During the research for Join The Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music, I approached a Sheffield-based DJ/producer to ask for an interview. He was someone I had known for many years – he’d come down and played at my best before: party on numerous occasions – and he first broke through in the Steel City during the years chronicled in the book. To my surprise, he said no – though he was happy to answer questions and chat off the record – saying that he was “suspicious of nostalgia”.

At the time, I was a bit perplexed; to me, his experiences, and those of other people, places and music communities featured in the book, were ‘history’. Chronicling them was an important and vital pursuit – to me at least – as previously they had largely been omitted from the narratives. I was approaching their stories as a cultural historian, not a raver. Besides, how could I be nostalgic for an era of dance music and club culture that I played no part in?

Eight or nine years on from that encounter, and after years spent reading academic texts arguing about what history is (not to mention plenty on the ‘heritagization’ of culture and the knotty relationship between music, memory and identity), I’ll grudgingly admit that he possibly had a point. Not that what I was doing was inspired by nostalgia – it wasn’t – but that ‘history’ can easily slip into nostalgia if you’re not careful – or if that is your intention.

Nostalgia is undoubtedly factored in when editors, publishers and broadcasters consider whether to back cultural history projects. A book, documentary, article or podcast series is far more likely to be optioned, commissioned or produced if it has the potential to tap into the nostalgia of a generation pining for their lost youth (hence the multitude of texts on acid house/rave, the ‘swinging sixties’, punk and, more recently, Britpop).

Whether I like it or not, the lines between history and nostalgia have long been blurred. In my experience, some people are genuinely keen to dig into cultural and social history, immersing themselves in books, podcasts, documentaries and articles in a bid to learn something new or, in the case of younger music enthusiasts, understand what happened in the past and how it impacted on what came next and – eventually – the music they listen and dance to today.

There are of course plenty whose decision to buy a book or watch a documentary on some aspect of music history is informed by living through that moment. For these people, there is usually some element of nostalgia involved – an opportunity to immerse themselves once more in a world or musical movement that shaped their life or helped forge their identity. They’ll either learn something or reinforce existing knowledge, but more importantly this process will be accompanied by warm dopamine hits as they recall flashes of their own youthful journey through the culture being chronicled.

There is nothing wrong with this necessarily, as most of us are more likely to watch a documentary, read a book or listen to a podcast if it is discussing something we lived through and have some personal investment in. What I do have an issue with, though, is pure nostalgia dressed up as history.

If you market a book, podcast, article or documentary as a ‘history’ of something – social, cultural, political, military or otherwise – then it should attempt in some way to chronicle that history as accurately as possible, in a way that educates the attended audience.

There are many different ways to do that and such a history need not go into microscopic detail about the subject – that’s what books like Join The Future, or Tim Lawrence’s stupendous Love Saves The Day and Life and Death On The New York Dancefloor, are there to do – but it should contain useful information, rooted in research or the expertise of specialist historians and cultural commentators, with some light contextual analysis (so the ‘why’ accompanies the ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘when’). It can be presented in a light-hearted or accessible way, of course, with complex issues simplified to appeal to a wider audience.

It’s for this reason that ‘popular history’ podcasts like The Rest is History, and totalising historical documentary series like The World At War, Andrew Marr’s Making of Modern Britain, or Dominic Sandbrook’s (admittedly annoyingly conservative and in my opinion, flawed) 2010s ‘history of our national imagination’, are so successful. The histories within them, while relayed from the perspectives of the historians involved, are communicated in an accessible manner, with added commentary on what happened next and its impact on the world we live in. You learn something while being entertained, even if you don’t agree with the analysis.

In general, dance music culture is not well served by popular histories, whatever vehicle is chosen. I won’t bore you (again) with my spiel about misleading and over-simplified narratives, or the frustrating over-reliance on easily debunked cultural myths, but it is pertinent to this discussion: too many ‘popular histories’ of dance music (and there aren’t that many) repeat the same stories, feature the same contributors of a certain age, and avoid important contextual information, counter arguments, or the voices of the marginalised.

Last month, while browsing through podcasts and radio shows on the BBC Sounds app, I noticed that digital-only station Radio 1 Dance had released a major new series fronted by the corporation’s long-serving dance DJ: Pete Tong’s Essential History of Dance. I was curious as to how the history would be presented, who was involved and what kind of historical narratives would be presented – and crucially in what volume.

The series scope is, on the surface at least, impressive, with 15 two-hour shows. It begins with a two-part, four-hour exploration of the history of house music, then takes in jungle and drum & bass, tech-house, UK garage, techno, trance, Afro-house, French touch, EDM, dubstep, hard house, UK funky, disco and ‘chilled dance’. It is, in effect, not a singular ‘totalising history’, but rather an episodic collection of genre-focused histories.

Except it isn’t.

To put it bluntly, it is little more than a series of nostalgic, genre-specific playlists dressed up as ‘history’. At this point, it could be useful to look in more detail at the first episode I listened to – the one that explores the history of one of dance music’s most storied (and, in the 21^st century, loosely defined) genres: techno.

Packaged as a two-hour radio show with two Essential Selection style features (in the case of the techno episode, Nina Kraviz selecting “essential 21^st century techno anthems” and an excerpt from hard Euro-techno star Charlotte de Witte’s earlier Essential Mix), each episode sees Tong (or whichever engineer puts the show together) rushing through largely well-known anthems, periodically switching between foundational cuts, game-changers and more recent hits.

At various points, Tong appears to relay some very basic historical information – for example about techno’s origins in Detroit, the prior collapse of the city’s industrial base and the role of the Belleville Three (in particular Juan Atkins and his early experiments in fusing driving drum machine rhythms with the inspiration provided by Kraftwerkian electropop).  In the case of the techno episode, the role of Afro-futurism in techno’s genesis, the influence of the Electrifyin’ Mojo’s radio show, and even the indisputable fact that techno’s roots are Black were not deemed worthy of passing on to listeners. This is basic stuff and would understandably irritate Deforrest Brown Jr, whose own militant (and undeniably scholarly) history of the genre, Assembling a Black Counterculture, was in part inspired by the widespread lack of acknowledgement of techno’s Black, forward-thinking roots as the 21st century enters its second quarter.

In the episode, Tong follows that brief nod to the Motor City with a simplified run-down of the essential elements of techno music. He does this by listing some musical ‘ingredients’, helpfully selecting a Rebuke track that basically introduces all of them in sequence (insert your own gag about formulaic and functional dance music here). Next, he drops LFO’s ‘LFO’ without announcing what it is or why it is important as an early, game-changing example of techno’s mutation in the hands of music-makers from Europe and other parts of the United States. I wouldn’t expect a lot on bleep & bass, but at that point it – and the role it played the short-lived genre played in the UK finding a distinctive and long-lasting voice within dance music culture – should have at least been mentioned in passing.

Neil Rushton’s role in introducing the genre to a wider British audience via the Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit compilation is mentioned while Inner City’s ‘Good Life’ plays (“yes, this is a techno record!” Tong bellows), but there’s zero information about, or analysis of, the UK mutations of techno that followed.  He represents the UK wave by dropping Bizarre Inc’s ‘Playing With Knives’ and says it had “a significant impact on the scene”. Fair enough, but why? Within a couple of sentences, you could easily explain how and why techno evolved in certain ways within the UK, but for whatever reason neither he nor the production team thought it would be valuable to listeners… within a show that purports to be a history of techno.

There are occasionally nods to the harsh, driving and heavy European techno sounds of the early 1990s, but again there’s zero information on that scene, the key people, or how it changed the game and influenced techno across the world (for example the brief NY techno scene, or the developing sound of breakbeat hardcore in the UK). These are not deep narratives – most of you reading this know the stories – but you would expect them to be mentioned.

Naturally, the role of Berlin as the 21^st century’s most significant techno city is mentioned. But there’s little on other German cities and the various sonic waves associated with them, minimal techno (huge for a long period of time), dub techno or any of the other essential variants that have emerged and thrived at different points over the last four decades.

I get that the idea of popular history is to simplify narratives, but this isn’t a popular history: it’s a whizz through a relatively small number of undoubtedly classic (and in many cases genuinely significant) tracks, designed for nostalgic listening, with less information about the origins, spread and evolution of techno than I managed to fit in to a short children’s book about the history of dance and electronic music.

Recently, I’ve been working on a project for a large independent record label that involves squeezing 40 years of one city’s house music history into five 90-second video clips. Those are notably simplified – as you’d expect given the length– but I still managed to cram in more history and context than Tong and the BBC have provided in this episode of their ‘Essential History of Dance’. Crucially, the role marginalised communities played in that story has been foregrounded – as it should be.

The point is not that the historical information is brief but rather that it is almost non-existent. Across the series, too, some of the genre/style selections are odd. Yes, it’s great that, for example, hard house is in there, but should French Touch – a relatively short-lived musical movement that burned brightly briefly but didn’t really go anywhere – really be afforded the same time and weight as techno, drum & bass or trance? Also, ‘chilled dance’ – which had yet to be broadcast at the moment of publication – is deliberately vague; my suspicion is that the chill-out wave of Mixmaster Morris, the Orb and others will rub shoulders with trip-hop, Fila Brazillia style downtempo goodness and most likely Spanish guitar-clad ‘Ibiza chill out’ compilation filler. How they create a coherent narrative out of this remains to be seen, but it could easily become a mess.

The key point is that this isn’t history, it’s catnip for old ravers and Now That’s What I Call Dance Classics for younger listeners. There is a place for such themed nostalgia and I’m aware it isn’t aimed at people like me, who have skin in the game, but don’t call something a ‘history’ when it isn’t.

At this point, it is important to note that BBC radio has at various points dipped its toe into dance music history in different ways – for example an episode of Archive on 4 in 2022 that looked back on the week-long free festival-turned-rave on Castlemorton Common. From memory, they did that by combining original news footage with fresh interviews with attendees, members of the new traveller community and free party soundsystem operatives.

More significant was regular 5 Live presenter Chris Warburton’s passion project, Ecstasy: The Battle of Rave. I was quite impressed with how Chris handled that story. We exchanged a few emails about it – and the complaints he received from a few disgruntled listeners who seemed offended that his retelling of events from different perspectives did not match their own experiences or what they had read in books published in the late 1990s. In its own way, it was quite revolutionary, as the documentary episodes – meticulously researched and beautifully produced – were accompanied by short, fictional ‘drama’ episodes based on the experiences of different players within the story (dancers, dealers, gangsters and so on).

What was good about that series, which launched as a podcast but was also broadcast in weekly episodes on 5 Live (albeit at weird times, like midnight on a Saturday), was that it re-told a familiar story – the birth of rave culture and what happened next _– by largely eschewing familiar voices (IE those who always appear on acid house and rave documentaries and have seemingly forged a career from being at Shoom in 1988) in favour of those operating outside of London. Yes, there was a fair amount of coverage of the more salacious aspects of the scene – the impact of Ecstasy culture and the associated gang activity – but these portions were at least rooted in the Blackburn raves rather than the M25 ones. I also squealed with delight when one interviewee claimed that they started their own events because the Ramplings wouldn’t let them into Shoom – the fact that it was by design selective and cliquey, with more mates, celebs and London liggers in attendance than ordinary dancers, does not get discussed enough.

The BBC has enough resources (and, with its own speech/music app and various radio stations, platforms) to commission, broadcast and produce a very good popular history of dance music culture. Their arrangements with MCPS, PRS and the like allows them to pretty much play any piece of music that exists in recorded form – a luxury that does not apply to independent podcast producers and audio documentary makers, whose licensing budgets are usually minimal (hence the widespread use of library music or pieces commissioned for the series).

There is also an argument to be made that they should. I am biased, since this is my specialism, but if we agree that dance music has become a massive part of the national (and international) cultural landscape since the disco era, it follows that it is ripe for ‘historicization’. That has been happening for some time anyway, but in a piecemeal and fractured way.

Dance music’s social and cultural impact has been recognised in some countries and cities around the world, but not others. Amsterdam hosts a ‘house museum’, for example (even if it is ‘very commercial’, as one Dutch contact of mine put it), ‘Berlin techno’ is on the UNESCO world heritage list (meaning it has some protection and wider recognition – that the same does not apply to Detroit is shameful, but then city leaders in the Motor City never applied for this status) and various museums have put on, or are planning, exhibitions focused on different aspects of dance music culture (for example a forthcoming celebration of techno in Switzerland).

Britain lags behind in marking and celebrating its dance music heritage, despite a glut of books (like mine) appearing in recent years focused on different aspects of our national dance music story. Any of these books would make fine audio documentaries or podcast series, or the inspiration for one, but no broadcasters have yet taken the plunge. Yes, independent production companies or audio platforms could, but so far none have. This may in part be due to perfectly valid commercial concerns – something a public service broadcaster such as the BBC has to worry about less (though it is still, I’m sure, a consideration).

Imagine this: a multiple-part history of dance music on BBC Sounds, featuring narration, documentary style interview snippets and analysis from creators and music writers, with an accompanying soundtrack showcasing a blend of pioneering productions, influential underground favourites and, yes, crossover hits. The corporation has the ‘talent’ on its books to find a suitable narrator (not Tong, please – he needs to be put out to pasture). It woudn’t be absurdly expensive to pay historians and journalists to do the research, conduct interviews and script the series either. With the right vision and personnel involved, they could create something genuinely great. Hell, there’s no shortage of freelancers out there – me included – who could help shape a series.

There are no shortage of interesting dance music related stories either. They could be even bolder and create a ‘people’s history of dance music’, or mirror the travelogue, flitting-between-towns-and-cities approach of Jim Ottewill’s book Out of Space, a state-of-the-nation type affair that contrasts dance music’s past with current and recent developments that have impacted the culture.

Dance music is embedded within our culture, has helped shape it for decades (as Ed Gillett discusses in detail in his book) and is widely popular – even if weekly club attendances are sadly a fraction of what they once were. Given that a high percentage of pop hits mine dance music for inspiration, it’s also more significant culturally than it has ever been. We deserve so much more than a series of nostalgic playlists dressed up as history.