he’s like, “I just want to go and get off my face, and you think I’m Jeremy Corbyn. What’s going on?“ What’s interesting about dance music is that it exerts a political force without it necessarily being consciously political in any way. Like, assembling a group of people without state permission to make loads of noise and get off your face is inherently a political act. It’s an act of act of communion, it’s an act of ritual that lends itself very, very easily to more overt forms of politics, but doesn’t necessarily need that in order to exert a political pull.

Governments generally fear people gathering together in large numbers, and especially if they’re working class.
That’s one of the things I wanted to do with the book was make sure that they didn’t treat dance music as unique in that sense, right? The way that the government responds to dance music was not really rooted in some particular specific fear of dance music as opposed to a fear of growing trade unionism. The policing at Orgreave was the same as the policing at Castlemorton and all these other places. The concept that I go back to throughout the book is the enemy within, which referred specifically to militant unions and labour led councils, but actually was kind of a proxy for, I think, all of the degeneracy that Thatcher and her acolytes saw in Britain. Whether that’s ravers or travellers or homosexuals or people of colour or whoever, they’re all part of that same kind of othering.

So dance music is inherently political. It can’t not be political, because it always automatically represents some sort of threat to the status quo. That doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is chatting about Marx in the smoking area or using the club as a tool of revolution. You know, the free party scene in the early ’90s. By rejecting the profit motive, that was an inherent part of the political function of those parties, even though it was about nothing to do with any kind of political movement beyond simply just not charging.

Dance music getting co-opted for political campaigns by political parties or the Socialist Workers Party turning up during the anti Criminal Justice Act campaign, deadens it, actually. Dance music is at its most politically potent when it doesn’t need to rely on the traditional signifiers of party politics. It’s a politics of being and experiencing, and that’s still really powerful, but it often eludes or escapes traditional definitions or structures around political activity.

What do you think of the political stance of the Night Time Industries Association?
Obviously my interest and the bit that I find inspiring is very much the left wing side of it. The NTIA is very much an industry body for the moneymaking arm of dance music and nightlife, and that’s how they’ve secured political buy-in. The whole concept of the nighttime economy is a really interesting one, I feel, because it reflects a growing political engagement with dance music, from Sadiq Khan or Amy Lamé or Sacha Lord or whoever. But there’s sort of a trade-off there in that it’s all about what economic benefits is it generating? How can it be used as a tool of place-based branding to help secure investment? And that’s part of what dance music does and has always done. Whether that’s superclubs in the ’90s or clubs like Shoom becoming iconic.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Well, I think it’s a double-edged sword. You undoubtedly have seen things like when Fabric closed, and real political pressure was brought to bear on keeping it open. That’s undoubtedly a good thing for nightlife, that a big flagship club was not allowed to be closed by the police and Islington Council. At the same time, I think there’s a risk in allowing the safeguarding of nightlife and dance music culture to be entrusted to industry lobby groups and centrist Labour politicians and large entertainment conglomerates, that their interests won’t necessarily always represent the interests of everyone within the culture, and certainly people at the bottom of the food chain who potentially need protection.

I think in certain cases, they can pull in the same direction. There’s a bit in the book about Sacha Lord, and I think he’s a really, really good example of some of these conflicts. Like, he’s done a huge amount of good with the dance music industry in lots of ways, but where his interests conflict with those of other people’s, you can begin to see some of those tensions play out. During COVID, he was really instrumental in pushing the government to expand COVID relief funds to cover dance music. So initially, relief for venues during COVID only applied to venues where there was live music played, and he lobbied successfully for it to be expanded to clubs as well. He was then able to get a massive stack of cash from The Warehouse Project, which he owns, but smaller clubs were able to get access to those funds as well. So, you have interest at the top of the industry and grassroots interests being kind of symbiotic.

But if you look at something like exclusivity clauses, for example, I know a lot of smaller promoters in Manchester are really frustrated by bigger promoters in the city, using really restrictive exclusivity clauses to prevent acts that play at The Warehouse Project from playing anywhere in Manchester, often for like huge chunks of the year.

So, I asked Sacha about this, and his response was, “I came up running a stall selling leather jackets, and if someone opened a stall selling leather jackets directly across from me, I’d be really annoyed. Like, obviously go and sell them around the corner, but not right next to me.“ So he was essentially protecting his patch, which is perfectly legitimate for him to do as a businessman, but given that he’s also the political figure responsible for nightlife in Manchester, taking that kind of approach to it suggests that he’s looking at it through the lens of his perspective on the industry, rather than necessarily acknowledging some of the complexities that might be viewed very differently from people at the other end of the food chain.

But it’s not a black and white thing. Even the operators right at the top of the industry, the Broadwick Lives of the world, their cultural and financial benefits to dance music becoming more professionalised, more corporatised. More people are able to earn a living from it. The market certainly for live dance music events continues to grow. But there is a double-edged sword in that power and money and agency do seem to be concentrated in an increasingly small coterie of people rather than as it was maybe potentially in the ’90s being a network of loads of much smaller bedroom operators. That’s partly just a function of the way that the economy as a whole has changed in those 30 years, partly a function of dance music becoming more popular, so there being more room for big operators at the top who then cannibalise the market.

There are clearly nuanced, quite tricky questions about, okay, this is making loads of money and you’re generating this top tier of DJ superstars. but how’s that feeding back into the rest of the culture? We had some of those arguments in the ’90s around superclubs. The dance music industry in the UK seems to operate along largely the same principles as the superclubs did in the ’90s. Big global media brands working in dance music and then expanding, possibly even more corporatised now than it was in the ’90s, and they’re backed by venture capital and global hedge funds. James Barton, who ran Cream, now runs this global entertainment company that’s backed by this massive California hedge fund.

But at the same time, our rhetoric around what the music does hasn’t acknowledged that. People who go to a venue like Printworks may well think of it as kind of an underground club, because it plays ostensibly underground music. There’s been kind of a disconnect. In the ’90s, superclubs played big, brash, cheesy, poppy, trancey music, and underground clubs played weird industrial techno.

I think that was a function of the opening of Fabric, because Fabric was the first really good, big, credible club that actually booked weird DJs. They were booking really unusual DJs and filling it because people had respect and confidence in their programming.
I mention it briefly in the book, that period where Home opened in Leicester Square after Darren Hughes left split with James Barton and Cream. It crashed and burned, and it was very much the kind of ’90s superclub model. Big, glitzy, progressive house and trance, superstar DJ headliners. And Fabric opened at the same time and was much more leftfield, much more pared down, and Fabric took over the city. That feels like a paradigm shift. Fabric’s the last of the ’90s superclubs and also the first of that new idiom of clubs, like that I guess to a certain extent got picked up by Berghain in Berlin and then brought back to the UK in terms of that post-industrial monochrome techno vibe. But they function exactly like superclubs did. It’s just the music on offer is less obviously commercial.

I mean, I find it interesting that our rhetoric and our analysis has not kept pace with that. We think of superclubs as something that existed in the ’90s, and we don’t really always dig into the financial or political or social meaning of what these big clubs are now and how they interact with underground music. So, that was one of the things that I was interested in, that double-edged sword of the world of the nighttime economy and industry lobby groups and huge clubs with global profiles, and analysing not just what they sound like and what gets played at them, but how they function economically, how that knits into the rest of the history and what it might mean for the future as well.

Boiler Room comes up a lot in the book, too.
I wrote a piece about Red Bull Music Academy when it closed, highlighting both the space that it created for this beautiful culture that otherwise wouldn’t have existed, but then the risks inherent in outsourcing that to a profit-making entity that isn’t actually really rooted in the grassroots culture that it’s supporting. So when Red Bull pulled out, that whole thing just died a death. So I wrote this article about RBMA and I got a DM on Instagram from Blaise Bellville [Boiler Room founder] saying, “This is stuff that I’ve been thinking about with Boiler Room. Would you like to go for a coffee?“ So I went for a coffee with him, and my pitch to him was give Boiler Room away, turn it into a cooperative. Make it cooperatively and collectively owned by the DJs that you work with. Like, just enable people to sign up as members for like a fiver, and then they run the business, share the profits. And by that point, obviously Boiler Room had loads of venture capital invested in it, so it wasn’t possible to just pay off all those investors, but that was my slightly utopian pitch.

I’ve met Blaise a couple of times, and I don’t doubt that his interest in and love for dance music is entirely genuine. But organisations like Boiler Room exist within a capitalist structure and they operate along capitalist lines, and there’s always, I think, going to be a tension between that and the collective emancipatory power of dance music. Like, how do you properly account for the value generated for Boiler Room and its investors by a grassroots queer DJ playing one of their shows? I’m not sure that in any of the capitalist structures of dance music, that cultural and capital that’s generated is ever really distributed equally or fairly. I think Boiler Room are a particularly stark example of that, both because of Blaise’s background as an individual and its atomised existence. It only exists digitally. It doesn’t really have a place to call home, so it’s more immediately obvious when it’s kind of globbing onto some other scene somewhere else in the world, and I think because it has over the years made a number of like very visible missteps in how it’s approached that question. At the same time, it’s been hugely important for breaking new artists. You only have to look at the career of someone like Sherelle right? Her first big moment was on a Boiler Room stream.

Undoubtedly, that’s a good thing for UK dance music, that Boiler Room moment and everything that spun off from it that happened. So, I do focus on Boiler Room quite a lot in the book. I’m not trying to single them out as the only people operating in UK dance music in ethically conflicted or complicated way, but I do think they’re a really excellent case study of how a genuine love for music and a maybe slightly naive understanding of the way in which capital and capitalism can infect culture. It’s a really interesting case study of the way that those two forces can lead people astray.

What do you think it is that enables music, and specifically dance music, to break down religious, racial, sexual boundaries, and is it only ever doomed to be temporary?
That’s a really interesting one. I don’t know if you’ve read Emma Warren’s book, Dance Your Way Home. I think she and I share a certain amount of skepticism over the critical role of drug-taking in creating that sense of commonality. Obviously drugs are incredibly important in terms of creating the context in which people have that communal, collective experience. But I don’t think that it’s the key to unlocking everything. There’s a really good bit in Emma’s book where she says, “People who assume that the drugs are the key to understanding everything clearly haven’t experienced that feeling of dancing with people and the connectivity that it can bring up.“ I’m paraphrasing it, but I think there’s something psychologically, physiologically really, really powerful about moving in rhythm with other people, of sharing, for want of a less wooey, hippie term, a vibration of some kind. I think there’s something very difficult to define, but intuitive if you’ve ever experienced it, where just dancing together, moving to sound together, sharing in that kind of rhythmic experience aligns you with people in the same way that lying next to someone and your heartbeats aligning. There’s something in that that’s just very deep-rooted in how we function as animals.

I think there’s also a social element in terms of dance music being something that exists on the fringes of society in one way or another. Even if you’re going to a mainstream club, you’re generally going late at night or to an area with the city that you wouldn’t otherwise go to. There’s some sense of sharing an unusual social space that I think is – particularly if you’re going to, say, an illegal rave – you’re sharing in a conspiracy with people. You are stepping out of yourself and into another version of yourself along with loads of other people. That’s particularly true when you look at marginalised identities in that context, right? Stepping out of a world in which you are denigrated or dismissed or marginalised and into a space where your identity and experience is foregrounded and centered and valued and celebrated.

But also the grammar of performance in a club. You’re not just part of an audience. I think that dance music, so much of the energy of a dancefloor depends on the crowd rather than the DJ. I think that the performer/audience distinction is a more permeable barrier in dance music than in other forms of culture. The audience are part of the performance in a way that you don’t always get in other forms of culture. So I think that heightens dance music’s particular strength in forming that kind of communal identity.

In terms of whether it could be temporary, I think yes and no. The experience of the dancefloor is always temporary, and that’s kind of the beautiful thing about it, right? It is ephemeral. It is time-based in the same way that music is. I think trying to create a vision of dance music that is immovable and immutable also leeches out what’s vital and exciting about it. But that sort of communal world building, that sense of a space that is ours, that feeling can persist and it can act as a catalyst for world building that can be more permanent.

One of the groups of people I talk about in the book are the Exodus Collective in Luton, who started off throwing free parties in the late ’80s, closely affiliated to communal squats in the town. They ended up building a community centre in the early 2000s, became this entire self-sustaining community where the rave was one part of a much wider holistic system of social capacity building and communal bonds of solidarity. When there was rioting on a nearby estate, the riots only calmed down when Exodus started throwing a party on a Saturday night. On the weekends where Exodus threw their raves, crime levels in the local area dropped precipitously. But they were targeted quite aggressively by the police, to the extent that the local council, rather as you would expect in siding with the police, voted to investigate their own local police force, because they valued what Exodus were doing and saw something really dodgy in the police’s approach to them.

Or you look at a collective like Dialled In, which is a festival in London that focuses on British music of South Asian origin and heritage. When I interviewed them, they spoke about they’d had their own kind of hypie Boiler Room moments. They’d been press darlings for a year, but because of the way that hype cycles work, that had maybe started to fade a little bit, and their position was very much like, “We’re not interested in industry gatekeepers or success on those terms. What we’re interested in is using the music as an entry point to build a community”. So they would run workshops, and they’ve got a whole programme of educational stuff and skill sharing. Just that kind of stuff with a much broader emphasis on creating a whole ecosystem around a party rather than just viewing dance music as something that only goes to the boundaries of the dancefloor and no further. I think that’s where some really interesting stuff’s happening and where you can take that energy and vitality and optimism that occurs when everyone’s dancing together and begin transferring that to the real world, for want of a better word, in a way that feels really organic, exciting and really inspiring.

What’s your view on potential Arts Council funding of dance music?
So you get this kind of reification of rave as something that happened between 1987 and 1994 where everyone drove Vauxhall Astras to a club in a warehouse just outside the M25, because that’s the thing that is immediately identifiable that can be moulded into a shape that meets these expectations and criteria and can be absorbed into the structures that places like the Arts Council work within. I think the other thing is that dance music has always been kind of fun and exciting in a way that there is demand for it, that people will always want to go out and lose themselves a bit and go dancing in a way that there is not perhaps an enduring, permanently reinventing demand for ballet amongst young people.

But also, is that not just completely class bias, the amount of funding that ballet or opera get, when they are really minority interests in the UK?
Oh, absolutely. But that’s reflective of kind of class prejudice across society. It’s obviously very, very, lopsided, but also dance music has continued to be vital and exciting without a reliance on those sources of funding. And just as with the nighttime economy, I suspect that were that funding ever to be made more available, it would come with strings attached, which would leach out some of that vitality and urgency in the culture as well. But I do think that things are shifting slightly. I do think that things have slightly improved, but also, I’m not sure it’s a hugely profitable use of anyone’s time to be angry at society for being that it is. I think it’s important to acknowledge it and map those historical trends and threads, but then also to use that as motivation to go off and imagine other ways of doing things.

I’m not even completely convinced that Arts Council funding would necessarily be a good thing.
Yeah. But you look at Berlin, where they’ve identified clubbing as not just a tourism driver, but also a cultural good in itself. It would be wonderful if there was a mindset shift in the British state and the way that it operates. But also we can poke people and hope that they get better, but I’m not overly optimistic about the chances of that happening anytime soon, and I think it’s possibly better to use it as a cautionary tale and think about other ways to achieve the same goals than waiting for those gatekeepers to give dance music a cultural and economic legitimacy that it has survived for decades without.

You can buy Ed’s book here –>

Gay Bar – Why We Went Out

After being told his hot new boyfriend is dangerous trash, gay bar ingenue Jeremy Atherton-Lin briefly despairs of the situation: ‘It was as if I’d been adopted by the wrong family – these nightclub people, thriving on secrets and risk.’ He’s consoled by his first sniff of poppers, and soon comes to his senses. Because as we know, secrets and risk (and poppers) are the main ingredients of a great night out.

After his initial wobble, Jeremy’s nightlife family becomes central, providing true love, a deep understanding of human nature and a growing sense of identity – as well as some highly illuminating identity crises. As he explores the shifting sands of the culture, and his changing place in it, he weaves a smart history of the gay bar into a beautifully written memoir. Each chapter is built around a particular bar, either in his native San Francisco or in London, where he moves in search of a Britpop waif. ‘Xuan had produced a spreadsheet of museums to visit. I was fixated on getting to Popstarz. I imagined a pale and interesting boy awaited me there.’

He tracks the gay bar’s development from clandestine Regency cellar to unspoken ’50s hideaway, via out-and-proud activist centre, vital community support hub, to an inclusive, non-denominational queer space that seems to have LGBTQIA’d itself out of an identity. And latterly to a raucous fun palace with more hen nights than homosexuals. When a recent BBC news piece asks, ‘Do Gay People Still Need Gay Bars?’ he laments, ‘Do gay bars still need gay people?’

The story is written in social and political realities – in the gay bar’s changing legality, appearance, purpose (ostensible and otherwise), and of course in its clientele. To the author it has been a place of liberation, education, exploration and occasionally disillusion. He admits he first ventured inside to learn about himself. ‘Of all human categories, adult gay males were amongst the least familiar to me,’ he writes poignantly, confessing he hoped to receive wisdom from his elders and to grow by emulation: ‘I didn’t know how else to learn history, but to try it on.’

We learn of the grand queer histories of London and San Francisco, filled with memorable nuggets and reverberations – and sites that have been gay for centuries. That the iron columns in the Vauxhall Tavern are all that remains of the great Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, where orgies took place in ancient row-boats hanging from the trees. Or that Villiers Street, home to Heaven, is named after George Villiers, a favourite of King James I, who gave him the land while calling him his ‘sweet child and wife.’ Villiers also gave his name to another famous gay bar The George, off The Strand, which hosted ’90s Britpop confection Popstarz, where the author does indeed fall in love.

He tells us that the first guide to gay London was a 1937 publication called For Your Convenience, printed between the leaves of a map of public toilets; how the tradition of drag queens performing on the bar was a smart way to avoid extra charges in the event of a raid – a show was harder to deny if there was a stage; that at one covertly gay place the orchestra would play a fanfare whenever a fit guy walked in, and how another would warn its patrons the police were on their way by playing the national anthem (ie ‘God Save The Queen’).

Occasionally something stuns. Like the fact that because the 1967 decriminalising of British gay sex only applied to private spaces, ironically there were more arrests after it was passed, as public meetings for sex remained fair game for the cops. Most of the history reminds us that the rich always had their safe spaces; for those less privileged there was usually danger and uncertainty.

Gay Bar is an exploration of masculinity, a nuanced dissection of gender politics, a homogeography of oppression and rebellion (including several events that predate Stonewall), and not least a collection of quirky characters and brilliant anecdotes. A favourite tale tells of a San Franciscan bar owner who bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of flowers after his place was busted, so as well as posting people’s bail, he could drape a garland round the neck of each arrested customer as they were released.

The writing alone will have you smiling throughout. In a leather bar he recalls ‘men built like chesterfields.’ Wolfgang Tillman’s subjects look ‘like beautiful weeds.’ He describes his college friend Xuan with the line, ‘She ordered both lipstick and photographs in matte finish.’ Noting the bizarre Aztec architecture of the MI6 building that dominates the Vauxhall riverside near the bar he’s in, he writes, ‘Like the men in here, it’s a little too much and it gives itself away.’

The opening scene is priceless: a hilariously candid sequence of him and his partner ‘Famous’ negotiating the delicacies of an orgy in a dark room filled with prowling suitors.

‘The men skulked in trackies, inhabiting or playacting working-class bodies. I thought then I had better not speak. My accent is too equivocal, scuppered somewhere on the Atlantic and apologizing. The point here was to be regular. The only distinguishing feature should be an erection the size of a Sky+ remote control.’

For those unfamiliar with the complex etiquette of such a situation, as the tale unravels Atherton-Lin’s sharp, thoughtful prose is hilariously informative. Frank Broughton

You can purchase a copy of this brilliant book via our store.

Ibiza ’89

As acid house crossed over nationally in the UK and the tabloids started whipping up their manufactured outrage, Time Out Nightlife Editor Dave Swindells went to Ibiza with i-D writer Alix Sharkey to see where this culture had come from. They planned to reconnect the ‘Balearic beats’ that had kicked things off the previous year to the island of their birth. But their editor Don Atyeo told them to take a whole week and forget any preconceptions. He was a veteran reporter who had spent months in Zaire for the Rumble in the Jungle, getting to know Muhammad Ali, and he gave them the dream assignment – ‘Ask questions and let the story tell itself.’

Dave’s visual chronicle of that week in the sun has finally been packaged up into a glorious book, and while you’ve doubtless seen a couple of the more famous shots before – like the couple reflected in the Amnesia pyramid – seeing the full collection is brilliantly evocative. It’s like owning holiday snaps from a clubbing moment most of us missed out on. For the magazine (it was 20/20, Time Out‘s monthly lifestyle title), Dave concentrated on capturing a few dancefloor portraits and those all-important sunrise moments, picking out the incongruous mix of aristocratic Eurotrash and seasoned clubbers on the blag. Nightclub photography was a different game back then – the technology meant you needed an intrusive flash to catch any after-dark action. With a full book to expand into he’s been able to add all the contextual shots, showing the sleepy rural nature of ’80s Ibiza, giving us some great images of the epic club architecture, acres of fashion nostalgia, and a hint that Brits-abroad lager-boy lairiness was already in evidence.

1989 was the year before Ibizan authorities made the clubs build roofs over their dancefloors, so there’s a poignancy to the carefree partying. They were there for the opening of Amnesia, which figures large in the book – the club where Alfredo Fiorito’s playlist did so much to energise British music. Read the captions and you get a great idea of who was there – it’s a roll call of the more exploratory members of London nightlife. Alix Sharkey was very much a face about town and between him and Dave they could spot a London DJ or promoter at 20 paces. In fact the first person they encountered in Ibiza was Boy George, always an early adopter. Sharkey’s original piece is included and it’s a great scene-setter: scallies dancing with Italian princesses, labourers chatting up girls fresh from daddy’s yacht. There’s a nostalgic intro from Terry Farley, and Dave adds plenty of stories too. Blaggers rushing the door by getting on their hands and knees, ecstasy urchins shooting water pistols filled with liquid MDMA. All in all a wonderful time capsule. Frank Broughton

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Ibiza 89 Amnesia Pete Heller (left in black T-shirt) and Portia Bishop greet the sunrise

Ibiza 89 Cafe DM The Sun on the beach (as read by ‘Spit’ Fenton and Megs Osler)

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Yo! The Early Years of Rap, 1982-84

We’re in the train yards, at the Fever, in Bronx River, in the Roxy. We’re tagging on the subway, looking through Bambaataa’s crates, backstage with Melle Mel. We’re in D.ST’s bedroom crammed with studio gear, at the Fun Gallery downtown. These unguarded moments tell you exactly where you are on the timeline: right at the start of things. This is hip hop when it was still fresh and fly. The first records are coming out, the breakers have just been on daytime TV, the writers watch their train-art loop the city daily. Hip hop energy is the biggest thing in New York. It’s a young scene, baby-faced and smiling, a little unsure of what’s next, but really excited to get there.

One photo shows kids queuing up to get into the Roxy. A black tape holds them in line. As the flash pops, a lad of 17 or so – his cap announces ‘Deeski’ – raises both hands in peace V’s for the camera, in front of a sea of faces. His smile tells us all we need to know about the excitement bottled up behind him. In a moment these kids will charge into the club for another weekly episode of the best night of their lives.

The stars are dressed in silver leather or leopard-print, with fur and tassels, studs, buckles, boots and head-dresses. They’re looking fine, but they haven’t got used to it yet. Few will ever be famous beyond the five boroughs. And the faces of future legends still look teenage. Jazzy Jay, Melle Mel, Scorpio, Afrika Islam, Cold Crush, Rock Steady, Red Alert, Fab 5 Freddy. There’s a photo of Bambaataa and Herc together, and even Kool Herc – the grandaddy of the scene – still hasn’t hit 30.

The DJs are grinning as they pass each other the next great breakbeat. There’s fun ready to burst. The breakers are still discovering all the ways their bodies can flex. The b-boys in a circle watch them battle. Sophie Bramly was clearly family. Her photos capture innocent moments that bring home how wild and new all this must have felt. She would go on to create Yo! MTV Raps for MTV Europe, copied a year later in the US.

As veteran hip hop publicist Bill Adler points out in his intro, from the birth of hip hop at Kool Herc’s back-to-school jam in 1973 up to the end of that decade there’s no photography beyond a few snaps. When the visual record begins, most is focused on graffiti or breakdancing. French Tunisian Bramley gave us the first body of work that takes in the whole joyous scene. This book drops you into those glorious years when hip hop emerged from the clubs and started making its way in the world. This is when it was all still just a party, and when the science of fun behind it: DJing, MCing, breaking and graffiti, was discovering new bombs every week. Amazing times. From the lovely people at Soul Jazz, this great book is an access-all-areas pass to see hip hop’s first steps. Frank Broughton

Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor

‘Dancing with other people isn’t passive, it is active, and it can create action,’ writes Emma Warren. And what this action generates, she tells us, is ‘…collective music created by the thousands of dancing bodies punctuating the tunes powering out of the sound system.’

The history of dance music is a love affair between the DJ and the dancefloor. The dancer is fickle and restless, always looking for new sounds and fresh excitement. In response the DJ invents new tricks, curates new styles, evolves new genres, to keep their mutual passion hot. This beautiful new book examines this call-and-response relationship from the inside, bringing us a dancefloor history with unparalleled intimacy.

The science of dancing can be mindblowing. Some people with Parkinson’s can dance to music when they can hardly walk. Seeing someone else in motion can make the corresponding muscles twitch in our own bodies, a phenomenon called ‘body mirroring’. Researchers have isolated a related effect, ‘aesthetic resonance’, where humans enjoying music enjoy it more if they can see others enjoying it too – this is why music is more dramatic when you’re dancing with other dancers. Music works better with you.

‘Powerful dancefloors can be tied up with feelings of repair, of becoming whole again,’ Emma reminds us, as she meets a neurologist specialising in strokes and epilepsy who’s built himself a bass chair to send booming stimulation to your vagus nerve. She calls it ‘a calm-down button, a hug from the inside.’ We learn details of how the brain/body calibration you get from moving to music measurably improves balance. And how movement therapy can reduce ADHD symptoms in children (perhaps making up for a lack of movement in their screen-filled formative years). Motion is only a letter away from emotion.

Emma treads lightly through the science, however, making it support her real subject, which is how dancing is central to being human. She shows how we each evolve our own personal dance, the culmination of the cultural and interpersonal lives we’ve led. She makes us see dancing as a language we all speak, and shows us dance history as the evolution of different dialects. ‘Dance your history,’ Toni Basil tells her. ‘People dance their story,’ says veteran house DJ Frankie Valentine.

The main thread of the book is memoir, and in a life devoted to dance music – as a writer and explorer for The Face, Jockey Slut, Caught by The River and Brixton’s Live Magazine – Emma has moved on significant dancefloors in many memorable scenes. Her personal dance moves took shape in a sequence of places familiar to many: from school discos, via her student union bop, to Flesh at The Haçienda, via Heaven, Land of Oz, the last night of Shoom, Rage, Manchester’s Electric Chair, through the many faces of Plastic People, up to the live jazz of Stoke Newington’s Total Refreshment Centre. We see these famous clubs through new eyes as she takes us down into the crowd and colours in the dancers of each congregation.

She gives generously of herself, telling us about the exuberant high kicks she instinctively gave at her school disco, then, after a boy pointed and laughed, of the shame she felt for this, followed by the pressure to rein in her movements for the sake of teenage cool. In time she casts off this reserve and revels in the freedom of not caring how her dancing looks on the outside, ‘…recognising how my body liked to move, how it could stretch and contract on its own terms, without having to consider how this affected my status as it related to being fanciable… I was there to dance and I would dance for hours and hours.’

Transposed to Madchester for college, she changes her dance style to suit. This personal shift is a process we’ll all recognise but have probably never thought about: ‘I needed to tune in again, absorb some new information, lose some accent, add some accent.’ Another dramatic change comes when she starts having seizures and finds her motion restrained by the fear of bodily failure and the need to out-nerve the strobes. She muses on the futility of ever separating mind from body. Years later at a dance class she finds herself useless at choreographed steps despite a life of dancing. The teacher reminds her, ‘You can’t think yourself into it. You just have to feel it and trust that your body knows where to go.’

The responsive relationship between dancer and music-maker runs through the whole book, pinned down by vivid recollections. And when she describes in detail the dubstep crucible of DMZ at Plastic People, we get an unprecedented dissection of how the evolution of music is guided by the DJ but led by the dancefloor. She sets the scene:

‘At DMZ, little else existed bar the sound and the movement. Someone pulled up the tune and you paused. A synth line or a snare signalling the opening of a big tune and you prepared for the moment, winding up inside, becoming ready. The tune dropped and – pow! – there was a mass upsurge of arms and a collective dancing style that mixed a cockney knees up with the militant skanking and stepping embodied by men and women in Brixton reggae dances three decades earlier.’

In this small dark cocoon, with key DJs and producers on the dancefloor themselves, and with the booth as close to the dancers as possible, the perfect venue for dancing with abandon met a scene of wild musical experimentation. The result was dubstep, a distinct new genre that swept the world. There’s no doubt dancers led the way: ‘The listening entity on dancefloors like DMZ’s indicated what it collectively wanted through gesture. And what a small but growing part of the dancefloor wanted was even more energy. This request, made with gunfingers and a grimey pogo, resulted in a record that perhaps contains more energy than any record ever made: a 2007 release by top producer Coki titled “Spongebob”.’

By going deep into the spatial history of British dancefloors she gives us the personal stories of several venues, showing the ripples of lives changed and communities enriched. She emphasises the huge cultural contribution made by youth clubs, reminding us just what we’ve lost through the Tory’s vicious austerity. She traces the characters and creators who flourished in these spaces, showing a pre-teen Dizzy Rascal’s DJ debut and a young Winston Hazel kickstarting Sheffield dance culture.

Dancing is collective action, and an important chapter takes us into the rebellion that it can embody. Whether unifying a march or offering refuge from a hostile world, dance has been important to protest and evolved as a result. Emma’s style throughout has a sensitivity that’s rare in cultural history, and when we read about the militant reggae cellars that a movie like Babylon brought to the screen, or the dance-focused repudiation of the National Front racism in ’70s Lewisham, she’s careful to bring us the protagonists’ voices and feelings directly. Always, this is history from the inside, from the floor.

It’s memoir, anthropology, reportage, cultural history, but most of all ‘Dance Your Way Home’ is a plea to keep moving, to ignore the conscious voice that says you’re too clunky, too much, too old. A call to close your eyes and feel the amazing gift of movement: sinews pulling, hips bouncing, fingertips tracing. To know that what you’re doing might be older than language, deeper than love; that dancing built our venues and directed the DJs and music-makers and their tunes. This landmark book is nothing less than the dancers’ history of our music. Frank Broughton

You can buy the book here >

Emma’s membership card for junglist ground zero, Rage

Frank Broughton: It’s an amazing book. So personal and so deep. I was blown away by how great it is, and how emotional it made me. I guess it was a very personal book to write as well.
Emma Warren: What were the bits that made you feel something? Is there anything in particular?

It was your approach throughout. The way that you gave so much of yourself. You’ve taken the story much deeper and made it much more personal. It’s the best kind of history because it shows what it was like to be there.

Your lifetime has been on so many of the right dance floors. Were you aware of that when you started writing – that you’d connected so many famous or significant dancefloors?
I mean, I definitely knew I’d been to some good spots. Some of the very first things I went to were so culturally powerful that I knew what that meant. However, like yourself I also know a lot about the bigger picture. I’ve always also been aware of the places where I wasn’t.

Sometimes people talk to me about the places I’ve been, in the context of them having missed out. I find myself saying repeatedly, ‘You have not missed out!’ None of us that are in this thing have missed out. No, we just all happen to be located in different parts of the map. I’ve been on certain parts of the map; you’ve been to places that I wish I’d been to – all those New York clubs, for example. I went to Shelter once, that’s it pretty much. I don’t think the feeling of having missed out is a useful one. For those of us that value the culture, we just need to be really glad about the places we have been, and respectful of the places that we haven’t.

It’s easy for history to write about the songs and the movements and the significance and the DJs. So it’s great to read the history from the floor, from the grassroots.
Histories take the perspective of certain groups: the DJs, the producers, maybe sometimes if you’re lucky, the coat-check person. But the vast majority of the people are the dancers. Ordinary dancers. And yet, you don’t usually see things from their perspective, you get it from the DJ booth, or you get it from the studio. But because I’m not a DJ, I’m not a producer, I’ve always been aligned with the people on the dancefloor.

I remember when I was in Manchester, when we were doing Jockey Slut, just having that feeling: If I’m not on the dancefloor, what am I doing writing about it? If I’m not on the dance floor, what the hell am I doing here? If I was just propping up the bar, I probably shouldn’t be writing about it. I felt my contribution was only really valid if I was in it.

It’s funny because in writing the book I’ve selected certain dancefloors that I’ve been on. And they tend to be the ones that are more what I would call ‘culturally powerful’. But I’ve been on lots of other dancefloors as well. Like Basement Jaxx’s night Rooty, which I went to regularly. At one point I was thinking, maybe there’s something I can weave in, but it just ended up not quite fitting the story I wanted to tell. which ended up being about these foundationally, culturally powerful, dancefloors.

So could you draw a map? The dance map of Britain
Collectively, we can probably do something like that.

You and I, we’ve shared many a dancefloor. And we’ve rarely met in other places. And it made me think there are so many people in my life that I know that way. And I wonder if that’s a generational thing. Has there been a generation before or after that has that intense social life based on the dancefloor?
I think it’s tempting to imagine that that’s the case. But I’m pretty sure that there will have been generations before who knew each other on the dancefloor. And that there will be generations after. Maybe the difference is to do with the numbers. When we began going out more people than ever before were on a certain type of culturally powerful dance floor, house- or techno- or rave-related. By the early ’90s, everybody I went to school with had been to a rave: everybody, maybe minus like two people. There just came a point where you didn’t have to be very specialist to have gone to some kind of rave or warehouse party or specialist music night.

What’s the dancefloor that you’d go back to first?
None of them. The only thing I want to do is go to the current iteration of all of that. Last week, a friend took me to an amapiano night at Pop Brixton, run by DJ Super D. And it’s just such a perfect, perfect, example of the way UK music culture just keeps on evolving and generating new things. The crowd was demographically quite broad. Most people probably in their 20s or 30s. But there were definitely people in their 40s, definitely people their 50s and above, and some little young ones as well. And lots of very nice cars parked outside this building. London is still alive.

Thinking back, phones changed the dancefloor vibe in clubs massively, but I think the smoking ban made more of a dramatic difference. It forced that shuttling in and out and lack of concentration. Restrictions of any kind are damaging to the dance, aren’t they?
I think when the smoking ban happened, in terms of just the flow of the night, it definitely made it harder to have that ongoing intensity where everybody is in the spot, in the zone, for hours at a time.

I was talking recently to someone I shared a dancefloor with at DMZ, who was only 16 when he started going there. And he was describing how as a 16-year-old he entered into that clubbing environment in a place where the bouncers weren’t really bothered. They might check your ID if you looked 12 – like he did. But your slightly crap fake ID, it wasn’t a barrier to entry. People just got in. He later found it quite hard to be in environments where you had a big pat-down, and lots of roving bouncers trying to stop you from doing bad things.

You do lose something of the freedom that you feel when you’re in a space where you’re welcomed in, when nobody’s coming around to check on your behaviour, where you can just basically do what you want, within reason. As adults, why not? But clubs are increasingly policed aren’t they? At entry and inside.

It’s tricky, they’ve got to protect their licence and show they’re doing the right thing. But ultimately it takes away that sense of abandon, doesn’t it?
It’s to do with councils, cracking down on licensing, because as far as I understand, you know, the police want an easier time of it. And they think that by applying greater controls to clubs, they make it easier for themselves. But the kind of places we’re talking about are not the kind of places that generate trouble – quite the opposite. They undo the kind of things that cause trouble, because they allow people to dance it out.

The positive effects of dancefloors are all so obvious to people who spend time on them. But people who make the laws might never have experienced any of those things. So they just don’t know their value. Like your great chapter about youth clubs, and all the dancers and DJs and musicians who got their start in them. One of the saddest things in the book was thinking what’s been thrown away in such a clueless way with the Tories’ austerity cuts.
Yeah, youth clubs was just such a massive subject. Like you’re saying: the people who made the rules don’t understand. Maybe the leaders need to be socialised in advance. Maybe a qualification for having a position of power should be you’ve spent a certain amount of hours on a culturally powerful dance floor.

I’d campaign for that
On a subcommittee that wants to empower the sub-bass.

School disco shenanigans 1990. A Bernard Achampong Production, flyer by Xavier Fraser

You describe dancing very beautifully as a personal language. That was a really nice thing running through the book. How distinct do you think that can be?
Very. You can tell someone by their gait, how they walk, before you can see their face. I once recognised someone even though she was wearing full hijab – niqab, actually. And I was like, ‘Sara, is that you?’ I could tell by the way she moved. Yeah, everybody’s way of moving is incredibly individual. I think the police actually use movement analysis sometimes to convict people. It’s as accurate from a policing point of view as a fingerprint. So when you’re dancing, you’ve got that basic thing, which is incredibly individual, but then you’ve got the way that you’re feeling that day, that morning, that evening, that year. How happy you’re feeling, what life stresses you’re carrying, whether you’re in love or whether or not you’re in a break-up… You dance differently depending on how you’re feeling, maybe even the weather as well.

Do you think you could read someone’s history? I mean, from watching someone dance? Could you do some detective work? How much could you tell about a person?
I think I could tell a fair bit. I mean, you can always be surprised. And you can only tell what someone is prepared to show you that day. So if someone’s controlled, you might not tell very much. But I think you can tell whether or not someone has a certain degree of knowledge of the dancefloor. Just by the way they hold themselves.

So could you do a blind taste test – like a wine tasting – from the way people dance? Could you see what cultural input they’ve had over their lifetime?
Yeah. I think you can tell a lot about where people are coming from. If they’ve got some sort of ’90s garage moves, like what are their feet doing? I just spend a lot of time now looking at people’s feet. I love it. It’s just endlessly fascinating. Looking at someone like, ‘You’ve definitely done some raving. I think you went to quite a lot of UK garage nights’. Or, ‘You don’t feel very comfortable doing this, and maybe you haven’t done this a lot.’ You know.

That’s a Channel 4 programme right there, The Dance Doctor, or something.
I did have an idea for something I wanted to do as a sort of event, which in my mind was called Hesitant Dancers 101, something like that. And it was for people who just feel really, really, really hesitant about dancing, who are like, you know, those ones who just clam up, quite literally, when a dancing situation comes up. And I was thinking, How could you do it to make it comfortable? People could just start to get a little bit of kind of comfort and confidence in just finding the moves.

Like a motion makeover. Do you remember that programme Faking It? The very first one was a classical musician who became a DJ, and she was amazing. And one of the things they did was boxing training. They got her to be more assertive by hitting a punchbag. I’ve got a friend whose daughter has an eating disorder, and I’ve often thought that’s the kind of physical thing someone like her should do – use your body to affect the world. And you’ll come out of it feeling a little stronger, and you’ll feel like you don’t have to hide so much.
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s so healing. There’s a quote in the book from Brian Belle-Fortune from his book All Crews. And he described a night where a big guy comes in all pent-up and they’re saying, ‘Boy, he’s going to be trouble’. And then at the end of the night they saw the same guy skipping out: ‘I love you, I love you!’ The dancefloor in its best and most powerful modes just can be such a site of repair. For teenage girls, for sure. I just think that for all those kinds of life stresses it can be good repair.

Comic strip from Labrynth in Hackney. Note Captain Twylab who can rave for 96 hours straight without a break

Do you think we have a BPM?
I don’t know. Maybe. I do know about something called tempo entrainment. It’s the degree to which your body locks into rhythm. And you can either have a high or low amount of it. If you have high tempo entrainment, you’re probably going to start bobbing if you hear a tune, regardless of whether or not you like it, a bit involuntary. If you have very low tempo entrainment, you’re unlikely to be moving unless you actively choose to.

I’ve sometimes found myself on a dance floor where I’m like, I like this music. But it’s just too fast for me – and that’s a physical feeling. The other thing is what I call the noodle factor. My body prefers the groove, it likes something cyclical. Going to a drum and bass night, I might love the music, love the sonics. But there’s something that stops me really enjoying the movement, because it’s too surprising. Those rhythms are just a little bit too ungroovy, it’s the high surprise factor or something. Drum and bass, I would always dance the half speed. And then I’d feel like I’m not putting enough energy into it. I would definitely argue that there’s some sort of inbuilt motor. I don’t know if it’s biological or learnt. That’s the big question, isn’t it?
Preferences? Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right, that people have a preference, don’t they, for a certain tempo or feel. And maybe that’s to do with your kind of dance ability as well. Where you feel comfortable finding the bits of music that you can easily move to.

Do you think we have a national style? A national dance?
Well, you know, in the book, I’m arguing for the electric slide. As a new national dance, if a national dance is a dance that most people know how to do.

I’d purposefully swerved really talking about Morris dancing too much in the book. It’s not really the kind of dancing that I’m interested in, but actually it appears a little bit in there. James Mary, who is Björk’s headwear designer, his sister Alex Murray has this troupe called Boss Morris. And they were dancing at the Brits when Wet Leg were performing. And it looks wicked. Really! A bit lairy, a bit aggie, and lively and fun.

It’s all stories and it has that pagan thing going for it. Just the fact that it’s so old makes it quite interesting.
It’s a workers’ dance. You have Morris dancing, there used to be Molly dancing. And that was much more about workers making themselves a bit non-recognisable, going out and doing slightly menacing dancing at the landowners.

Or clog dancing. They’d have the metal segs in their clogs so that the wood didn’t wear out so quickly. And then when you danced, they’d make sparks on the stone. I guess that’s British tap dancing, isn’t it?
I remember I had Blakeys in my shoes because I wore all my shoes out really quickly. I’d tap noise out of them as well.

What are the great dancefloors at the moment?
I really like what Marsha MarshmeLLo and Leanne Wright are doing with their Moonlighting events. They did one at Servant Jazz Quarters and then one at one at Spiritland before it closed. It was Marsha, Leanne and Zakia Sewell, and Josey Rebelle was their special guest. And the music was just wicked. They bring different musical styles, but they’re all really, really schooled in the dancefloor. I’m sure there are amazing things happening left, right and centre. Even without knowing exactly where the amazing places are, I just feel very confident that they’re happening.

What makes a great dancefloor?
This is a bit of a personal preference, I just like places that are small and dark, where everybody is actively listening and actively moving and responds to the music – even if they don’t know it. You know that thing: a crowd who know a good track, even if they’ve never heard it before.

What guidance would you give for someone who doesn’t have that history but wants to put on a great event and wants to create a great dancefloor.
Go out a bit first.

And what about the age make-up? Are we getting more segregated by age in dance floors? I do think there’s a bit of a rebellion against that.
I think there’s a mix, like always. When I first started going out there would have been places that were for the older lot. Places that were just teenagers, places that were mixed. And I think now’s the same. You’ll have places that have a mix of older people and younger people. Where most people are average clubbing age, late teens, or into the 20s. And then you’ll have places where everybody is under 21. And then you have a lot of house nights, where you’ve got to be over 25 to even get in.

We’ve lost a lot of nightclubs. And we can’t underestimate the effect of that – it is awful. But there are still a lot of people making it happen. And the spectrum of things that we have still serve lots of different generations in lots of different ways. We just need more of them. Especially under-18 nights. I know it’s difficult from a licensing and insurance point of view. But we really, really need to make sure the young ones have a chance to experience it like they did in the jungle and garage times, when there were loads of underage teens nights. I really, really want people to put them on, to make it their mission.

It can be hard being an older person on a young dancefloor
I was talking to a friend of mine, the American writer Piotr Orlov. He and I share kind of parallel lives and dance on different continents. I was talking to him about what it’s like to be an older person, but to still want some of that dancefloor feeling. And to know you can still find your space on the dancefloor, where it’s okay for you to be there. And he pointed out that as soon as you move, people can see that you know what you’re doing. You’ve been around. So your movement indicates the fact that actually it’s completely fine for you to be there.

What do you think about TikTok. How has that changed things?
It means a lot of people know a lot of dance moves.

It’s kind of different from the communal thing, though, isn’t it? It’s about learning something and being precise.
Maybe. But so was learning dance moves off MTV. You know, I really feel a tendency to want to flatten the negatives, you know. There will always be something which means that people are behaving differently. I think the only reason why it’s a problem really, TikTok and online life, is because there aren’t the physical spaces for people to use.

I remember when my daughter was about six, seven, this is pre-TikTok, but ‘Gangnam Style’ was the thing, and that was the first communal craze of her dancing life, and it was so great to see her and all her friends suddenly just want to do this one thing together. I don’t see TikTok as negative, I just think it’s quite a different thing, because it’s talking about precision. And emulating. But you’re right. It’s just like watching Soul Train or Top of the Pops, or all those things that everyone’s always done.
Exactly. And I think it also probably helps move us away from that slightly gendered way that dancing happened before. It’s made it much more acceptable for boys to move their bodies and to dance, and that’s really healthy. TikTok and online dance means that a whole generation of kids under 15, under 18, are very dance literate. They’ve got lots of different styles, they’ve got lots of different dance moves available to them.

They just need more places to get together.
I’ve got a little series of intentions for the book, things that I want to be conveyed, or things I’d like to happen. So we can collectively get more dance in schools, encouraging school leaders and school governors to advocate for dance on the curriculum. I want school leaders to have more language to advocate for dance, to have more language and authority to advocate for space.

You uncovered a few DJs with professional dance pasts. I didn’t realise that Fabio had actually been a pro dancer. And Gerald.
I think there’s a higher than acknowledged number of really seminal figures in UK dance music – in its broadest sense – who share that. There are many of those originators, who you could describe as DJ/dancers. Like Paul Trouble Anderson, Gerald, Shut Up And Dance, Fabio, I think Colin Dale as well. There’s this one guy. Travis Edwards, who was in that Spats, Crackers era, early-to-mid ’80s London jazz-dance scene, who ended up making this amazing, early ’90s rave record under the name Satin Storm. Those jazz-dancers were probably quite young when they were doing that, and by the time the’90s came around they were still on the scene, but it changed, it was no longer jazz-dance, it was now hardcore. And there’s a strand, which I wasn’t aware of beforehand, of jazz dancers who ended up having this really important role in the early days of house, techno, hardcore, into jungle, etc.

I suppose in some way, a really good dancer is a bit like a musician – a musician without an instrument. So when you start producing records in the way that happened in the late ’80s, early ’90s, where it’s all about rhythm patterns, being a dancer is almost more helpful than being a DJ.
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lovely quote from [A Guy Called] Gerald, where he says the most important piece of kit in the studio is the dancer in your head.

You use these metaphors a lot in the book, that there are those moments where you’re so in the dance that you feel you’re creating the music rather than responding to it.
But don’t you think that actually the dancers are dictating, they are generating?

Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
It’s a feeling, but also, I think, it’s a reality. If you’ve got a whole load of people who are really responding to what the DJ is playing, then the DJ is going to go a certain way, aren’t they, because of how the dancefloor is responding. And if something brings the energy down, then the DJ might decide to bring it down even further, for a wheat-from-the-chaff moment. Or they might decide to bring it back up again, or stay at a certain level. They can’t do that without the information they’re getting from the dancers.

No, absolutely. In my experience of DJing, the feeling that the dancers are guiding you is so powerful. I remember the first time I played records with people in front of me, it was so much easier than doing it in your bedroom. Because in your bedroom, you’ve got no feedback, it’s just you. Whereas when you’ve got people in front of you, it’s so obvious what’s going to bomb and what’s going to hit, that they are totally guiding you. I guess the ideal is where everyone is literally feeling that they’re just in the same moment, isn’t it? It’s like, you’re not even guiding it. You’re just in it together.

One of the things I loved about uncovering history was realising that people have always had pretty much the same urges and the same desires. Were there any amazing little surprises and nuggets that you found from a long way back in time?
I absolutely loved the idea of Anglo Saxon lairy raves in ale houses. The girls going off in the woods to dance together. I can imagine like, ‘C’mon ’Chelle, let’s get away from all those stupid annoying boys for a bit. Let’s just go, we can hear the music from the woods.’ Or bringing their own little drama with them or something. So that made me feel really connected to the lineages and histories that just seem otherwise completely impenetrable. Somehow by imagining those dancefloors I could imagine my Anglo Saxon self wailing around the hay bales. It’s a nice feeling of connection, connectedness.

On a more serious note, there was a historical thing I wanted to ask you about – this fascinating story I’d never heard before about white men can’t dance being a kind of a learned, constructed thing that happened after the first world war. Your quote, ‘white middle-class men are rarely reduced to their bodies,’ I thought that was so powerful, because right there, you’ve got this economic and colonial understanding of why some people historically didn’t like dancing.
I remember, friends of mine, writers of colour, describing to me how the white middle-class men in the dance will be the ones who are trying to explain to you how the tune was constructed… While the drop’s happening! I kind of had a sense of this thing, but I didn’t really have any way of articulating it, until I spent time reading around the subject, and talking to Maxine Leeds Craig, who wrote the book, Sorry, I Don’t Dance: Why Men Refuse To Move. She really helped me understand the context, which is learned and is cultural, and does relate to histories of colonialism, it does relate to issues of control. It’s a very tricky area. And it’s a sensitive area. But it made me think, maybe if men who fall into that category read it, they might know that they’ve got choice. If they knew that their disinclination to move might be cultural, they may decide to test out a different way of being.

We know that dancing makes people like each other more. So why not build connections? Why not actively try and build relationships in the powerful nonverbal ways that dance can offer? Just, you know, moving a little bit in a space with other people, you’re indicating that you are of something, not separate from it.

There’s a lot of unspoken politics going on on a dancefloor. Just the feeling of togetherness is such a powerful thing. The feeling that you’re constructing something together. My most powerful times were at the Sound Factory, and that felt like we were all actually working. You know all those lines: ‘You better work!’ It did feel like that. People would turn up in shorts with a towel tucked into their waistband because they were going to sweat. That feeling on the dancefloor that you’re all aiming at something, and trying to create something, is really, really powerful.
Yeah. And all of that is condensed in the Theo Parrish quote at the very beginning: ‘People say that the dance is all about escapism, but really, it’s about solidarity.’ That’s much better understood by communities that have experienced oppression in some shape or form than by those who haven’t. Which is why I feel the importance of writing about things from that perspective. Because it is really powerful. And I think it really does matter. And at the end it is about solidarity.

You can buy the book here >

Love Goes To Buildings on Fire – Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever

In January 1975 in New York City a bomb went off in the name of Puerto Rican liberation; a young man named Soulski was gunned down by the police, inspiring his cousin to leave gangbanging behind, rename himself Afrika Bambaataa and take his DJing efforts more seriously; An established DJ named Hollywood was riffing on adapted Isaac Hayes lyrics to rhyme over records at his next gig; a near-riot hit ticket outlets as thousands of kids trying to see Led Zeppelin were met by armed police; Blood on the Tracks came out, the result of Dylan’s intensive secret studies in visual art; a band named Television was planning a Friday night gig at CBGB’s, confident they were close to being signed by Island, but unsure whether they’d remain intact; on the same bill a band named Blondie had just found a new drummer, having narrowly avoided losing him to Patti Smith; Watergate revelations were rumbling on, and The Jeffersons debuted on TV.

That was just January. In February Malcolm McLaren arrived in town, Mingus played at The Bottom Line, Talking Heads double-billed with The Ramones, Springsteen was recording ‘Born to Run’ in Times Square, and Billy Cobham’s ‘Funky Kind of Thing’ with its nine-minute drum solo arrived in the collection of Joseph Saddler, giving him the perfect raw material to perfect his quick-mix DJing technique, a skill he’d make famous under the new name of Grandmaster Flash.

Everything everywhere, all at once. Only not everywhere, just New York City.

It’s an epic crime chart, with a thick web of red string connecting hundreds of musical innovators and every kind of music. Even a world as incestuous as the downtown punk scene had fibres leading to and from every other style – from avant-classical, loft-based jazz, street-level Latin, blue-collar rock, disco, hip hop. The joy of this book is seeing chance inspiration and unlikely influence, as scenes cross-pollinate each other and wildly different imaginations drop grains of sand into each others’ oysters. It’s an epic job of cross-referencing, mapping scores of biographies and genre histories into an all-encompassing soap opera.

New York 1973-77 was a wasteland of crime and cheap rents, the city abandoned by the federal government to go broke as an example of liberal profligacy. New waves of heroin washed its shores, cryptic serial killers stalked its streets. And in this exciting breakdown, human minds had the time and space to create so much.

Will Hermes makes it all sing; he sketches everyone so they feel real, and he immerses you in the wide creative life of the city like never before. Travelling chronologically, but with an aerial view, is a new kind of omniscience. If you can juggle enough plates in your mind, the experience is like living it. Or at least a whole lot closer than a traditional music history. There’s a fashion for this kind of storytelling, and this book joins Stuart Cosgrove’s masterful soul trilogy at the top table.

The only downside is that it makes you nostalgic for a time when so many fundamental genres were new enough to take your breath away, and when there was a deep revolutionary spirit in every kind of music. Or, to put it another way, for a time when city centre rents were cheap and New York was on fire.
Frank Broughton

Spot-on acid house daftness

Foremost acid house history

TV spin-off house history

On-the-ground house memoir

Scrappy happy house history

Precision-engineered rave chronicle

Chi-town originator stakes his claim

Tooled up gangster house

US ’90s dance boom

Southern deathbed rap

Straight outta Compton

Hip hop’s Rosetta stone.

20 years of Black culture

Hip hop’s pioneers tell their tales

Remembering James Hamilton – by Les Adams

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