A book about the rave and clubbing scene might seem an odd choice for a review in Soca News, but Ed Gillett’s masterful analysis of the rollercoaster history of dance music is packed with insights that apply to Carnival too.
Gillett knows his subject inside out and the depth of his research is impressive. Although the book weighs in at over 460 pages, it’s an absorbing and often amusing read, as Gillett skewers the sheer idiocy and wrongheadedness of the politics, policies and policing of people having fun. Party Lines is a beautifully written record of half a century of moral panics.
He’s at pains to point out the Black origins of so much British dance music, as he guides us through its development from the blues dances of the 50s and 60s, the free festivals of the 70s, warehouse and out-of-town raves of the 80s and 90s, to Covid-era ‘plague raves’ and modern corporate superclubs.
Many of the DJs, venues, radio stations and clubs are likely to be unfamiliar to soca fans and carnivalists, but parallels keep hitting you as you read accounts of the cat-and-mouse games played by promoters and revellers on the one hand and police and policy-makers on the others. Over every field of ecstatically happy people dancing to a common beat there invariably hangs a roiling cloud of suspicion, provoking a downpour of outrage from the tabloid guardians of public morals.
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.
Later in the book, Gillett relates the sorry tale of music livestreamer Boiler Room’s involvement with Notting Hill Carnival. Back in 2017, Soca News briefly covered the story of its extraordinary £300,000 grant from the Arts Council of England. In Party Lines Gillett demolishes Blaise Bellville’s pet project, describing Boiler Room as “an aloof media behemoth led by a well-meaning but deluded aristocrat and funded by global capital, haplessly trampling across grassroots Black culture in order to increase its market share and enrich its owners; an understanding of music solely as an exploitable resource rather than a living culture.” Although Bellville had a “deep and entirely genuine affection for Black music, and Carnival in particular” and got buy-in from the council, sound systems and even some residents, “there was no consideration of the people who use Notting Hill as the one or two days a year where they get to be expressive, be themselves, get out of their nine-to-five and go and party on the streets”.
Dance music is squeezed between, on the one hand, those who seek to obliterate it and, on the other, those like Bellville who would co-opt and corporatise it. Happily, soca’s relative obscurity allows it to slip beneath the radar. For years, artistes and promoters have tried, and largely failed, to bring soca into the mainstream. The Billboard charts remain elusive and soca is still a niche genre, except at carnival time. After reading Party Lines, the soca fan might feel that missing out on the “big money wine” at least keeps our music free of the dead hand of big business.
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.
Carnival is, though, beset by a wearying barrage of demands from click-seeking columnists, shock-jock radio hosts and rabble-rousing politicians to move the event off the streets into a park or stadium, or to close it down altogether. In retrospect, each swivelled-eyed pundit indignantly demanding that “something must be done” looks absurd, their histrionics about Carnival or some new manifestation of music and dance culture exaggerated and off-kilter.
Absurd they may be, but these people have the power and the influence that musicians, carnivalists, ravers, revellers, promoters, clubs, DJs and festival organisers generally lack. A prime example is Conservative mayoral candidate Susan Hall, who said of Notting Hill Carnival, “I don’t think the public realise just how dangerous it can get. Astonishing that we should put our police in this position every year and the cost to the taxpayers is eye-watering… there is always violence.” In 2022, she told a London Assembly meeting: “There is an issue with crime in the black community in London.” And recently we learned that Hall had ‘liked’ a tweet that praised Enoch Powell and his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech about the dangers of non-white immigration to the UK. Shocking, mad and wrong – but if elected, Hall may be the one who holds the fate of Notting Hill Carnival in her hands.
Critics of Carnival are invariably utterly ignorant of it. They dislike it on principle and make no attempt to immerse themselves in the event in order to understand it (Hall confined her visit to the police control room). Newspaper reports – and Party Lines has much to say about media coverage – are written by people who never set foot in Notting Hill on August bank holiday. Nor do they attend festivals, raves, fetes or other manifestations of dance music culture. But too often, the only voice that’s heard is that of the haters. The vast majority of those who participate in our great communal celebrations are never able to express themselves on a national platform. Ed Gillett has therefore done us all a great service. We need writers like him who can provide the counter-blast to Carnival’s critics.
As journalist Emma Warren emphasises: “Unless you tell your own stories then people who don’t share your lived experience – the material that underpins all culture – are likely to.” And we all know what happens if it’s the Daily Mail, Nick Ferrari or Susan Hall that tells our story.
- Party Lines. Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain, by Ed Gillett. Published by Picador at £20 hardback; ISBN 978-1-5290-7064-4
