I’m taking part in the annual Louder Than Words Club Culture panel at Innside Manchester on Saturday 13th November. Tickets and more details from Eventbrite

“The club scene has continually reformed and regenerated, whether the lindyhoppers in 1920s Harlem nightspots, pill-popping mods in 1960s swinging Soho or the ravers who partied their way through 1988’s Second Summer of Love. Throughout those years, however, rarely has the dancefloor fallen entirely silent, as it has done through the global pandemic. But the needle has now dropped firmly back into the groove once again, the lights are back on, and can we, in fact, party our way out of the pandemic? Do we all deserve this chance to let loose? Or is that entirely the wrong response?

This panel has been convened to drill down into these conversations and contingencies in order to decode the disco and decide a) Whether there was ever, in fact, a point to this party and b) what (if any) role the club scene might have in our journey out from the Lockdown. Still to be finalised, the panel includes the legendary Haçienda DJ Graeme Park, back within the shadow of that great nightclub, in a rare personal appearance before he leads the Haçienda Classical event later in the night at the Warehouse Project. Joining him is Vass Lauricella, MD of club culture PR agency Urban Rebel, working dancefloors across the planet, and Professor Martin James, a music writer and academic who over the last 20 years has been punched by Goldie, kidnapped by Italian DJs and still found time to write books such as State of Bass: Jungle – The Story So Far. The panel will once again be chaired by Louder Than Word’s Dr Simon A. Morrison, columnist for DJmagazine and editor of Ministry in Ibiza; author of books such as Discombobulated and Dancefloor-Driven Literature. Now Programme Leader for the Music Journalism degree at the University of Chester, he has never ben punched by Goldie... but he did once go raving in Ibiza with Judith Chalmers.

So on Saturday 13th November, Louder Than Words moves to an altogether more electronic beat, in deciding whether there was ever a ‘politics of dancing’… or merely the ‘politics of oo oo oo feeling good’.”