‘It was like a big union’: emotional communities, working-class subjectivities and the popular memory of acid house and rave

This article deals with the competing histories, mythologies and popular memories of the acid house and rave scene in the UK from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. We explore its cultural importance through an analysis of the feelings articulated by commentators across the political spectrum, from the disgust and anxiety expressed by contemporary journalists at the Daily Mail, via the popular memory of rave as resolving the issue of terrace violence, through to the more recent publications of former participants, particularly Simon Reynolds, Ed Gillett and Jeremy Deller, which argue that acid house should be best understood as a challenge to the politics of Thatcherism. Throughout, we argue that the post-structuralist modes of feeling dominant in the 1990s were and still are highly influential in the formulation of how acid house was conceptualised, written about and received in the British media. However, turning to the important and moving set of oral histories captured by the Blackburn Acid House Flashback project, we argue that neither a postmodernist framing of subjectivity nor the popular memories that circulate about the scenes can fully do justice to the particularity of these experiences.