Once the subject of tabloid moral panics, dance music’s early days are now being celebrated in books and galleries. What can 21st-century Britain learn from the ‘second summer of love’?
Visitors entered this summer’s Sweet Harmony exhibition through a tangle of ripped-up fencing, as if stealthily gaining access to a forbidden ritual. Inside, old-skool rave anthems rattled the Saatchi Gallery’s window frames. On the walls were hundreds of flyers alongside photographs of saucer-eyed youngsters waving air-horns and wearing T-shirts adorned with amusingly brazen drug references.
Dave Swindells, the man responsible for many of these classic photographs – and, indeed, many of the most memorable visual documentations of 1988’s summer of love – was struck by how much his images meant to strangers whose reckless youth he captured. “It’s emotional. I was getting messages from people saying how amazing it was that they were on the walls of the Saatchi!”
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Continue reading...by Phil Harrison via Electronic music | The Guardian
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