As his rave film Everybody in the Place strikes a chord, the Turner prize-winning artist explains why
Brexit Britain needs acid house
In less than a week since it was broadcast on the BBC, Jeremy Deller’s Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 has enveloped viewers in a loved-up embrace. Across social media, even hard bitten, seen-it-all old ravers have been celebrating the film – now on iPlayer – and Deller says feedback he has had on
Twitter has been almost universally good, “apart from one guy with a Brexit party icon who said ‘I was expecting to relive the best days of my life but you’ve ruined it with this leftwing propaganda’”.
The premise of the documentary is pretty straightforward: contextualising the acid house/rave moment in the social movements of the 1980s: the miners’ strike, the Traveller convoys, British-Caribbean soundsystem culture and, of course, the LGBT culture of
Chicago that birthed house itself. But rather than, as Deller puts it, “the standard
BBC Four documentary where it’s middle-aged men talking with their record collections behind them, then some unattributed archive and a voiceover”, it’s structured more interestingly – as you would hope from a Turner prize-winning artist such as Deller.