History is made at night

Herman Hesse's novel Steppenwolf , first published in 1928, is an outsider novel whose protagonist, disgusted by German militarism and b...

No festival seems to be complete without a fairground and in the past week I've been to a couple in London. On Sunday I went to the Lamb...

Just how fundamental is musicking and dancing to human experience? To be sure, 'music', 'dance' and indeed 'human' h...

This month, rave shut down in England, religious police raid club in Malaysia, and Iceland's first Reclaim the Streets party. Suffolk, E...

One night of Fire in New York ( Village Voice , July 16 2007) : 'Global terror, the NYPD's increasingly restrictive rules governing...

Previous posts have considered the recent 30th anniversary of The Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen and the 25th anniversary of The Falkla...

Soren Kierkegaard has a great line about ‘dancing in the service of thought’ . I don’t think he was really talking about dancing, but it go...

Next up in our collection of space-themed songs comes this East London punk obscurity from 1978. 'I wanna be a cosmonaut' by Riff...

Just a few months after the death of his former bandmate Mick Mulligan , another of the great jazz ravers has died - George Melly . We have...

The anarchist Emma Goldman (1869-1940) is perhaps best known today for one quote attributed to her: 'If I can't dance I don't w...

A sad weekend in London, with two young people out with their friends killed in separate incidents. Annaka Pinto (left), a 17 year old from...

I went to the degree show at Camberwell College of Arts yesterday and was struck by Georgia Rodger's video piece Blinkers Instrument , w...

The Celebrating Sanctuary refugee music festival last weekend (see earlier post ) was rudely interrupted by the sound of assorted airborne k...

Big solstice celebration at Stonehenge this morning : 'An estimated 20,000 people gathered at the stone circle in Wiltshire, in southwes...

Trouble for some of the biggest names on the European clubbing circuit. In Sheffield, Gatecrasher nightclub (formerly The Republic) burnt do...

One of the best things about being in London in the summer is taking in the free music events, official and unofficial, along the South Bank...

An obituary in The Guardian today for music promoter Rik Gunnell (1931-2007). The clubs he was involved in were critical in London music i...

This month's round up includes neo -prohibition in the US, drug testing in a Thailand nightclub, sound systems at the G8 and a rave in a...

The Ted Heath Orchestra were the ultimate in British pre - rock'n'roll light entertainment (Ted is pictured in 1958). The same co...

"The Twist, superseding the Hula Hoop, burst upon the scene like a nuclear explosion, sending its fallout of rhythm into the Minds and...