The SLMan Culture List – August

Party Lines is a ground-breaking new history of UK dance music from the illicit reggae blues dances and acid-rock free festivals of the 1970s, through the ecstasy-fuelled Second Summer of Love in 1988, to the increasingly corporate dance music culture of the post-Covid era. Ed Gillett explores dance music’s pivotal role in the social, political and economic shifts on which modern Britain has been built. Taking in the Victorian moralism of the Thatcher years, the far-reaching restrictions of the Criminal Justice Act in 1994, and the resurgence of illegal raves during the pandemic, Party Lines charts an ongoing conflict, fought in basement clubs, abandoned warehouses and sunlit fields, between the revolutionary potential of communal sound and the reactionary impulses of the British establishment. Brought to life with clarity and depth, this is social and cultural history at its most immersive and shocking.

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Like every other 17-year-old boy, Joe has one eye on his studies, the other on his social life – smoking, Britpop, girls. He's looking ahead to a gap year full of travel and adventure before university when his teacher – attractive, mid-30s – takes an interest in him. For his final two years at school, he is bound to her, a woman twice his age, in an increasingly tangled web of coercion, sex and lies. Their affair, a product of complex grooming and a shocking abuse of authority, is played out in the corridors of one of Britain's major private schools, under the noses of people who suspected, even knew, but said nothing. Thirty years on, this is Joe's gripping record of the illicit relationship that dominated his adolescence and dictated the course of his life. With a heady dose of 90s nostalgia and the perfectly captured mood of those final months at school, Joe charts the enduring legacy of deceit and the indelibility of decisions made at 17.

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This wildly entertaining account of the golden age of the action movie charts Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s carnage-packed journey from enmity to friendship against the backdrop of Reagan’s America and the Cold War. Revealing fascinating untold stories of the colourful characters who ascended in their wake – high-kickers Chuck Norris and Jackie Chan, glowering tough guys Dolph Lundgren and Steven Seagal, and quipping troublemakers Jean-Claude Van Damme and Bruce Willis – it chronicles the rise of the invincible action hero who used muscle, martial arts or the perfect weapon to save the day. It also looks at how, as the 1990s rolled on, the glory days of these macho men began to fade. Drawing on candid interviews with the stars themselves, plus their collaborators, friends and foes, The Last Action Heroes is a no-holds-barred account of a period in Hollywood history when there were no limits to the heights of fame these men achieved, or to the mayhem they wrought, on screen and off.

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The second season of Invasion is almost here. The sweeping, character-driven sci-fi drama series follows an alien invasion through different perspectives around the world. While much of the second season is under wraps, we do know it’s set across multiple continents, and stars Shamier Anderson, Golshifteh Farahani, Sam Neill, Firas Nassar and Shioli Kutsuna.

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In the dead of night, three young brothers leave LA for Iran, taken by their father from their mother to a country and an ancestral home they barely recognise. They return to the Valley months later, spat back into American life and changed in unfathomable ways. Under the dazzling light of the California sun, the youngest brother begins to piece together a childhood shattered by his father's violence, a queer adolescence marked by a shy, secret love affair with a boy he meets on the basketball court, and his ever-changing status as a Muslim in America at the turn of the new millennium. Lyrical and open-hearted, I Will Greet The Sun Again is an unforgettable portrait of a family being torn apart – and a boy emerging from its ashes.

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