8/30/2023 0 Comments Man seeking woman book![]() ![]() There are walk-on roles for Guido Fawkes and cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Party Lines is a wide and deep undertaking, which relies on substantial research while acknowledging its debt to previous works on rave culture. Just as the enclosure acts banned commoners from grazing their sheep on land previously open to all, Gillett envisions the status quo arbitrarily banning relatively safe compounds to serve their own interests. Naturally, drug laws come in for scrutiny, with Gillett bristling at the demonisation of MDMA as “the enclosure of the periodic table”. The arc is historic, he says possibly going back as far as farmers v hunter-gatherers, with the enclosure of the commons and the triumph of private property rights dovetailing into the authorities’ fear of people congregating and moving about. We got here, the author argues, by raiding Afro-Caribbean blues dances, sound systems and gay night clubs, by forcing travellers off the road – and by beating up miners and E’d-up kids.Īt the centre of this strategy, he posits, was the Thatcher-era notion of “ the enemy within” – which Gillett extends to pretty much anyone the Conservative party didn’t like the look of (early shots, arguably, in what we now know as the culture wars). But his aim is to consciously stitch together events to account for the repressive, authoritarian, fun-sceptic place in which the UK finds itself in 2023. It’s no great leap to segue British social history of the early 80s into that of the late 80s, as Gillett often does here. It was no accident: this was a force battle-hardened against its own miners, enacting, Gillett reckons, the biggest mass arrest in UK history. Then in 1990, another rave just outside Leeds was violently shut down by West Yorkshire police. History remembers the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985, when Wiltshire police went in hard against a convoy of new travellers (“new age” is a coining they reject). Photograph: PA Images/AlamyĮlsewhere, the scenes were far uglier. (Its unofficial logo? A police badge with a smiley face at the centre, crossed out – discovered by Gillett in police archives.) Once again, Tappenden operated at the greyer end of legality, threatening companies supplying sound equipment, lighting rigs and marquees.Ī traveller is arrested at the Battle of the Beanfield in Wiltshire, 1985. ![]() A subsequent high court ruling found the commanding officer had exceeded his powers.įive years later, that commanding officer, Ken Tappenden, was the head of the Pay Party Unit, tasked with stopping raves across the nation. In 1984, police blocked London’s Dartford Tunnel in a ploy to stop Kentish miners from supporting their striking colleagues in Nottinghamshire. Tactics used against striking miners were applied to moon-eyed ravers. Gillett makes plain the continuum of police suppression. The UK has just passed the Public Order Act, an historic piece of legislation suppressing political dissent – the latest instalment in a continuum of increasing police powers that includes the Criminal Justice Act, which increased powers to stop and search, demonised electronic music and criminalised “disruptive trespass”. Policing strategies, Gillett argues, connect a seemingly disparate group of partyers, nomads, sound system DJs, queer space organisers, drill rappers and activists pretty much anyone who has ever found themselves on the wrong side of a truncheon or punitive court case. But there is also a thin blue line running through the pages, making it an important book about policing, policy and politics too. This engrossing doorstop of a book is indelibly steeped in dance music culture, analysing how we got from thrilling early imports of Chicago house music (played in Black spaces first), via the British rave explosion, to “business techno” – today’s sanitised, mainstream clubbing fare. In 1990 a rave outside Leeds was violently shut down by West Yorkshire police ![]()
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