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”. 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. Kids enjoy making up a new identity because on a phone you can be whoever you want to be,” Christopher Woods of the Friendship Network, a chat line company out of Los Angeles, told The Boston Globe. “Every guy on the line will say he drives a Porsche or some other exciting car. There’s a lot of fantasy involved.”

Dancing to music: what could be more joyful? Rhythm and sweat, release and abandon, feeling rather than thinking, being yourself and becoming someone – or something – other. Dancing gives us, however fleeting, a glimpse of freedom. It can tilt reality. This appalls puritans and fundamentalists. Too many young people “prefer the dark night to daylight”, complained James Anderton in the 1980s. “They dance like there is no tomorrow, and they spread the virus of drug abuse wherever they go. They are not of this world. They believe in very different things to you and I.” 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: There’s something inherently political about a group of people taking control of a space without necessarily having the approval of mainstream society. That could be a marginalised community finding a space of solace and peace for a night; it could mean mobilising 30,000 people to go and seize a piece of common land.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. 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.

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Notting Hill Carnival is a bigger target. Potentially, it’s eminently exploitable, but it’s probably too diffuse and problematic to attract major investors. Whatever RBKC might like to think, it’s not owned by anyone, so it can’t be bought outright, and attempts to exert overt municipal or corporate control provoke fierce community resistance. Unlike music, Carnival is intimately tied to place and in Notting Hill it is, after 57 years, firmly embedded in a strong community, which is its greatest protection. From time to time, a narrative arrives so focused both aesthetically and politically that it’s impossible not to be pulled in by its narrative. 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.’ One thing I found striking about the book is that it partly functions as a history of policing across the last four decades. What role has the police played in the history of dance music?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. You are correct that these are party lines. The letters represent an additional digit dialed after the others in cases where automatic operations was implemented. This article goes into great depth all about how multi-party telephone lines worked, but as a short excerpt: 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.