Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain

Product Information

Can't talk about New York (as I'm in Australia), but when I was a kid the Brisbane phone numbers had a one two digit alpha prefix, then a 4 digit number - eg my grandparents were J 2871, and my aunt LX 1710. These letters were merely mapped on to the dial (note that Australian phones go from 1 to 9 then zero): If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. It’s no great leap to segue British social history of the early 80s into that of the late 80s, as Gillett often does here. But his aim is to consciously stitch together events to account for the repressive, authoritarian, fun-sceptic place in which the UK finds itself in 2023. We got here, the author argues, by raiding Afro-Caribbean blues dances, sound systems and gay night clubs, by forcing travellers off the road – and by beating up miners and E’d-up kids. The history of dance music has been hugely mythologised. Were there any particular cliches you wanted to avoid?

A passionately argued and intensively researched addition to the ever-evolving narrative of UK dance music culture. 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”. Then parents saw the bills — their kids had charged hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars worth of calls in the space of weeks. I 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. Kids enjoy making up a new identity because on a phone you can be whoever you want to be,” Christopher Woods of the Friendship Network, a chat line company out of Los Angeles, told The Boston Globe. “Every guy on the line will say he drives a Porsche or some other exciting car. There’s a lot of fantasy involved.”

17 Aug 2023

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

In 1971/72, I lived in a grotty flat on Westbourne Park Road, a couple of streets away from Island’s studios. We bought out veg on Portobello Road, saw films at the Electric Cinema, but rarely ventured further west to Ladbroke Grove or north past the motorway overpass to the nether reaches of the market. For a short while I sold Frendz on the streets - I was very bad at it - but that involved going to the office which was up that way. I recall seeing completely burnt-out saucepans for sale on a market stall, which puzzled me. All of which is to say that we didn’t have really any interaction with the West Indian community and I don’t recall any obvious presence on their part. The place was crammed with hippies and boarded up rows of houses, but squatting was not yet widespread, although there was talk of it. 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.

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: Many of the DJs, venues, radio stations and clubs are likely to be unfamiliar to soca fans and carnivalists, but parallels keep hitting you as you read accounts of the cat-and-mouse games played by promoters and revellers on the one hand and police and policy-makers on the others. Over every field of ecstatically happy people dancing to a common beat there invariably hangs a roiling cloud of suspicion, provoking a downpour of outrage from the tabloid guardians of public morals. 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.” Ed Gillett is a writer, film-maker and communications professional from London, telling innovative and attention-grabbing stories about the points where politics, music, communities and technology meet.

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: 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. 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. Ed Gillett is a journalist and film-maker based in South London, who has written for The Guardian, Frieze, DJ Mag, The Quietus and Novara Media. His film and TV credits include Jeremy Deller’s acclaimed rave documentary Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984–1992 for BBC Four, and Four To The Floor, Channel 4’s award-winning music and factual strand . Party Lines is his first book.

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. 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”. Some chat lines attempted to appease parents by adding moderators who periodically reminded teens of the price per minute.