Glastonbury Festival 2019 was a milestone event for Stormzy, grime MC from South London and Black British man of the moment: ‘London city, we the hottest in the world’, he rapped while performing ‘Vossi Bop’, after donning a Union Jack-styled stab-proof vest to open the show. It's a London Thing resonates with Stormzy's energy, filtering it through a historical and geographical lens. The book offers a rich history of three black dance music ‘multicultures’ of the 1980s and 1990s, exploring how they interacted with racist ‘logics of separation’ in urban spaces while celebrating London's status as a global centre of Afro-diasporic culture (pp. 1–2). It is the first book-length output of the Bass Culture research project led by Mykaell Riley (Reference Riley2019), a timely contribution to the growing conversation between writers, scholars and artists documenting sound-system music history and its current manifestations, from dub-reggae to grime and everything in between.

Arranged chronologically, the text blends social history with perspectives from cultural studies, geography and critical race studies. Melville weaves together his own experiences with over 40 interviews conducted since 1997 to shed light on how DJs and other club-goers experienced club culture. In this sense, It's a London Thing reads like an ethnography without being one: some of its best thick description appears at the beginning of each musical chapter in vivid, yet oddly decontextualised, first-person vignettes of nightlife experience. When outlining his theoretical framework, Melville works largely in dialogue with the scholarly legacies of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, and Lefebvre's theorisation of the production of space is also recruited to argue that music can function as a ‘spatialising technology’ (p. 5). This represents music's capacity to ‘divert space, recode the libidinal energies of the post-industrial city and create the space for new […] multicultural forms of sociality’ (pp. 6, 9). The ‘horrible word’ that is ‘multiculture’ is smoothly divided into ‘prescriptive’ and ‘descriptive’ types (pp. 9–10), with the latter entailing a relational model of lived experience and ideas like Gilroy's ‘conviviality’ that are the focus of the study (p. 8). These ideas are briefly articulated to some research on race, capital, culture and Empire (see especially Matera Reference Matera2015), setting the stage for the first chapter's extended account of urban London in terms of its racialised geography and encounter with migrants from 1950 to 1980.

As the longest in the book, Chapter 1's details are not linked to later sections or the introductory theory as often as I expected, but they nevertheless form a valuable resource, as Melville carefully explains how the state and individuals engendered a hostile urban environment. He reminds us that, from the exclusion of Caribbeans from decent housing to racist attacks deliberately carried out by police, many London areas were marked by violence, community backlash and subsequent riots – as recently as 1985 in Brixton. In response, unlicensed drinking and social spaces (known as ‘shubeens’) and sound systems sessions, together with soul clubs and the annual tradition of carnival, quickly formed an important realm of black musical culture from the 1960s. Meanwhile, pubs and football represented a largely white working-class sphere. Taking in these social divisions, crucial in their shaping of 1980s and 1990s nightlife, I grew sceptical of the thesis that music ‘remapped the city’: the impression is that racism remapped music, even if rare groove and jungle scenes went on to facilitate genuine experiences of urban multiculture and a reimagining of what inner city life could be.

Indeed, the warehouse party and rare groove scene of the early-to-mid 1980s comes to life in Chapter 2, depicted as a dynamic yet precarious social world for young adults of different identities. Rare groove was built on DJs’ curation of 1970s jazz-funk records by acts from The J.B.'s to Cymande. It leveraged the energy, danceability and popularity of black American music, drawing together what Melville calls collaborative ‘moral economies’ and a multicultural London ‘alliance’ (pp. 2, 21) that resisted racist door policies and other problems. Deftly illustrating a network of ad hoc warehouse parties and pirate radio stations linked to key dance clubs and tastemakers (such as Crackers in Soho and Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson), Melville also shows how rare groove revolved around a specialised, gendered dance culture. Such insights represent one of the book's greatest strengths: we learn, for example, about women and men who practised their moves throughout the week, inspired by soul divas and funky dancers, finding freedom in rare groove's ‘post-reggae’ sensibility (p. 126).

In Chapters 3 and 4 we arrive at a new era of London club culture, beginning in 1987. Acid house and rave culture exploded across Europe, spurred by the welcoming of house and techno music from the USA. Here, Melville astutely asserts the complicated blackness and hybridity of house as a musical form, while also dismantling the oft-cited ‘origin myth’ of acid house's colourful birth during an ecstasy-fuelled trip to Ibiza (pp. 145–7). By 1992, a new subculture and sound called jungle (Chapter 4) emerged, following the moral panic around rave culture and a desire, especially among black artists in some of the city's most deprived areas, to ‘remake London dance music’ (p. 202). This attitude was reflected in jungle's new ‘’ardkore’ (p. 201) sound: DJs combined fast, cut-up drum breaks with dub-reggae bass lines and elements of hip-hop and techno, a mixture that became the template for myriad other offshoots including the now highly successful EDM genre drum ‘n’ bass. Melville's synthesis of diverse sources and ideas is captivating, as he explores how jungle music allowed clubbers to articulate racialised violence, both real and symbolic, on the dancefloor, while also fostering a ‘strange patriotism’ as ‘the first truly British black music’ to be enjoyed by multiracial crowds (p. 196). Some readers may be disappointed that dubstep is not mentioned, despite its emergence in South London in the years 1999–2002 under many of the same social conditions and spatial divisions that shaped early jungle and grime – although such continuities, along with Stormzy and the recent rise of drill music in London, do get a nod in the concluding Epilogue.

Further questions arise. Did ‘multiracial’ London crowds always have a corresponding multiculture, if second-generation participants identified not as Caribbean or South Asian but as British (for example)? Critique might also be levelled at the casual deployment of terms such as ‘commercialisation’ (especially in Chapter 3), the gendering of jungle as ‘hypermasculine’ and ‘dark’ (see Stirling Reference Stirling2016), and the lack of a map illustrating how important clubs and parties were distributed across London. Moreover, I frequently found myself anticipating a Marxist critique that would better frame the varied spaces and class identities in Melville's narrative, synergise with Lefebvre's own politics, and provide a firmer context for terms like ‘proletaire’ that crop up in later chapters. Indeed, the ‘white middle class’ of 1980s and 1990s London is sometimes situated in opposition to a (presumably black) working class, but clearly some black DJs became very successful in the 1990s, and white pub-goers were major participants in cosmopolitan nightlife, especially raves. These messy overlaps point to whether the term ‘middle class’ can still be regarded as anything more than a distraction from the structural problems and divisions shared by the global post-industrial underclass (Weiss Reference Weiss2019).

In all, It's a London Thing is timely, valuable in its historical coverage, and at times thoroughly enjoyable to read. It critically documents an era of club culture still regularly viewed through rose-tinted glasses, complementing recent histories of rave culture and sound system music (see Muggs and Stevens Reference Muggs and Stevens2020) and earlier work by authors such as Lloyd Bradley. The book will be insightful for fans, students and scholars interested in any bass music with a connection to London, although the slightly loose theoretical agenda and occasionally unrefined prose may create some stumbling blocks within that wide readership. Minor gripes aside, I believe the study can absolutely meet Melville's stated goal of making genres like rare groove and jungle a more integral part of ‘the debate around British urban culture […] and our understanding of both the relation between music, race and space and the history of the post-colonial city’ (p. 8). It's a London Thing is a compelling exploration of dance music history, inviting us to keep our eyes and ears glued to where the music comes from and what it can teach us.