As outlined on last month’s episode of Join The Future on Noods, 2023 has been a vintage year for books about dance music culture, especially those with a UK-centric slant. In my opinion, there are two titles we should class as ‘essential reads’: Emma Warren’s Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through The Dancefloor (a seriously good examination of why and how we dance, the social role of dancing, and the impact of the dancers on wider dance music culture) and Ed Gillett’s recently published Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain.

Ed’s book is a very different tome to Emma’s, but like hers, it presents a wilfully different take on the history of dance music in the UK that revels in writing marginalised groups back into the narrative (as they should be – you can find a whole episode of JTF on Noods dedicated to the importance of correcting narratives and the way we document dance music history here), while focusing on the “knotty” (as Ed would put it) relationships between politics, power and commercial interests over the course of the last 50 years.

The idea that gathering to dance – and all that entails – is fundamentally a political act is not a new one, but it’s naturally at the heart of Ed’s argument and continuing narrative. What’s different about Party Lines, though, is that it does not merely repeat arguments and historic information around the blues dances (which, I’m happy to say, he argues provided a blueprint for much of what followed – both in terms of the nature and style of events such as warehouse parties and raves, and the vindictive and authoritarian way that the police, government and local authorities reacted to them), free festivals, acid house raves and free parties, but goes much further and examines what has happened since those days in the 70s, 80s and early 90s.

So, you’ll find sharp analysis of the global drug trade and the idiocy of government policy around narcotics; a fine chapter on the complex relationship between New Labour and dance music (a time, in the mid 90s and early 2000s, when dance music was in its ‘superclub’ phase and well-connected entrepreneurs were beginning to exploit the commercial potential of the culture); an examination of the role of pirate (and licensed) radio on access to the culture; the demonisation of black (and to a lesser extent working-class) dance music; musings on The Hitman and Her, Channel-U and Boiler Room; the intersection between commercial property interests, wealthy cosplaying individuals and dance music events in the ‘business techno’ era; ‘plague raving’ (where Ed recalls one memorable research trip to an illegal party during the pandemic); and where he sees dance music culture going in the months and years ahead.

It’s a highly impressive piece of work, underpinned by rigorous research and nods towards writers and researchers whose work set the platform for Ed to extend and enhance previously overlooked viewpoints and corrected narratives. It’s no surprise that the book has generally received rave reviews (the Observer named it as their Book of the Week a few weeks ago, which was nice to see given that they largely ignore books about dance music culture) and that Ed has received a good reception while speaking about it around the country.

I’ve been keen to get Ed to come on the radio show and talk about his work – which includes some significant ‘pre-book’ articles on aspects of the story told in the book, including this one for the Quietus that went viral a few years ago – for a while, so it was great to finally chew the fat with him over Zoom last week. In the conversation, we discussed key themes and chapters in the book, his plague rave experience, the arguments around whether dance music is ‘political’, and one of the key figures in the early part of the book: notorious Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable James Anderton, a close friend of Margaret Thatcher whose frankly repulsive and Victorian views led to an all-out assault on black, LGBT and working-class dance music culture throughout the 1980s.

You can listen to Join The Future on Noods: S3E6 – Party Lines: Ed Gillett in conversation, on-demand via the embedded Mixcloud player below.