This summer, in south-east London, the beloved club Printworks will be turned into an office block just six years after opening; more depressing yet is that Printworks – owned by event-management firm BroadwickLive – was never just about the music.

Absurd they may be, but these people have the power and the influence that musicians, carnivalists, ravers, revellers, promoters, clubs, DJs and festival organisers generally lack. One of the things I was hoping to do with this book was to re-examine some of that history, taking into account the changes in society and culture that have happened since then. In any case, as another comment points out, the ring patterns implied by Morse code J, M, R and W were probably not used as ring patterns and the Morse code connection is probably apocryphal. Finally, the police have a lot of power in terms of licensing, in deciding which spaces get permission to exist and which don’t.The fact that the crowd were predominantly black and drug-free didn’t quite tie in with the cool, hedonistic narrative of acid house. The letters represent an additional digit dialed after the others in cases where automatic operations was implemented. The fear was that Arcadia would be breached and that real England would be sullied by manic hippies and unwashed ravers. Plenty of lawmakers, before and after him, have thought so too, seeing the dancefloor as a battleground, a potentially countercultural space that, according to Ed Gillett, they have sought to “constrain or commodify”. Staging dance parties (or attempting to prevent them) involved cat-and-mouse, sometimes dirty tactics.

It’s bound to have played a part for some people, but various factors were in play around that time - several bad events in 1985 culminating in the Heysel disaster all conspired to dent the dubious glamour associated with the ‘firms’, and the resulting improvements in police tactics and marshalling, all-seater stadia, then Hillsborough in 89 all played their part.Ed Gillett: Dance music is desirable, it’s alluring, it has a cultural cachet, and I think it’s been very easy for successive generations to mistake that for genuine community. In the introduction of his superb book ‘Party Lines’, author Ed Gillett lays out the vision for his exciting history, namely: ‘to deconstruct some of the myths around raves emergence and early years’ and further ‘to expand the narrative towards the present: where previous retellings tend to lose some of their urgency after the Criminal Justice Act is passed.