A truly thrilling journey through the politics, culture and successive social revolutions of British dance music: a landmark book, and a reminder that the dancefloor is always political. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. A traveller is arrested at the Battle of the Beanfield in Wiltshire, 1985. Photograph: PA Images/Alamy His highly-acclaimed documentary work and writing have appeared on the BBC, Channel 4, The Guardian, Frieze, DJ Mag and The Quietus amongst several others. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?

Hard truths and rhythms collide as a controversial and erudite unravelling of UK dance culture, uncovers its secret social and political history. Some chat lines attempted to appease parents by adding moderators who periodically reminded teens of the price per minute. Chaptered by theme rather than chronology, Party Lines can be a little repetitive. But Gillett’s research is thorough and thoughtful, particularly when debunking some of the myths around dance music and drugs. When, in 1995, 18-year-old Leah Betts died after taking ecstasy and then drinking 12 pints of water in just 90 minutes, causing her brain to swell to fatal proportions, the tabloid railed hysterically against drug taking and clubbing. And yet, reports Gillett, omitted from this coverage was the fact that Betts took the pill at home. The moral panic had no constructive effect anyway: between 1994 and 1996, self-reported Ecstasy use among 15-to-34-year-olds almost doubled.

On December 31 2000, the Millennium Dome hosted a 20,000-person, 24-hour rave promoted by the Ministry of Sound. It was a watershed moment for dance music in Britain. As journalist Ed Gillett writes in Party Lines, his fascinating and comprehensive history of Britain’s fraught relationship with the dance floor, “rave – and the countercultures which birthed it – had spent much of the 20th century harried by the police, targeted by politicians, and exiled to the fringes of polite society and urban space”. Now, a year into the 21st century, ravers were “clutched tight to the Government’s bosom”. This article was amended on 24 July 2023. An earlier version had misattributed to Ed Gillett the coining of the term “business techno”. The dial was a mechanical interrupter so the marks and spaces were the same length, as I remember it. This worked but was slow and eventually was replaced starting in 1961 by an electronic 2-tone system. Ed Gillett is a writer, film-maker and communications professional from London, telling innovative and attention-grabbing stories about the points where politics, music, communities and technology meet.

With regard to automatic operation, in metropolitan areas, the dials had most of the letters of the alphabet associated with digit values, and through that scheme J, M, R and W were associated with the digits 5, 6, 7, and 9. In other areas, when the dials did not have the full repertoire of letters, they nevertheless had J, M, R and W on the corresponding digits. I got on at 1 in the morning, and I didn’t get off till 6 in the morning,” one girl said on Connections, according to the Tribune. It’s no great leap to segue British social history of the early 80s into that of the late 80s, as Gillett often does here. But his aim is to consciously stitch together events to account for the repressive, authoritarian, fun-sceptic place in which the UK finds itself in 2023. We got here, the author argues, by raiding Afro-Caribbean blues dances, sound systems and gay night clubs, by forcing travellers off the road – and by beating up miners and E’d-up kids. 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. It is quite correct to say this was done to make it easier for the human (mostly women by this time) operator. Transylvania-6 and -7 were NYC exchanges the most famous number was Transylvania-6-5000 used in the song by that name. (See note below.) That was before my time, but I remember it was the Hotel Pennsylvania near Madison Square Garden. (Its still there!)Fantasy is right. Some teens used the service to talk about sex, and later when moderators were added, used veiled language. “I listened in once, and I can’t even begin to tell you what they were talking about — with strangers!” a mother of three from Wellesley, Massachusetts, told People . Others defended the chats as preventative. “You can’t catch anything over the phone,” insisted chat line operator Betsy Superfon. Meanwhile, the phone companies collected a share of income from each group phone call — about 60%, reported Newsday in 1988 . And virtually anyone with a few hundred dollars lying around could buy up a local number, advertise it, and if it caught on, start raking in cash. It was the 1980s entrepreneur’s dream, albeit a risky one.