Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain

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Meanwhile, the phone companies collected a share of income from each group phone call — about 60%, reported Newsday in 1988 . And virtually anyone with a few hundred dollars lying around could buy up a local number, advertise it, and if it caught on, start raking in cash. It was the 1980s entrepreneur’s dream, albeit a risky one. Fantasy is right. Some teens used the service to talk about sex, and later when moderators were added, used veiled language. “I listened in once, and I can’t even begin to tell you what they were talking about — with strangers!” a mother of three from Wellesley, Massachusetts, told People . Others defended the chats as preventative. “You can’t catch anything over the phone,” insisted chat line operator Betsy Superfon. Ed Gillett is a journalist and film-maker based in South London, who has written for The Guardian, Frieze, DJ Mag, The Quietus and Novara Media. His film and TV credits include Jeremy Deller’s acclaimed rave documentary Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984–1992 for BBC Four, and Four To The Floor, Channel 4’s award-winning music and factual strand . Party Lines is his first book. Then parents saw the bills — their kids had charged hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars worth of calls in the space of weeks.

This article was amended on 24 July 2023. An earlier version had misattributed to Ed Gillett the coining of the term “business techno”. I don't think this has much to do with the Morse code. The letter is the same as dialing the number. Look on your dial the numbers are still there. Later when the telephone number system was expanded, my number in NJ was through the Charter exchange; Ch-9-0979. C is 2 and H is 4. So you actually dialed 24-9-0979. Did you see the TV documentary ? He goes into a school & explains the story to a load of 14yr olds who appear very enthralled (as you should be!!). You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. Notting Hill Carnival is a bigger target. Potentially, it’s eminently exploitable, but it’s probably too diffuse and problematic to attract major investors. Whatever RBKC might like to think, it’s not owned by anyone, so it can’t be bought outright, and attempts to exert overt municipal or corporate control provoke fierce community resistance. Unlike music, Carnival is intimately tied to place and in Notting Hill it is, after 57 years, firmly embedded in a strong community, which is its greatest protection.

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Money Matters Neurodiversity Preparing for University - Subject Reading Lists Reading For Pleasure Stationery Sunday Times A fascinating deep dive into dance music's uneasy relationship with the establishment. A passionately argued and intensively researched addition to the ever-evolving narrative of UK dance music culture. Aug 2023 Party Lines: Ed Gillett in conversation with Fergal Kinney. Sorry, this event is now cancelled. Good to know. Thanks for the word. I’ll take that as an I-need-it book - just when I swore not to buy any more books until I’d made a substantial dent in the several piles of unread and partially read tomes that I live with.

Share this event Save this event: "County Lines" Theatrical Performance Invite For YP Practitioners The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our Some chat lines attempted to appease parents by adding moderators who periodically reminded teens of the price per minute. I got on at 1 in the morning, and I didn’t get off till 6 in the morning,” one girl said on Connections, according to the Tribune. Gillett might have put the voices of partygoers higher in the mix; ideas such as the “communal world-building of the dancefloor” deserve more grounding. A comparative element would have been helpful too: are the English angstier about collective revelry than people in other countries? Party Lines invites many perhaps unanswerable questions. Like its subject matter, it’s buzzing, restless, bolshily insurgent.

Loves long walks along the beach, holding hands and romantic 80's power ballads, partial to electronic music and likes to make the odd mix or two. Britain’s largest and most infamous free party took place on May 22 1992, when 30,000 people danced to Spiral Tribe for an entire week on Castlemorton Common in Worcestershire, an event that, Gillett believes, shaped “modern British social history as a whole”. It prompted draconian reforms of the Criminal Justice Act, with the police granted powers to shut down events featuring “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”.

His highly-acclaimed documentary work and writing have appeared on the BBC, Channel 4, The Guardian, Frieze, DJ Mag and The Quietus amongst several others. A traveller is arrested at the Battle of the Beanfield in Wiltshire, 1985. Photograph: PA Images/Alamy Chaptered by theme rather than chronology, Party Lines can be a little repetitive. But Gillett’s research is thorough and thoughtful, particularly when debunking some of the myths around dance music and drugs. When, in 1995, 18-year-old Leah Betts died after taking ecstasy and then drinking 12 pints of water in just 90 minutes, causing her brain to swell to fatal proportions, the tabloid railed hysterically against drug taking and clubbing. And yet, reports Gillett, omitted from this coverage was the fact that Betts took the pill at home. The moral panic had no constructive effect anyway: between 1994 and 1996, self-reported Ecstasy use among 15-to-34-year-olds almost doubled.Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? The narrative thread that runs through the book is, the author explains, “a power struggle: between our collective urge to congregate and dance, to lose and find ourselves on the dance floor, and the political and economic authorities which seek to constrain or commodify those messy and unstable desires.” Swap “the road” for “the dance floor” and that sentence describes the essence of the battle for the heart and soul and freedom of Carnival. I don’t care,” she said. “If there was no phone, I wouldn’t be living right now. In my town, there’s nothing to do.”

Around the same time, party lines hooked up to computer modems and people could type to each other as well as talk. The technology’s popularity allowed a brief resurgence. One party line hosted a wedding, where the bride, groom, and officiant were at different terminals in Manhattan. Instead of throwing rice, the 1,000 callers who tuned in typed apostrophes. “It was very beautiful,” said a party line owner, “and very profitable.”Ed Gillett’s excellent history of UK dance culture, moves beyond the saucer-eyed clichés of the raver’s epiphany and towards a sharper sort of revelation . . . the politics of dancing expertly laid bare. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.