Jeremy Deller: everybody in the place, an incomplete history of Britain 1984-1992 (2018)

Acid house is often portrayed as emerging sui generis, inspired by little more than a handful of London based DJs discovering ecstasy on a 1987 holiday to Ibiza. In truth, the explosion of acid house and rave in the UK was a reaction to a much wider and deeper set of fault lines in British culture, stretching from the heart of the city to the furthest reaches of the countryside, cutting across previously-impregnable boundaries of class, identity, and geography. With everybody in the place the Turner prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller upturns popular notions of rave and acid house, situating them at the very center of seismic social changes reshaping 1980s Britain. Rare and unseen archive materials map the journey from protest movements to abandoned warehouse raves, the white heat of industry bleeding into the chaotic release of the dance floor. We join a level politics class as they discover these stories for the first time, viewing this familiar narrative from the perspective of a generation for whom it’s already ancient history. We see how rave culture owes much to the battle of Orgreave and the underground gay clubs of Chicago as it does to shifts in musical style: not merely a cultural gesture, but the fulcrum for a generation shift in British identity, linking industrial histories and radical action to the wider expanses of a post-industrial future.

– source Centro Pucci

Everybody in the place, an incomplete history of Britain 1984-1992 is a film by Jeremy Deller, filmed in London in May 2018 with students of politics class, year 12-13 and their teacher Mr. Russell child.