The Second Summer of Love

The phrase echoes the original Summer of Love of 1967, the hippie high point in San Francisco. Writers reached for it to capture a similar sense of sudden, euphoric cultural change, this time driven by electronic music and a spirit of peace and unity on the dancefloor.

The label usually covers the summers of 1988 and 1989, though the energy carried on well into the early 1990s.

Acid house moved out of a few clubs and into warehouses, fields and disused buildings across the country. Parties grew from hundreds to thousands, organised through pirate radio, flyers and answerphone messages that gave out meeting points at the last minute to stay ahead of the police.

The crowd was strikingly mixed for the time, cutting across the usual lines of class, football rivalry and region. On the floor, the mood was famously friendly, and that openness became as much a part of the story as the music.

A media panic and a wave of policing followed, and by the early 1990s new laws were being drawn up to target unlicensed gatherings. But the culture had already reshaped British nightlife, fashion and music for good.

Superclubs, the modern festival, and decades of dance music all grew out of this window. It is the cultural big bang that DOVEDUP’s heritage reaches back to.