History is made at night

Over at Datacide, Christoph has been publishing texts from Alien Underground, a great zine published in South London in 1994/95 offerin ...

Cold, dark and wet in the drizzle, down by the river Thames on Friday night looking for a party. Boom boom boom - the sound of gabber in the...

A couple of weeks ago (16 September) I wandered down to the Waterloo headquarters of the London Fire Brigade, where hundreds of firefighter...

Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music is an ambitious, accomplished and entertaining survey of 100 years of music-...

As discussed here earlier this year, Shoreditch-based club Plastic People was threatened with losing its license, prompting a wave of const...

A British government in debt following an expensive war seeks to make people pay through unpopular policies - sounds familiar? This instance...

Stephen Biko, anti-Apartheid activist and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, died at the hands of the South African police on this...

On this day (12 September) in 1973, the Chilean folk singer Victor Jara was arrested by the military and taken to the Chile Stadium. The da...

Sid Rawle, a key figure in the free festival movement in the UK, died last month aged 64. His activism encompassed the Hyde Park Diggers in ...

Summer's almost gone, so guess the free party people will be moving back indoors soon. Here's news of a few outdoor gatherings last ...

Chapter 3 of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is entitled 'The Night Shadows' and opens with reflections on night, ...

In 1933, the photographer Brassaï (real name Gyula Halász, 1899–1984) published Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night), a remarkable photographic ...

As this story from Schnews makes clear, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get permission to put on any kind of festival in the UK ot...

From the chapter on Rhythm in Elias Canetti's Masse und Macht (1960), translated as ' Crowds and Power' : 'Rhythm is ori...

Worrying story from Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph (3 August 2010) about drugs and alcohol testing in pubs and clubs: 'Revellers in...

Good article by Dan Hancox in the Guardian last week on 'sodcasting' (as its critics have termed it)- playing music aloud on mobile ...

Predictably, the new UK ConDem government has announced the launch of a new crackdown on benefits claimants, including using private credit...

The annual Lambeth Country Show in Brixton's Brockwell Park - held this year on the 17 th & 18 th July - is a slightly surreal ...

Excerpts from René Viénet's 1973 film "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?" - a Situationist detournement of a Chinese kung fu movie ...

Some Vietnamese 'flashmob' action, June 18 2010. OK this one clearly isn't a genuine unlicensed, spontaneous gathering. It's...

One Day by David Nicholls is a novel based on the familiar theme of a group of friends growing up (see also Jonathan Coe's The Rotters...

In Milan Kundera's novel Immortality (1991), one of the narrators critiques the notion of what he terms 'Homo Sentimentalis... the ...

'Her first ball! She was only at the beginning of everything. It seemed to her that she had never known what the night was like before. ...

Big Dance 2010 (3 -11 July) was a week of live dance performance in the open air across London. I caught some Latin dance at the Scoop by T...

The day before the national celebration of the storming of the Bastille in pursuit of liberty, the French government today passed a law bann...

Since Prince fell out with with Warner Brothers in the 1990s he has pursued various unconventional strategies for distributing his prolific ...

Five years ago this month world leaders at the G8 summit were promising to 'Make Povery History', something seemingly forgotten toda...

This from Schnews (18 June 2010): 'Around 2,500 partygoers descended on Dale Aerodrome in Wales last May bank holiday for the 2010 UK Te...