From Inspector Morse to Eye Ball Paul: UK dance music on screen
Hi there, and thanks for reading - I’m Ed Gillett, an author and journalist focusing on the points where politics, policing, communities and culture meet.
My first book, Party Lines, comes out in August. 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 21st century, 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.
In the lead-up to the book’s release, I’ll be sharing some of the fascinating material I’ve uncovered during the writing process, from weird rave ephemera to extended interviews with people who’ve been instrumental in the social and political evolution of UK dance music over the decades.
So first up, I’m thrilled to share the full lineup and details for Party Lines’ offical launch party with you all: find out more here.
I’m going to be doing a Q&A with the author and academic Julia Toppin, whose incredible writing on the hidden role of women in the jungle / drum ‘n’ bass scene was published last year by Bloomsbury.
There’ll also be a fantastic selection of DJs exploring different angles on UK dance music, from Death Is Not The End’s archival pirate radio recordings to Ambient Babestation Meltdown’s breakbeat hardcore classics, via Klaus’ take on soundsystem history. And you’ll be able to get hold of a copy of Party Lines itself!
I’ll be announcing the event publicly soon, but you can grab a ticket before they go on wider sale here.
If you’d like to come along but are unwaged or might struggle with the ticket price, please drop me an email and I should be able to sort you out.
For this edition of the newsletter, I’m going to take my cue from Chapter 5 of Party Lines, which looks at the cultural rehabilitation and commodification of UK dance music in the decade or so between Castlemorton and the end of Tony Blair’s first term in power.
Despite ongoing concerns over its proximity to drugs and crime, this was a period in which popular understandings of UK dance music were turned on their head: transforming it from a semi-demonic social scourge, threatening to tear society apart at its seams, to a fully regulated leisure activity clasped tightly to the bosom of the British establishment.
There are many different aspects to that process explored in Party Lines - from the overlaps between raving and religion, to Blair’s newly-formed Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s emphasis on the “creative industries” - but one particularly fun way to explore it can be found in dance music’s fictional representations on TV during that period (a later chapter of Party Lines looks at more documentary approaches, from The Hitman and Her to Boiler Room and No Signal).
The obvious starting point is an infamous 1992 episode of Inspector Morse, titled “Cherubim and Seraphim” and directed by Scottish film-maker Danny Boyle, two years away from finding fame with Shallow Grave and then Trainspotting.
The episode opens - somewhat unexpectedly for Morse - with a solo dancer grooving euphorically, lit from behind by a spotlight. We’re at an illegal rave on an abandoned industrial estate outside Oxford, a mass of of young people forcing open warehouse doors and warming themselves next to bonfires of burning wooden pallets.
One of the ravers is Morse’s suitably angelic niece - the cherub of the title - who slumps in the back seat of her friend’s Vauxhall Nova and talks dreamily about how she “sees the world as it really is”. Within minutes, we find out that she’s killed herself having taken a drug called Seraphim (an unsubtle proxy for Ecstasy) at the rave.
Airing just over a month before Castlemorton, Morse positions rave firmly within a shadowy underworld corrupting Oxford’s young people, and defines it entirely through its relationship to illegal narcotics. ‘Youth culture’s a bit of a mystery to you, isn’t it, officer?’ asks a shady venue owner when Morse quizzes him on late-night goings-on. ‘When young people say parties,’ he says with a villainous smile, ‘what they mean is drugs.’ Sergeant Lewis’s tearaway daughter, meanwhile, spends the entire episode locked defiantly in her bedroom, muffled beats thudding through the door, unreachable and by and unintelligible to the rational adult world.
‘That’s what’s really wicked,’ opines Morse of Seraphim’s effects. ‘To make you think you’ve seen everything there is to see, at [the age of ] sixteen. That you’ve had the best of life, before it’s even begun. To make you think you’ve got nothing more to live for.’ In Morse’s world, the joy and transcendence of the dance floor becomes its own inverse: euphoria is in fact self-abasement, ecstasy is in fact despair, the communal experience of the dance floor terminally isolating.
It’s worth reading Jennifer Lucy Allen’s superb Low Culture essay for the Quietus for more on the episode; one particularly interesting tangent is its soundtrack, composed by the series’ in-house composer Barrington Pheloung rather than actual dance music producers (unlike the visual element of the episode’s climactic rave scene, for which real-life promoters Fantazia were brought in to bring a gloss of verisimilitude).
More used to classical compositions than drum machines and synthesisers, Pheloung’s attempts to mimic the sounds of UK rave and acid house are deeply uncanny, and server to underline its alien qualities: in one unintentionally hilarious moment, Morse is staggered to discover a sample of the Hallelujah Choruse mixed in with the beats and basslines.
While the specifics of Pheloung’s soundtrack work fall a little outside the remit of rave’s political and cultural rehabilitation, the series producers’ choices here reflect the general approach taken by Morse - one in which dance music is largely misunderstood and demonised, portrayed entirely from an outsider’s perspective: the episode’s fictional DJ mixing with reel-to-reel decks rather than turntables, Morse’s own deeply pessimistic take on what happens on the dance floor, or the starched, unreal atmosphere of the show’s rave scenes (regardless of Fantazia’s involvement).
Or, as Allen puts it:
Good club scenes are where the camera is a roving eye, a protagonist looking for a friend, lover or dealer. A bad club scene is where the camera is a camera and people dance around it as if auditioning for a club scene.
Morse wasn’t the only TV drama to take this approach. In “Cherubim and Seraphim” the ultimate source of the titular drug is a corrupt research chemist, played with villainous twitchiness by Jason Isaacs: the same actor reappears in 1995’s Loved Up, swapping his lab coat for a terrible goatee and backwards Kangol cap to play a more stereotypically sinister drug dealer.
Broadcast in 1995, a matter of weeks before the death of Leah Betts would bring moral panics around Ecstasy back to the front pages, Loved Up comes to largely the same philosophical conclusions about UK dance music as Morse – perhaps unsurprisingly, given the production’s origins as an anti-drug PSA.
Drawn into a world of pills and partying by a new boyfriend, Sarah (played by a pre- fame Lena Headey) narrowly avoids being beaten up by one dealer and raped by another, before her mother’s suicide attempt (strongly implied to be the direct result of Sarah’s absence) convinces her to return to the straight and narrow. Sarah’s rejected boyfriend, by now deep in the grip of addiction, is left to hoover up another two pills and dance alone on an empty rooftop, the very picture of wretchedness.
Despite the censoriousness and rave-related scaremongering evident in Morse and Loved Up, the ground was already shifting under the moral majority’s feet: by the time 1995 was out, the ongoing transformation of UK dance music would be embodied by that most archetypal of 90s sitcoms, Men Behaving Badly.
‘Right, we’re going to a rave,’ declares Martin Clunes’s character Gary, in a misguided attempt to bring some youthful zest back into his life. He’s terminally out of touch, of course, dancing ridiculously in a pub and, by the end of the episode, crawling around the dance floor and vomiting onto the camera: the trauma of chemical overindulgence played not as tragedy, but as farce.
When the Channel 4 sitcom Spaced devoted an entire episode to its cast of characters going clubbing in 1999, they dispensed with even this thin veneer of moral disapprobation.
It’s made as clear as possible, without actually showing characters necking pills and snorting lines, that they’re all higher than the sun and loving it: the cast gurn and rush to the sound of irrepressible hard house thumper ‘Let Me Show You’ by Camisra, gabble lovingly in the chill-out room, and eventually collapse in a heap on the sofa, their feet still tapping instinctively to a half-remembered beat as they fall asleep, all of their tensions soothed and narrative frictions reconciled.
Where drug-induced psychosis once drove Inspector Morse’s niece to her death, Spaced’s pathologically twitchy cycle courier Tyres – so addled by Ecstasy use that he regularly hallucinates dance music emerging from everyday sounds, like a kettle boiling or a clock ticking – ends the series blissfully cutting shapes to the sound of a pedestrian crossing in Hammersmith.
However, there’s a one fictional depiction which sums up dance music’s political, cultural and economic transformation over the mid to late 90s more potently than any other: the unmistakeable and largely incomprehensible Kevin & Perry Go Large, released in 2001.
Fortysomethings Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke dress in Kappa tracksuits to portray gurning teenagers, whose primary narrative motivation involves going to Ibiza and ‘shagging all the birds we want’. Rhys Ifans’s superstar DJ Eye Ball Paul arrives with the immortal words ‘Tits up, Big Baz! ’Avin it large!’ – things still somehow manage to go downhill from there. At one point, Kevin is shamed by Eye Ball Paul for his insufficiently edgy tastes, after he lets slip that he’s not as big a fan of 90s chart-trance mainstays Chicane as he presumably should be.
In the film’s sole concession to factual accuracy its climax is filmed at Amnesia, the original Ibizan home of DJ Alfredo, repurposed by 2001 as the decadent and aspirational Balearic outpost of Liverpool superclub Cream.
As our two heroes’ trance anthem ‘Big Girl’ sends the crowd into raptures, Perry’s camcorder video of Kevin’s parents having sex is broadcast on the big screen to thou- sands of unsuspecting ravers. It’s Carry On Clubbing, only with more smut and less wit: a film that simultaneously treats dance music as something aspirational and glamorous – Kevin handles the white label of his debut single as if it was a holy relic – and everyone involved in it as a venal, drug-addled moron.
Where illegal narcotics and sinister machine music were in 1992 depicted as a malevolent force corrupting Britain’s innocent suburban youth, here it’s Kevin and Perry’s priapic gormlessness which instead corrupts the harmless fun of the dance floor: a reversal which speaks powerfully to the wider forces affecting UK dance music over the same period.
Thanks for reading, look out for more news about Party Lines very soon!