Dancehalls, glitterballs and DJs

by Bruce Lindsay

ISBN: 9781800505971

Published: 2025

The history of disco and its predecessors is often portrayed as one of glamour and excess. Dancehalls, Glitterballs and DJs expands this history, to encompass tatty but much-loved provincial dancehalls, mobile DJs with home-made light shows and rusty vans, one-hit-wonders on the chicken-in-a-basket circuit, and nights out with Jane Austen. It's a vital, fun-packed history of a cultural movement that, despite the vagaries of fashion, remains part of the entertainment scene today. Dancehalls, Glitterballs and DJs begins in Georgian Britain's Assembly Rooms and Pleasure Gardens, then moves through the vulgar activities in the penny gaffes, the arrival of the first gramophone and disc jockey, the Jazz Age, the swing-era dance bands, and the post-war ascendency of recorded music and the discotheque. It then explores the dance music scene that spread across Britain's towns and cities, when teens and twenty-somethings danced where glamour meant no denim, no trainers--a world epitomised by...