You don’t bop or bounce or swing to classic northern soul stompers, you nail yourself to the floor, you are pinned down by the weight of history, the weight of black and white trash oppression, the cotton fields and dark satanic mills alike. Every move, every turn, every yelp, every bleating horn, every clattering snare is a shout from heart bound by a bands of steel. Rattle that cage in a northern town, dance like Nijinsky but never leave the floor, poetry in motion that doesn’t raise a smile. A strictly coded vocabulary of moves to an impossibly rare set of records where the vinyl itself is like gold dust; where is the joy in that? The joy is in finding expression inside the rigid structure, seeing light at the end of the tunnel. A when they came into the light they found god or went to pot or drowned themselves in a sea of strings and smaltz and it was called R&B and it sold by the bucket load and the money rolled in and no one gives a damn.

I can remember sitting up all night 10 years ago trying to get my head around the limitless possibilities of interactive narrative, layered, multimedia experiences, data mining, and open global access to all knowledge, and then getting up in the morning to get on with trying to squeeze a Macromind (sic) Director presentation onto a hard little thing called a floppy disc. But it was going to be great, Steve Jobs and Tim Berners-Lee said so, there was going to be video and more than 256 colours and more than two notes on arcade games and total cross platform compatibility. Although why anyone would want to spend an evening looking at Windows, God alone knows. I had a particular obsession with typefaces, but experts assured me that on screen all fonts looked like Times or Helvetica. The founder and Director of one of the World’s Largest design companies ‘Sam’ of SampsonTyrell told me anti-aliased type looked blurred, that’s probably because it was. [all names have been changed to protect real corporate identity; they’re called Enterprise IG now].

And just when we were stretching our arms and enjoying the wide open spaces of CD ROM, the gates came down again and we were caught in this net called the word wide web and the colours were being rationed again and the tunnel looked pretty narrow. You had to stake your life that it was worth waiting 5 minutes for the pretty picture you made in PhotoShop to download. But now, hey, it’s cool, you can do anything, whatever you like, you’re completely free. But what do you want? When Flash came out all that designers could think of to do was zoom around in circles for a couple of years. The tyranny of the printed page was quickly replaced by a miniature coffin measuring 468×60 little pixie feet. But that’s the only place we feel safe; nail down the lid, I’m dancing in here, but I don’t want to fall out of bed.