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

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.