Party Lines

From the illicit reggae blues dances and acid-rock free festivals of the 1970s, through the ecstasy-fuelled Second Summer of Love in 1988, to the increasingly corporate dance music culture of the post-Covid era, Party Lines is a groundbreaking new history of UK dance music, exploring its pivotal role in the social, political and economic shifts on which modern Britain has been built.Challenging popular narratives about the history of dance music, journalist and film-maker Ed Gillett explores a fifty-year struggle between the desire of young Britons to collectively lose and rediscover themselves on the dancefloor, and the use of ever-expanding government and policing powers to control, monetize and stifle those radical impulses.Taking in the Victorian moralism of the Thatcher years, the far-reaching restrictions of the Criminal Justice Act in 1994, and the resurgence of illegal raves during the Covid-19 pandemic, Party Lines charts an ongoing conflict, fought in basement clubs, abandoned warehouses and sunlit fields, between the revolutionary potential of communal sound and the reactionary impulses of the British establishment.Brought to life with stunning clarity and depth, this is social and cultural history at its most immersive, vital and shocking.