One short step for man …

The dancefloor is both black hole destroyer of time and memories, and big bang breeder of stars and scenes. For novelist Andrew Holleran (Reference Holleran2001, p. 35), the dancefloor is ‘the aesthetic center of the universe’ yet, just as the universe itself expands and evolves, the dancefloor too is mutable, moveable. In Holleran's 1970s New York-based, gay incarnation, the dancefloor is rendered a ‘blonde rectangle of polished wood’ and yet as locus it might equally be a beach, field or burnt-out, broken-into warehouse. This account will consider the role of the dancefloor as breeder of stories and systems, interrogating the way music is then used within these literary texts – both specific references to music tracks and technologies and the more general impressionistic rendering of the sonic architecture of the story. The dancefloor, then, is both modest and massive, witness to both micro-moments and the birth of entire Subcultural Systems. Such Subcultural Systems rely for their homological, astrological coherence on three important factors, a constellation of effects that, combined, create the necessary mass to form a System. It is an unholy trinity of effects: music, intoxicants, literature. If these three celestial bodies elide, then a Subcultural System might be born, all from the beat of the dancefloor. In the late 1980s, for instance, we find such an eclipse: acid house music, the drug ecstasy and the words that coalesced and then cooled to form what this paper will define as Dancefloor-Driven Literature, fiction born of the dancefloor. The printed page is as flat as the dancefloor and yet worlds of imagination operate within its sphere. New grooves for new moons, new phases recorded not only in the grooves of records and the collective hippocampus of the dancers from the dance but in the graphological groove of words. UK ‘style bible’ The Face magazine contended that ‘you wouldn't think … that dance culture would be well-suited to literature. While dance music may be fluid and ephemeral there's few things more solid than 200 pages of paperback’ (Redhead Reference Redhead2000, p. xxii). In their Introduction to the ‘Literature and Music’ special issue of this journal, the editors also remarked that: ‘The original proposal for this special issue began by noting the common elements between the study of music and literature. It suggested that the two areas often deployed the same theories and methods, but it also observed that this shared perspective had generated relatively little dialogue’ (Popular Music, 2005, Vol 25/2).

Let us therefore opens comms channels. Let us consider the dialogue open.

… One giant leap for methodology

The Critical Imperative. The call was a coded signal sent out into deep scholarly space. Signs only. An appropriate response must necessarily be to reach for new approaches, whether that be the varied theories of fieldwork explored in a 2013 volume of the Electronic Dance Music Culture (hitherto EDMC) journal Dancecult, or the theoretical land grab of New Academicism staked out previously by the author of this account (Morrison Reference Morrison2014, p. 74). In these cold, outer reaches of the scholarly solar system, the academic must function almost as astronaut, such is the effect of leaving the academic mothership and undertaking this solo spacewalk – this EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) – weightless, floating, little theoretical gravity to pull one down, yet also starved of oxygen, thoughts discombobulating.Footnote ² In the 1960s pioneers of innerspace – using psychotropic drugs to open not only doors but wormholes – were called ‘psychonauts’ and the relationship and cultural synergies between psychedelia and cosmology, between hidden depths of inner space and farthest reaches of outer, are well-formed. Graham St John touches on just this terrain, exploring the ‘ways the space odyssey, and the adventures, trials and insights of astronauts, have been appropriated to narrate the psychedelic journey’ (St John Reference St John2014).

One must step very carefully, of course, when opening the airlock and performing this theoretical space walk in response to that signal. Even then, every scholarly spacewalk needs that umbilical, methodological cord anchoring astronaut to the mothership. Indeed the academic blending of musical and literary approaches is not itself new, and the antecedents of musico-literary intermediality must be acknowledged, as well as more recent accounts (Brown Reference Brown1948; Scher Reference Scher2004; Wolf Reference Wolf1999), although an interstellar intermediality might be said to advance such discourse. At this juncture we must be clear on the marked difference between intertextuality and intermediality, where text refers to the object, and media to the vessel for carrying and communicating that object. In The Musicalization of Fiction, Wolf is helpful in clarifying this distinction, arguing that ‘intermediality research is a logical continuation of the interest in “intertextuality”, which has emerged since the 1970s (intermediality is in fact often conceived of as a special case of intertextuality’), while agreeing with the principle distinction that ‘intermediality is “the participation of more than one medium of expression in the signification of a human artefact”’ (Wolf Reference Wolf1999, p. 1) rather than the text object. In methodological terms, this paper will build from a three-way taxonomy in which music might be used in Dancefloor-Driven Literature: a figurative or metaphorising use of music; a mechanical use in terms of writing musically and the use of music in the construction of the text; and finally a contextual, perhaps subtextual, use of music to provide a rich diegetic soundtrack for the narrative, signifying subculture. If there seems to be a lacuna of any overt musicological interpretation in that taxonomy, then that is deliberate, perhaps realising fears outlined by Richard Middleton (Reference Middleton2000, p. 3) in his introduction to Reading Pop. The interest here is demonstrably not in the music as text, but dancefloor as context, where music is foregrounded in terms of its consumption, not production. American critic Lawrence Kramer calls this ‘cultural musicology’ (Smyth Reference Smyth2008, p. 5), and that broadly holds true for this spacewalk, necessarily concerned more with the cultural resonance of music than its immanent tonality, with the way writers write about music.

For concision, this exploration will fix coordinates in time and space: the 1990s and, broadly speaking, the Mancunian dancefloor diaspora, when the planets in this system seemed to align: fashion, crime, drugs, clubs, music. The period is not fin de siècle, then, but rather fin de millénium, before (as identified by Dom Phillips is his Reference Phillips2009 work Superstar DJs Here We Go) this System suffered the cataclysmic asteroid impact of 31 December 1999, when the UK's key parties failed commercially, and dramatically.Footnote ³ In this corner of the galaxy we can locate a time when the literati infiltrated the discothèque, and used the tools of fiction to try to make sense of its chaos. Smyth, using the term ‘music-novel’, states: ‘The contemporary British music-novel is, in this sense, a portal (albeit one of many) through which we may access some of the defining concerns of our period’ (Smyth Reference Smyth2008, p. 9). A portal is indeed what we have with Dancefloor-Driven Literature, a portal through which we can even now, some 25 years beyond the initial big bang of acid house culture, view and understand its stories, preserved in literature. Two of these orbiting literary artefacts will now be pulled down in order to be more closely interrogated.

Disco Biscuits

Penguin's 1997 collection Disco Biscuits is the urtext for this investigation. An assembly of 19 short stories, the collection is subtitled ‘New Fiction from the chemical generation’; in itself semantically interesting for advancing the preposition ‘from’ rather than ‘for’, suggesting a communal, collective sensibility on the part of the authors.Footnote ⁴ In conversation with the author of this account,Footnote ⁵ Champion recalls: ‘Disco Biscuits was an experiment really for me trying to find writers who I wanted to read, writing about the life I was living myself, something I could relate to’. The collection formed as an overt attempt to meld the interlocking worlds of music and literature, two worlds that orbited Champion's own life, in order to reflect contemporary society back upon itself. A call went out to writers who were interested in stories that revolved around the dancefloor (the brief simply requested ‘a celebration of acid house’). Fernández reports that ‘Sarah Champion … believed that the porous quality of the new fiction was something natural; fiction could receive the influence of disco music just as the Beat Generation in the 1950s had been affected by the beat of bebop’ (Fernández Reference Fernández2013, p. 6) and these short hits, these quick narrative highs, became the Beat, the Gonzo, the last word from the underground in the dying days of the 20th century, a point reinforced in Champion's own introduction to the collection:

In deep scholarly space, readers can hear you scream

Several of the principal progenitors of Dancefloor-Driven Literature are located within both Disco Biscuits and Steve Redhead's Reference Redhead2000 collection Repetitive Beat Generation. Here we find a title that itself plays on the Beat Generation scene of the 1950s, as well as the UK's Criminal Justice and Disorder Act of 1994, which in Section 63 (1b) describes music played at raves as ‘sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. If the ‘succession of repetitive beats’ seemed culturally alien to the ears of quotidian society, the literature was similarly impregnable. Dancefloor-Driven authors reached for both the electronic beat and the lexicon of the dancefloor, in the kind of musico-literary intermedial blurring of forms required to contain such an atmosphere within the pages of a book. A subculture defines itself by its language and signs. ‘Disco Biscuits’ is in itself slang for ecstasy and in this way a subculture found it could hide behind the arras of argot, a thin page of thinly veiled code behind which Champion exposed ‘my punk … my psychedelia’, in Hebdige's terms, the last spectacular subculture of the 20th century (Hebdige 1979, p. 97). Disco Biscuits authors themselves actually reference this subterranean culture in altogether extra-terrestrial terms. In the Martin Millar story ‘How Sunshine Star-Traveller Lost His Girlfriend’, people rave under the stars in the ‘disco al fresco’ fervor that feeds so many outdoor events and Millar also references the famed Full Moon Parties, where we witness a character ‘raise his arm to the full moon’ (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 90), as though hedonism itself were tied to the heavens, locked to the lunar. Such a relationship is not always positive, as Sunshine Star-Traveler reports: ‘I'm a victim of the stars. Possibly even a chaotic rip in the fabric of the universe’ (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 96).

We find memes of music also run as sonic seams through the collection, fulfilling each of the uses in the taxonomy outlined earlier. In figurative terms, in the story ‘Sangria’ we hear that ‘the drug is like the music’ (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 128) and in the story ‘Inbetween’ we hear a character report, ‘your conversation is like techno, one repetition after another’ (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 245). Within this urtext, these fictional characters even question in philosophical terms where music even originates: ‘Like, where does music come from, right? Out of the body. Heartbeat, breathing, stomach pumping food: they've all got their own bpm’ (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 102), prefacing the analysis of inner and outer space that this account will detail in its conclusion. The second use of music relates to writing musically, and certainly we find evidence of such approaches in the volume. Mike Benson writes impressionistically, dropping to the lower case in order to engender a stream-of-consciousness, melodic flow: ‘i can hear thumping banging grooving pulsing sounds all around me. I can feel it feel me. i'm inside it as it enters me’ (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 24).

Content analysis reveals that the key approach from these authors is the third use of music, however, in terms of its use as context, in constructing authentic subcultural grooves where even smells of the dancefloor are rendered in words. In ‘Sangria’ we are told: ‘The music's pure’ (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 134), and later that: ‘The music has been stripped down so there is nothing but the beat, the first instrument of the world’ (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 136). Some authors choose to paint more precisely, with narrative detail that might include musical genres, or nuanced details of DJ technique. In the Nicholas Blincoe story ‘Ardwick Green’ we are told of a DJ's process: ‘The idea was to keep it ambient, maybe a little Balearic. But Jess only functioned in excess of 150 bpm's and the idea of a smooth cross-fade was the jump-cut, one-twenty to one-ninety bang’ (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 9). The DJ in the Charlie Hall story ‘The Box’ reports: ‘I play house. I keep it fat and funky. I want to convey that happy sexy vibe I got through funk, as well as the moody weird shit and the trippy frequencies of dub’ (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 153) and Ben Graham effectively transcribes the aural into the linguistic: ‘Echoing, stygian dub and unholy blasts of klonking techno stream from the large, battered speakers that balance precariously at either end of the room. The soundtrack only heightens the sense that we've wandered into some self-contained, alien landscape, entirely detached from the outside world’ (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 164).

Some authors go further, in including real DJs, real clubs and real music tracks, all in the course of rendering the architecture of the fiction. Content analysis of such subcultural product placement reveals the following DJs: Andrew Weatherall (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 73), David Holmes (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 151), Kenny Ken, Fabio, Mickey Finn (all Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 210); and parties: Clink Street raves (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 67), Shoom, Spectrum, Super Nature, Sunrise (all Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 72), Boy's Own (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 73), Joy and Taste (both Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 111) and Full Circle (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 154). There are also specific music references. In the Alan Warner story ‘Bitter Salvage’, we are also told: ‘The DJ is only playing the 45s of Funkadelic, A sides and B sides in chronological order (implying the lucky bastard has two copies of each single): “Better By The Pound”, “Stuffs & Things”, “Let's Take It To The Stage”, “Undisco Kid” etc.’ (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 263). In the Puff story ‘Two Fingers’, we hear how ‘Kenny Ken got back into the groove and dropped a crucial slab of reggae-fused breakbeat. I wasn't too sure if he was mixing Desmond Dekker's “Israelites” into the track but it definitely sounded like it. I recognised the “So Thata Every Mouth Can Be Fed” refrain’ (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 211) and a little later how, ‘Kenny Ken went on to finish his set with a storming junglist version of Eek-A-Mouse's “Ganja Smuggling”, before throwing down the gauntlet to Fabio to keep it rocking “Inna Ruff Tuff Drum'n‘Bass Stylee”’ (Champion Reference Champion1997, p. 212). Puff's story is almost fan fiction, the DJs and music described subcultural shorthand for setting the scene, allowing the cognisant reader to step beyond the red rope of the page and into the VIP area of the story itself. As well as the broader real-world heritage and cultural-historical infrastructure of the rave scene – the importance of the summer of 1988, the origin of the drug ecstasy, Ibiza as locale – music genres such as drum & bass, jungle and house are all used as details upon the canvas of the page, all to render the authenticity of the subculture described.

Without Disco Biscuits as cultural artefact, then, historical-cultural authenticity dissipates. We can understand the late 1980s club scene because we can view it through this prism, this portal, provided by Disco Biscuits. The short story format seemed perfect for capturing these ephemeral highs. The Disco Biscuits authors did write novels but many found it harder to sustain that literary high across the longer form. Champion reports: ‘Taking that to the level of writing a novel is so hard … I think that's possibly why it didn't become a wider genre, as well’. For the purposes of this paper we must now stake a claim for one novel, 1989's Trip City, forming the very first work of Dancefloor-Driven Literature in its reformation as an ostensibly ‘rave’ narrative. Its author is our Neil Armstrong, our discosmonaut planting the first flag on the moon. This claim will have controversial implications as it predated, by many years, the work of the author held up to be the ‘poet laureate of the Chemical Generation’.Footnote ⁶

Trip City

Author Trevor Miller did not feature in the Disco Biscuits collection, an omission all the more remarkable when you consider that not only does he come from Manchester, like Champion, but was actually born and bred in the same suburb, Chorlton-cum-Hardy. However, his work remains fundamental to this interstellar exploration of intermediality, Trip City fulfilling points two and three of the taxonomy of musico-literary function, in terms of music being used both mechanically within (and indeed without) the text, and also for providing its silent diegetic disco soundtrack. The links between the musical and the literary are found in the subcutaneous matter of the text, but also in the desire of the author to draw upon the musical in the creation of the literary, reaching for the rhythms of music as literary muse. Miller claims ‘Originally I wanted to write the whole thing with a 4/4 rhythm to mimic House beats’.Footnote ⁷ As we have identified, house music is characterised by a ‘series of repetitive beats’, a legal definition that might also be considered musicological. Certainly Miller's clipped language is used leanly, almost electronically, in this novel. Trip City opens with the line: ‘It was a blue Monday. Grey light split the blinds. Traversed the wooden floor. Then it hit the bed. Cold and piercing and harsh. There was no gentleness left’ (Miller Reference Miller1989, p. 1). Beyond the reference to ‘Blue Monday’, the most successful track by Manchester electronic band New Order, we find linguistically precise, adjective-light prose that defines, in stylistic terms, the novel that will follow. One might even scan the lines as you would a line of poetry – or a sequencer such a Cubase might track a line of music – detecting the beat and the metre of the prose, in a simple act of scansion that reveals music beyond the words, stars beyond the sky.

In terms of musical mechanics, Trip City is important in this interrogation for another central reason. Smyth contends that the novel is a ‘legible form – one that is usually consumed alone and in silence’, adding that, ‘the novel does not produce any remarkable sound of itself, other than perhaps a rustle of pages as it is being read or a dull thud as it is set aside or replaced on a shelf. In fact, silence appears to be built into the novel's historical, sociological and commercial heritage’ (Smyth Reference Smyth2008, p. 3). Trip City runs entirely counter to that proposition. In 2015 The Huffington Post declared that ‘The only way to write a story set in an EDM scene is to make a novel with a soundtrack’ and yet a quarter of a century earlier… that is precisely what happened. Trip City was published, and packaged, with a soundtrack produced by Manchester electronic music pioneer Gerald Simpson and as such, this novel now marks a fundamental intersection in this interstellar interrogation. More commonly known as A Guy Called Gerald, his soundtrack was covermounted as a cassette (very much the available technology of the time).Footnote ⁸ Gerald's music was subtitled ‘The soundtrack of the novel’, the attendant suggestion that you might read Miller's words to the sonic backdrop of Gerald's beats, hinting of a prosumer agenda,Footnote ⁹ in that providing such music implies a more proactive agency on behalf of the reader, constituting the remixed reality of the story in the process of combining its musical and linguistic elements. Gerald's music is dark, urban, urbane; the effect is to build tension and menace in the music, influencing the reading of the words. The titular track, for instance, is an unsettling, jarring piece of nocturnal electronica, the sounds of the city sitting above and underneath hi-hats, hand claps and a dark rumbling, bassline. ‘Trip City Mambo’ contains a warmer sound but ‘Valentine's Theme’ builds once again from an ominous bassline and haunting, almost Gregorian vocals that suggest a dark disco-pia. The idea of a ‘literary soundtrack’ was picked up by other publishers who provided soundtracks to accompany the publication of the text. In this way Disco Biscuits was released as an accompanying compilation CD (although not packaged with the book); the US version of Simon Reynolds' Generation Ecstasy, titled Energy Flash, came with a covermounted CD soundtrack, while Calcutt and Shephard note that: ‘In 1997 Welsh's Ecstasy was even tied in with a dance CD’, in reference to an author we will hear more of shortly (Calcutt and Shephard Reference Calcutt and Shephard1998, p. xv). This interstellar exploration has already touched on cinematic reference points in studying the greater cultural canopy, and must now also indulge in a process of interstellar interdisciplinarity in order to borrow theory from cinema and further define ‘diegesis’. In cinematic terms, diegetic music refers to that sound for which the source is apparent: a car stereo or radio, where non-diegetic therefore relates to the soundtrack or score of the film, undetected by its protagonists. This account will now move on to make a claim for literary diegesis within fiction, but must accept that non-diegetic music can only exist in literature in such paratextual material, for instance the soundtrack to accompany the reading of this account itself.

Disco diegetics

Diegesis must now be repurposed for a literary function and, using this literary diegesis, we find that Miller creates soundtracks to his club environment via the DJ protagonists that he ultimately, as author, controls. For instance we are introduced to Jay: ‘Jay flicked the crossfader. A fresh mix stuttered in … The V.U. meters pulsed, peaking red out of green. The floor was rammed. A twelve inch static in his hand’ (Miller Reference Miller1989, p. 173). Miller also uses music diegetically in the nightclub construct, where it might be perceived as background, a wash of sound, broad sonic brush strokes to engender a more impressionistic atmosphere in the prose. We read (or in actuality, hear) how, at The Tower nightclub: ‘The music upstairs was hip-hop. House. There were no soulful grooves. The crowd danced predictably. One step wonders’ and later how: ‘The soundsystem pulsed from Hitman Records. A house track from Chicago. Machine gun samples cut the road’ (Miller Reference Miller1989, p. 137). Into this literary landscape Miller then blows a fabulist drug, the green chemical FX, further warping the soundtrack. Indeed it is so powerful and penetrative that, in an interesting typographic innovation, it turns even the print of the novel green.

Is this a book driven from the dancefloor, then, or a book with dancefloors within it? In conversation with the author, Miller argues: ‘You can't have been in and around as many discos as I was and not have it seep into you. It's like cigarette smoke, you know … I think when you go to fantastic discos that's what happens. It infects you. It gets on your clothes’. Now a screenplay writer and film director based in Los Angeles, Miller reveals a cinematic method to his creativity, a personal projector whirring within his head. He explains to the author: ‘My drug hallucinations, they would often feature Jesus, bits of films, Spaghetti Westerns, the assassination in Day of the Jackal’ and such a rich cerebral mis-en-scene must, of course, be accompanied by a soundtrack. The third musico-literary intermedial function, as defined by our methodological taxonomy, is the diegetic role of music within the text, its silent soundtrack and content analysis reveals references to specific music artists and songs: Kid Creole (Miller Reference Miller1989, p. 16), Kylie Minogue (Miller Reference Miller1989, p. 20), ‘Car Wash’ (Miller Reference Miller1989, p. 108), ‘Superstition’ (Miller Reference Miller1989, p. 167), ‘Phuture’ (Miller Reference Miller1989, p. 173), ‘Superfly Guy’ (Miller Reference Miller1989, p. 175) and Bill Withers (Miller Reference Miller1989, p. 240), as well a music genres such as acid house (Miller Reference Miller1989, pp. 8, 173 and 177), jazz (Miller Reference Miller1989, p. 100), hip-hop (Miller Reference Miller1989, p. 108), house (Miller Reference Miller1989, pp. 108, 137, 174) and funk (Miller Reference Miller1989, p. 167). In this world constructed from words the choices for soundtrack are perhaps surprising, where sometimes, for literary effect, the marvelous must be revealed as mundane: ‘He shivered. Buttoned up his jacket. There was a tune in his head. ‘High Noon’? No. It was the Shake ‘n’ Vac commercial’ (Miller Reference Miller1989, p. 2).

Such real-world music examples are aural signifiers, underpinning a bed of realism beneath the text, sonic signposts by which the reader might orientate themselves through the text and onto its dancefloor. Stephen Benson argues that ‘Fiction serves as an earwitness to the role of music in everyday life, a record of why, where and how music is made, heard and received’ (Benson Reference Benson2006, p 4), appreciating the sonic in the semantic, identifying the music that lies beyond the page. We might go further therefore, in arguing that the diegetic music within the text almost becomes non-diegetic, merging into a rolling score for the novel; it is silent, its volume turned up by the a priori cognisance of the reader in a process redolent of a subcultural take on relevance theory, drawn from linguistics. In terms of this deep scholarly spacewalk we might, then, consider the role of music, in Derridean terms, behind the words, in a kind of cosmic hauntology. Taking this to an even further intermedial dimension in pursuing cinema connections, we might reference Christopher Nolan's Reference Christopher2014 film Interstellar, in whose powerful narrative we discover not only what lies behind the words, but behind the bookshelves: astronauts, galaxies, other dimensions.

The dancefloor needed Miller to tell its stories. Miller reports (erroneously in the context of its argument): ‘As far as I'm concerned I don't think before or since, many people had written club-based things, for a number of reasons but I think mostly because club people – present company excluded – are never normally that literary’. There had, of course, been nightclub books before (Colin MacInnes’ 1959 novel Absolute Beginners among others), but in this late-millennial rave reconstituting of music and words, Miller was an early pioneer of intermedial, interstellar space. He recalls: ‘So many people wanted to write the club culture novel but none of them did! They didn't write anything serious’. However one name looms large, according to Collin ‘the most extraordinary literary phenomenon of Ecstasy culture’ (Collin Reference Collin2009, p. 302), the author whom theorist Stan Beeler calls ‘the most prominent writer of the Chemical Generation’ (Beeler Reference Beeler2007, p. 56).

In 2001, in a previous life as a music journalist the author was called upon to interview Irvine Welsh, who said precipitously: ‘I used to do loads of clubbing and that's what I wanted to capture – to get that perpetual movement into my writing, the beats and rhythms of the language’. Like Miller, Welsh also sought to write to this electronic beat and it was his first novel, 1994's Trainspotting, that arguably opened the wormhole to this subcultural subspace, quickly leading to a ubiquity of rave novels that Collin refers to as ‘pulp fiction drugsploitation’ (Collin Reference Collin2009, p. 301). Miller reports in our conversation that, although Welsh has apparently since denied his influence, Miller recalls seeing him in the audience of his one-man show, based on Trip City, that he took to the Edinburgh Festival, arguing: ‘This is what I'd say about Irvine Welsh. Although his wasn't ostensibly set in nightclubs I think I blazed the trail a little bit’. In the light of Miller's recent words, might Trainspotting remain as pioneering as first perceived or, rather, a half-decade earlier, do we find in Trip City the true founding text of Dancefloor-Driven Literature? Certainly Miller is adamant on this point, arguing that it would be hard to avoid tripping over Trip City when it was published: ‘I was on The Other Side of Midnight with Tony Wilson, I was on fucking everything’.Footnote ¹⁰ Trip City was launched in a nightclub, and like the Disco Biscuits PR campaign, Miller also toured the book around the clubscene, which he admits he based on Spalding Gray's Visit to Cambodia, explaining, ‘I thought … I'll do the disco version’. This is something Irvine Welsh would go on to do with the Arthrob events, leading Miller to report, perhaps factually loosely: ‘Again, I'm the person who pioneered that, not him. He'd never been to a disco in his life’. However what is not in question is that in 1989, five years before Trainspotting, Miller was alone, on his own subcultural spacewalk: ‘When in 1989 was there the confluence of discos and literature? I didn't know of one’.Footnote ¹¹

Subcultural Systems Theory

Through this paper there have been hints that there are larger systems at work behind the individual activity of these works of fiction, beyond the finite totality of the page, of the dancefloor. The focus of this particular paper is not the arbitrary construction of signs within a text; it looks not only down to the page but up to the stars, to build structures between – and beyond – those texts. This notion of interstellar intermediality is the mechanic by which words gather not only on the page, or within a book, but also build bridges of semantic meaning and understanding across galaxies of cultural space. As academics, we might operate in an environment that is post-structural, but that does not preclude the construction of systems, of patterns in the sky. The next step is therefore to understand and value the impact each system has had on the other and in this way Subcultural Systems Theory itself expands (Tench and Yeomans Reference Tench and Yeomans2006, p. 27) so that we can see that these three-way systems not only operate within their own immured space, but exert influence across time in directly affecting other systems that form.

If we therefore imagine EDMC to be one such system, we can locate, at its core, the sonic scene. We might then further imagine these literary artefacts orbiting, almost as moons, influencing the ebb and flow of the music, conferring gravity, and gravitas. It is these re/presentations that bestow cultural significance, that give subculture substance. As outlined in the opening of this paper, there stands an unholy trinity of effects – of beats and words and intoxicants – that align in order to birth a new subcultural system. There can be no scene in the absence of any one of these essential elements, in itself nothing more than Einstein posited with his Theory of Relativity: bodies have mass, they affect one another. This must be extended to literary bodies, and cultural mass. Further, while the printed page, even an empty dancefloor, might be said to be ostensibly flat, and two-dimensional the words and worlds described create the third dimension. Folded into the page we can also add the fourth dimension. Time. In this way we can appreciate that what we are seeing in the stars in the sky, in the words on the page, is not in the present, but rather signifying light from the past, taking light years to travel through subspace: the once spectacular light of a dying subculture.

E for Ephemeral

The dancefloor is a multi-authored text. Each dancer from the dance adds their memory, each discosmonaut a privileged witnesses to this subcultural big bang. However, one must appreciate that memory is also fragile, ephemeral. Novels, however, endure – their shelf life extends beyond that of a newspaper or magazine. These literary artefacts are therefore robust enough to carry the coding for the subculture itself – subcultural philology – in the words locked within, for future generations to decode. This, then, is the archive, the DNA of a subculture encoded within the printed page, preserved in literary formaldehyde, time capsules sent to the future for cultural archaeologists to unlock, to understand the subcultural truth preserved within. In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard writes: ‘We can no longer observe the stars in the sky; we must now observe the subterranean deities that threaten a collapse into the void’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard1990, p. 195), but I would further respond that we have now moved on, adapted, now equipped with the ability to look both up and down, to conduct the kind of dual astrological historicism that seeks to chart subcultures in the stars by reference to these subterranean basements of the city. Oscar Wilde claimed that we are all lying in the gutter staring in the stars, but maybe the objective must be to appreciate the gutter with the same poetic elegance as the heavens, to elevate the cult, the pulp, the Dancefloor-Driven Literature to rarified heights of the ‘canon’, ascending the high/low axis of literature defined by F.R. Leavis et al. The question then becomes why, after a quarter of a century, would readers want to re-experience these events, as though it were still possible to breathe in the smoke of the dancefloor, secondhand. While more space would have allowed theories of audience and reception to unpack this area, Walter Benjamin discusses the notion of the ‘saved night’ (Middleton 2006, p. 26), and perhaps, after all, we might repurpose this notion for what Dancefloor-Driven Literature has now provided: a save button for the nocturnal and nefarious; an archive of subjective, subcultural history; books as subcultural back-up.

Once the needle has left the record, once the dancers have quit the dance and made their way through the liminal edge of the dancefloor, as discosmonauts we can, therefore, still understand the events that took place at the very ‘aesthetic center of the universe’, this ‘blonde rectangle of polished wood’, this big bang breeder of cultures, memories, stories. Understand that there is poetry in the gutter and music beyond the words. That there are astronauts behind the bookshelves.