Out of Space: How UK Cities Shaped Rave Culture (Revised and Expanded Edition)
Maynooth University (Ireland)
A friend of mine, Breffni, tells a wonderful story about discovering rave culture in North Western (NW) London, aged 17. Out and about with friends one evening, he came across a Spiral Tribe free party in a warehouse in NW London. It was unlike anything else he’d known. It was music and a vibe, music and an embrace; a feeling, then, and one he continues to enjoy and chase after. Today, after a few decades of raving, he’s employed to make urban places more liveable for all (and he’s successful at it). Back then, though, it was the rave culture he discovered that went on to make the city liveable; it was rave culture that went on to make so many places and spaces of wonder, discovery and joy.
UK cities since the late 1980s and early 1990s have been bound up with rave culture in profound ways. Both the city and the culture have existed in relation to each other and to a wider array of places and spaces. Those fleeting moments on the dancefloor, the randomness of meeting and hugging strangers, the chaos, the buzz—it all needed somewhere to occur and rave culture did manage to create those geographies. Indeed, looking back at the story of rave culture, perhaps one of the most notable aspects was simply that the promoters, free party collectives, DJs, sound engineers, new age travellers, ravers and clubbers found so many spaces to embrace each other. Looking around now, it’s hard not to be worried about the future. What chance will our children have of making discoveries like Breffni’s?
A similar anxiety pervades Out of Space: How UK Cities Shaped Rave Culture (2024). In this expanded version of his 2022 book with the same title, Jim Ottewill takes the act of “looking around” to an elevated level. Ottewill works his way across the country, from north to south, to ask the promoters, the originators and the DJs who got things started and kept things going, to tell their stories. What we get out of this is a brilliant and rich historical geography of rave culture in the UK. We get insightful biographical details about the promoters and DJs; rare nuggets about how clubs got started; and fantastic quotes that capture the vitality and energy—the love—that went into and came out of rave culture.
Out of Space has ten core chapters. The bulk of them are dedicated to covering developments in Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham, London and other smaller cities and towns such as Coventry and Margate. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on party and sound system scenes with fewer fixed ties to any particular place but with strong bonds to UK cities. Then in Chapter 10 and the concluding chapter, Ottewill examines the contemporary struggle to find a place for rave culture in UK cities.
The book has two standout features. The first is a justifiable sense of awe and respect toward the great many people who have dedicated so much of their lives to emplacing rave culture in UK cities. It’s been their task to find venues, bring in the crowds and deal with authorities or angry neighbours. It’s their labour and often their capital that’s generated the landscape of rave culture in the UK. Out of Space is a book that fist-bumps those people. It works. It’s a book with love and hugs.
Alongside the love, though, the second feature is an overriding sense of dread. Ottewill has his finger on the pulse of rave culture in the UK. He’s spotting the novel ideas and experiments, such as community ownership models that try to counteract rising rents and the overall loss of space; and highlighting other efforts to battle the growing sense that rave culture is on the decline. Yet, it is precisely the fact that rave culture is on the decline that jumps out from the book, especially in the final two chapters. This leads me to wonder if a weakness in Out of Space is that Ottewill is too committed to rave culture. He wants to spot and discuss some of the ways that rave culture can keep going. He knows this means we need space. But to my mind, Ottewill does not dedicate enough energy to asking if there is going to be enough of a commitment from younger generations to the making of spaces like clubs or other dancefloors.
For sure, processes such as gentrification are a major source of pressure on clubs and promoters. Regulations, insurance, health, safety and the wider institutionalization of cultural practice with respect to capitalist life also bear down on rave culture. But what about generational differences? Thirty years or more have passed since Breffni (and kids like him) discovered Spiral Tribe (and then, for Breffni, Bedlam and numerous other events and venues). Today, though, a great many young people are on smartphones or Playsations all day long. They’re updating their followers on Instagram. They’re Tik-Tokking videos; creating, capturing, commodifying and sometimes cancelling culture in novel ways that just might not need the same sorts of spaces that rave culture needed.
Against this backdrop, to want clubs and raves to keep going—to seek out a space for them in the city—is one thing. But maybe we might need to accept that our kids won’t want to spend quite so much of their weekends bubbling around on an ecstatic ride in hot sweaty clubs, warehouses or other venues. One has to wonder if our kids will need the same spaces as rave culture needed. Will they seek out the same sorts of life-changing or mind-altering experience that so many ravers desired? In short, maybe rave culture is running out of space; but maybe it’s also running out of ravers.
These minor critiques aside, Out of Space is a fantastic book precisely because it can provoke debates about the past, present and future of rave culture. Ottewill writes clearly, quotes the people he interviewed astutely and ensures the reader knows there they are relative to the rest of the book. It’s a brilliantly crafted text, demonstrating serious writing skills and drawing on an incredibly rich archive of material collected via first-hand interviews and other sources. My sense is that anyone interested in the rise, development and significance of rave culture will need this book. Anyone fighting to keep the vibe alive should also get a copy.