You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. Today I'm talking to

Chal Ravens, the head of audio at Navarra Media and one of the presenters of the No Tags podcast.

She had a piece in a recent issue of the LRB on the history of rave in the UK.

It's a review of party lines, dance music and the making of modern Britain by Ed Gillett.

Hello, Chal, and thank you very much for joining me today.

Hello.

So shall we begin with the origin story or the founding legend, as you put it,

of how Acid House came to Britain from Obita in 1987,

even if the truth is perhaps a bit more complicated than that story?

Yes.

So throughout the book, Ed Gillett is quite careful to point out all the ways in which the past down legend

of dance music might differ from all of the things that actually happened. And so this founding

legend is about a group of men who became known as the Ibith of Four. And so they were Danny

Rampling, Paul Oakenfold, Johnny Walker and Nicky Holloway.

And in the 80s, they were all DJing and they decided to go on a holiday to Ibiza, which was

definitely some kind of destination for dance music at that time, but not yet what it would

grow into in the 90s. And they went on this holiday,

they took ecstasy, they went to a club called Amnesia, which in those days was an open

air club, and they watched a DJ called Alfredo play. And Alfredo is part of a kind of legend of Asset House because he plays this style of

music which comes to be known as Balleric, as in the Balleric Islands. And what Beleric really

means, although sometimes people think it just means a sort of chilled out island sound,

but what it really means is to play a mixture of different music. So they heard

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