Space is the Place

A pleasant evening at the Camberwell Squatted Centre in South London last night, spent watching the fantastic Sun Ra film Space is the Place, as well as a short film about the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA). Later I played some of my extensive collection of space-themed music. Last night this included everything from Pharoah Sanders (Astral Travelling) to The Rezillos (Flying Saucer Attack) via Klaxons (Gravity's Rainbow), with some Derrick Carter (Tripping among the stars) thrown in.


I began accumulating this collection when I was part of the Disconaut node of the AAA (1995-2000). The premise of the AAA was a global network committed to challenging the state and corporate monopoly of space through the development of community-based space exploration programmes. Within this network, Disconaut AAA focused on dance music as a vehicle for space exploration. Some of the Disconaut material from our Everybody is a Star! newsletter is archived at Uncarved, but the full story of the AAA remains to be told - and maybe the story isn't finished yet, as AAA Kernow (not unconnected to Nocturnal Emissions) apparently relaunched itself last month. I have reflected on the AAA experience elsewhere and will be considering all of this further at this site, but for now here's the founding text of Disconaut AAA:


Disconauts are go! (from 'Everybody is a Star!', no.1, 1996)

Forget Apollo, NASA and the Space Shuttle... the most exciting explorations of space in the last 30 years have been carried out through music.

Emerging on the radical fringes of jazz in the 1950's Sun Ra (1914-1993) and his Intergalactic Research Arkestra (as his band was later known) set the space vibe in motion with interstellar explorations like 'Space Jazz Reverie', 'Love in Outer Space', 'Disco 3000', and the film 'Space is the Place' [picture is of Sun Ra in film].

Described by one critic as "a comic strip version of Sun Ra", George Clinton developed his own funky cosmic Afronaut mythology in the 1970's through his work with Funkadelic and Parliament. For instance, the album "Mothership Connection" (1975) is based around the concept of aliens visiting earth to take the funk back to their own planet.


Sun Ra and Clinton's work can be read as a sort of sci-fi take on Marcus Garvey. While Garvey dreamt of Black Star Liners shipping back people from slavery across the ocean to an African utopia, they leave the planet altogether.

Space continued to be a preoccupation during the 1970s disco boom. Derided by rock critics for its lack of serious content, disco had a distinct utopian element. In disco the intensity of pleasure on the dancefloor was reimagined as an ideal for living rather than just a Saturday night release. The implicit fantasy was of a 'Boogie Wonderland' where music, dancing and sex were organising principles rather than work and the economy. "Lost in music, feel so alive, I quit my nine-to-five", as Sister Sledge put it.

In the unpromising social climate of the 1970's, this wonderland was sometimes projected into space. Earth, Wind and Fire (who recorded 'Boogie Wonderland') combined elements of Egyptology and sci-fi with albums like 'Head for the Sky' (1973) and 'All n All' (1977) with its cover pic of a rocket taking off from a pyramid. In the late 1970s there was a rash of space themed disco hits like Sheila B. Devotion's 'Spacer' and Slick's '(Everybody goes to the) Space Base' (1979), the latter imagining the space base as disco and social centre rather than military-industrial installation.

Some of these space records can be viewed as simple cash-ins on the popularity of Star Wars and similar films of this period, but was there something deeper going on? While the sale of disco records reaped big profits for the record companies, the logic of the dancefloor was potentially at odds with the society of domination. On the floor pleasure was elevated above the puritan work ethic and hierarchies of class, race, gender and sexuality were (sometimes) dissolved.

Discos (like today's dance spaces) could have been the launchpad for explorations of different worlds on earth and beyond, powered by the Dance Disco Heat energy on the floor. In this light the disco icon par excellence, the glittering mirror ball, has to be re-evaluated. Detailed archaeological investigations of the alignment of these spheres of light suspended high above the dancefloor will doubtless reveal that they were installed to equip dancers with a rudimentary astronomical knowledge to help them find their way around the universe.

Dancing Santa Faces Deportation

No One is Illegal in Vancouver are fighting against the deportation of an Iranian refugee, well known in the local community for his dancing.

"Refugee claimant Iraj Ghahremani, 70, has danced as a "Santa Claus" in North Vancouver's Iranian new year festivals since he fled Iran in 1999. But now that Canada has denied him refugee status and ordered Mr. Ghahremani deported next week, the Iranian community fears it will lose a dancer much-loved by children, and that Mr. Ghahremani will be imprisoned in a country where it is forbidden to dance in public.

"I want to bring happiness to the Persian community," Mr. Ghahremani said. "Right now dancing in Iran is forbidden, it's suppressed, they don't like that kind of happiness." Ray Negini, a friend, added: "He helped people and has made the children laugh. He is a humorous person who will not be abandoned. No one can replace him."

Mr. Ghahremani plays Haji Firouz, a boisterous traditional figure whose songs and dances herald the coming of Norouz, the Iranian new year. Clad entirely in red with a pointy hat, Iranians liken him to Santa Claus - a well-known figure in traditional celebrations who has little meaning in religion. This was his favourite character when Iran was under the regime of the shah, which crumbled under the Islamic revolution in 1979. Among the reforms demanded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomaini in the new Islamic Republic was a strict prohibition against dancing in public.

"Religion mixed with the government, and the fanatic part was that no one could dance," Mr. Negini said. "Iraj abandoned [dancing] because the government wouldn't allow him to do that." Mr. Ghahremani became an activist in the Islamic Iran, said Davood Ghavami, his lawyer and community advocate. Mr. Ghahremani was arrested for membership in the opposition party, the National Front of Iran. When he was released, he came to Canada in 1999 and claimed refugee status' (more here)

Dancing Questionnaire 5: Charles Donelan

Charles Donelan has sent in this fascinating questionnaire covering his dancing odyssey through some legendary clubs in New York and elsewhere with a cast including Madonna and the Jesus & Mary Chain. Charles writes regularly on arts and entertainment for the Santa Barbara Independent, but really should get working on that book on 1980s New York!

Can you remember your first experience of dancing?
First ever was probably to some classic rock cover band in the junior high cafeteria. Or was that the gymnasium? But really dancing—for me that started in New Haven , CT , USA around 1979. People danced to the new wave and punk music of the time, but that was where I also began to hear the first Sugarhill records, and to dance to James Brown, Fela, and Parliament/Funkadelic at parties in dining halls or at people’s apartments. This was fun but still essentially random, just college kids messing around.

By the time I moved to New York City in 1982 I had discovered the Mudd Club, Danceteria, and the Peppermint Lounge, where people were dancing to the Bush Tetras, the Feelies, James White, Konk, ESG, and other new wave bands of that era. But this was also when “The Message” broke, and a lot of other great early hiphop, and I can remember hearing it for the first time on club dance floors at places called things like “Fallout Shelter” that closed after a month and thinking this is big. At first people did the same new wave style dance to the hiphop beats, bent at the waist and knees, crossing their arms and legs rhythmically, low in front, and popping up at exciting moments, and spinning 360 or 720 degrees. When I started working as the elevator boy at Danceteria in 1983 (flyer left), the second floor dance area had a range of steady DJs who were all in Rockpool—Mark Kamins, Ed Bahlman, Walter Durkacsz, and Johnny Dynell—and they all had the signature New York sound—a mix of hiphop, disco, rock, funk, and what we now call “80s,” all filtered through these really loud, really noisy sound systems and mixed with way too much cheap phase shifting etc. All the kind of cheesy effects that you can still hear on something like Armand Van Helden’s New York a Mix Odyssey CD.

Around 1983 everyone started to go to the Roxy roller disco on Thursday nights to hear Afrika Bambataa. There was crazy break dancing going on there, with an “Everbody”-era Madge right in the middle of it [Madonna's was the last record played at the Roxy's gay club earlier this year - even if she didn't turn up personally - Neil] . Malcolm Mclaren hired young teenage doubledutch rope jumpers from Harlem to perform at 3 in the morning to premiere “Buffalo Gals.” My gf and I were in the Roxy VIP with Daryl Mac, Run, and John Lydon. If you want an idea of what the sound was like, think the loudest system ever, turned up. Each week they premiered a song—I can remember being there for the premiere of “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life.” To make the people really dance, Afrika played just the first two bars of “Hey Mickey!” for five minutes.

2.What’s the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?
Connecting with other people. There are certain things that only come out on the dancefloor, and great music takes people far out of themselves. I have met and befriended individuals through going out dancing who have changed my life, and my interest in nightlife has had an impact on my career. But the most significant things that happen while out dancing are the excitement of the moment and the intensity of the memory impressions that it leaves.

3. You. Dancing. The best of times…
Nell’s on West 14th circa 1986-90 had a great, small, dark basement dancefloor. It is perhaps best known as the place where Tupac’s New York sexual assault charges began. Nell’s had a really strict door policy, but it was still done by coolness, rather than how much money people planned to spend. The cover charge was $5, and they took it from pretty much everyone, at least for the first year. For at least the first two full years we had the run of the place on Thursdays, which was the best night. The DJ, who is still working, and is a wonderful dancer, was Belinda, and I am convinced that she was responsible for breaking Eric B. and Rakim to the right people in New York . Her signature song was “For the Love of Money,” she played a lot of hiphop, and it was the most exciting dance floor you could imagine. It often had combinations like Tupac, Kate Moss, a Haitian drugdealer, Prince, his bodyguards, the Beasties, and Linda Evangelista all dancing at the same time in a group of no more than 200. That was fun.

So was the next big place to open, which had a much harder edge to it. Mars was in the Meatpacking district and it was opened by Rudolf of Danceteria and Yuki Watanabe, his Japanese backer. This place looked out on the Hudson River through metal pilings and had a neon sign over the dance floor that said DRUGS. The records that broke there include the the late 80s Public Enemy hits, the Soul II Soul record, “Keep on Movin’,” which was incredibly influential in New York, and a whole bunch of other classic hiphop of the late 80s and early 90s.

The best of all New York clubs in the 1980s was the World. This was an abandoned Ukrainian dance hall in the lower east village that was 100 feet from the Toilet, the city’s most notorious heroin spot. The World had a super-strict, totally countercultural door policy, and hosted the U.S. debuts of such talents as the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Pogues. I think that dancing to Street Fighting Man at the Jesus and Mary Chain show at 3 am because the band still had not gone on, and being happy about it, might qualify as the best of times ever.

4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…
Afterhours at Save the Robots on Avenue B… with real vampires.

5. Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you’ve frequented?
New York City , see above, and in Southampton , New York , in the potato barns turned nightclubs of the late 1980s and early 1990s. These parties were good, with mostly pop music, but this is also where I got my earliest exposure to techno. Places I traveled to where dancing occurred include London, from about 1981 on, where I went to whatever clubs I could find in timeout; does anyone remember a place in an old theater that had a raked dancefloor? That was something. So was Leigh Bowery (pictured). I saw a very good Pogues show at the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden in 1986 I think, and I danced to Haircut 100 at the ICA on or around New Years of 1981. Then there’s Los Angeles , where I went to a vintage warehouse rave in the early 1990s with people who would not do that today. LA has a funny dance club/nightlife history, with 80s hair metal giving way to hard house somewhere around 1993, and lots of the same people somehow attending. The most recent great dance scene I have witnessed was in South Beach Miami for Winter Music Conference 2007. Miami has some of the energy of New York back in the day.

6. When and where did you last dance?
I danced on Saturday night at the Wildcat Lounge in Santa Barbara , California to hard contemporary house. It was Memorial Day weekend, a big holiday here, and I felt I saw almost everyone I know, because Santa Barbara is a small town.

7. You’re on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?
Caravan by Duke Ellington.

1983 Halloween flyer for Danceteria, New York from the excellent Danceteria blog - where there is a whole archive of flyers from this period.

Raging Ravers

Our latest policing round-up features the oldest rave prosecution we have found to date...

England: '63-year-old faces ASBO rave ban' (EDP 24, 26 May 2007)

'A 63-year-old man was made the subject of an interim anti-social behaviour order (ASBO) by Yarmouth magistrates yesterday preventing him from either organising or participating in illegal raves.The joint application against Christopher Farrow, of Hitchin, was made by North Norfolk District Council and Norfolk police.The application came in the wake of a rave that took place at Horsey Gap, owned by the National Trust, over the weekend of May 5-7 involving about 1,000 people'.

England: 'Raging Ravers trash cop car' (Sun, 14 May 2007)

'Rampaging partygoers at an illegal rave are being hunted by cops after a police car was “trashed” on an aristocrat's land. The car was attacked on land owned by Conservative peer Lord Marlesford, weeks after the 75-year-old asked Home Office ministers a parliamentary question about policy on policing raves. Around 500 revellers are thought to have gathered on a former airfield at the weekend. Police say no officers were hurt as a result of the attack on the car at Parham, Suffolk, early on Sunday'.

India: Ministry of Sound in Delhi (Times of India, 14 May 2007)

'The party had just begun to rock on Friday night when the Delhi police suddenly entered Ministry of Sound, a swank disc in South Delhi at around 8 pm and asked the owners to down the shutters by 10 pm. The owners argued with the police, saying they had all the pre-requisite licenses and papers. They kept the party going. However, after 12, the cops came again, this time armed with a challan for operating a disc after 12. They asked the partying crowd to leave the premises, went to the bar and asked the tenders to close it. The police also barricaded both the entries... Later, the Delhi Police spokesperson told us, "The action was initiated because of constant complaints from people living in the neighbouring areas. There were also violating some licensing rules"... But all this has only left the people who had come to party at MoS that night puzzled. Like Bir, who'd come with a friend. "This is ridiculous. Why are the cops here? And why are they asking us to leave?" he asked. Echoed Rahul, "This is just not done. We look forward to Friday night parties, and this is what you get.'

USA: Long Island Drug Raid (Long Island Press, 29 May 2007)

'East Quogue’s Neptune Beach Club, located on Dune Road, found itself in a drug scandal involving 15 individuals this past weekend. Southampton Town Police Street Crime Unit reports that of the fifteen arrested, six were from various towns on Long Island. At the popular nightclub, an undercover police officer bought Ecstasy twice from three different people and arrested the three on felony charges on Monday. The other twelve allegedly possessed and/or ingested Ecstasy; cocaine; Vicodin; ketamine; GHB; anabolic steroids; marijuana; Percocet; drug scales; and packaging materials in the Tiana Beach parking lot... People other than the fifteen were arrested for urinating and consuming alcohol in public as well as littering'.

Repeat after me: F*ck Queen and Country

30 years ago this week the Sex Pistols released God Save the Queen as royalists prepared to celebrate the Queen's Silver Jubilee. The anniversary has prompted some nostalgia for a period when a song could have such a power to shock. In an interesting interview, Simon Reynolds remarks "The myth of the song seems to be the truth about it. It was one of the last times, possibly the last time, that a song could send shockwaves through an entire society. It was an injection of energy and conviction that took almost a decade to dissipate. " Some of the people involved in this fine act of cultural terrorism have been backtracking ever since - Vivienne Westwood becoming a Dame of the British Empire, Steve Jones hanging out with Cliff Richard... so it is important to recall what an outrageous gesture it was, and the reaction it provoked - including arrests on the river Thames during the Pistols' Silver Jubilee boat party. Les Back suggests that 'The thing that remains disruptive about God Save the Queen is that it insisted that England was/is in a state of soporific stupor. There could be no escape beyond the nostalgia in which the past is eternally replayed in the waking somnolence of nationalism'. The virulence of the lyrics have never been surpassed in a hit record in the UK: "God save the queen, She ain't no human being, There is no future In England's dreaming... When there's no future How can there be sin, We're the flowers in the dustbin, We're the poison in the human machine, We're the future Your future" (see the video here). Subsequent anti-monarchist efforts have lacked the same impact only because the Pistols broke the taboo, in the process undermining the symbolic power of the royal brand. Still the final nail is yet to be banged in the feudal coffin, with Queen Elizabeth II 55 years on the throne next week. There's still space for some more republican efforts, so let's give an honorable mention to The Stone Roses' four line classic Elizabeth My Dear: 'Tear me apart and boil my bones, I'll not rest till she's lost her throne, My aim is true my message is clear, It's curtains for you, Elizabeth my dear'; to The Smiths' The Queen is Dead: 'Her very Lowness with a head in a sling, I'm truly sorry - but it sounds like a wonderful thing', and to The Manic Street Preachers' Repeat: 'Useless generation, Dumb flag scum, Repeat after me, Fuck queen and country". Or maybe even Shelley's England in 1819: "Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring, Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, But leech-like to their fainting country cling". Related posts: See also: Funk the Wedding 1981; We live to tread on Kings

Almost Dancing at Tate Modern

Lots of interesting music-related activity going on at Tate Modern in London as part of its Long Weekend. Throbbing Gristle were playing last night in memory of Derek Jarman, performing while showing some of his Super-8 films. There have also been showings of Andy Warhol and Maya Deren films with accompanying musical performances from the likes of Michael Nyman and Ikue Mori.

I went along yesterday afternoon to check out the Turbine Hall where French artist Mathieu Briand had created a sound installation: SYS*011. Mie>AbE/SoS\ SYS*010, also known as the Spiral. Among other things this included five decks and a vinyl-cut machine, while around the gallery a crowd of people in masks wandered around, choreographed by Prue Lang.

I was most interested in the musical performances. I managed to catch Charlie Dark (of Blacktronica and 'broken beat' fame, pictured) who did a great track built up around some dub poetry (was it from Linton Kwesi Johnson's Five Nights of Bleeding?). The Bug, with Spaceape, dropped a bit of The Specials while Radio Active Man (Keith Tenniswood of Two Lone Swordsmen) played a set of techno and breaks. In the cavernous Turbine Hall it all sounded like a warehouse party, the music setting of various vibrations around the space. All that was missing were people really dancing. Lots of people, sitting and standing, were nodding heads, tapping feet, swaying around and some people (me included) were dancing a bit but in a hesitant, restrained kind of way. It was if the conventions of the gallery and maybe time of day were holding people back, but it felt like there was a tension waiting to snap, as if a few people jumping on a podium and really letting go would trigger an explosion of movement. But I wasn't going to put myself out there as the detonator!

Dancing Questionnaire 4: Sonic Truth

Our latest dancing questionnaire comes courtesy of Muz from Sonic Truth and Whorecull.

Can you remember your first experience of dancing?
Aside from school-era disco and slow dances and the occasional breakdancing burn (we had our own ‘crew’ but were really too young to be serious), the first moment to stay in the memory is of someone’s birthday party in a village hall nr Farnham, Surrey, where I went to school. It was standard fare until the two Inner City tracks of the time – Big Fun and Good Life – were aired and enjoyed so much that they were, er, rewound several times. All the rave-like expressive hand and arm motions were employed.

What’s the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?
Nothing really stands out other than the usual catalogue of uncanny-then but sketchy-now moments. I’ve always been someone to get 'locked into' the dance, riding the ebb and flow, and no doubt critiquing the dj’s performance in my head, a complement to the whoops and come-ons around me. I’m also someone who instinctively migrates to the back of the dance rather than the front.

What’s the best place you’ve ever danced in?
Probably the Glastonbury car park at dawn with my mates in 2000. After three heavy nights with my mates, set and setting combined and Squarepusher never sounded more appropriate.

You. Dancing. The best of times…
Never really found a parallel to the hardcore scene for a year and a half from 1991-92. Not every event can be characterised by brilliant highs, but the expectation building up to events and the buzz at them are hard to recapture, not least because I would never have that youthful zeal again. In fact, I was known to dance so enthusiastically during these times that one or two associates were known to take the piss out of my full-cycle motions!

Ironically, the best collective moment through dancing was not music-related as such, but came when I was celebrating my team City get promoted in 2000. The outside lobby of the central Manchester hotel the players were at was a sea of blues, dancing and chanting to a City mantra until it was genuinely ‘tribal’ in nature, disconnected from place or time. Sean ‘Feed the’ Goater came and saw us and it was all good thereafter. Like carnival but more extreme.

You. Dancing. The worst of times…Any time where circumstances and habits compel you to drink too much before the main club action, or when someone says something at the wrong time, exploding paranoia and putting me right off the rhythm. It’s happened a few times.

Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you’ve frequented?
Though I’d been listening to rave pretty much since it went overground, the first serious dancing was via the aforementioned hardcore rave scene. During this time, there would also be the occasional mosh-out to whatever noise-rock we liked that week. One of my mates once ended up in first aid due to getting caught up in the moshpit at a Ride gig at the Kentish Town T&C; I ended up in Dorset.

The rave places included sanitised home counties venues like the Park Prewett Mental Hospital in Basingstoke, Farnborough Recreation Centre, Reading Rivermead Centre, as well as in lots of fields round Surrey or Hampshire and London venues such as Labryinth, the Lazerdrome in Peckham and the Tasco Warehouse in Plumstead. Nights included Evolution, Yikes!, Zen, Desire, Innersense and loads more cheesy-sounding names.

From late 1992 I went to Leeds university, and there was a self-imposed hiatus from the harder side of dance music where narcotics might be required. It was broken only by acid jazz/latin/funk nights, where I learned to express myself in different ways with alcohol as an accompaniment, or the occasional house/techno shindig in one of the city’s “clubs of the year” (Vague, @ the Warehouse, Back to Basics/Up Yer Ronson at the Music Factory, the Orbit in Morley).

On return from Leeds, there was another lull as Britpop dominated before I moved to London in late 1996, where eventually there were enough connections to start going out dancing again, mainly to ‘deep’ house (Rob Mello, Kenny Hawkes and co), jungle (in a scene increasingly ruled by techsteppers like Ed Rush) and electro, with the occasional hip-hop gig. During these times up to the commitment of raising a family last year, I probably got closest to where my mind needed to be for continued dancing, rather than hanging around jerking on the periphery. The house scene around London was the mainstay, at nights like Wednesday’s Space @ Bar Rhumba and Derrick Carter’s bimonthlies at the End, with the occasional label-related do in warehouses around Hackney. That contributed a lot to the more digital/synthy side of house now. Also, all my flatshares had decks as the main entertainment focus so there could be long nights dancing at home.

When and where did you last dance?
At the party after the screening of the McClintock Factor.

You’re on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?
Too many to mention – so I’ll pick a few faves from some of the highlighted genres. Derrick May/It is What it Is; Joey Beltram/Energy Flash; Nookie/Love Is; DJ Krust/Warhead; Gang Starr/Dwyck; Technasia/Technasia; Isolee – Beau Mot Plage/, etc, etc.

Desire flyer reproduced from the amazing collection at Hardcore U Know the Score

New Police Powers to Close Clubs?

From today's Guardian, a parting gift from Tony Blair:

'Civil liberties and homelessness campaigners last night sharply criticised plans to give the police powers to "shut and seal" all premises, including flats, pubs and clubs, generating yobbish behaviour. The home secretary, John Reid, announced at the Police Federation conference in Blackpool yesterday that the powers would form part of a criminal justice bill to be introduced in the next few weeks, before Tony Blair leaves Downing Street.... He said he wanted to extend police powers - rules allowing the temporary closure of crack houses, which have been used more than 500 times since their introduction in 2004 - to "all premises generating yobbish behaviour".

The powers of police to close premises where Class A drugs (not just Crack) are alleged to be used, produced or sold, were included in the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003. The precedent set by this act is that the police do not actually have to prove through convicting somebody of a drug offence that the premises are being used in the way alleged. The Act specifically states: 'It is immaterial whether any person has been convicted of an offence relating to the use, production or supply of a controlled drug'. A similar low burden of proof for 'yobbish behaviour' could certainly be used by hostile police to close squats or clubs without having to actually to go through the trouble of convicting anybody of any offence.

Comanche Sun Dance

In desparate times, millennarian movements have arisen in which people hoped to be liberated from their oppression by a sudden magical transformation, perhaps sparked by the return of the ancestors or divine intervention. In many of these movements communal dancing and festivities have played a key role, what Bryan Wilson in his study Magic and the Millennium called 'efforts to dance into being the new dispensation' - a party to bring on the end of the world, or at least turn it upside down. One such episode arose on the South Plains of the United States in the 1870s:

'the Comanches... way of life was under severe threat in the 1870s, when the buffalo herds were fast diminishing, when Ishatai ('Coyote Droppings'), a young warrior medicine-man, who had 'proved' his own immunity to bullets and had 'raised the dead", arose in 1873. The Comanches had resisted confinement in the reserva­tion at Fort Sill...

Ishatai claimed to have communed with the Great Spirit, and he successfully predicted the appearance of a comet, to be followed by a long summer drought. He succeeded in gathering all the Comanches together—a feat which the great chiefs had never been able to do in the past—to perform the Sun Dance, in which all but one band, the Swift Stingers, joined. This was a wholly new venture for the Comanches, although they had watched the Kiowa sun dances and those of the Cheyenne for many years. A buffalo herd was captured, and a buffalo was killed, stuffed, and mounted on a pole. Mud-men clowns (imitated from clowns seen among the Pueblos) provided 'a light hearted gesture in an act of desperation—the inauguration of the Sun Dance for the earthly salvation of the Comanche way of life'.

A mock battle was fought, and the people danced in bands for five days before the sun dancers themselves danced, drummed, and sang for three further days, doing without food and water for the duration of the dance. Ishatai had promised that he would share his immunity with others, and that they should drive the whites from the land and restore the old way of life. But in the action they mounted against a post at Adobe Wells, soon afterwards, nine Comanches were killed. Ishatai lost his power, and the Comanches, their spirit broken, entered the reservation in 1875.

Source: Bryan Wilson, Magic and the Millennium (London: Heinemann, 1973). Picture is of a Sun Dance amongst the Ponca people

Indie Pop

Back once again last week to How Does it Feel? in Brixton, the guest DJ this time Amelia Fletcher, indie pop stalwart of Talulah Gosh in the 1980s and subsequently of Heavenly, Marine Research and lately Tender Trap.

Amelia played a set consisting entirely of female-fronted sounds from the Shangri-Las to Stereolab via Le Tigre and Bis. As on previous visits, I was full of wonder that there's a dancefloor in South London full of people of various ages dancing to this stuff. In fact there's a little scene of places like this, including Spiral Scratch in London. There are also plenty of new indie pop bands, not all of them from Scandinavia!

I enjoyed the Indie Pop explosion in the mid-1980s, associated forever with the free C86 cassette compilation given away with NME but actually much more interesting than that. I was in recovery from a period of black-clad anarcho-punkdom so it was great to be able to go to places like the Camden Falcon in a paisley shirt and sate my taste for melody with the likes of The Razorcuts, Jasmine Minks and Revolving Paint Dream. There was anyway a punky aspect to the whole scene, not so much in the music but in the DIY attitude. In the sleeve notes to the Rough Trade Shop's excellent indiepop 1 compilation, Matt Haynes (then of Sarah Records, now editor of Smoke magazine) recalls: 'everywhere you looked... people were doing things: writing letters, editing fanzines, inventing bands, compiling cassettes, setting-up record labels, plotting revolutions'.

There was also a wilful musical amateurishness which Talulah Gosh embodied, not to mention a 'twee' critique of gender that created animosity from rock boys everywhere. Haynes again: 'It's easy to forget how revolutionary this was - women being part of the motor rather than just the decoration on the bonnet. Or to forget how much genuine hatred and loathing Talulah Gosh inspired. And how much fun it was watching people trip up in their unconscious equating of femininity with inconsequentiality'.

What do they know of music who only music know?

Democracy and Hip Hop is an interesting project, with informed critical thinking of hip hop culture starting from the position that 'Hip-hop is an inherently democratic organism. Anyone, regardless of race, age, gender, location, or economic status is able to participate within it and to offer it new dimension. This is evidenced by the fact that hip-hop is not only a national, but a worldwide phenomenon and has literally left no country, race, or social group untouched.In addition to hip-hop’s global existence, it is also breaking down traditional categories of identity, whether of race or nationality, and of what people can become".

D&HH avows its key influence to be CLR James (1901-1989, pictured), the Trinidad-born radical intellectual. James developed an open-ended Marxism based on the principle of self-activity rather than top-down party politics. His interest in popular culture is best shown in his celebrated book on cricket, Beyond a Boundary. While he wrote little specifically about music and dancing, his insights are certainly relevant here. His famous quote 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?' could equally apply to music. After a period in the States, James settled in his later years in Brixton, where he was a big influence on the Race Today Collective - including dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.

Dancing: the test of anti-racist politics

In a 1949 article, Road Ahead in Negro Struggle (in this period 'Negro' tended to be used by radicals, 'black' was seen as being a racist term), James quoted approvingly from a 1930s steel union organiser's report: “... held a couple of bingo games and a dance all of which Negroes attended in force with their ladies. At the dance, held in the lower section of the city near the Negro district, there were no restrictions. Dancing was mixed, racially and sexually, Whites with Negro partners. I danced with a Negro girl myself. Negroes enjoyed themselves immensely and there were no kicks from the whites. This lodge will soon have a picnic which will also be mixed.”


From a similar political background, Charles Denby wrote of his experiences in the car factories of Detroit before the second world war: 'The union was giving a social at the Eastwood Gardens Ballroom... One of the Negro women asked me if it was a dance where the Negroes would dance on one side and the whites on the other. The Negro women said they had heard white women saying that they'd be dancing separate from the Negroes... The union called a special meeting and about one hundred workers attended. Ray [the union organizer] spoke: "If whites and Negroes want to dance together at the social they will dance. And my wife will dance with whomever she chooses. Those who don't want to see this don't have to come." I went to the social and he introduced me to his wife and said if we wanted to dance to go ahead. We danced one or two dances. Some mixed couples were dancing but the majority of whites danced to themselves' (Denby, Indignant Heart: A Black Worker's Journal, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1979).

Denby later left the US Socialist Workers Party because they tolerated members who opposed black members going out with white women, and again noted that that at their social dances 'The whites crowded around on one side of the hall and talked among themselves'. For black radicals like James and Denby, dancing was a key test of how serious a movement was in confronting inequality. Writing in a period when black and white workers (men and women) were moving North from the segregated Southern states to work alongside each other in factories, both saw the potential for new forms of non-racist organisation and sociability. Both too were aware that organisations that encouraged black people to join but put up barriers on the dancefloor were not to be trusted.

Acoustic Tuning

An excellent line up at the Festival Hall on London's South Bank last Monday, with Bert Jansch, human beatbox Schlomo, Sonic Boom (who covered Kraftwerk's Hall of Mirrors) and Saint Etienne (pictured). Sarah Cracknell of the latter also sang a jazz arrangement of St E's Side Streets with the Tom Cawley Trio, and there was a 'Saint Etienne Quartet' folk version of the normally electronic Like a Motorway. I missed Billy Childish unfortunately.

The premise of the event was 'Acoustic Tuning', with the Festival Hall (built in 1951) having undergone an extensive refurbishment, partly to improve its sound qualities. The musical diversity of the programme was designed to 'fine tune the acoustic settings of the auditorium' and the audeince was asked to complete a questionnaire with prompts like 'Do you hear the sounds of each instrument clearly and without colouration or distortion?' For once the invisible musical instrument - the space in which music is performed - was foregrounded. And yes, it did all sound great.

The hall opens properly next month, with a film launch on 29th June of This is Tomorrow, tracing the history of the venue with Saint Etienne performing the soundtrack live.

Vauxhall, Vietnam and other Parties

Last weekend saw hundreds of police on the dancefloor from Vauxhall to Vietnam…

1000+ arrests at Vietnam nightclub

More than 500 police raided Ha Noi’s New Century nightclub in the wee hours of Saturday morning, seizing a large amount of illegal narcotics, from amphetamines to heroin, and detaining around 1,160 people for drug testing. Police also caught couples having sex on the premises and found used condoms. Of the first 600 persons tested for drugs, 15 per cent were positive. By Saturday afternoon, more than 1,100 had been released while others remained in custody for further investigation, including New Century’s manager, Nguyen Dai Duong, and four women accused of drug-related offences. New Century, one of the most well-known nightclubs and discos in the northern region, has been in business for eight years. (Vietnam News , 2nd May 2007)

South London Gay club closed

"The Fire gay nightclub has been temporarily closed following a raid by Lambeth police in the early hours of Saturday morning. Witnesses claim hundreds of police were involved in the raid. Nine people were arrested in the raid that followed a three month long intelligence led operation into Class A drugs- codenamed Pivot. Officers armed with a search warrant raided the club in Vauxhall at 2:15 am on Saturday. Suspects are being held in a central London police station. The club which hosts A:M (taking place during the raid), Orange, Juicy and Rudeboyz has been temporarily shut down under the Misuse of Drugs Act. Supersluth wrote on DiscoDamaged (a clubbing blog), "The lights came on at 2am. We were then lined in in groups of 3 in the car park - had our pictures taken in the glory of spot lights jacked up on police vans, sniffer dogs have a good nose around our legs and escorted out onto the road where there were literally hundreds of police lining the closed off roads and railway bridge." (Pink News, 28th April 2007, Film footage here).

Bedfordshire party shut down

As many as 200 ravers found their illegal party short-lived in Caddington when police told them to go home. The revellers had set up a sound system at the Chaul End reservoir, Caddington, on Friday night but officers were soon on the site to kick them off after a neighbour's complaint. Police issued a section 63 notice under the Criminal Justice and Public Order act threatening to remove the expensive music equipment before the crowd dispersed (Luton Today, 2nd May 2007)

Squat party at Streatham Megabowl

Squatters used a derelict bowling alley to host an illegal rave last Saturday night. They entered the boarded up Megabowl building in Streatham Hill, south London, through a side door and revellers were charged £5 each to go in. Police were called out in the early hours of Sunday morning after complaints from residents. A spokesman said the squatters would be taken to court and should be evicted from the premises by the end of the week. The two-storey building, which closed in August, is earmarked for part of a new shopping mall and housing development stretching (This is Hertfordshire, 28 April 2007).

OK so it gets a bit tedious simply cataloguing police raids on clubs and parties across the world, but we’ll stick with it because it is interesting to identify patterns and differences, and the various reasons for turning off the music and turning on the sirens. Analysis to follow (one day...)

Islamism vs. Dance

Earlier this week, five people were found guilty of plotting bomb attacks in the London area. One of the convicted had apparently been heard to talk of the Ministry of Sound as a potential target, saying: "No one can turn around and say, 'Oh, they were innocent', those slags dancing around. Do you understand what I mean?".

No evidence was presented that there was a definite plan to attack the South London club - the comment might have expressed a fantasy - but it does indicate a misogyny and hostility to dancing that is common in radical Islamism (but by no means in Muslim cultures more generally). In this it shares with other fundamentalist forms of religion, including Christian variants, a profound hatred of the female body in pleasurable motion.

For instance Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s, proposed in relation to women: "a campaign against ostentation in dress and loose behavior... private meetings between men and women, unless within the permitted degrees of relationship, to be counted as a crime for which both will be censured ... the closure of morally undesirable ballrooms and dance-halls, and the prohibition of dancing and other such pastimes...".

Beyoncé Knowles, freedom fighter notes how this conflict between Islamism and dance is playing out across the world, quoting for instance the case of Indonesia where 'a 24-year-old singer from East Java named Inul Daratista (pictured) unleashed a sexual revolution simply by rotating her lower body onstage in such a way as to cause millions of men to worship her and millions of women to emulate her. Inul's dance style, which she calls "drilling," is indistinguishable from a move that has been ubiquitous in hip-hop clubs and videos for years, and which Beyoncé recently brought to the mainstream, called "booty popping." Islamic authorities in several Indonesian provinces have banned the dance, Muslim clerics have called for a national boycott of Inul's performances and pray for rain to keep fans away from her shows'.

May Day Dancing in the Streets

A fairly low key May Day in London yesterday. At Canary Wharf (big business centre) about 100 people danced to a samba band, having previously entered the area disguised in office suits (an event initiated by Space Hijackers). They ended up partying on the Thames beach. In South London, there was dancing round a maypole in Kennington Park to the sounds of Soca, Gogol Bordello (a CD not the band) and a man with a mandolin. A banner read 'Workers of the World Relax'. Elsewhere in the UK there was a street party with sound system in Glasgow.

Globally, things were heavier in some parts of the world. In Los Angeles, police used tear gas to disperse a crowd partying in MacArthur Park at the end of a May Day migrants' rights rally.

Matthew Stone

Now on at UNION (London SE1) is 'the first solo exhibition of London based artist Matthew Stone. Emerging from a strongly collaborative South London squat-scene of young artists, actors, writers, musicians, moviemakers and designers, Stone produces chiaroscuro laden photography, dramatically portraying friends and night-time players stripped of context-locating clothing, draped in cheap fabric swatches, and locked in self-absorbed states of romanticised visionary ecstasy'.

At his Optimism as Cultural Rebellion blog, Matthew Stone also documents the artier end of the current London squat party scene (picture is from this blog, of a Squallyoaks party).

As discussed in my previous Nu Rave post, this vaguely art squat linked scene is a real phenomenon. Interestingly it seems to have developed largely outside of the longer running London anarcho-squat/free party scene, which has been going in one form or another since the 1970s -with some continuity in people between 80s anarcho punk and 90s acid techno parties, as well as links through Advisory Service for Squatters with the previous era of 1970s squatters.

Limbo Gateway

"The limbo dance is a well-known feature in the Carnival life of the West Indies today... The limbo dancer moves under a bar which is gradually lowered until a mere slit of space, it seems, remains through which with spread-eagled limbs he passes like a spider.

Limbo was born, it is said, on the slave ships of the Middle Passage. There was so little space that the slaves contorted themselves into human spiders. Limbo, therefore, as Edward Brathwaite, the distinguished Barbadian-born poet, has pointed out, is related to anancy or spider fables. If I may now quote from Islands, the last book in his trilogy:

'drum stick knock / and the darkness is over me /knees spread wide / and the water is hiding me / limbo / limbo like me'

Limbo then reflects a certain kind of gateway or threshold to a new world and the dislocation of a chain of miles... I recall performances I witnessed as a boy in Georgetown, British Guiana, in the early 1930s. Some of the performers danced on high stilts like elongated limbs while others performed spread-eagled on the ground. In this way limbo spider and stilted pole of the gods were related to the drums like grassroots and branches of lightning to the sound of thunder"

From 'History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas' by Wilson Harris (1970)

Police party raid round up

Time for another round up of international police party action - did you know that in some parts of the USA teenagers can be arrested for loitering in a place where alcohol is served even if they're not drinking? Read on:

USA

'After the arrest of more than 100 underage customers of a downtown Hartford nightclub Thursday, many parents were puzzled about why youths were arrested even if they weren't drinking. The club, Temptation on Asylum, advertises an 18-and-over night on Thursdays, when underage patrons can dance on the first floor, where no alcohol is supposed to be served. But in a sting operation Thursday night, Hartford police raided the club, found alcohol where it wasn't supposed to be and arrested 117 people - including 113 youths aged 17-20. On the floor where underage customers were permitted, police said they found a fully stocked bar, tapped kegs from which pitchers of beer were being sold for $2 each and full pitchers throughout the area. Police arrested everyone who was underage, loaded them into police vans and drove them to the department's booking facility, which Sgt. Dave Dufault said was "stacked beyond capacity."

Police could not say Friday how many of the minors arrested actually were drinking. Most were arrested on charges of loitering where alcohol is sold. Some of the youths on Friday maintained they had not been drinking and remained confused about what they had done wrong. It is against the law for anyone under 21 to loiter in an establishment with a permit to sell alcohol'.

Hartford Courant, 24 March 2007

Wales

'Five people have been arrested after police in riot gear broke up a three day illegal rave in an ancient woodland in Monmouthshire. Gwent Police drafted in extra help to disperse the estimated 3,000 people and around 1,000 vehicles at the illegal gathering in Wentwood Forest. Officers seized 10 large trucks containing powerful sound equipment. Upwards of 250 police officers were involved in the operation and according to Gwent Police it was the biggest illegal rave in the force's area. Officers were drafted in from Avon and Somerset, Gloucestershire, West Mercia and South Wales Police to help'.

BBC News, 9 April 2007

Zimbabwe

'A police crackdown in Zimbabwe moved into well-to-do residential suburbs in the nation's capital where scores of teenagers were detained in a raid on a popular disco, witnesses said on Sunday. Some of the teenagers - both blacks and whites - were hit with riot batons and slapped by paramilitary police who said they were clamping down on alleged underage drinking, witnesses said. Others were not carrying identity cards required under security laws. Several of the youths were treated for shock after at least 100 were taken in two police buses to the feared downtown central police station from the "Glow" nightclub in Harare's affluent Borrowdale district in the early hours of Saturday. The raid came after police shut down bars and beer halls in impoverished townships in an undeclared curfew during a surge in political tension since police violently stopped an opposition-led prayer meeting in western Harare on March 11'.

News24, 1 April 2007

Fiji

'Police may now seek the assistance of the military to raid those nightclubs in the Central Division, who are opening after 1am. Assistant Commissioner of Police Operations SSP Jahir Khan said that after the military coup last year all the nightclub owners were closing the nightclubs on time [but] they are breaking the law again over the past weekends. ACP Khan also warned the nightclub owners that they will request the Commissioner Central not to renew the license of those nightclub owners who will be caught in the illegal act'.

Fiji Village new, 31 March 2007

Hampstead Heath Rave 1955

Steve Fletcher has sent this great photo of himself and then girlfriend at a jazz 'rave' on Hampstead Heath in 1955.

According to Steve, The Ken Colyer Band played at this event. Ken Colyer was a key figure in the 'New Orleans' infuenced English jazz scene in the 1950s, with regular all nighters at his club at Studio 51 in Great Newport Street, London WC1. The Ken Colyer Club also provided a platform for the emerging British R'n'B scene in the early 1960s, with The Rolling Stones playing there regularly.

The 1950s trad and revivalist jazz scenes interest me as a largely unwritten chapter in the history of English youth cultures. Most people assume that it all started with rock'n'roll, but as discussed elsewhere on this site jazz raves were being held from the early 50s.

There is something very timeless about this photo - with his stripy top and glasses Steve could have been a member of Orange Juice in the early 1980s or maybe The Long Blondes today.

More posts on 1950s jazz raves here.

Haunted Folk

The Montague Arms in New Cross on a Friday, a night jointly presented by White Noise (linked to Battered Ornaments records) and Spinning Jenny. On the stage, Pete Hedley of Beneath Smoke and Fire is singing accompanying himself on a fiddle. The sound is not so much Seth Lakeman, but something more spectral. There are echoes and noises off, bursts of electronic beats underpinning the haunting melodies.

Folk music has always been concerned with ghosts and spookiness, and not just in the form of supernatural ballads like Tamlin or the Elfin Knight. Since Cecil Sharp began collecting songs in the early 20th century and defining a specific ‘folk music’ in opposition to other popular musics, folk revivals have invoked the spirits of gypsies, agricultural workers and miners against the evils of modernity or capitalism, depending on political perspective.

The difference between the various current folkisms (twisted, neo, acid, psychedelic, folktronica etc) and the earlier ‘traditional folk’ revivals is that the latter were only unconsciously hauntological. The ideology of authenticity disguised the fact the old songs were not simply a direct testimony from the past but were being reframed and understood according to contemporary needs. For instance the need to believe in an unbroken oral transmission of song led to a downplaying of the historic role of literacy and printed sources such as ‘broadside ballads’ (something well documented by more thoughtful revivalists such as A.L. Lloyd). Like all ghosts, ‘folk songs’ are neither of the past or the present but partake of both – central to the meaning of Hauntology as coined by Derrida, and more lately applied to music by Simon Reynolds, K-Punk and Bethan Cole.

The music promoted at clubs like White Noise might occupy a similar sonic territory to traditional folk music (give or take electronic treatments) but the aesthetic is less concerned with authenticity than with the past as a slightly spooky storehouse of half remembered melodies and uncanny phrases.

Jane Weaver's softly sung moments of beauty on the same night remind us of another thread of current acoustic musics. There is a fey element (cf Joanna Newsom) but this is not fey in the sense of vaguely ‘girly’ and lacking in presence. This is fey in its original meaning, as in like the fairies, but not fairies in their diminutive Victorian chocolate box version. In older fairy tales, the Good People might have been beautiful and alluring, but were also powerful and not to be messed with. Tales like the Legend of Knockgrafton, in which a man who responds correctly to the enchanting songs of the fairies is rewarded by being cured of his disability, while another who responds rudely has his troubles doubled. Similarly behind some of the fey melodies of folk old and new lie sentiments of passion, jealousy, murder and bewitching. This is feycore.

With its stuffed animal heads, bones and maritime bric a brac, the Montague Arms is the perfect setting for a club like this (more Battered Ornaments than you can shake a stick at). Over the past few years, many an art punk hopeful has played in this pub (and indeed art punk originals The Gang of Four played their first gig in 20 years here). That a folk-tinged club can draw a respectable crowd here is perhaps a healthy sign of diversification away from a more or less exclusive musical palate of boys and guitars.

Next White Noise is on April 27th, 'a monthly South London gathering with Doug Shipton (Finders Keepers/Delay 68/Battered Ornaments) and Luke Insect (The Laughing Windows) pulling strings left, righ tand centre to deliver some of the best in off-kilter independent music as well as a host of firebrand guest DJs spinning a mixed bag of soft psych, acidik folk, radiophonic anomalies and fuzz-ridden-break-heavy psychedelic platters of yesteryear on the last Friday of every month'.

Stone Age Dancefloors?

Last week I visited Nine Ladies Stone Circle on Stanton Moor in Derbyshire (pictured). This is one of many such sites in England to which is attached the legend that the stones are dancers, petrified ‘by a divine punishment because they have broken the rules of Sunday observance’ by dancing on the Sabbath. Similar stories have been told of the Merry Maidens and the Nine Stones in Cornwall, among other places.

These stories postdate the building of these monuments by thousands of years, and are a testimony to the fact that for the Church authorities dancing ‘was suspect because it encouraged sexual attraction, and became yet more wicked if it diverted people from their religious duties’ (Westwood and Simpson).

Nevertheless the notion that ‘standing stones are petrified motion, frozen music, arrested dancers’ (Stewart) may have some validity outside of later Christian folklore. It has been noted that stories may have arisen because ‘throughout the Medieval period people danced in a ring, so the visual analogy with a stone circle was striking’ (Westwood and Simpson), but ring dancing is a basic dance form that goes back much further. It is certainly possible that the creators of some stone circles were consciously seeking to represent dancers, perhaps to create a kind of permanent dance to reflect cosmic cycles of movement: ‘many such sites are aligned to stellar patterns and sightings, thus the dance of the stones reflects upon a geometric ground plan the dance of the stars’ (Stewart).

The circles may also have been specifically created as places for music and dance, as well as other purposes. There is some evidence from the emerging science of ‘acoustic archaeology’ of ‘resonance and echo effects in caves and megalithic monuments’ and that these may have been deliberately used or even designed by the people who made them: ‘in the light of the long prehistory of human interaction with sound, it becomes unreasonably conservative to doubt that there would be important acoustic aspects to megalithic monuments, or that the dramatic resonance of caves would have been ignored by Stone Age people’ (Deveraux)

It is generally presumed that stone circles would have been used for magico-ritual purposes, but this does not necessarily just mean solemn processions of druid-like priests. It is just as likely that all kinds of community seasonal festivities took place in such spaces, with the music and dancing associated with such rites in almost all known human cultures. So circles like Nine Ladies may be our oldest surviving dancefloors.

Sources:

Paul Deveraux (2001), Stone Age Soundtracks: the Acoustic Archaeology of Ancient Sites

R.J. Stewart (1990), Music, Power, Harmony: a workbook of music and inner forces.

Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson (2005), The Lore of the Land: a guide to England’s Legends.

Bruno Social Centre Evicted in Trento

There have protests, street blockades and barricades in the Italian city of Trento following the eviction by riot police of the Bruno Social Centre on March 21st 2007.

A demonstration has been called in Trento on April 21st in defence of occupied social centres. The call states: '"We believe that social spaces are not only made by physical walls, but they are also places in where the growth of political participation is formed, opportunities for alternative lifestyles and places of innovation and the construction of new social relations. Everywhere Social Centres represent the prototypes of the 'Other City', the city of welcome and inclusion, the city of rights, dignity and new citizenship... A Social Centre represents the melting pot of struggles and dreams, the forge of radicalism and new ways of fighting, a machine that is self-managing and self-producing. We want the 21st of April to be an important day of mobilization and fighting to affirm with great determination the movements’ autonomy, represented for us by the bear “Bruno” that travels free throughout the Italian and the European territory, independently managing its time, its life and its dreams".

A friend who visited the centre reports that as well as hosting various political initiatives, the space was widely used for parties, with drum and bass being very popular (a recent programme also shows northern soul, disco, rare groove and dancehall DJs). I was particularly intrigued by his report of a night featuring Gli Orsi delle Alpi (Bears of the Alps), an anti-fascist scooter club playing northern soul and related sounds.

Montreal Metro Party

Party on the Montreal Metro last week (30 March)arranged by Newmindpace (see:
http://newmindspace.com/metroparty.php).

Looks interesting, though as somebody commented on YouTube 'That was a great party, but there were as many people documenting it as there were partiers!'

Dancing Flash Mob

From the London Evening Standard, 5 April 2007:

More than 4,000 clubbers danced through the rush hour at Victoria station in Britain's biggest flash mob stunt. Revellers responded to e-bulletins urging them to "dance like you've never danced before" at 6.53pm.

There were knowing looks and giggles among the casually dressed crowd that gathered from 6.30pm, wearing earphones. A deafening 10-second countdown startled station staff and commuters before the concourse erupted in whoops and cheers. MP3 players and iPods emerged and the crowd danced wildly to their soundtracks in silence - for two hours.

University of London student Lucy Dent, 20, was among the flash mobbers. She said: "It was my first flash mob and I'm hooked. I've been dancing non-stop since we began. I didn't even notice the commuters. When you get into the dancing you're oblivious to them and forget you're at a railway station."

Chris Gale, 39, brought his daughter Sophia, three, and son Jacob, six. Mr Gale, a property entrepreneur from Bromley, said: "The children were a bit bewildered at first but then had fantastic fun. Some of the commuters are only interested in their trains and had to weave round us to the platforms. But most of them stood and stared, finding it hugely entertaining - and some even joined in. I saw the straightestlooking guy in a suit with his briefcase doing the freakiest dance moves."

Last night's flash mob ended when four vanloads of police dispersed the dancers. The event was staged by clubbing website mobileclubbing. Invitation emails and texts went out a week in advance. One commuter failed to see the funny side: "I was trying to get my train home but the whole concourse was filled with students dancing and I couldn't get through. The last thing I wanted after a hard day at work was to miss my train because of the idiots."

Flash mobs, groups of people brought together via the internet who perform a bizarre act together before disappearing, took off in America in 2003.

Photo of dancers in Victoria Station from http://www.myspace.com/mobileclubbing

Reclaim the Future in London

A Reclaim the Future event went ahead in a squatted building in North London's Holloway Road last weekend, with various radical workshops from No Borders and others in the daytime and a party with sound systems later on.

However, several people were arrested as riot police sealed off the road and prevented people (including some of the bands due to play) from getting into the venue -even though hundreds were already partying inside.

Further reports at Wombles and Indymedia

Sound Systems Ban at Luton Carnival?

From The Luton News, 27 March 2007:

'Police-run carnival' anger

Bedfordshire police appear to be digging in their heels over a ban on urban sound stages at Luton carnival. The force remains committed to keeping the dedicated music sites out of the May event for safety reasons. But carnival bosses say the police are simply dictating how the town celebrates its biggest day on the calendar.

Luton Carnival Arts Development Trust's Paul Anderson said: "They basically, flatly turned it down and we are still wondering why they are being opposed to it when the sound sites didn't have any incidents last year. We are starting to see a police-run carnival and that's not what we want."

A meeting on Thursday, between police, the carnival trust, the Afro Caribbean Cultural Development Forum and the Luton Sound Systems Forum, was the latest attempt by Luton Borough Council to find a solution suitable to all. As first reported in the Luton News, the urban and reggae sound systems, which attract thousands of people from across the UK, are set to be removed from the event at the insistence of the police. Supt Andy Martin, at Luton Police Station, said an objection raised by the police against four of eight music sites was based on previous experience of the carnival and was purely on the grounds of public safety.

Photo: Luton Carnival 2006

Death of Roller Disco

Following the closure of the Roxy this month, New York City's last remaining roller disco is due to close in April 2007. A news report this weekend stated: 'Roller skaters are hoping the wheels at the city's only remaining roller rink won't screech to a halt. At a demonstration in Crown Heights Saturday, people came out to support the Empire Roller Skating Center, which has been sold and is slated to close its doors at the end of April. After nearly 70 years of fun on wheels, the building is scheduled to become a storage facility'.

In 'Night Dancin'' (1980), a guide to the New York disco scene, Via Miezitis described the Empire in its heyday: 'Rainbows, clouds and blue skies cover the walls. Neon criss-crosses and circles mirror balls hung from high gymnasium-like ceil­ings and transform them into phosphorescent planets in outer space. More rainbow-colored neon outlines a large, square railed-off skating area contained within the main rink; the neon is re­flected on the ceiling and looks like a meteor or laser beams.

Over 1000 skaters cover thousands of square feet of roller rink. Human satellites, they orbit defy­ing gravity, dancing and speeding effortlessly through space. Some re­semble glider planes that float in the air; still others appear as precision per­formance jets as they whirl, dip, roll, fall and suddenly cut across the paths of other "planes." The Empire Roller Disco attracts the best roller disco skaters in the world, who perform their practiced and improvised disco routines regularly to disco beats spun by a regular disc jockey. The dee jay helps lead the skaters through the vari­ous peaks and dips of the speeding and furious en­ergy high that is roller disco at its best'.

Quotes and images from 'Night Dancin'', text by Vita Miezitis, photographs by Bill Bernstein (New York: 1980). There is a petition against the closure of The Empire here.

Dancing Times 1943

One of my favourite pastimes is browsing through books and vinyl in car boot sales, jumble sales and charity shops, so I was delighted today to come across a stack of vintage dance magazines in Haynes Lane Market in Crystal Palace, South London (still plenty left there in the book stall there if that's your thing too).

The English magazine 'The Dancing Times' was 'a review of dancing in its many phases' covering ballet, ballroom and other styles. The March 1943 issue (cover here) included various reviews and an article on dance films with the headline 'colour films have come to stay'.

The adverts included ones for The Astoria and the Hammersmith Palais de Danse in London, two venues which have survived down to the present but which are both now under threat of closure.

Both of these venues in 1943 (during the height of World War Two) offered dances every day at 3 pm as well as in the evening. This was a time of more or less full employment so who was dancing at this time of day - shiftworkers? I am fascinated by this daytime dancing culture, which seems to have continued down to the 1970s (Robert Elms mentions going to a lunchtime disco club, and the mod daytime scene in the 1960s was famously described as The Noonday Underground by Tom Wolfe). Who has time to go out clubbing at lunchtime now if they're working, and even if they did where would they go? This is surely due a revival!

Adverts from The Dancing Times, March 1943:

Battle at the Roxy 1984

From the film Beat Street (1984), filmed at the Roxy in New York.

The Roxy, New York

As previously mentioned the Roxy club in New York closed this month. It opened in 1979 as a popular roller disco and, since 1991, had hosted a gay club on Saturday nights. Now it has been sold to developers - as the New York Press notes: 'sprawling redevelopment has engulfed much of the neighboring land on West 18th Street in recent years, and Roxy’s prime location directly below the soon-to-be renovated High Line made the former truck warehouse an irresistible target'. As it came to an end, the DJ played as the final record 'This used to be my playground' by Madonna.

In the early 1980s, the club was a critical stepping stone for hip-hop from Bronx scene to global phenomenon. As Jeff Chang describes it in his essential 'Can't stop ,won't stop: a history of the hip-hop generation':

"When Kool Lady Blue finally found a new home for her "Wheels of Steel" night, her club became the steamy embodiment of the Planet Rock ethos… To its ecstatic followers, the Roxy would become "a club that changed the world." In June [1982], Blue hung out a sign at the rink: COME IN PEACE THROUGH MUSIC. Her gamble was immaculately timed. She opened the club with all of the scene's leading lights at the beginning of a hot summer when graffiti and b-boying and hip-hop music was on everyone's minds.

"The regulars were Bam [Africa Bambaataa ]and Afrika Islam, and then Grandmixer DST, Jazzy jay, Grand Wizzard Theodore, Grandmaster Flash, and I'd rotate them," she says. "We had no booth. The DJ would be in the center of the floor on a podi­um. Everyone could see what he was doing, and he was kind of elevated to rock star status." On both sides of the DJ, large projection screens displayed Charlie Ahearn's slides of Bronx b-boys, rappers, and scenemakers. Nearby, the Rock Steady Crew convened all-night ciphers on the beautiful blonde wood floors.'"

Although it was "billed as the anti-Studio 54", the club attracted David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Talking Heads et al, facilitating the cross over of the music to a wider audience. One regular recalled "The crowds were very diverse. That was why I was so excited to be there. Suddenly this racially mixed group was having a good time partying in a room, which was a very rare thing. On the level of music and art, people were able to bridge all these boundaries."

The club was used as a setting for the 1984 film 'Beat Street', including the classic break dance battle between the Rock Steady Crew and the New York City Breakers (see next post for clip).

Last Dance at the Roxy

Legendary New York club Roxy closed earlier this month. I'll post some more about its history soon - it hosted a gay club and roller disco up until the end, but also had a key role in the development of Hip Hop. For now here's some footage of the last night.