Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.In the postwar period the dominant forces in making the world dance have been America and the UK, with some fairly irresistible help from Jamaica. Britain’s love affair with what is predominantly Black music has been a two-way exchange, from the resurrection of R&B by the Rolling Stones in the 1960s to the embrace of English synth pop by the African-American artists who invented techno and hip hop.In Transatlantic Drift, two British academics set out to document, in their rather nebulous phrase, this ebb and flow of dance music. Sociologist Katie Milestone and music journalism lecturer Simon A Morrison divide between them the period from the birth of rock’n’roll in the late 1950s to the modern day.Their scope is ambitious: where people danced, how they danced and the music that made them move. It’s a golden era that takes in the rise of the mod, the birth of Northern Soul, the disco boom and rave culture, but over their account hangs the spectre of contemporary decline. In 2013, the UK had 1,700 nightclubs; by June 2024 there were 787.In its chronology, the book is a successor to Going to the Palais (2015), James Nott’s lauded analysis of the financial success and decline of Britain’s dance halls between 1918 and 1960, and their social impact. In a Nott Palais, people dance in couples, doing steps they have often paid to learn, accompanied by a band. In the Milestone and Morrison establishments of early-1960s London they are dancing solo, making up their own moves to the sound of vinyl records. “[B]oys and girls . . . go into this kinetic trance,” reports US writer Tom Wolfe on a visit, “dancing by themselves, just letting the music grab them”. Give or take a kinetic trance or two, it’s the way we still dance today.Leisure groups such as Rank and Mecca attempt to transplant these excitements from central London by opening new clubs in provincial towns, but the advent of flower power in the latter part of the 1960s is already transforming the culture. The mod audience is drawn predominantly from the working class. They like preppy looks and subterranean locales in which to take amphetamines and listen to singles made by Black Americans. The rise of the more middle-class hippy ushers in an appetite for LSD and flares. Hippies favour albums made by white Americans, and festivals in fields.But there is no stopping what Milestone calls Britain’s “passion for esoteric Black music”. In the industrial north, dance nights flourish and the booming car ownership of the early 1970s links towns such as Wigan, Wolverhampton and Blackpool in a network of all-nighters that becomes the Northern Soul scene. Entrepreneur Freddie Laker launches his “no-frills” transatlantic flights in the mid-1970s, allowing DJs to go to America, the mythical world that makes the music they love, and buy more 45s. “Each record,” as Morrison puts it, “is a sonic postcard, spreading the good word across the world.” By the early 1980s, cassette mixtapes brought back to the UK from the US are showcasing the 12-inch single: “No longer were people on and off the dance floor every three minutes.”There is an evanescent quality to the world the book inhabits. Underground scenes form, enter the mainstream, fade away. Visiting the location of once-influential New York club the Paradise Garage, Morrison finds it returned to its original use as a place to park cars. The apogee of the transatlantic exchange comes in the UK’s embrace of house music, an American form unknown in its homeland outside a few marginal spaces.By the mid-1990s, this arcane, gay, Black sound, made in bedrooms thousands of miles away, has transformed much of Britain into what Milestone memorably describes as “a community united by a love of dance music outside the mainstream, and the sense of euphoria that can be found on the dance floor”.Transatlantic Drift: The Ebb and Flow of Dance Music by Katie Milestone and Simon A Morrison Reaktion £12.99, 272 pagesJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
