Party Lines is out! Extracts, playlist, tour dates and more.
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, came out on 3rd 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.
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.
Hi there! This is a very special edition of the Party Lines newsletter, celebrating its hardback publication last week. I hope you’ll forgive the lack of exclusive new content in this edition, on the basis that the last few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind and I’ve barely had time to think, let alone write anything.
Instead, I wanted to share a few bits and pieces around the launch and let you know where I’m going to be discussing the book over the next few weeks.
Here’s a quick rundown of the Party Lines book tour as it currently stands (I’m working on dates for Bristol and Sheffield as we speak):
Thursday 10th August - Reference Point, London (free entry!)
Saturday 12th August - We Out Here, Wimborne St Giles w/ Kate Hutchinson
Thursday 17th August - Manchester Central Library w/ Fergal Kinney
Friday 18th August - Sound Affects, Brighton w/ Jak Hutchcraft & Vinca Petersen
Thursday 24th August - Walthamstow Rock n Roll Book Club w/ Megan Townsend
Saturday 26th August - Lost Village, Lincolnshire w/ Grace Sands
Wednesday 7th September - Dartington Bookshop, Totnes
Friday 15th September - Tetbury Book Festival
Thursday 21st September - Melodic Café, Liverpool
Monday 25th September - Glasgow University
Sunday 1st October - Marlborough Literary Festival
I’ve put ticket links wherever they’re available - if you’d like to come along but are unwaged or might otherwise struggle to afford the entry fee, please drop me an email and I’m sure we can sort something out.
In particular, if you’re in London and free this coming Thursday, 10th August, my event at Reference Point is free for anyone to attend - please do come along if you fancy it!
Next up, here’s a selection of different extracts from the book which have been published online in the lead-up to publication:
Blues Dances and Rare Grooves - Factory International
The story of UK dance music is, to a large extent, also a story about physical space: who owns it, who controls it, who has access to it and what it’s used for.
It’s a thread which connects disused warehouses to glitzy superclubs, cavernous post-industrial spaces to domestic living rooms and open fields: for as long as we’ve danced together, other people have tried to stop us from doing so, usually by restricting, outlawing or otherwise controlling the physical spaces in which we congregate. Nowhere is this spatial conflict more apparent than in rave’s immediate pre-history, and disputes over Black British music in the second half of the 20th century.
‘From the dancefloor to the ballot box’: how house music helped Labour win a landslide in 1997 - The Guardian
However different the sweat-drenched walls of the Warehouse in 1987 and the ballot boxes of the 1997 general election might seem, and however distinct the indignities of ingrained American racism and homophobia might be from the upheavals of the Thatcher years, both of these versions of house music speak to similar emotional states: a collective weight being cast off and disfranchised communities belatedly emerging from the shadows of an oppressive superstructure. “‘It’s difficult to remember now what Thatcher’s Britain felt like,” DJ Fabio told the Guardian in 2008, describing the birth of acid house in terms which could just as easily be applied to New Labour’s ascent to power. “A lot of people were searching for something, for a way out.”
How a failed Thatcher experiment in community radio helped create Kiss FM - The Right To Dance
The MC’s voice swirls up from the past, through a fog of radio static, tape hiss and YouTube compression: ‘382a Lea Bridge Road, Leyton E10. Kiss FM going live, the Christmas ’86 warehouse party. Get on down here if you can, we’re gonna be rocking, shocking and everything else until 7 a.m.’ Even at nearly forty years’ remove and with only low-fidelity audio to go on, recorded off the radio onto cassette before being uploaded, you still get an unmistakeable sense of the party itself: a gloomy, low-ceilinged post-industrial space, in a corner of East London decades away from anything even approaching gentrification, knots of soul boys, rockers and hip-hop heads shuffling in the gloom.
And here’s a playlist of the music featured in Party Lines, in roughly the order that it appears in the book. A sonic tapestry, tracing dance music’s relationship with politics, all the way from Linton Kwesi Johnson to SOPHIE and Spiral Tribe to… umm, Lighthouse Family.
Get it here:
And finally, at the risk of blowing my own trumpet ever so slightly, here are a couple of reviews and interviews about the book which I’m particularly proud of:
“Though this is a book often driven by exasperation, a labour of love written with scholarly precision, Gillett’s passion for the transcendental, communitarian experience of dancing shines through throughout” - The Observer
“Party Lines invites many perhaps unanswerable questions. Like its subject matter, it’s buzzing, restless, bolshily insurgent.” - The Guardian
“Excellent” - The Sunday Times
“A fascinating and comprehensive history of Britain’s fraught relationship with the dance floor” - The Daily Telegraph
“My writing process is loosely as follows: daydream and procrastinate for roughly three quarters of however much time you’ve got available, wake up one morning in a terrifying panic, and then smash through everything in a complete blur as your deadline approaches.” - Music Journalism Insider
If you’ve got a copy of Party Lines already, please do leave a review on Amazon or GoodReads to help spread the word! If you haven’t, here’s one final plug for it:
Thanks for reading - hopefully see you at a Q&A event or something similar soon.