> Also a book by UK writer Sheryl Garrett - forget the title. She > is the first > writer to actually broach the gender imbalance in the > industry/music and is > very sympathetic to the Black artists who pioneered the music, > from Chicago > and Detroit - a contrast to the dubious revisonism of Reynolds. I > am yet to > read it but have it on authority that it's one of the best. >
Here's the info on Garrett's book. It's new to me and isn't available through Amazon.com in the US but can be purchased on the UK site. Curious to know if anyone's read it. Adventures in Wonderland Sheryl Garratt List Price: £7.99 Our Price: £6.39 Paperback - 346 pages ( 6 May, 1999) Headline; ISBN: 0747258465 http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0747258465/o/qid=968704525/sr=2-2/0 26-9688576-7726859 Reviews Amazon.co.uk Tracing a history that takes in the Stonewall riots of 1969, New York's gay clubs, the advent of disco (much reviled at the time), and the genesis of House in Chicago and Techno in Detroit, through to the British Northern Soul scene, Ibiza, and the vast illegal raves that terrified and appalled little England, Sheryl Garratt's Adventures In Wonderland is a surprisingly full account of the emergence and evolution of contemporary dance culture: surprising in that, given its 330-odd pages, Garratt manages to include interviews with many of the major players and with clubbers themselves, as well as her own personal reminiscences of many of the key events (post-1980) of this history. She also manages deftly to place this monumental transformation of youth culture in a carefully framed social context, whether in America, Ibiza, or Britain-- the result is a book that is both a sober social and historical document and a breathtakingly thrilling story. The book is also valuable in its exploration of the often ambiguous politics of the club scene--its attraction was felt by socialist utopians and by right- wing libertarians, and its profits attracted viciously unpleasant interventions by the criminal underworld--and the even more ambiguous politics of drugs, especially Ecstasy. After describing the heady communality of early shared experiences, Garratt's final chapter begins with the legacy of the death of Leah Betts in 1995. Adventures In Wonderland is a compellingly readable inheritor of Sarah Thornton's ground-breaking Club Cultures and Matthew Collin's Altered State: place it alongside Simon Reynolds' Energy Flash (which focuses more on the music itself) and, if you were there, wait for the heady rush of nostalgia; if you weren't, you can finally understand what was going on; and if you never understood, you can learn to love it now. --Burhan Tufail Customer Comments Average Customer Rating: Number of Reviews: 1 Dan Scott from Melbourne, Australia , 15 November, 1999 Feel the love Sheryl Garratt was there and felt the love (and in some cases, the hate)of the emerging club culture in the Uk of the late eighties. More to the point, she knows that if you want to know where you're going you've gotto know where you're at. Her encyclopaedic guide to the many roots of modern electronic dance music is one of the joys of this book, particularly her knowledge of Larry Levan's Loft years in NYC as well as the Chicago scene. Her evocation of the 1987 summer of love with all the acid teds, Centreforce and Spectrum:Theatre of Madness and all those Balearic beats takes me all the way back 12 years - it's almost as if it really DID happen because someone has written the account par excellence about my youth!
