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.
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, Ed Gillett explores a fifty-year struggle between the desire of young Britons to collectively lose and rediscover themselves on the dance floor and the reactionary impulses of the British establishment.
Bringing to life with stunning clarity a conflict that has been fought in basement clubs, abandoned warehouses and sunlit fields, Party Lines is social and cultural history at its most immersive, vital and shocking.
Size: 128 x 195mm
Pages: 464
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
