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

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

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.