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

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…

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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...