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

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.

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.