An Old School Stomper: Reflections on Place, Identity, and Drugs and the Fluctuating Roles of the Participating Ethnographer
University College Dublin (Ireland)
<http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.12>
I find a space in the main room of the Subway City, a subterranean venue occupying the cavernous inside of bricked arches, opening into an industrial, rough-and-ready outdoor area.[1] Finding space to dance is not hard, as most people are clustered by the DIY bar or smoking outside. We haven’t arrived that early, driving up from Oxford and walking into this all-night event around 11pm. Without warm bodies pressed against me, it feels wrong, and although the high tempo bass vibrates the air around me and familiar breaks structure the set, it is already not the hard house experience of my teens. Looking around, I am unsurprised to find that the fluffy boots, the complex UV hair adventures and the handmade outfits of the early to mid 2000s hard house scene are also absent from this rather monochrome bunch milling around the space. My fluffy boots—hand-sewn and rancid from club floors before the UK smoking ban—are long gone, unceremoniously binned before I left for university, the other pieces surviving a little longer, reinvented for parties. All that remains stylistically are my boxing boots, light and comfortable enough for a whole night of dancing. And as ever, I am here to dance.
It takes some time to warm up physically and emotionally, exposed as one of few dancers on the floor and fuelled by an energy drink alone, but eventually a familiar sample brings me back to some core movements. As I get into the beat, I use the space around me, returning to old favourites, the tight arm shapes, sharp head and shoulder dips, stomping legs (dominant on the right, but consciously using the left for variation of direction), beginning to throw in a few twists. 15 minutes later, I am completely in the music and anticipating the breaks and the build ups, when someone taps me on the shoulder. “Have you got anything?” Ripped from the music I am confused and take a moment to look at the stranger and wonder what they want. “No, I don’t”, I finally respond, realising that—based upon my dancing—they think that I am on drugs and may have some to share or sell. I did learn to dance like this on a variety of stimulants, and perhaps next to the basic marching stomps of the smattering of dancers around me, I do look like a good bet for someone hoping to buy on the inside. It is sound logic, I suppose. A sober (or even drunk person) could not or would not dance like that.
With a little shrug, I return to dancing, but after fifteen minutes or so the DJ changes and the music moves into hard trance, away from the bouncy camp of hard house and towards longer ethereal breaks, unsuited to my dancing. I head to the bar and watch as more people begin to arrive. The nearby pubs and bars are beginning to close and Subway City offers well-oiled revellers the club stage of their night out. Leaning against the bar waiting my turn in brightly coloured leggings, I stand out amongst the AllSaint greys and blacks. And whilst I am probably only a couple of years older than most of these people, I feel generationally removed. Now in my late-twenties, I am already an older member of a multigenerational scene, separated by my colours and my dancing, by my memories of how it used to be: an old school stomper.
As a (lapsed) insider, I experienced this and other nights like it as indicative of cultural change and changes in my own embodied experience. With insufficient evidence for any scholarly claim for cultural change, in the piece that follows I focus on my own embodied experience—from chemically heightened to comparative sobriety—consciously avoiding the term “nostalgia”. Instead, I turn to place, placemaking and work that attempts to consider the role that drugs play in embodied experience and what this might mean for our current and remembered spaces of dancing.
Having driven from Derby—the five of us crammed into a decidedly shabby hatchback—we arrive in Coalville late in the evening light of a British summer. Not raining, but grey skies still blanket the shabby streets, unnoticed by clubbers eager to get in early and stay until the sun rises again. We join the long queue for the door, a sense of slight unease as we remember the little twists of cheap speed secreted in fluffy boots and bikini tops, yet we all get through with a nod of the head. Once inside, we move from this queue straight into another and wait to check our flimsy jackets and bags into the coatroom. We only need a little cash for a water bottle to be refilled with tepid bathroom water, and perhaps a digital camera, if you wish to document the wide-eyed, sweaty antics of the night ahead.
Club veterans, if only 17 years old, we pace ourselves, taking pre-wrapped speed bombs in the toilets and making sure that we are all safe. The press of heat, colour, noise, base-y smells escaping from our collective pores is a potent cocktail, an instigator as we all come up, pupils widening, heart rates increasing, euphoria and energy mounting as our bodies clamour to move. And together we do, finding a small space on the crowded floor, with no time nor self-awareness for tentative engagements, but rather a cascade of kinetic energy as your body does what the music tells you. And we dance for what seems like days, finding new ways of shifting from one footwork type to another, or picking up something new from other dancing bodies, small revolutions in movement that will be retained even if the rest of the evening becomes misty and vague.
A break is enforced—by a slight sub-genre change, the need to pee, a friend suggesting another bomb—and it’s back to the bathrooms. The “Ladies” are filled with all folk: people in fake fur skirts, cropped tops, wings, wigs—it is colourful and queer, gender fluidity the norm, the cotton candy camp of hard house and funky house creating a strict tribe separate from the wide-eyed skinheads in the Scouse House room.[2] The task done, we cool down—water on wrists and necks—and seamlessly engage in deep, meaningful conversations with strangers on clubbing, life and love, organically filtering back into the room to continue our momentary friendship or to drift apart again, reuniting enthusiastically later in the night.
My hard house places of the early and mid-2000s were, even at the time (and since remembered), black box spaces, primarily locations for dancing, divorced from the wider outside world: temporally, culturally, aurally, socially. When I started clubbing at the early age of sixteen, hard house clubs were not spaces of prohibition or controlled access.[3] Drugs were not used out in the open of the dance floor, but taken in bathrooms, secreted into the club. They were, however, ubiquitous. Perhaps reflective of a drug-focused music scene, each social interaction was warm and easy. I do not remember one edgy interaction with a stranger, although I was not keen on seeing the vacant eyes of clubbers in a k-hole (see Riley et al. 2009) or having to deal with the friend who always went too hard too soon. These were explicitly queer and fluid places, safe spaces of experimentation, which existed, floating within a named city, but—as I would later discover—critically divorced from my future engagements with those cities and even buildings. As I returned to dance in the 2010s, and again as a PhD researcher and resident of Birmingham until 2021, I struggled to equate the imposing and somehow now-commercialised civic buildings and the dank, cold industrial labyrinths with the queer cocoons of my colourful clubbing memories, changes in demographic and ethos (and perhaps my comparative sobriety, too) stripping the remembered warmth from these places.
My engagements with, experiences of and attempts to map clubbing places are in constant flux. Whilst the physical place remains the same, the embodied place may be entirely different and at times unrecognisable to the clubber, particularly to those, like me, who have returned. By extension, my mental maps of cities are not linear and cumulative, but rather combative and messy, created through half-remembered or chemical-tinged adventures, lying detached from its actual geography. The embodied and social experience of drug taking—or the move to comparative sobriety—also adds an additional messy layer to this sensory experience of place.
Beyond these struggles with (re)experienced place, I have also begun to consider these experiences and questions in relation to my more recent ethnographic engagements in dance-focused communities. If my experiences are now so different due to my comparative sobriety, what can we say about drug use and the ethnographic experience? This is particularly relevant to our invocations of embodied experience within musical places through our published writing, especially within our fluctuating positions as the participating ethnographer. As a fresh-faced doctoral student, a sober engagement with research was an institutional requirement, made without question or comment. But as an emboldened (and slightly cantankerous) research fellow, I now reflect upon what may be lost without more nuanced and reflexive considerations.
Whilst not until now a part of my academic writing, these reflections on experience, place, clubbing geographies, community and indeed drugs have long since been central to my ruminations on ethnography. In 2012, I moved into a very different dance-focused music scene: northern soul. And in 2015, I began a three-year ethnographic doctoral study of this retrospective and multigenerational community. Much was different, from the strict etiquette of the northern soul space to the primacy of the ageing body on the dance floor. I was a classroom teacher when I entered the scene and later a doctoral researcher, aware of the ethical expectations and bureaucratic requirements of UK institutions. All my engagements with northern soul were undertaken under the steam of a gin and tonic or two, and all detailed interviews I completed sober and away from the dance floor. These decisions had a significant impact on my engagement.
On an embodied level as a dancer, I struggled to make the leaps in development that I had previously experienced in grimy hard house clubs. No longer free from the watching eyes of others, I rarely had breakthrough moments on the dance floor, and I was competent only by the end of my 3-year PhD and 6 years on the scene. In terms of access and understanding, this decision also meant that it took me some time to identify the extent of drug use within the scene and to appreciate the associated complexities and scene-specific moralities, hidden as it was from other scene members (see Raine 2020: 95-9). Equally, the northern soul places of most of the young people in my study were not the same as those that I had experienced sober even though we danced, chatted and drank in the same physical place. I am not, here, advocating that ethnographers must engage in the same chemical experiences as their participants, but rather arguing that fieldwork researchers must identify and make explicit these limitations and attempt to articulate and evoke the worlds of others.
It is the task of the ethnographer—as the conduit of the ethnographic research (see Shehata 2015)—to make explicit the nature of the sources and experiences drawn upon in the construction of their thick descriptions (Geertz 1973) and critical insights. Whilst the ethnographer cannot be objective, they can make their analytical framework—to include their own positionality and embodied experience—clear to the reader. In terms of ethnographic writing—the evocative recreation of a place, a happening—it is essential to immerse the reader in an environment with which they may not be familiar. It is within the embodied and emotive language of the writer that the seeds of important themes and insights are sown, to be further analysed as part of wider structures and processes as the ethnography develops. From my memories of hard house nights, it is clear that in removing the embodied experience of drug taking, you potentially remove insights into the caring function of the wider community and the disjointed clubber experience of space and place. And in not making explicit one’s own drug taking, you do not sufficiently consider or attempt to articulate the chemical synergies between the sensory experience of music-focused happenings and recreational drugs.
Why, then, do so many popular music ethnographers remove themselves from this essential layering of music scene experience? Whilst many scholars discuss the importance of drug taking for their research participants (see for example Malbon 1999; Taylor 2010, 2012; Wilson 2007; Farrow 2020), surprisingly few explicitly analyse their own embodied and chemically enhanced engagements, either as a member of these communities or as a visiting ethnographer. For some, like me on the northern soul scene, it may be that they did not engage in this element. But for others, it is clear that they have written out this layer of knowledge development from their research (see Wilson 2019 reflecting on Wilson 2007). In her seminal book Club Cultures, Sarah Thornton “submits [her]self to the experiment” of taking ecstasy in a club context and reflecting upon the experience (1995: 89). Whilst this is a rare example of explicit drug reflections, it is couched in terms of a measured and purposeful one-off experiment of the non-using researcher. It is not an account of an ongoing strand of embodied knowing and understanding which the researcher brings to the research and—significantly for the theme of this special issue of Dancecult—to the places that they experience, analyse and invoke.
In working through my own embodied experiences, ethnographic research and fluctuating roles that I occupy in my private and scholarly life, I have found inspiration in narcofeminism. This scholarly approach draws heavily upon sociologist Elizabeth Ettorre who has written extensively on feminist ethnography and “drug user researchers” (see 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017). As Chang summarises, narcofeminism is “a site of feminist resistance to patriarchal order and modes of rationality”, a “conceptual framework and burgeoning political movement” formed by activists and more recently applied by scholars (2023: 760). As a framework, it has been applied to not only consider the gendered experiences of drug takers—to include “ways of accomplishing a gendered identity” through drug-taking—and drug policies, but also to consider the emancipatory and activist uses of drugs (Measham 2002: 335). Feminist autoethnography is here applied as a means to “speak back”, to analyse and communicate experiences that have been hidden or obscured, both on an individual and a societal level (Chang 2023: 762, 763; see also Denshire 2014: 831). Whether an exploration of pleasure or trauma, this theoretical and methodological approach aims to reclaim control over the stories being told, to reflect upon the complexities of drug use and to provide respectful counternarratives to inform both policy and scholarship (Chang 2023: 762; Dennis et al. 2023: 946).
Writers such as Florêncio (2023) work within this approach to reflect upon drug taking, queer bodies and world-making, and to critically consider club cultures. In his autoethnographic reflections, he describes evocative moments of queer care (in relation to drug-taking) within the club space, a context that I also recognise as a clubber. Florêncio offers a richly layered understanding of the queer club scenes through the placing of himself within the narrative. Reflecting upon this embodied experience, he argues that such queer care practices “are not just about harm reduction but about investing ourselves in the lives and dignity of others” (Florêncio 2023: 877). These words offer food for thought for dance floor ethnographers. We, too, should reflect upon our invested relationships with the communities that we research.
The cultural worlds that we occupy and attempt to analyse are messy and entangled, with many boundaries blurred in the process of world- and self-making. Whilst narcofeminism offers one approach through which we can theorise our embodied engagement as participating ethnographers in club scenes, further exploration is required into how we can justify these engagements within our institutions. Essential processes—this time institutional—are also hidden in published work: the ethical frameworks and processes which made these projects possible. Yes, more critical and open ways of analysing these experiences—many of which already exist in sociology, criminology (see Wakeman 2013, 2014, 2021) and queer studies—are required within popular music studies. Yet these can only be successfully applied if we are all able to access more nuanced institutional processes for the protection of researcher and the researched alike as we attempt to communicate “the dignity of others” in the work that we create.
Dr. Sarah Raine is an SFI-IRC Pathway Fellow based in UCD’s School of Music, Ireland. She is the PI of Improvising across Boundaries: Voicing the Experience of Women and Gender-Minority Improvising Musicians (2023-2027), funded by Science Foundation Ireland/Irish Research Council. Sarah is an Editor for Jazz Research Journal, a co-Managing Editor of Riffs, a Book Series Editor for Equinox Publishing (Music Industry Studies/Icons of Pop Music) and a member of the Subcultures Network.
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[1] Subway City was on Livery Street in the city centre of Birmingham and has since been renamed Tunnel Club.
[2] I use this term to describe gabba. Many hard house nights seemed to have gabba or a general hardcore room, in addition to main rooms with hard house, hard trance and funky house.
[3] Ben Malbon (1999) discusses entry into the club as a key moment. Whilst bouncers were indeed positioned on the doors of music venues hosting a hard house event, I was never challenged and always gained entry. This was possibly due to the lack of consistent ID checks in the early 2000s or a vaguely remembered fake ID, courtesy of a student discount company who didn’t check birth dates.