Clubbing Culture in Islington, 1986-1995
Ravers, Junglists, and House Fans
Buch in deiner Nähe kaufen
Beschreibung
This is the first book to map and celebrate the overlooked history of producers, promoters and DJs from Islington that contributed to the acid house and rave scene as it developed in derelict spaces in the borough in the late 1980s, and how this paved the way for the house and jungle scenes that dominated Islington clubs during the 1990s. Blending oral history interviews with contemporaneous reports in the style press, the music press, local and national newspapers, and archival documents stored at the Islington Local History Centre, this book sheds new light upon key clubs, the music, cultural identities, and fashions. The book presents unpublished eyewitness accounts by people from Islington’s council estates that contributed to these scenes to unravel the complex and hitherto poorly understood interrelationship between gang culture, subculture and localised club culture. It argues that the backlash to the perceived unsavoury nature of clubbers and promoters, combined with the onslaught of gentrification in the borough in the late 1990s, led to the venues being closed down, and to this vital moment in the history of UK popular culture being brought to an end.
Ray Kinsella is an academic researcher and writer who co-founded the Subculture Interest Group at the University of the Arts London, UK. His previous book, The Bebop Scene in London's Soho, 1945-1950: Post-war Britain's First Youth Subculture, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022.
This is the first book to map and celebrate the overlooked history of producers, promoters and DJs from Islington that contributed to the acid house and rave scene as it developed in derelict spaces in the borough in the late 1980s, and how this paved the way for the house and jungle scenes that dominated Islington clubs during the 1990s. Blending oral history interviews with contemporaneous reports in the style press, the music press, local and national newspapers, and archival documents stored at the Islington Local History Centre, this book sheds new light upon key clubs, the music, cultural identities, and fashions. The book presents unpublished eyewitness accounts by people from Islington’s council estates that contributed to these scenes to unravel the complex and hitherto poorly understood interrelationship between gang culture, subculture and localised club culture. It argues that the backlash to the perceived unsavoury nature of clubbers and promoters, combined with the onslaught of gentrification in the borough in the late 1990s, led to the venues being closed down, and to this vital moment in the history of UK popular culture being brought to an end.
Uses Islington as a case study to explore the UK's rich club cultures during the 1980s and 1990s Details the music and fashions that constructed identities in these scenes Explores the impact of gentrification on the closure of these clubs during the late 1990s and early 2000s
Autor*in
Ray Kinsella
Themen in »Clubbing Culture in Islington, 1986-1995«
clubs council estates fashion gentrification music
Stimmen zu »Clubbing Culture in Islington, 1986-1995«
“This is an outstanding contribution to the growing field of historical scholarship on the 1980s and 1990s. The book recovers the Black origins of house music in Islington and skilfully traces the explosion of the rave scene in the capital and its evolution into jungle. In a nuanced corrective to post-modern and post-subcultural accounts, Ray Kinsella shows that race, class, postcode and gang membership fundamentally shaped the sartorial and musical styles of Islington’s clubs. Kinsella’s work provides a powerful example of working class cultural innovation and community making at a time when both were alleged to be in terminal decline. An impressive work of social and cultural history, it deserves the widest possible readership.” (Benjamin Jones, Associate Professor in Modern British History, University of East Anglia, UK)
()