Dance Your Way Home

We are a dancing nation because of the youth. The world is always changing and those in charge of the future – young people – will generate culture that reflects their reality. And so, in the final decade of the last millennium, it was people in their mid-teens to their early twenties who used their feet to expand and create new culture in repurposed dance spaces. We were adding a new verse to an old song, and we did so at scale.

“Dancing with other people isn’t passive, it is active, and it can create action: buying records or making music for fellow dancers; or creating a space where people can dance for the allotted five hours before tumbling out of the exit and looking for more.” Emma Warren

Collective ways of dancing change over time. Sometimes it crests generationally, like at the infamous marathons of Depression-era North America when couples would dance for hundreds of hours for cash, or at the highpoint of a cultural moment at, say, Quadrant Park or the Haçienda or a packed venue that only you and your friends remember. Sometimes the collective dance is atomised, in retreat, as it has been in the UK since 2010 as venues continue to be picked off by property developers courtesy of global hyper capitalism and profit-facing planning laws; and sometimes it’s stilled, at the lowest of low tides, during illness, anxiety or bereavement or under repressive regimes, when we retreat indoors, dancing out of sight, solo, or only in our imagination.

There was a lot of dancing in the 1990s. A survey quoted in Sarah Champion’s classic study Club Cultures showed attendance (a word I read in two parts: atten-dance) to be large-scale, with over 200 million admissions to nightclubs in the UK in 1994. They compared dancing to other entertainments and found it outstripped admissions to sports, film and the remaining ‘live arts’. Another piece of research by economists at the Henley Centre for Forecasting claimed over 50 million attendances a year in 1993 at ‘rave events’ in the UK. Another way of getting hold of what these 50 million admissions means is to understand that there were only 35.7 million people aged between 16 and 64, according to the 1991 census.

People like me were dancing to variants of Chicago house and its sibling genre Detroit techno multiple times each week, in clubs, at house parties and in semi-derelict flats and warehouses, without consciously learning dance steps and without considering ourselves dancers. I recognise the limits of my perspective: in comedian Gina Yashere’s autobiography Cack-Handed she describes going out at the same moment in time to Soul II Soul’s Friday night residency at the Fridge in Brixton. She’d spend hours there doing the Running Man or the Wop. She brought ‘every move we’d spent the previous week copying from Yo! MTV Raps and practising in front of our mirrors’.

The dancers of this decade expanded the dancing estate. The sheer volume of young people wanting to go out in, say, Plymouth or Middlesborough forced new dancefloors into existence. The dancers queued their way into pub backrooms, high-street discotheques and purpose-built nightclubs created in the shells of old factories and bus garages. Many of these venues no longer exist, and with the absence comes a forgetting. Places like Stoke-on-Trent had a powerful dancefloor culture that influenced the rest of the country, through clubs like Shelley’s or the Void. Culture matters when everything else falls away. You can’t eat culture and it doesn’t pay the rent, but it does provide pride and history, which are useful starting points for recovery.

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“We are a dancing nation because of the youth.” Emma Warren

I enrolled at Manchester Polytechnic and quickly found the dancefloors I needed. The movement information around me was different to the London clubs I’d been attending, however, and I needed to tune in again, absorb some new information, lose some accent, add some accent. This wasn’t a phenomenon that was specific to me, or to then. We all do it, all the time. We modify our moves in response to what’s around us, or we don’t, better to revel in our differences. I realise now, in a way that was invisible to me at the time, that dancers stamp out local detail in the moveable architecture of the dance. People in Manchester danced differently than I did coming from the suburbs of south-east London, influenced as I was by soul weekenders I’d never been to. We danced to local weather, even within a city: born and bred Mancunians moving to brilliant DJs like Jam MCs or Hewan Clarke moved differently to students like me who’d washed in from across the country.

By the mid-1990s Ancoats, in the east of the city, contained only the bare bones of urban life. Once you crossed the busy main road that flanked the edge of Oldham Street onto Jersey Street, parallel with the Rochdale Canal, you stopped walking past shops and instead just walked past derelict cotton mills. Ten minutes down the road was Sankey’s Soap (later just Sankey’s) and the adjoining building, Beehive Mill, which housed office space. Jockey Slut magazine, where I worked, was based there, as was A Guy Called Gerald’s record label Juice Box, and studios used by pioneering drum ’n’ bass DJ Marcus Intalex and Happy Mondays offshoot Black Grape. There was a cab company whose instructions to drivers leaked through our office speakers, a corner pub and a hole-in-the-wall caff that sold thick tea from an urn. This was an industrially degraded area which had been emptied out, as if the mills had been lifted up and shaken out at some point during the years when the industrial era became post-industrial.

Every week dancers filled the room at Sankey’s Soap for Bugged Out! which was run by Jockey Slut editors John Burgess and Paul Benney. Regulars would lay claim to their favourite part of the dancefloor or the raised stage, and would stay there, digging into the techno and the harder end of house music for a solid four hours, sometimes longer. My friend and fellow Jockey Slut writer Joanne Wain had good moves, honed in the northern soul youth clubs of her teen years – her sliding footwork demonstrated her movement heritage. Others bounced and bopped, stepping and swaying and swatting the air with clenched fists. There were arms in the air, conducting the beat.

We orchestrated our moves to the sounds delivered by resident DJs James Holroyd and Rob Bright as well as the greats of techno and house DJs at a time when their greatness was only a handful of releases deep. After a banging set by Detroit innovator Carl Craig I watched an end-of-night negotiation as one of the club’s sweaty and trenchant regulars attempted to swap t-shirts with him, like they were footballers at the end of a match. Other legends of house and techno came too: Jeff Mills battered us with relentlessly inventive iterations of ‘The Bells’ and unreleased Underground Resistance records. Richie Hawtin brought skinny Canadian energy and hypnotic techno. Robert Hood played in a fedora hat playing deep, minimal body music, and I dance-watched DJ Claude Young power through his set on three turntables, scratching with his elbow. The Detroit DJs came in waves, and the city, this club and our delirious stomping welcomed them in.

“The layers of connection you build up when you go out dancing regularly – recognising and being recognised by the doorman or the person taking your money on the door, people you begin to nod to, resident DJs who you see play month in, month out, and the musical evolution you can witness and support through your collective presence. “ Emma Warren

Dave was one of my dancefloor buddies at the time and he can still remember the intensity: ‘I can vividly recall dancing with you to three tunes that James Holroyd was spinning and the delirium in your face,’ he tells me when I track him down by email. ‘It was one of the few times he DJed the last set of the night. You felt the music as much as me. Mad times indeed. I still dance crazy and, as the missus notes, without always keeping the beat with my hips.’

Generally, I’m with Gil Scott-Heron, who enunciated the ‘no’ at the start of ‘nostalgia’. I believe in the archive as encouragement and permission, but I don’t believe in parading generational gains in front of those who lack the physical space older people had. There are also many things that remain true across the decades. For example, the layers of connection you build up when you go out dancing regularly – recognising and being recognised by the doorman or the person taking your money on the door, people you begin to nod to, resident DJs who you see play month in, month out, and the musical evolution you can witness and support through your collective presence. Dancing with other people isn’t passive, it is active, and it can create action: buying records or making music for fellow dancers; or creating a space where people can dance for the allotted five hours before tumbling out of the exit and looking for more. This was as true in Manchester decades ago as it was when I attended a party run by the Touching Bass collective in a Peckham bakery in the late 2010s, or at Total Refreshment Centre, which helped curate a wave of new London musicians like Nubya Garcia or Moses Boyd who were deeply connected to the dancefloor. A large percentage of people at Bugged Out! or Touching Bass or Total Refreshment Centre or any similar places across the country at any point in the last 30 years would have given something back; not just caught a vibe but made a vibe. Many of the people who attended made something in response to the dance, whether it was clothing, or music or artwork – or the fleeting but fundamental contribution of moving your shoulders to the beat.

Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through The Dancefloor by Emma Warren is published by Faber & Faber and is out now.