Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain

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Hard truths and rhythms collide as a controversial and erudite unravelling of UK dance culture, uncovers its secret social and political history.

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Ed Gillett: Dance music is desirable, it’s alluring, it has a cultural cachet, and I think it’s been very easy for successive generations to mistake that for genuine community. So there’s a risk of dance music becoming tokenistic in its politics. You get quite a lot of shallow, superficial feel-good semi-political activity and there isn’t always the space to have deeper conversations. There’s one festival (I won’t single them out) who were lauded in the press for having a 50/50 gender balance on its bill. That’s good in and of itself, but the festival is run by this huge corporate entity – it’s the same old white men. If you’ve never owned a rotary dial telephone, then you’ve probably never seen a number card installed in the center of the dial plate. (Touch Tone phones had a slip of paper at the bottom of the keypad.) This enabled anyone who was using the phone to immediately know what number they were calling from. 6. Large Print Dial Overlays Notting Hill Carnival is a bigger target. Potentially, it’s eminently exploitable, but it’s probably too diffuse and problematic to attract major investors. Whatever RBKC might like to think, it’s not owned by anyone, so it can’t be bought outright, and attempts to exert overt municipal or corporate control provoke fierce community resistance. Unlike music, Carnival is intimately tied to place and in Notting Hill it is, after 57 years, firmly embedded in a strong community, which is its greatest protection. Britain’s largest and most infamous free party took place on May 22 1992, when 30,000 people danced to Spiral Tribe for an entire week on Castlemorton Common in Worcestershire, an event that, Gillett believes, shaped “modern British social history as a whole”. It prompted draconian reforms of the Criminal Justice Act, with the police granted powers to shut down events featuring “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. Aug 2023 Party Lines: Ed Gillett in conversation with Fergal Kinney. Sorry, this event is now cancelled.

Ed Gillett: The first function of the police is to embody moral panics around dance music. Whether it’s M25 raves in 1989 or panics about knife crime in 2019, they have been a constant presence. Dance music is noisy, it’s seen as seedy and it is objectively connected to organised crime, so it’s always going to attract a certain amount of police attention, which in turn has shaped the culture itself. Getting one over the establishment, and doing something you’re not supposed to do, has always been part of the appeal. One of the things that really drove attendance to the Castlemorton Common Festival in 1992 – possibly the biggest illegal gathering in British history – was the police and media loudly urging people not to go. Chaptered by theme rather than chronology, Party Lines can be a little repetitive. But Gillett’s research is thorough and thoughtful, particularly when debunking some of the myths around dance music and drugs. When, in 1995, 18-year-old Leah Betts died after taking ecstasy and then drinking 12 pints of water in just 90 minutes, causing her brain to swell to fatal proportions, the tabloid railed hysterically against drug taking and clubbing. And yet, reports Gillett, omitted from this coverage was the fact that Betts took the pill at home. The moral panic had no constructive effect anyway: between 1994 and 1996, self-reported Ecstasy use among 15-to-34-year-olds almost doubled. His highly-acclaimed documentary work and writing have appeared on the BBC, Channel 4, The Guardian, Frieze, DJ Mag and The Quietus amongst several others. From time to time, a narrative arrives so focused both aesthetically and politically that it’s impossible not to be pulled in by its narrative. In the introduction of his superb book ‘Party Lines’, author Ed Gillett lays out the vision for his exciting history, namely: ‘to deconstruct some of the myths around raves emergence and early years’ and further ‘to expand the narrative towards the present: where previous retellings tend to lose some of their urgency after the Criminal Justice Act is passed.’ Meanwhile, the phone companies collected a share of income from each group phone call — about 60%, reported Newsday in 1988 . And virtually anyone with a few hundred dollars lying around could buy up a local number, advertise it, and if it caught on, start raking in cash. It was the 1980s entrepreneur’s dream, albeit a risky one.

17 Aug 2023

Although they may have been party lines, that has nothing to do with Telephone exchange names which were used, "so that each telephone number in an area was unique." Nevertheless, Party Lines ends on optimism – the founding spirit of the dance floor, after all. Gillett believes that we don’t need another revolutionary moment like the rave at Castlemorton, but rather “a patchwork of tiny gestures, each of them committed to serving a specific community, each small enough to evade censure, but… knitting together to form something of immense power.” Things, surely, can only get better.

Dancing to music: what could be more joyful? Rhythm and sweat, release and abandon, feeling rather than thinking, being yourself and becoming someone – or something – other. Dancing gives us, however fleeting, a glimpse of freedom. It can tilt reality. This appalls puritans and fundamentalists. Too many young people “prefer the dark night to daylight”, complained James Anderton in the 1980s. “They dance like there is no tomorrow, and they spread the virus of drug abuse wherever they go. They are not of this world. They believe in very different things to you and I.” A traveller is arrested at the Battle of the Beanfield in Wiltshire, 1985. Photograph: PA Images/AlamyI don't think this has much to do with the Morse code. The letter is the same as dialing the number. Look on your dial the numbers are still there. Later when the telephone number system was expanded, my number in NJ was through the Charter exchange; Ch-9-0979. C is 2 and H is 4. So you actually dialed 24-9-0979. Historically, some of these gatherings were domestic – a shebeen (essentially a house party organised by Caribbean immigrants unable to rent commercial spaces) was firebombed in the late 1950s; in 1981, speaking in the Commons, Conservative MP Jill Knight described them as “a seething mass of people, 99% of whom were of the Rastafarian type, who can look a little frightening”. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Ed Gillett: The canonical texts on dance music were mostly mainly in the late 1990 and early 2000s, from the perspective of people who were there at the time. One of the things I was hoping to do with this book was to re-examine some of that history, taking into account the changes in society and culture that have happened since then. The narrative thread that runs through the book is, the author explains, “a power struggle: between our collective urge to congregate and dance, to lose and find ourselves on the dance floor, and the political and economic authorities which seek to constrain or commodify those messy and unstable desires.” Swap “the road” for “the dance floor” and that sentence describes the essence of the battle for the heart and soul and freedom of Carnival.

This article was amended on 24 July 2023. An earlier version had misattributed to Ed Gillett the coining of the term “business techno”. A passionately argued and intensively researched addition to the ever-evolving narrative of UK dance music culture. I don’t care,” she said. “If there was no phone, I wouldn’t be living right now. In my town, there’s nothing to do.” A scheme widely used in the Bell Telephone System for four-party full selective lines (under both manual and automatic operation) used a suffix letter, generally from the set J, M, R, and W, to designate which of the four ringing signals applies to the station. These letters were chosen to not be easily mis-heard when spoken (with regard to manual operation). Around the same time, party lines hooked up to computer modems and people could type to each other as well as talk. The technology’s popularity allowed a brief resurgence. One party line hosted a wedding, where the bride, groom, and officiant were at different terminals in Manhattan. Instead of throwing rice, the 1,000 callers who tuned in typed apostrophes. “It was very beautiful,” said a party line owner, “and very profitable.”

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The dial was a mechanical interrupter so the marks and spaces were the same length, as I remember it. This worked but was slow and eventually was replaced starting in 1961 by an electronic 2-tone system. Ed Gillett: In the book I talk about AI and climate change. The threats posed by AI to dance music are the same as with any other cultural pursuit. I guess the interpersonal nature of DJ’ing and the experience of being in a club might help certain sections hold out for longer. But we’re not far from the point that AI will be able to mimic basically any genre. Dance music is synthetic by its nature, it’s designed to be functional and often quite minimal in the elements it uses – there are very few fields of endeavour more suited to AI. One thing I found striking about the book is that it partly functions as a history of policing across the last four decades. What role has the police played in the history of dance music? The history of dance music has been hugely mythologised. Were there any particular cliches you wanted to avoid? You are correct that these are party lines. The letters represent an additional digit dialed after the others in cases where automatic operations was implemented. This article goes into great depth all about how multi-party telephone lines worked, but as a short excerpt: