Why are the authorities so keen to stop the young having fun?

Oh Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed. You have written a magnificent tome, but I am so conflicted about it. Party Lines is more than 400 pages: a quote from Goethe at the start, a lengthy introduction, plus a glossary and an index. But we get into semantics from the beginning. What is dance music now? Practically anything with a beat that isn’t George Ezra or Sam Fender – and they’ve probably got a load of dance mixes on the go as well.

There were plenty of unlicensed raves happening even in lockdown, from Blackburn to Primrose Hill

This is not a definitive book about dance music. There is, for example, scant mention of the late and supremely influential Andrew Weatherall, chief architect of acid house and the scene that followed. Yet Spiral Tribe – a very agreeable bunch of travellers who happily gave me their vinyl music to play on my BBC radio show – get pages of attention.

I think it would have been far better to include the word ‘underground’ in the title, and also ‘politics’. Ed Gillett admits early on that there have been several excellent books written about the modern music revolution – a view with which I concur, arms in the air (like I just don’t care), Simon Reynolds’s Energy Flash and Matthew Collin’s Altered State among them. Gillett worked on the breathtaking 2018 Jeremy Deller film Everybody in the House – An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992. That started with the miners’ strike and included conflicts from then on. Perhaps Gillett wanted to complete the incomplete film with this book.

He and Deller are prophetic, reflecting worrying reports coming now from the world of British rap and drill that their lyrics are being used and scrutinised by the authorities to prosecute them. The thrust of this book, therefore, is not about dance music per se.