History is made at night

From the archive - this is an article I wrote for Alien Underground 0.1, Spring 1995, a zine edited by Christoph Fringeli (Praxis Records) ...

At the weekend I took part with my daughter in a South London community musical production of My Fair Lady , featuring a cast and crew of 20...

Back in the 1970s/early 80s the Throbbing Gristle /Psychic TV nexus explored the notion of sound as control, including how particular sonic ...

The Waltz was the focus of outrage as the dance spread from Austria and Germany to France and England in the late 18th and early 19th centur...

Bronx-based radical Commie Curmudgeon has completed our Dancing Questionnaire (also posted on his site), and very interesting it is too. S...

Interesting article in last week's Time Out London about policing of grime nights: "Imagine a society where the police force says w...

The writer Anais Nin (1903-77) lived between Paris and New York in the 1930s, and her diaries provide a vivid account of bohemian nightlif...

Last week in India, near the city of Pune, police arrested 271 at a rave at a rural farmhouse. Seven people accused of organising the party ...

This US magazine cover is from 1954. By this point the word 'rave' was already being used in London to describe all night parties in...

A Saudi Arabian judge sentenced 20 foreigners to receive lashes and spend several months in prison after convicting them of attending a part...

Scott Wood describes himself as 'a fortean, veggie, wanna-be writer'. He is the promoter of South East London Folklore Society , run...

Excellent BBC4 documentary this week. Once Upon a Time in New York: The Birth of Hip Hop, Disco and Funk was only an hour long when any of ...

'Being against war, telling stories, singing in the shower - these are the signs of a pleasant disposition' (Jean Baudrillard, Fragm...

1. Cambridgeshire, England "Police officers were attacked with fire extinguishers as they tried to break up an illegal rave at a disuse...

In previous posts we have looked at the revivalist jazz raves organised by Mick Mulligan and Cy Laurie in 1950s Soho. From the mid-1950s a ...

I went down to How Does it Feel to be Loved? at the Canterbury Arms in Brixton last month, which describes itself as a 'a london club ...

Thousands of people have taken to the streets of Copenhagen in angry protests against yesterday's police eviction of Ungdomshuset (the...

Where do the licensing laws that control where and when people can drink, dance or listen to music come from? The principle behind them is q...

When was the birth of rave as a word for a wild party and raver as the party-goer? Quite a few sources suggest a Caribbean origin. The Wikip...

In an earlier post , we referred to the revivalist jazz raves organised by Mick Mulligan and George Melly in London in the early 1950s, the ...

Good article on disco by Paul Lester in the Guardian this week: 'For Steven Collazo, the musical director of Odyssey, disco was a time ...

From Herts and Essex News , 15 February 2007: Raving the day! Illegal ravers were stopped dead in their tracks when police broke up an even...

The Daily Express has been a fount of right wing bile for many years. Here's a classic example of its historic racism, a leading article...

The Trinidad Carnival this week has commemorated a key point in the Carnival's history - the Canboulay riots of 1881-1884 (the picture ...

It is Carnival time in Brazil , now a major cultural celebration, but one which people had to struggle to establish: 'By the turn of the...

When was the warehouse party born, that is a party in an industrial space rather than a specially designed dancehall or ballroom? One candid...

Extracts from 19th century ballroom manuals: From a New York publication 1864: "Loud conversation, profanity, stamping the feet, writi...

'I was in a shit environment that I hated doing stuff I didn't want to do. I loved dancing, it was the first time [for] northern mal...

There is a dancefloor utopia, the fantasy of a Boogie Wonderland, a Saturday night that never stops. They Shoot Horses Don't They (a 193...

I want this site to reflect people's personal experiences of dancing and musicking, so I've designed a short questionnaire which I...

The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men; A thousand hearts beat happily; and when Music arose with its voluptuous swell, Soft eyes...

"On Sat 6th Jan a group of local people, along with others, occupied 139-141 Church Street [Stoke Newington, London] with the intentio...

I'm not sure that central London gig venue The Astoria Theatre is still under threat - the fear that Derwent Valley Central (a property...