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

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.