Everybody In The Place: An Incomplete History of Britain, 1984 1992 by Jeremy Deller

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qotJoCIhIjk

Fucking brilliant, this. Too much in it for me to draw out all that impressed me in this intro post but hopefully a bit of stimulating conversation will help.

Really impressed with JD's easy way with the teenagers and ease and subtlety of communication in general. Of course his enthusiasm!

Really loved him contrasting the disembodiment of individuals within society resulting from the mechanisation of the means of production at the time of the Industrial Revolution + subsequent emigration to cities w/// connection to nature in the Rave movement as being counter to that. Of course, Deller is 1st an artist, not a theorist so the connections remain vague but are thrillingly so, like when he compares the Kraftwerk photo to religious art.

Highlight: The Hitman and Her accidentally booking their live broadcast from an actual rave rather than a nightclub with vaudeville/1950s challenges etc. and the look on P Waterman's face.

donwloaded this last night and really looking forward to watching it.

Yeah, I loved this. Such a refreshing change from the usual nostalgic interview-based patronising guff.

Yeah it's refreshing to hear someone from that era putting it into a social history context. And especially someone quite perceptive and amiable and whose brain hasn't been turned to mushy peas from too many dodgy E's!

I was surprised the New Dance Show footage with people dancing to Numbers (has been linked on ILM before too iirc) is apparently from 1991 not 1981.

yeah have to echo the praise, thought this was fantastic

Yup, this was brilliant, best thing I've seen in ages - incredible footage and tbh a bit shocking to see something with real thought and argument stuck in the comfort programming of the bbc.

watched this yesterday. a couple of sweeping generalisations notwithstanding (did exciting nightlife really not exist in the UK prior to 1986? Do young people these days really not know how to go wild and party?) I thought it was wonderful.

did exciting nightlife really not exist in the UK prior to 1986?

Not a fraction as exciting as being at a rave, I'm sure.

sure, but it wasn't all Butlins-style things like... I'm sure there was the odd punk gig or something. I do get the wider point though :-)

Northern soul, disco, soulboys, mods etc etc

Taking drugs to keep dancing all night, that wasn't invented in 1986.

that said, yes, LOL at Strachers and Waterman looking sweaty and bug-eyed as though they're just about to come up on the eccies

Really enjoyed the section with the bystanders arguing about the new age travellers too

Deller admitted the connections he indicated were fanciful, poetic license. Still I expect a bunch of right wing churls will cite this programme as evidence of lefty academic propaganda while squirming over how relatively few white kids there appeared to be in the class.

Taking drugs to keep dancing all night, that wasn't invented in 1986.

it's not a historical documentary, it's a film made by an artist about the things that interest him and the ideas he has about them that connect them to other things he's interested in that also feature in this film.

What a great doc.

Do young people these days really not know how to go wild and party?

The UK is not the USA, but here trends are firmly in the direction of young people staying in, for a host of reasons (and with effects both good and bad).

xpost - to be fair the documentary needed some more wild connections, really.

also, the classroom framing device prevents him from talking about drugs.

Yeah, a real treat -- even with flights of fancy, it was so NOT what we were expecting, namely some kind of talking-head 'and that was an amazing night!' parade. Funny thing is about half way in I said to Kate "Given everything he's mentioned he'll have to mention Spiral Tribe and Castle Morton" and about five seconds later...

Taking drugs to keep dancing all night, that wasn't invented in 1986.

it's not a historical documentary, it's a film made by an artist about the things that interest him and the ideas he has about them that connect them to other things he's interested in that also feature in this film.

― Funky Isolations (jed_), Tuesday, 20

Very good but that's not what I was responding to.

It was good that it didn't talk too much about a 'track that changed EVERYTHING' - in fact very little about specific music or artists; also drugs were mentioned very seldom.

Supposedly the BBC put pressure on him not to go on about drugs.

I haven't seen it yet, but will very soon.

Totally naive question for those that know more than me (or better yet, were there). The dancers in these rave clips seem overwhelmingly if not exclusively white. Is that accurate, or were the gatherings more integrated than depicted?

The dancers in these rave clips seem overwhelmingly if not exclusively white.

lol I thought this too. The contrast between the students in the classroom and then the opening clip of the kids standing in line is pretty striking.

britain was very white

they were more integrated than depicted.

the clip of the kids standing in line is from blackburn, lancashire which at that time was 90+% white.

if you went to the m25 orbital raves it was a very diffrerent picture.

Speculative but e.g. the Hacienda crowd in 1990 might've been 2/3 white at best in terms of diversity - same for any rave in the actual countryside by 92/93...at best. Could go up to 90%+ white depending where you were.

Only the dedicated soundsystem parties mentioned in the lecture in places like Moss Side (Manchester) or a few around London would've had more black than white participants having originated directly from the black communities in those cities.

Such a great doc. Made me tear up a little bit

me too.

also - The Hitman and Her accidentally booking their live broadcast from an actual rave rather than a nightclub

I don't think it was an accident. They fully embraced rave culture, albeit they were slightly late to the party. The Hitman and Her was de rigeur late night weekend viewing for ravers even though they tended to play the cheesier end of the rave spectrum. But, Pete Waterman's label, PWL, did release some credible records such as Toxic Two's 'Rave Generator'. There were several '91 / '92 Hitman and Hers where Waterman was patently on E.

Actually, I'd go even further and argue that one of the reasons rave music exploded amongst the 'working class' was because they were so primed for high energy dance music as that was thee soundtrack in nightclubs right across the north of England and Scotland in the late 80s and Pete Waterman's PWL had provided a high % of that soundtrack. Hi-NRG and Rave have so much in common but it is rarely discussed.

oof he looks melted here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCXoWqPtwJM

haha! at 5:40
"we're gonna have a rave dj doing a bit of mixing, he's called carl cox"
"carl cox!...... oh right, forgot what we were doing then. carl cox"

I do wonder why Deller chose to frame it that way, then. The truth is no less interesting a narrative.

Maybe he perceived it to be that way? Also, it makes good telly; as you point out, he is an artist, not a theorist so it's ok for him to be a bit playful. there are a couple of other factual errors in the programme but i can happily let them them go precisely because he is not presenting it as definitive cultural theory.

i loved it and am not ashamed to admit i shed a ton of tears watching it. it is the story of my youth.

:)

I actually did the same at that Bicep Video for the track Glue.

I had MASSIVE issues with this tbh:

a) really uncomfortable with Deller celebrating the act of capitalist entrepreneurialism where a black subculture was sold on to a white audience and the scenes at the end where the crowd was predominantly white made me feel uneasy, I get that Staines was featured to show that Tory cunts were in this as much as anyone but Deller seemed quite happy to just let this pass when in actual fact there is a huge gulf between the rave social utopia ideal and the practice of selling it as the ultimate Thatcherist business model

b) I was born in 1988 so i obviously wasnt there but people speaking about how rave culture was open and accessible to anyone seems insane to me - even though petrol was 34p a litre or whatever I can guarantee you that a weekend off your face on ecstacy and driving to raves involves a level of comfort and privilege in your life; I can hardly do it at 30 due to the pressures of everyday life and obligation, and I couldn't do it at 18, and the lack of imagination required to not understand why this might be problematic speaks to the class divide that definitely exists today

c) "what if phones but too much" at the end, where a bunch of old people looked at footage on youtube then used social media to complain about social media and people filming at modern day equivalents unlike the people who... filmed these events

The kids playing on synths looked fun though

I mean i also dont believe everyone who runs a clubnight is a capitalist opportunist pig but i also think its churlish to pretend it was all blissed out ideals, 30 years on and my own life experience tell me otherwise...

I

i don't know where to begin with this.

House music was a black subcuture. Rave was a multicultural subculture. As you say, you weren't there, you weren't alive and I think you analysing it through the prism of 2019 'problematic' Identity Politics is downright moronic.

I had zero money then. I couldn't afford to buy E - it was £25 when it first appeared. I probably had £40 a week to live on. It didn't stop me fully participating in this culture and I also fully participated in every aspect of the Rave era while being mostly straight edge. It wasn't all about drugs abd you didn't need to be coming from a place of privilige to participate.

The Rave era was for many people the first time they were in a room and sharing a powerful, life changing experience with someone from a different class background, with a different sexuality, of a different race, in their lives. It had massive positive social impact and truly tore through the class divide more than any cultural movement in this country before or since.

Don't belittle or try to cancel something you patently completely fail to understand.

i honestly don't think i have felt more patronised in my entire life.

£25 E's were so expensive and if it turned out to be shit quality you'd be crying at wasting that much money, acid tabs and whizz were all I could afford most of the time!

I didn't really sample really cheap and plentiful ecstasy till about 10 years later when my brother was buying huge amounts of crystal MDMA. That shit was amazing!

I can guarantee you that a weekend off your face on ecstacy and driving to raves involves a level of comfort and privilege in your life

For real I had to get a Saturday job and find a friend with a car.

i was there (well, in leeds), and never once took drugs.
1 ltr of merrydown cider, and a few vodka/fresh orange, and boom, i was throwing shapes.
like stirmonster, i was flat f*cking broke, but totally soaking up the scene as much as possible.
loved the documentary.
found the classroom presentation so much more watchable that a bunch of z-list vox pops declaring how brilliant it all was.
also, the shock on the new kids faces when they realised that there were no phones, and everyone was just in their own space not giving a shit re videos appearing on social media.

In the beginning, there was Jack, and Jack had a groove.

And from this groove came the groove of all grooves.

And while one day viciously throwing down on his box, Jack boldy declared,

"Let there be HOUSE!"

and house music was born.

"I am, you see,

I am

the creator, and this is my house!

And, in my house there is ONLY house music.

But, I am not so selfish because once you enter my house it then becomes OUR house and OUR house music!"

And, you see, no one man owns house because house music is a universal language, spoken and understood by all.

You see, house is a feeling that no one can understand really unless you're deep into the vibe of house.

House is an uncontrollable desire to jack your body.

And, as I told you before, this is our house and our house music.

And in every house, you understand, there is a keeper.

And, in this house, the keeper is Jack.

Now some of you who might wonder,

"Who is Jack, and what is it that Jack does?"

Jack is the one who gives you the power to jack your body!

Jack is the one who gives you the power to do the snake.

Jack is the one who gives you the key to the wiggly worm.

Jack is the one who learns you how to walk your body.

Jack is the one that can bring nations and nations of all Jackers together under one house.

You may be black, you may be white; you may be Jew or Gentile. It don't make a difference in OUR House.

And this is fresh.

shivers all over.

I can guarantee you that a weekend off your face on ecstacy and driving to raves involves a level of comfort and privilege in your life

It really doesn’t. It just requires a lack of commitments (or a lack of commitment to commitments).

I'm not old enough to have gone to the original 90s raves but I went to plenty of free parties and outdoor raves in my early 20s and I definitely had no wherewithal whatsoever

Are you sure about 25 euro pills in the late 80s? you would be the only person paying this.

£ not euros, so more. In 1988, definitely. 1989 they went down to £20. i didn't pay that as i couldn't afford it but it was definitely the case where i live.

indeed, I vividly remember people going round clubs to find their mates for the fiver each so each person could have a quarter.

(euros began in 1999 fwiw)

or, perhaps, by the time I can remember it circa mid 90s, it was £4 or so each for a £16 pill. It was definitely a clubbing together to buy one pill situation though.

Oof, factoring in inflation a tenner ecto is a real bargain. What a time to be alive.

This doc was absolutely fantastic. I've always felt I was born about 5-10 years too late. Caught the tail end of the 90's rave scene right after high school in the San Francisco bay area. This really puts context and cultural impact together around a profoundly influential music scene and I also teared up a bit at the end, despite not having ever been a part of it. Castlemorton seems like a blossoming British style Burning Man in a way.

this was enjoyable, most of it v familiar except somehow I'd missed that paul staines started out promoting raves wth?!?! anyway this made me go back and watch mark leckey's fiorucci made me hardcore, which is rad even without a big screen and an even bigger speaker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dS2McPYzEE

£4 or so each for a £16 pill

handing over 16 pound coins to a dealer in a club toilet "yes I think you will find this satisfactory"

also as a side note I'm a bit surprised by the extent of 'I'm not British I'm a Londoner' sentiment in that classroom. mb the reluctance to raise hands was partly self-conscious classroom dynamics (exacerbated by being filmed) & obv it's not v scientific, but my hunch is that is says more about London than Britain, and if you asked that in a majority BAME high school outside the M25, even round Bradford or somewhere, you'd hear a more complicated, layered and less exceptionalist idea of identity (altho obv still ambivalent, but ambivalence is m/l part of contemporary British identity, for the conscious anyway)

when I was 18 I was living in a village ~20 miles outside of Glasgow, working 30 hours a week to bring money in to feed the brother I was caring for, while trying to manage a full-time degree course. Obviously I always had money for a Blu WKD on a Friday night but I was never going out the way I wanted to. And I love dance music. It really didn't take a leap of imagination for me to think about people who had various factors in their life excluding them from nightlife. Clubbing is a leisure activity and a luxury and I don't think it's "moronic" to keep that in mind. You call it "a lack of committments", I hear the privilege of "freedom from obligations and responsibilities." And that's just me bringing my own biases to it. I'm sure there are other factors that limited people that I wouldn't consider without hearing about it.

I mean, I'm hearing you guys talk about how cheap it was and how you could do it while signing on and it's convincing me that maybe it really was that different 30 years ago, but that's not coming from the documentary itself and I still don't think it's as straightforward.

Of course, in 2005 all my hometown pals were into "The Kooks" and I think had we been 18 in 1992 I would have been trying to go to these things alone. Which would have shaped my experience differently - I'm an out gay man, and I live in a world where I constantly have an awareness of ambient homophobia - not actively being a victim of it, but knowing that every social situation I have to navigate involves a level of care and self-protection against bias and bigotry. I police what I say and to who until I can be sure they're an ally and I can relax. I think going out alone to a warehouse party in the late 80s as a gay man would have been a very different experience. When your identity politics shapes your whole existence I think it's natural to filter your view of the world through that and that's why I find a lot of the generalisations made in the narrative of rave culture to be questionable.

I mean if nobody in your scheme drives a car because they can't afford one where were you going?

as for rave as capitalist business model: I take part in it just as much myself as a consumer - I buy tickets for events and understand that DJs and producers and promoters all need money to live on and have bills to pay and I don't begrudge them that. I mean, I want to sell music and art as a commodity and live off it myself really!

I just didn't think it was legit to portray "bringing rave mainstream" as an act of subversive politics when it's still ultimately part of the capitalist mode of leisure. In fact, rave culture really only exists as a riposte to working life, you can only provide escape and relief from the misery of everyday life if your audience is part of that. I don't know what the solution is and I doubt there is one because what that involves is escaping capitalism. But I still think Deller missed an important issue by glossing over the impact and implications of taking a minority subculture and selling it to a mainstream audience.

there's also probably something to pick at the story beyond this period, in the fact that jungle evolved via house into UK garage, which is my favourite music ever but comes with the worst culture imaginable - the conspicuous consumerism of designer clothes and expensive drinks, completely at odds with everything great about rave culture's egalitarian spirit. Why did that happen, why didn't British dance music remain a utopian vision?

You're generalising massively but...I will too. The House/Garage side of things always had a 'dress up' foundation which had translated certain ways to the mainstream by the time of 2 Step. The more 'hardcore' side could be seen as more aggressive (more male I guess) and hippie-ish (people wearing whatever) by comparison. A lot depended on the exact nature of the music - its themes and intent, but you could argue a London Garage night in 97 playing Dem 2 while a cosmopolitan glamorous crowd dance was a closer equivalent of the New Dance Show clip than what transpired here before that.

Its a cruel generalisation I'm making too. Of course not everyone into garage was into the bling culture and you're right, it is a generalisation.

So you can watch something like this Sun City Hippodrome documentary from 1998

https://youtu.be/gtKIilc_3NQ

And compare it to this footage of Castle Donnington in 1992

https://youtu.be/TZjICj8pkpE

And I wonder... what changed in six years, and why?

(Sorry to hijack this thread for my ignorant and decades-out questions about the history of British dance music but it seemed as good a place as any to ask people who were experiencing it as Actual Nightlife and not just Songs On The Radio)

boxedjoy, I grew up with the romanticisation of rave culture all through my early-mid teens. I was really excited to experience dance culture and the movement around it but once I was old enough to go out to actual clubs I was super disappointed.

(A younger and much more naive me from the distant past laid out my feelings in a post here I HATE CLUBBING - my apologies for this).

It coincided with the era of commercial garage, Ibiza trance, super-clubs, over-paid DJs etc... Plus, because my only experiences of 'clubbing' came largely from provincial town clubs, student nights and one ill-fated excursion to Home in London as a grungey student, I wasn't exactly getting the full experience. My friends and I resorted to going to grotty warehouse free parties instead, but they weren't a patch on the raves depicted int he video - more full of what we would now call wooks and roadmen, and very much centred around drug culture and shit music.

I can only guess that the Criminal Justice Bill was the main factor in turning a grassroots egalitarian youth movement into a commodified, consumerist and commercial enterprise. Dance music went from being this slightly dangerous, illicit thing to being something that was being discussed properly on Channel 4 with proper albums being made with pop stars guesting etc..

(i wish I hadn't linked to that post - I'm going to be cringing all day). That said, I'm glad the days of clubs turning people away for wearing trainers are largely over. Even at Home (in its time a more commercial rival to Fabric), you had to wear proper shoes, and IIRC no jeans or t-shirts.

god imagine being shocked at £3.50 for a pint

I thought this was very very good. There were of course numerous "problematic" things about it, but I think it quite often did a good job of preserving tensions rather than trying to smooth them over. There were moments where I wished that he would have tried to let the images speak for themselves a bit more rather than nearly apologising for the looseness of the connections as he did at one point ("its just a theory of mine").

He was interested in rave as a mass phenomenon that happened all over England this interest was very distinct from the kinds of insiderish accounts of nightlife and subculture that have become quite preponderant post-midtown 120 blues in particular. I think even a passing familiarity with his work, which combines highly normative, or even reactionary, models of "fun" with more critical perspectives (eg, historical re-enactment and leftist historiography). While its true that there were lots of people having great fun and taking drugs and staying out all night prior to rave, and he mentions quite a few of these, the film argues that rave was a sortof singular moment in transforming provincial working-class entertainment and narrowing the gap between the cities and provinces.

Of course it leaves out all kinds of things, my boyfriend wondered why they didn't film it in a school in Milton Keynes or Staines. I wondered why he didn't do it in Dulwich College. I think Mark Fischer is the main unacknowledged influence (as well as John Berger) and the specific context of the students felt-underexplored, and they spoke too little. They did feel uncomfortably like props throughout, signalling something somewhat mutely. They contributed more of an ambiance, though it would be unfair to deny that two of the best moments ("do you ever go to the countryside?" and "do you think of yourself as british?") were prompted by his engagement with them. In addition the rapport between Deller and the students felt sincere if strained which I think was probably rather an honest portrayal. Having worked in schools in London I'm often uncomfortable with the zealous funneling of social capital into state schools in ways that seem to least benefit the students. I've worked in schools where students experience high level of poverty and social marginalisation that have been involved in projects with the London Symphony Orchestra, Zaha Hadid Architects and the AA, The Barbican Centre, LSE. I hope there are some other outputs from the project that mobilise this tension more effectively. I don't necessarily think it was a failing that the show didn't delve into this tension, especially as doing so in a half-assed way would have felt much more like covering its own ass than thoughtfully addressing this.

I do agree to some extent with boxedjoy that the film could have benefited from introducing more dissonance around the concepts of "fun" and "pleasure." To some extent, it never really cracks open what is fundamentally different between the two scenes from the hitman and her except that we see them and understand the difference. It definitely borrows Thaemlitz's dictum "let's try not to lose sight of the things you're momentarily trying to escape from," but doesn't follow this all the way to taking a more ambivalent view of hedonism and pleasure. I found the fetishisation of "people having fun" in the final scenes especially jarring.

Still, there was so much to recommend this, and I think a more critically bulletproof approach would have been far less illuminating. I think it did a good job of exposition around things like how the construction of new infrastructure (the building of the m25) and the collapse of old industries combined to bring about a novel environment that made the events it describes possible. The shots of bugged out ravers in front of stately homes and squinting at the sunrise in fields were unpacked with great efficiency given the film's runtime.

boxedjoy I think a fairer comparison would be the Donington event with something like Tribal Gathering in 97 where outdoor events began morphing more into 1-2 day mini-festivals with broader line-ups. To somewhat complete the circle that particular event had Kraftwerk headlining but also stuffed with superclub DJs. I think there is a really important difference between the outdoor events and urban club nights and despite some overlap both had their distinct points of influence, strengths and weaknesses.

Great post plax (ico). incidentally those bugged out ravers in front of the stately home are from my home town and I sometimes see the dude out and about, probably in his mid-late 40s now

I went to Boomtown festival the weekend, which originated out of the West Country rave scene and I can tell you that unbridled hedonism is alive and well among young people, so that's nice to know

Booming post plax, agree with all of it

Having the pupils list these regional venues at the end was like a cute nod to It's Grim Up North. I think Brunel Rooms (Swindon) was the only one I've been to. I half thought they were gonna stick 'Jerusalem' on in the background while they were being read out.

I've got a few historical questions some of you can probably answer. It had never occurred to me until I read a recent "Altamont" book that the US West Coast psychedelic scene (Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, et al.) didn't have a real impact in the UK (not least because apparently acid, among other drugs, were relatively rare). I can understand why the music didn't necessarily take, but the whole Summer of Love hippie/counterculture explosion in the States, did *that* take at all in the UK, contemporaneously? Were there hippies in the UK akin to the hippies in the US, or were the politics such that it was more a fashion thing? (I mean, fast forward a couple of years and the US didn't really have a glam/glitter scene, that could be a similar comparison). Obviously the parallels are such that it's been called the Second Summer of Love, but I wonder why it took so long to manifest itself.

And then moving on, the States are huge, so while we did have these regional counterculture explosions (west coast, later NYC punk) I don't know what the broader national impact was. But in the UK, late '70s punk seemed to have a pretty big national profile, and a big egalitarian DIY appeal. It also seemed like more of a radical reaction than rave. So what was different about subsequent rave culture? Why did punk (as the documentary states/implies) fail in a way that rave didn't, as a sort of grand unified expression of youth culture/rebellion or whatever? What made 1988 different from 1978?

Last batch of questions. There were obviously pretty big acts in the UK inspired by Detroit techno and the like. By 1988, acts like Depeche Mode and New Order (among others) were on the cusp of peak popularity, but beat-driven "dance" music, did it have any sort of mainstream presence? I think back to disco here - was there, for example, UK disco when it was huge in the States?

Sorry for rambles, waiting for coffee to kick in, but this is all interesting to me, especially your first person accounts.

Yes people have repeatedly annoyingly referred to "the second Summer of Love" in the UK when talking about acid house year zero in the UK (1987). I was just realising my dislike of the term may be a personal reaction to the apparent critical backlash in the late 70s/early 80s against disco and the concurrent perception in political discourse of the 70s as a lost decade, winter of discontent etc.

for a idea of 60s and 70s UK responses to US pop culture everyone shd read my book obviously (tho it's weak on anything after 1987 as it largely ends in 1985-86)

this shd also be good (from the same publishers but not by me): http://strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/bass-mids-tops/

I never went to the big raves, the first unlicensed party playing house and techno I went to was put on by a bunch of ex punks in London Bridge. That was in 1990 and by then if you wanted a rhubarb and cuatard it would cost less than drinking beer all night. Knowing a few people and living in London is a kind of privilege but that aside if you really wanted to go 'raving' every week it was mostly a matter of priorities.

By 1988, acts like Depeche Mode and New Order (among others) were on the cusp of peak popularity, but beat-driven "dance" music, did it have any sort of mainstream presence?

I wasn't 'there' (born in 1981) but from what I know (including a helpful recent Top of the Pops retrospective), house music had started to make an impact on the singles chart by '88 and even moreso that year - the first big crossover hit was Love Can't Turn Around in August '86; Jack Your Body made #1 at the start of '87. On the other hand I was genuinely surprised to find out that Joe Smooth's Promised Land missed the top 40 altogether.

"Theme from S-Express" making number one in 1988 felt like a big moment to my 10-year-old self, here was a totally new form of music that had ARRIVED, it had the same impact on me as hearing Public Enemy and De La Soul at around the same time.

US West Coast psychedelic scene (Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, et al.) didn't have a real impact in the UK (not least because apparently acid, among other drugs, were relatively rare). I can understand why the music didn't necessarily take, but the whole Summer of Love hippie/counterculture explosion in the States, did *that* take at all in the UK, contemporaneously?

Obviously it was different but... there was definitely psychedelia (?) and presumably quite a lot of LSD in the late 60s and early 70s. But maybe that's not quite what you were asking.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Julie

It also seemed like more of a radical reaction than rave.

I don't know about this - perhaps as a more tangible or obvious political statement? Rave was as much a response to new technology and radical techniques and their democratisation (sampling, teenagers making tracks on affordable computers in their bedrooms, getting it onto dubplates and played out within the same week) as to the equivalent political landscape 10+ years after punk (if these can be separated) - increasing urban/rural drift as Deller may have suggested, increasing diversity of people in line with the wider population.

I'd say the hippie side of things was best represented by the travellers movement and acts like Spiral Tribe and Eat Static, to so called 'crusties' who probably helped dance music get taken more seriously as festivals like Glastonbury, then spilled a bit into the psychedelic trance scene (think Goa and the sort of thing Paul Oakenfold ended up playing all over the world) but this was frankly a lot more white and middle class.

There were plenty of hippies in the UK and, afaik, plenty of acid too.

No need for the Grateful Dead when you've got Hawkwind and Gong.

Dead's first ever overseas show was in the UK in 1970, and a couple of years later they were popular enough to fill Wembley Empire Pool and play three consecutive nights at the Lyceum, which I think Hawkwind and Gong would've been hard-pressed to do even in their pomp.

But yes, there was definitely a first summer of love in the UK in the 60s - and plenty of hippies.

xpost I'm just going by what the book I read reported, that in the late '60s in the the UK, at the peak of the US hippie counterculture, there was not much acid around in the UK. And probably safe to assume Hawkwind and Gong were not attracting Woodstock (or whatever) numbers?

perhaps as a more tangible or obvious political statement?

Yeah, this is what I mean. UK punk seemed like a more blatant rebellion - not just DIY (labels, forming bands) but a reaction against conservative government/society. It was confrontational. Rave, afaict, was expressive but seemed significantly less aggressive, less of an affront to the status quo (until it was, I guess). But punk, despite being youth-driven, national, and at least to some extent commercially successful, never attracted crowds of tens of thousands, did it? The way rave did? Was it the violence/aggression of punk that did it in?

Anyway, my other question: were there any big UK disco acts at the peak of US disco? I assume disco did as well there as it did here.

Unlicensed raves and free parties were/are overtly 'defiant' (of the law, of how you're supposed to have fun and where you're supposed to go) but of course that only turns to aggression if at all when violently confronted. Probably the same could be said of punk.

Hawkwind played Isle of Wight 1970 (attendance ac..wikipedia = c.700,000, which is actually larger than Woodstock's 400,000 -- tho both had significant perimeter breaches, which presumably makes the exact counting trickier). Hawkwind played the "canvas city" part of IoW, which was the semi-illicit free part of it. They then toured relentlessly through the 70s, the chief or anyway the most dogged vector of the "60s underground" out of london (they were notting hill-based) into the rest of the UK, sustaining the free-festivals mind-expansion circuit. But I think they had/have a very complex relationship to hippie summer-of-love utopianism -- unlike Gong a lot of their subject matter is p much the opposite.

*(also due an excellent strange attractor publication later this year)
**(sorry i am loyal to my lovely publishers)

I'm assuming the Grateful Dead playing in London was 'an event', so people would come from all over for it, again I assume those were their only UK gigs. I'm betting Hawkwind sold exponentially more albums in the UK though.

Struggling to think of successful UK disco acts now. Hot Chocolate?

beegees, average white band

xp

I dunno when you'd consider the peak of US disco but UK disco existed, for sure, even if you don't count the Bee Gees as a UK act :) Examples of varying quality and longevity that come to mind include The Real Thing, Hot Chocolate, Hi-Tension, Kelly Marie, Average White Band, Tina Charles, though you might make a case that any of these were not strictly disco but in fact soul or funk or pop, or whatever.

A hell of a lot of Eurodisco was recorded in London with UK musicians and singers btw.

That free festival circuit was certainly the UK analogue to following The Dead around. IIRC the CJA and direct police targeting did indeed largely put an end to it. Very sad.

re: uk psychedelia in the 60s - there was this little band called the Beatles

the UK had its mod-psych explosion, yes, the london-based 65-68 shift from speed to LSD to heroin as sketched in jon savage's 1966: the year the decade exploded --but

1: access for most to west coast sounds and lifestyles was fairly limited
2: the underground scene in london was at its 67-69 peak only a few hundred at most; some of the underground press -- which had some grasp of west coastism -- had good UK-wide penetration but only on a tiny scale, so any idea of the summer of love was second or third hand, often mediated by baffled or hostile mainstream means, and as a consequence very delayed at a time of seemingly very fast fashion-shifts
3: the beatles as cultural vector had very much turned inwards post-pepper, and shifted into proto-divorce phase shortly after that
4: per the hawkwind post above, the "underground" outside london arrived late and complicatedly pre-disenchanted (wanting to be a part of the big druggy love-in, resentful and distrustful that it was probably already too late)
5: IoW 1970 was seen by many of the "old guard" UK psychedelians as the catastrophic end of something (not least bcz the set hendrix played was bad and soon after he was dead)
6: LSD was only available on a wider scale after the general sense of souring, its early visionary phase was exactly the one that most ppl (apart from a vanguard of musicians) missed and looked askance at.
7: the pop and rock press didn't adapt to rock culture until 1970 (when a gang of melody maker staff left to set up sounds) and didn't really mutate into a vector for countercultural attitude until 1973 (when a bunch of the younger underground-adjacent writers and editors landed up at the nme

tl;dr -- i think the blissful uplands moment was always already in the past for the bulk of those in the UK likely to be attracted to it, one reason the UK was *so* ripe for a counterreaction insisting it was all a fraud…

READ MY BOOK

It also seems obvious that the weather makes a hippy lifestyle much more attractive in California than uk

Vashti Bunyan traveling in a horse drawn caravan around Ireland always sounds really miserable to me

endless summer of love vs rainy bank holiday weekend

it's probably not an accident that ibiza and the med were a factor in the second summer of love

To Tom D (and apols for the Dead detour) - on their first European tour in 72 the Dead played two nights at Wembley, a gig at Newcastle City Hall, three nights at the Lyceum and the Bickershaw Festival in Wigan (organiser: Jeremy Beadle, Elvis Costello in the audience for the Dead.) They returned to the UK a number of times after that, but yes, p much stuck to London after 72 - venues like The Rainbow in Finsbury Park, Wembley Arena and Alexandra Palace - so still fairly substantial audiences. You could well be right about their record sales compared to Hawkwind (not so sure about Gong tho!) - and the first time I heard the Dead on the radio was when out of the blue one evening in the 1980s, Peel span Ripple.

I was never much of a dancer/raver but had a pal who was deep into Drum & Bass in the early 90s and went to a few squat raves and the like with him back then. Long time ago, but my memory was that there was at least some diversity at these things, in places like Hackney, and that we never paid more than fifteen quid for an E - tho acid was always much cheaper.

all hawkwind albs up to quark got into the uk top 40, and space ritual peaked at 9, all many weeks in the charts

dead's biggest uk alb hit is terrapin station (#30 in 1977), with four others before that all outside the top 40 one week only

I was a piss poor excuse for a raver. I went to the Hacienda in '90. Went to the Orbit in Morley a few times, but by my early 20's had decided I despised clubs but loved the drugs and music around club culture.

Thanks for all the discussion and responses so far. OK, caffeine kicking in a touch right now, here's one thing I was getting at: what, if anything, did rave aim for/offer/achieve in the UK that punk did not? Aside from the sound of the music, what, if anything, was different about rave that made it such a successful youth culture explosion?

one love

(not achieved obviously but it clearly felt on offer to a significant number of people for a significant amount of time)

So going back to punk again, was punk just so awash in anger and bad vibes that it was doomed as a unifying force?

Yeah UK House all pretty much forked from the mid 80s Ibiza scene and the British DJs and producers lulled out there - that plus maybe being more receptive/quicker to process what was coming out of the US esp. Chicago and Detroit by then, to imitate this (to varying degrees of success), homage, rip off, mutate, cross-breed etc. (at least in terms of sales I always got the impression big US House records way off making it into European charts, compared to the relative success of a a glut of them in the UK's, despite the Balearic connection and general holiday appeal).

So, somewhat conversely, always been curious about why UK disco never seemed as sophisticated or indeed good as what was coming out of (mostly) France, Italy and Germany in response to the US sounds.

punk was a splintering force: post-punk is the time of the tribes

I wasn't 'there' (born in 1981) but from what I know (including a helpful recent Top of the Pops retrospective), house music had started to make an impact on the singles chart by '88 and even moreso that year - the first big crossover hit was Love Can't Turn Around in August '86; Jack Your Body made #1 at the start of '87.

I was 12 in 1988 so obv I didn't actually go to any raves then, but house music was the first music I really got into, and probably mostly because of mainstream impact - the above TOTP appearances, Radio 1 airplay - having rewatched some of those TOTPs recently it's not surprising I went for house music so much given what else was on TOTP back then. the first tapes I bought with my own money were all stuff like the Beatmasters, Bomb The Bass, S'Express, Coldcut, Simon Harris etc. by the time Castlemorton happened I was 15 and had moved on to indie and grunge, pity because Castlemorton Common is less than 15 miles away from where I grew up, not that I would've been allowed to go even if I was aware it was happening

fwiw a lot of the early traveller/crusty type ravers had come from the anarcho-punk scene

So going back to punk again, was punk just so awash in anger and bad vibes that it was doomed as a unifying force?

acid house released as many great records every week as punk released in three years, duh

a splintering force less i think bcz of bad vibes (also very present during the 60s after all) or "anger" (always overstated as actually content, in contrast to pose) but bcz of punk's extremely vivid commitment to the urgency of self-expression

In that regard, was rave more ... passive? Riding in the car rather than driving it?

I don't think rave was "unifying" because it didn't unify anything, though it was very big and its effects were felt all over the place. There was plenty of other stuff going on that wasn't swept up in rave.

rave was about communal expression

(vs self-expression)

That was really the big point of this doc wasn't? That rave was a response to political and social ideas that denied the value of communality and fun for its own sake.

But was that new? Why didn't that manifest itself as a prominent youth movement earlier? What had changed that prompted the need for that particular expression of fun and community? The conflation with the miner's strike provided a useful illustration, I guess. Things *were* changing of course.

a version of "fun and community" manifests at every rock or pop show back to i don't know when, including punk tbh!

there'd been warehouse raves since the early 80s and reggae soundsystems back to the mid-70s, and clubs with DJ sets back the the mid-60s if not further, but the confluence of technologies (esp.digital & pharmaceutical, plus sourcing spaces to play in, portable PAs and so on, is a mid-late 80s thing

(also: not mentioned but certainly london-relevant, from the late 70s there had been a gradual dwindling in availability of *official* mid-scale music venues, as performance licenses were being increasingly contested by locals -- so a culture that could re-purpose warehouses and didn't always need to obtain a license was poised to ponce)

lol i meant pounce

Hey let's give New Romantic its due as well.

Calling Herr Freud. (xp)

Poised to Ponce would be a great album title.

I enjoyed this but it felt very disposable and OTM to posts saying it doesn't reflect their own experience at the time.

The point of The Hitman & Her was that it showed consumption of music in nightclubs, as a soundtrack to dancing around wasted or hooking up with people whereas TV music shows before (& after) depicted music as either watching live performers or as a product you could buy and listen to at home. Deller's version of him being shocked after "accidentally" appearing at a rave is wrong. On the show Waterman played up the misfit grandad image (though he's ten years younger there than Deller is now) but it belies his track record of producing dancefloor bangers for Divine, Hazell Dean, Dead or Alive etc. and his later career as a trance dj. I'm sure he knew exactly what goes on at raves in 1992.

JC, please talk about The Grateful Dead and how punk was fun as well on other threads.

hahahaha

threads on pet subjects are free to start, afaik.

https://www.discogs.com/Fabio-Grooverider-30-Years-Of-Rage/release/13808062

This had been really good listening lately, nothing that would surprise anyone here I'm sure but definitely welcome. I was really surprised because i always though they were d&b guys but this is all house/techno bobbins

Great comps those; i was playing a lot of those records back then too. i went to Rage with my sister one time. She asked me if i would try to find someone who could sell her an E. I did. They sold me an aspirin for £15.

Yeah UK House all pretty much forked from the mid 80s Ibiza scene and the British DJs and producers lulled out there

Sorry but this drives me bonkers too. So the official history would have you believe this but it is actually far from the truth. The “official history” was written by London centric media goons who were friends with these ex soul mafia dudes who discovered that DJs in Ibiza played a wide mix of music alongside house music and then came back acting as if they had discovered the second coming of Jesus Christ. Much of the country was wise to all this well before then and before NME, ID & The Face started writing about it from a London perspective and it went on to be regarded as 'fact'. Fake news 80s stylee.

These white guys who went on holiday to Ibiza in 88 actually had very little to do with the creative energy that was the birth of UK house music. Take the example of a Nigerian born black man in living in London called Tony Addis who had infinitely more to do with the rise of UK house music than say Paul Oakenfold. So many marginal figures have been written out of history in favour of dull white guys who didn't really do much except manage to generate a lot of myth making and media buzz.

As an aside I think the first ever UK chart house record (top 10 in early 87) was The House Master Boyz' "House Nation" which had been huge in your Hit Man & Her type clubs for months as had "Jack Your Body" (a UK no. 1) and "Love Can't Turn Around". Most of the people who bought the copies that launched these records into the charts probably had no idea they originated in Chicago. I remember my sister buying "Love Can't Turn Around" on 12" and looking non plussed when I told her how cool it was she had bought a house music 12".

And of course there was then the UK chart onslaught from the pop house artists Colonel Poo mentions - Beatmasters, Bomb The Bass, S'Express, Coldcut, Simon Harris, Yazz etc.

Also, people most certainly talked about a second summer of love in ’88.

Lastly responding to the earlier question about why UK garage is associated with "conspicuous consumerism of designer clothes and expensive drinks"; there are several reasons. It was a counter to the increasingly male environment of Drum & Bass clubs and the darkness of a lot of that music at that time. It was hard for a lot of these DJs to get a Saturday night booking often due to outright racism and police hassle so it developed into a Sunday scene with a lot of women in attendance. I guess for the same reason lots of English people vote Conservative, that dreaded thing, aspiration is one reason why it is associated with bling and champagne (escapism from all the shit of everyday life is another factor as is the perennial trying to impress a woman). But, it was probably a lot more about the music and dancing than you might imagine. I think a lot of the photo documentation of that era focuses on the bling rather than the amazing dance energy at these events.

Of course it makes for a good narrative, but as with punk, the year-zero idea that before rave the only clubs were full of people in chinos and proper shoes is nonsense. My own experience as a teenager in the 80s (albeit in big cities - B'ham, Mcr, London) was of weekly indie/ska/bangra/hiphop/northern soul/whatever nights put on by fans, usually in big clubs who were happy to get some punters in on week nights. Obv. they they weren't aimed at people who had to get up for work/school in the morning, and were pretty tame affairs - some of my most hardcore indie/goth club friends were the first to embrace rave culture as the big thing that had been missing from their lives.

The ‘media London style press’ aspect of acid house was just a part of it - at the time, Jeremy Deller was working at Sign Of The Times in Kensington Market, where all the party tickets were sold. So it’s good that he focused more on nationwide partying/crusties and the early history of sound systems in Birmingham/Manchester as well as London. All of those elements were together at the huge anti-CJB march (as was I) and having known a lot of the Balearic wing of club culture, many of them were from off the estates/members of violent football ‘firms’/potentially racist *until* they found pills and dancing and ‘one love’. As far as multiculturalism goes, people now are quite taken aback in hindsight by how white club scenes were, but at the time people were amazed by the class barrier breakdown.

Jeremy Deller has told me before that the Miners’ Strike was his political awakening while a pupil at Dulwich College - where fellow students included Nigel fucking Farage.

https://i.imgur.com/PjYzXUA.png

thread surely needs this classic. I haven't watch the doc yet so it may have been featured in that

Loving the banger playing in that last clip (Shelley's laserdome)

lol at that S*n cartoon that is bad. I was still doing a paper-round and can remember seeing the daily tabloid hysteria of '88. I think The S*n became obsessed with outing some shadowy Mr Big of acid house figure who was profiting from all this irresponsible hedonism. I think the vile UK ruling classes were still feeling sad about the UK's vastly diminished military industrial complex/standing in the world and wanting to enforce a bit of 50's style conformist discipline on the plebs .. or something like that.

There was a great radio advert in the early 90s with two policemen invading an ostensible squat rave that turns out to be a bunch of people at home watching MTV.

Also, does anyone remember the episode of Morse where he investigates the rave scene? He's taken aback by the fact the kids are drinking bottled water and not alcohol

the morse episode is directed by danny boyle! and has a link back to pre-acid house style, proper-shoe-and-shirt clubbing in featuring "wild child" liza walker

ITS A RAVE, LEWIS!

Any Jenkins was the ‘rave consultant’ on that episode and got the ‘This Life’ gig off the back of it.

as a clash of incompatible worlds it's amusing but -- you'll be startled to learn -- not actually very good

Lisa Walker, whatever happened to...

Liza, rather.

That Sun cartoon looks like something straight out of a Jack Chick tract!

“Don’t Laugh” but it’s all “haw”s

As far as multiculturalism goes, people now are quite taken aback in hindsight by how white club scenes were, but at the time people were amazed by the class barrier breakdown.

perhaps the scenes that got filmed give that impression but had they used footage of Rage at Heaven, Dungeons in Hackney or Thunderdome in Manchester or most of the M25 Orbital raves it wouuld have been a very different picture.

Most of the UK is still pretty white tbh.

xp
like this:
https://youtu.be/NSng4ZyAKWI

To go back to various things people have said, I remember reading 'Altered State' by Matthew Collin when it came out (in 1997) and there was a section where a DJ (I can't remember who) said something like house music was very underground and almost nowhere played it and hardly anyone knew what it was and that when he tried to play it in clubs blokes would come up and shouted at him to turn off 'that gay music'. I think he was talking about 1986-87, the period immediately before the Acid House explosion, and I found it difficult to believe. I was only 13/14 then and obviously not going clubbing and would only have learnt about things from Radio 1 / Top of the Pops / Smash Hits, but I was well aware of house music - it was hardly obscure. As has been said, 'Jack Your Body' (which I bought) went to number one, and a month or two before that (unless I'm imagining this) even Mel & Kim's 'Showing Out' was marketed as house music.

just remembered, when I was 12 our classroom at school had a rolling blackboard, and once I wrote ROK DA HOUSE on it in massive letters and rolled it round so that was on the back, and would only appear if a teacher rolled the board round again. lol what a rebel

I think it depended where in the country you were. In Scotland in 1986 the soundtrack in mainstream, predominantly heterosexual clubs was to all intents and purposes gay. Hi nrg (and the tail end of Italo) was the predominant soundtrack and the first wave of house records fitted right in. I can't imagine anyone would have found them wildly out of place. Phil Harding's 12" mixes of Mel & Kim aren't that far removed from "Jack Your Body" and after "Jack Your Body hit no. 1 almost every pop dance 12" would have a sticker on the front saying "Contains House mixes", even though the mixes were rarely what anyone now would think of as House.

BTW, I'm not for a second claiming Scotland was a progressive paradise - Glasgow was still a deeply homophobic city when I moved here in 1986 which made the fact that many of these homophobes were predoninantly dancing to gay music quite an odd thing (Man 2 Man feat Man Parrish's "Male Stripper" is the best selling 12" of all time in Scotland).

I think my experience is similar to Colonel Poo's*, albeit two or three years older. As a teenager I bought a lot of those singles on the kind of House-Hip Hop spectrum that existed then (Jack Your Body, Pump Up The Volume, House Arrest, Rok Da House, Theme From S-Express, Doctorin' The House, etc) but was too young to go clubbing so Acid House was just something I read about (or actually, I first heard about it in a special report on Capital Radio in maybe June or July 1988). By the time it had mutated into rave and I was actually old enough to go, I was an indie kid and it largely passed me by. I only started clubbing regularly in 1994.

*I will never not feel stupid typing that name

Man 2 Man feat Man Parrish's "Male Stripper" is the best selling 12" of all time in Scotland

i think you've posted this fact on ilm before and it always makes me very proud

Likewise. When Scotland becomes an independent country I think it would make a good basis for a new national anthem.

lol

either that or bits and pieces by artemisia

as long as its not Loch Lomond as performed by Runrig

once I wrote ROK DA HOUSE on it in massive letters and rolled it round so that was on the back, and would only appear if a teacher rolled the board round again. lol what a rebel

it's easy to rock: just bug and chill

love that story.

a friend of mine wrote the affirmation "HOUSE PIANO IS THE BEST!!!" on his pencil case

:)

https://imgur.com/wPKFHzo

https://i.imgur.com/wPKFHzo.jpg

if I didn't know better, that guy was a Steve Pemberton placed as a stooge

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-49126916

god i was in some club in Portsmouth about 89 and they put the strobe on for 10 minutes and i nearly fell over, stopped being able to move

Loads of the whingeing old men looked like League of Gentlemen characters and the Tory MPs looked like absolute Rik Mayall caricatures of Tory MPs at that. Probably at least in part down to the graininess of the footage, people don't look that pallid on modern TV.

also as a side note I'm a bit surprised by the extent of 'I'm not British I'm a Londoner' sentiment in that classroom. mb the reluctance to raise hands was partly self-conscious classroom dynamics (exacerbated by being filmed) & obv it's not v scientific, but my hunch is that is says more about London than Britain, and if you asked that in a majority BAME high school outside the M25, even round Bradford or somewhere, you'd hear a more complicated, layered and less exceptionalist idea of identity (altho obv still ambivalent

I think you're right about this and I thought the decision to frame the documentary in this way was the most interesting thing about the whole doc (which on the whole was excellent). The way the kids started off looking largely a bit bored and "who the fuck is this?", most of that footage looked prehistoric in comparison and he'd chosen a classroom who people who in large part are probably the young people *least* likely to take drugs and go dancing in a field. I don't think rave culture as depicted there would have meant that much to these kids (even though rave music is everywhere for them) but you saw their eyes light up at the footage of people dancing to Kraftwerk - there's a direct line from that to modern Youtube dance culture and you could tell they just instinctively got it. Obviously playing with the instruments would have been awesome fun and the reaction of the girl in the hijab creating an acid line was amazing.

But the way they reacted to the history was different, I dunno how much they teach kids about the Miners' Strike these days (probably not at all) but you could tell they saw parallels immediately, the divisiveness, the authoritarianism, and with the rave footage the sheer paranoia of the British state. (As an aside it occurred to me you could probably have woven an entire third line in about football in there (particularly from Hillsborough to Italia 90) and it would have made just as much sense). And I think if you do grow up BAME or particularly Muslim in London then you are more likely to view a lot of the rest of the UK as suspicious or weird or even hostile, even if that isn't actually true, because the whole media message is that that's the case. For all London's many faults there's a sense of a protective bubble in its sheer hugeness. I know she'd only been to Oxford but that sense of sudden dislocation is pretty common I think.

I was 8-10 years old at the time and all that footage felt familiar to me, like I'd seen some of those exact BBC reports at the time, I could really tell that this was happening and it was something big and alien and exotic even if I wasn't actually that interested at the time. But most histories of rave skip tend to straight from Detroit and Chicago to UK acid house, the moment where house existed as a black British subculture tends to get skipped over and kudos to Deller for highlighting that, and the culture of house parties that preceded it.

Like I think several years' worth of 'Sadiq Khan has ruined London' rhetoric has set a very clear message to these kids about how the rest of the country views them which as well as being profoundly damaging to their self-esteem also distorts their idea of what the rest of the UK is like (even though know a chunk of the country actually thinks like this).

At the same time this felt like a fundamentally optimistic documentary, no matter how shit things are people can work together to force something into being that makes things better, if only for a bit.

the only bit that irked me was his meanness towards Pete Waterman which was kinda bullshit as pointed out upthread, it is on several tiers above most BBC output nowadays tho

Yeah there's was a real Reithian feel to it which I'm sure was intentional.

kids reading Marx quotes was a stupid grin for me but FUCK YES

also as ogmor pointed out nothing is more beautiful and succinct as "Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore"

Yeah there's was a real Reithian feel to it which I'm sure was intentional.

― Matt DC, Saturday, August 24, 2019 9:07 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I really wanted to like this but was worried I might hate it. My main concern was that it would be a real auntie Grayson and auntie Beeb offering, and it was much much better than that.

I understood the anxiety about leaving the London bubble because I feel this for several reasons and definitely would much more if I was walking around with a hijab on my head.

Ultimately it is very uplifting, something I've been really needing for various reasons I won't go into, but I felt cheered by it, even the next day thinking back.

I think if it had actually been commissioned by the BBC and they had any creative input it would have turned out totally differently and been nowhere near as good.

I stopped thinking of myself as British quite a while ago so also found the 'I'm not British I'm a Londoner' sentiment in that classroom. particularly poignant.

There is a very old discourse about that, certainly in London. I suspect it has been interrupted and has had differing levels of traction within different "communities," but if you look at Menelik Shabazz's films about young black people, mostly around Brixton/South London from the late 1970s/early '80s there's a very similar rhetoric. Obviously the social and political context has been subject to huge transformations since then. Or has there? There must be longitudinal studies that focus on those kinds of shifts. Maybe the British social attitudes survey? My limited knowledge of that always suggests that the survey questions assume that you are the normative subject ("how do you feel about gays/blacks/immigrants/trans people etc?"), intrinsically fail to deal with different respondent positions, and consequently its maybe methodologically its ill-suited to this kind of question(? I'm not expert....)

I suspect this is something that's become more pronounced post-2010 and definitely post-2016.

https://youtu.be/JMS2xxVo2og?t=1414

This film is v interesting generally, and this idea is fleshed out much more throughout, but the most on-target bit is from 23:34

Plenty of Scousers have that 'I'm not British i'm from Liverpool' thing going on, I dare say it's the same in many other cities too.

I have never heard a white British Londoner say that fwiw.

No me either.

Used to be that Afro-Caribbean/Asian people were fairly happy to call themselves British but not English - being British is on its way out all over though.

I thought it was a great documentary. I am old enough to remember but I was far too indie at the time - I suppose I got a flavour of the scene in attending Meat Beat Manifesto and Orbital gigs circa 1991. As previously stated the documentary had to downplay the impact of drugs, the Daily Mail would have had a field day with "BBC spends your licence fee on sending remoaner lefty artist into school..."

well in any case it was paid for by Gucci

Got around to watching the doco - Matos had spruiked it to me a couple of weeks before the thread, so I feel especially lax. The film does a dazzling job of expressing its theses and combining all those sources into a broadcast hour, but I loved Deller talking to the class so much that I wish it was a series, with him coming back to present material and ideas sparked by their interactions. (Even a two-hour version of this would have been richer. Or including half an hour of the classroom rave at the end for release.)

Whenever Deller's work has intersected my awareness, it's been where he's drawing lines between devaluation of the working class and the relief & expression afforded by music. EG the Acid Brass project in 1997, the All That is Solid Melts into Air installation in 2013 - which, when I saw it at the Manchester Art Gallery, was paired with an exhibition of local music artefacts, spanning punk through acid house, drawn from the collections of individual fans and participants, not archival collections. Here that element was obviously aimed at multiracial students who've spent three of their most socially formative years growing up in Brexit turmoil, but he's just good generally at combining talking to them on their level with a gentle authority, and making connections that bring history alive to them.

In Scotland in 1986 the soundtrack in mainstream, predominantly heterosexual clubs was to all intents and purposes gay. Hi nrg (and the tail end of Italo) was the predominant soundtrack and the first wave of house records fitted right in.

I got schooled on house during its UK pop breakout from an explainer in Smash Hits, that delineated Hip-Hop, House and Hi-NRG for kids that were suddenly needing to understand these new sounds. (The local edition was 93% content from the parent magazine, with an article or two on Neighbours stars thrown in - house made far less of a chart or radio impact in Australia.) That article clearly & calmly made the point that elements of Hi-NRG had fed into house, that house had in significant ways evolved from disco, and that these were largely gay musics being straightened up for a pop listenership.

(In another explainer around the time, Smash Hits happily informed its readers that Rob Halford was the only out gay man in Heavy Metal, a solid decade before US metal audiences were horrified to discover the Hell Bent For Leather hitmaker was hell bent for leather.)

Ppl who think Britain looks alarmingly white in that vintage footage, try 1993 Sydney on for size:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzaEC95zEYA

The phrase "Let's get some guitars and have a party" has been haunting my thoughts lately

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jun/30/off-their-heads-the-shocking-return-of-the-rave

I keep reading about how raves are set to come back in a big way. Not that illegal parties ever really went away but there feels like there's a different energy to way this has been discussed in the past few months - the idea of lockdown, and the obvious and correct perception of the UK as a country working on very clear lines of social inequality and cultural fury, contributing to a collective moment of communal escape and pleasure.

Which is more deserving of scorn - young folk raving in the midst of a pandemic when social contact has been limited, or old 'clubbers' berating young folk for being irrespibsible. Tbh I'm not having any trouble answering this question for myself.