A New History of Rave Music

From Glasgow to Gloucester, Teesside to Tottenham, thousands migrate to nightclubs every weekend to move their bodies and commune with strangers. For many, a packed dancefloor, pounding house tunes and laserlike lights are part and parcel of a big night out. Dance music is so woven into the cultural fabric of Britain today that it’s hard to imagine a time before it.

If you have more than a passing interest in rave, then you’ve seen the documentaries full of middle-aged blokes pontificating about pills, read the oral histories of happy hardcore, and lost hours listening to pirate radio from the early 90s on YouTube. The history of dance music in Blighty has been mythologized by artists, writers and filmmakers for decades now – from Jeremy Deller’s Acid Brass to Kevin and Perry Go Large. As with all enduring folk tales, though, some elements of the story have inevitably been embellished, exaggerated, misremembered or consciously ignored.

That’s where Ed Gillett comes in. In his new book, Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain, the writer and filmmaker set out to challenge the accepted narratives, reexamine history, join different dots and retell the story of rave with fresh eyes. The book is a vivid pilgrimage, taking us from radical 17th Century political movements to the Windrush generation, gay liberation, psychedelic rock, the free party scene, acid house, the infamous “anti-rave” Criminal Justice Act, pirate radio, austerity, superclubs, gentrification, the lockdown rave scene and beyond.

We got him to share the true history of British rave culture with us and explain how we got to where we are now.

Ed Gillett: I think there's a tendency in some of the historical retellings, particularly of that 1987-1994 era, to treat rave as something unprecedented, strange, and alien that just erupted out of nowhere. But it is linked to far deeper, longer histories. 

The forces around illegal raves during lockdown, warehouse parties in 1989, Notting Hill Carnival in 1972, Elizabethan players in the 1500s and Druids gathering in the Woodlands in 2000 B.C., are all essentially part of the same thing. If I had to narrow it down or simplify it, I think it's a conflict between physical space being seen as a community resource – a communal good, free for anyone to occupy and use for pleasure or community expression without needing to seek permission – versus a model of the world in which everything has to be sanctioned. 

There’s a growing understanding of the sonic debt owed by UK dance music to reggae and dub and Black British art forms, communities and sounds. But what is less explored is how all of the infrastructure of dance music descends from earlier Black soundsystem culture too. There's a direct lineage there via the rare groove warehouse scene in the ‘80s. Dance music promoters in the late 80s weren't coming up with that model by themselves out of nothing. That already existed. The entire world that it occupied, the physical spaces that it occupied, the way that it was treated or demonised by people who didn't understand it is all part of a direct lineage from earlier Black reggae soundsystem culture. It’s really important to foreground and emphasise this as much as possible. 

What really stood out for me was the continuation of moral panics. If you look at the way that queer clubs in particular were treated in the years leading up to dance music’s emergence in the late 80s, there are a lot of the same tropes, same rhetoric, and they even were in the same spaces, in lots of cases. So when The Sun did their first scare story about acid house, I don't think it's a coincidence at all that they picked a gay club for the site of their outraged night out. They went to Heaven, where Paul Oakenfold had a night. So you have popular outrage about queer identity and queer spaces that just bleeds straight into moral panics around drugs and ecstasy in the years before acid house becomes a thing in the popular consciousness. 

You had people like Chief Constable James Anderton, whose approach to dance music in Manchester was exactly the same as his approach to gay clubs, which was to use archaic legislation to try and force these spaces out of existence. It was all part of the same process. Dance music became a totemic issue but it wasn't unique. It's really important to acknowledge that this all began before an iconic London club night like Shoom opened. 

When you speak to people like Spiral Tribe and a lot of the 90s free party soundsystems, their earliest musical memories are of going to free psych rock and folk festivals as teenagers. There was that crossover period between New Travellers [sometimes wrongly called New Age Travellers] and free party sound systems in 1990, 91, 92. Many people from Spiral Tribe, DIY, Tonka, Bedlam, had a kind of a light bulb moment at Glastonbury in the Travellers field in 1990. The tent that DIY played in was owned by Nick Turner from Hawkwind. Just like with blues dances and Black soundsystems, there is a direct lineage of infrastructure. So there is that side of things. 

On the one hand, Chicago House tunes from the early to mid-80s have nothing in common with Hawkwind sets, but when you look at how these events function socially, politically, it's the same model, basically: a bunch of people go and occupy a piece of land for pleasure without permission. They play really loud music. They get off their face and they engage in a communal experience together. You also had synth bands playing what were essentially kind of all-night DJ sets, just like weird, synthy, burble-y sounds for 6 hours in the early 80s at Stonehenge. That’s not that dissimilar to having the Chemical Brothers headline Glastonbury now.

I think we all gravitate towards stories that give us someone to lionise or venerate. So a story of a lone genius discovering something new is much easier for us to wrap our heads around than a messy web of interlinked connections. The story of Paul Oakenfold, Nicky Holloway, Danny Rampling and Johnny Walker almost like Moses descending from the mountain with the scriptures, having had this vision and bringing it to the masses, is not totally untrue. You can certainly trace dance music’s explosion in popularity to that starting point, and it's a very seductive story. But no great invention was ever the work of one single genius. 

It’s very clear that there were pretty substantial audiences enjoying house music in the UK prior to 1987. There were these kinds of hidden cultures enjoying this music in slightly different ways to how it has become mythologised. There’s definitely a difference between Shoom on the one hand and Moss Side community centre in 1986 on the other. It’s interesting how the Hacienda’s audience shifted from majority Black to majority white at the house music nights that Mike Pickering and other people were playing at. It was building on something that was already there, whether that was throwing illegal parties in warehouses, which came from reggae and dub, or house music itself which came from DJs picking up records that had been percolating amongst predominantly Black communities and subcultures. It was then in a position to transform into something else. 

The Criminal Justice Act, for me, is one of the most important milestones in modern British history. It’s a real turning point in the way that British society is organised. 

The post-war consensus, the birth of the welfare state, and the strength of the unions up to the arrival of Thatcher were part of a society essentially built on communal principles. Fundamentally there's a sense of social cohesion and communal identity, whether that's class identity or identity through working in a particular industry and being represented by your union. You also have communal access to – and power over – space. Throughout history, this lineage of nomadic or countercultural use of space has always existed. British law and society have historically afforded space for those communal rituals, whether that's the bonfire night parade in Lewes or weird competitions chasing cheese down a hill. Some things haven’t required establishment approval or management because they emerged from a community identity with enough force to assert its collective will and needs. 

Over the past 50 years, there's been a general shift from a society in which, unless it's been specifically prohibited in advance then, everything is permissible as long as the community around it understands and agrees to it, to a world in which everything is forbidden unless some kind of overarching power structure has granted permission. You see that in so many things, from the restrictions of the right to protest around Westminster to increasing powers for the government to snoop on your emails. There's a real encroachment on individual and communal liberties. I think the Criminal Justice Act is the fulcrum that all that revolves around. 

It was an anti-rave bill, but it wasn't just an anti-rave bill. It limited the ability of protesters to operate, increased restrictions on squatting and made it easier to evict squatters. It made it so the prison officers couldn't go on strike. It created the first centralised laws around the use and retention of DNA data. It added additional powers by which the police could stop and search people without suspicion of them having committed a crime. So there are all these different fronts on which it was designed to kind of expand the powers of the state and restrict the actions of the individual.

So, yeah, for me, it's not just about stopping people raving. It's about curtailing any kind of activity that doesn't fit with a narrow interpretation of what people should be doing across whole swathes of British life. Dance music was the figurehead, rather than the target.

I sometimes think that the mainstream book-length history of dance music misses out on where that energy got rerouted after the millennium. 

House, techno, drum and bass all became highly commercialised genres and lost much of their countercultural force over the course of the late 90s. But certain aspects of jungle, garage, grime and drill continued that kind of lineage, not just sonically. 

What was important in dance music in the early 2000s was not necessarily superclubs – although they are interesting as financial and social and political entities – but the whole other generation that followed. The disputes over grime and drill lyrics are all the same stuff that was leveraged at dance music in the early 90s. It never stopped being political, the politics just shifted. If it's a mass market, city centre chain club, that's as much a political gesture as an underground Black queer rave – it’s just serving different constituencies. 

If you look at the sonic signifiers, sounds, and genres, you might see the re-emergence of house and techno over the last decade as a continuation of the 90s. So many new records are aping those styles and reaching for a connection to that past. But how that music is experienced at big clubs and festivals is operating in completely different ways to how it was back then. So there's a continuation on the surface, but under the surface, there’s been a reversal. 

Anyone who goes to Printworks will almost certainly have had a wonderful time. It’s deeply pleasurable. The sound is always great, and the crowd's always fun. Line-ups are always brilliant, and the building itself is amazing and inspiring. But this is not an ideological continuation of, say, Spiral Tribe breaking into the Roundhouse in 1992 and throwing illegal raves. It’s dance music as a commodity in multiple ways. 

Broadwick Live, who are probably the largest group working on this model in the UK, will partner with developers and get funding from them to run a cultural venue as a meanwhile-space. Printworks used to be the printing presses for the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard and it got bought by British Land, a huge property developer. They needed a couple of years to put together their master plans for the area, so they brought in Broadwick to run Printworks as a cultural space, a club, on a five-year contract. Then the bulldozers move in. 

The funding that Broadwick would get from developers is way more lucrative than just running a club or a music venue in any British city. Plus, when you do that, you’re often up against developers who want to take over the building. You're up against councils who want to limit that late-night disorder. You're up against residents who move into an area and then start filing noise complaints. You can sidestep all of them by finding a space that the developers want you to use and kind of doing a bit of a deal with the devil. 

When you buy a ticket for these spaces you are both a customer and part of what is being sold. Developers love young people, disposable income, creativity, culture. It's an effective tool for overwriting the identity and associations of a given area. So dance music can be an unwitting victim of gentrification – but dance music can be the perpetrator of those processes as well. There's a trade-off between needing cultural spaces to experience things communally, to share, to dance, to be messy, to be noisy. But if that ultimately serves to feed into the interests of groups that are homogenising and commodifying these urban spaces, where is the ethical trade-off? 

I don’t think it’s black-and-white that these clubs are cannibalising the market and crowding everyone else out, but they occupy an outsized space in terms of our attention and discussion. People’s disposable income is finite, so if you’re spending 60 quid going to Printworks, you’re not necessarily going to be spending 10 quid going to your local underground club every Saturday night preceding it. I read a tweet that said London doesn't need another 15,000-capacity club. What it needs is five 1,000-capacity clubs, ten 800-capacity clubs… It feels like now you’ve only got either the developer-funded alternative super clubs or tiny basement dives with like 50 capacity.

When you go through the archives and the records, you can basically set your watch by this: Every 18 months at least, there will be a broadsheet newspaper article declaring the return of illegal raves. 

The reporting was particularly prominent during COVID, but there's a Guardian article from February 2020, the month before lockdown came in, saying that illegal raving is back. If you go back a bit further all the way through the 2010s, all the way through the 2000s, basically from the moment that the Criminal Justice Act was passed, there were stories about how people are back throwing illegal raves again. The only conclusion you can draw from any of that is that they actually never went away. The idea that rave was restricted to the 90s and then died a death is quite embedded in the popular consciousness.

The evidence for there being a surge of illegal raving during COVID is mixed, too, because you had legal promoters who obviously were out of work throughout the pandemic and received very little meaningful support throwing unlicensed parties because it was the only way they could survive. There are obviously complicated moral and ethical questions around that. You also had the word rave deployed to events that very clearly weren't raves, like ones that had really shitty soundsystems organised by restaurants. There was one that was a chicken shop that had basically organised a cookout barbecue on the beach. The headlines said ‘Beach Rave Broken Up By Police’. Rave has now kind of become shorthand for any illicit, unlicensed, unpermitted gathering of people, regardless of any connection to dance music. 

It never stopped being political, but now we've just got a greater awareness and a discussion around some of its social and political contexts: representation, identity, visibility, equality of access to industry mechanisms and spaces in line-ups and clubs, and the duty of performers and promoters to audiences. There’s been a huge amount of impact around Black Lives Matter, particularly within dance music, as people recognise that this culture they're part of feeds into many of the things that people are angry about. It's no longer tenable for us to continue as usual. 

I feel things are changing slowly, but there is a lot of work to do. What I think is really exciting and a cause for optimism is that many people operating within dance music recognise that now. This is a mature culture. It's been around for over 40 years, so in terms of rock music that’s like Elvis to Nirvana. 

People are explicitly saying that they want to use dance music not just as a means to go out and have a good time, not just as electronic music and drugs and space, but as a kind of building block for wider communal acts of solidarity and support. Dance music is communal coming together but also a space for education and exploration, all these things bundled together to create something that expands beyond the dance floor.

Ed Gillett’s book ‘Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain’ is out now via Pan Macmillan. He is speaking at Sound Affects in Brighton on August 13th alongside photographer Vinca Petersen.