Evans is a place on Earth: Let's Come Together Right Now:Jeremy Deller & the Second Summer of Love.

"Make the world your priority. Try to live your life ecologically. Play a part in a greater scheme. Try to live the dream on a wider scene. Let's come together right now (oh yeah) in sweet harmony" - Sweet Harmony, The Beloved.

"Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough" - Emily Dickinson.

Ewen Spencer - Happy Hardcore, UKG, Grime (1999-2005)

Curating an exhibition that manages to both look back at the rave scene of the late eighties and early nineties while at the same time capturing its excitement, its sense of infinite possibility, its sense of freedom, and its sense of wild abandon is a pretty difficult task. There's something about the sterile spaces of art galleries that, quite simply, can neither replicate the feelings of nights in dark clubs gurning and dancing, pilled up and loved up, or long summer weekends spent in the countryside with tens of thousands of like minded souls, feeling as if the real world will actually have changed because of your actions by the time you return to it.

If anybody's going to do it justice it's probably Jeremy Deller. Deller's got form with this kind of thing. He's responsible for Acid Brass in which brass bands played acid house tunes, for recreating the Battle of Orgreave during the miner's strike, and, very recently, a televisual re-evaluation of the acid house scene in which he showed film of ravers from the era to schoolkids now. While, understandably, he had tone down/completely remove the drugs references, it still made for fascinating viewing as today's kids wondered how people managed to have a good time, a better time even, without mobile phones or social media.

The title of that programme, Everybody in the Place:an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992, made it clear that Deller wasn't only telling the history of the rave scene, or of acid house, or of electronic music and clubbing, but, prismatically, the story of how Britain changed over those years, how the authorities, after failing to clamp down on it, co-opted the culture and used it to churn out money for those already rich, and how these events have affected the country, and world, we live in now.

He's done a pretty good job of it. Sweet Harmony:Rave/Today at the Saatchi Gallery was large, spacious, and spread over several floors so in that respect, at least, as well as the entrance fee of £10, it felt like going to a club. There were also DJs selecting tunes and a mocked up record shop (sections devoted to happy hardcore, IDM, jungle, and trance etc;) to give a more authentic feel as us visitors walked from room to room taking in a mixed bag of photographs, modern art installations, flyers, and memories.

"We used to travel really early. It was incredible because you'd get so excited, and you really didn't know if it was even going to be on. You never knew anything. All you had was this phone number. You'd hit the service station, and there would be all of these young people hanging around, and you'd be like 'Is it on? Is the rave on?'" - Lee Garrick, now a club promoter, then an assistant in a Birmingham clothes shop that sold rave tickets.

Garrick's quote and Colin Nightingale and Stephen Dobbie's mocked up illuminated petrol station, as well as the torn down fence and hole in the door scattered with litter you have to pass through to get to the next room, speak of the anticipation and excitement these events would hold. Often you'd spend a week or more looking forward to them. Making plans with mates, arranging lifts, and choosing what outfit to wear. That wasn't the only gear that needed to be sorted. In the case of me and my friends a trip to a local 'site' or 'bender' was often essential for 'procurement'.

Colin Nightingale & Stephen Dobbie - Getting to the Rave

I can't claim I was involved in the Second Summer of Love. In the late eighties my musical tastes were mostly indie pop with a side order of reggae and hip-hop. I'd bought a Todd Terry Project album (To the Batmobile, Let's Go) in about 1988 and it'd been sneered at by friends. I loved it but I still hadn't completely bought into the scene. Even as I found myself outside pubs at throwing out time singing acid house anthems like Inner City's Good Life with a random selection of drinking buddies.

Deller's curatorial hand reaches back much further than Basingstoke, 1988! The first 'raves' were jazz dance parties in dark Soho basements in the early fifties and had nothing to do with DJs. 'Raving' was about living it up and dancing to mostly British musicians trying to recreate the sounds of 1920s New Orleans trad jazz. Post-war rationing was still in place and rock'n'roll had barely reached Britain so the heroes of the beatniks, bohemians, and other assorted hedonists were the likes of George Melly and trumpeter Mick Mulligan.

It was another decade before Rave magazine was launched with The Beatles on the cover of its first edition. Rave's meaning, not for the last time, was changing. A 'youthquake' was happening, pirate radio stations were opening up, and if enough Mods and fans of 'beat' music could get together there was always the possibility of an all night dance party.

Rave magazine disappeared in 1971 and the term rarely appeared in British youth culture throughout that decade, resurfacing in the eighties predominately in black British culture, to describe anything from a house party to an illegal warehouse all nighter. These, far more than the bohemian Soho scene, were the springboards for what would happen later that decade. The egalitarian spirit, the less buttoned up clothing, and the reliance of word of mouth and pirate radio rather than more conservative and mainstream norms.

Soul II Soul were running 'blues' parties at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden while at the same time promoting Funki Dred clothing and operating under the motto "a happy face, a thumpin' bass for a lovin' race", before crossing over into chart success with huge hits like Back to Life and Keep on Movin'. These tunes didn't sound like the ones that unprecedented numbers of young people were racing across, and around, the country to here - but the ethos was the same.

People of all colours, clothes of all colours, positivity, football hooligans hugging each other instead of punching each other, these things seem like cliches now but at the time there was a feeling that the atmosphere was changing. The tribal element of youth culture was, for the most part - some refused to change, becoming less and less relevant.

Nice one. Top one. Sorted. It didn't matter if you were in a muddy field with no discernible way of getting back home. You were part of something. You were, for the most part, having the time of your life and, in doing so, demonstrating that society didn't have to be ordered in the way it was. Things could be different. Dave Swindells was there. He was working for ID Magazine and was night time editor of TimeOut. His Second Summer of Love and 1990 series, cumbersomely titled though it is, captures images of the scene in the years of '88 and '90.

Dave Swindells - Second Summer of Love and 1990 (1998-1990)

To the sounds of Alison Limerick, Definition of Sound, C&C Music Factory, and, er, Phil Collins these images capture both the hedonism of youth and the energy of being there when things start to happen, start to change. Put your shades on your head, wear a straw hat, dance until dawn, and climb a ladder into infinity and open up another level of your mind. Anything goes. As long as it's done with love and passion.

On the whole, these images are a much greater success than most of the installations which, with a few honourable exceptions, fail to add much to the story. But it's an art gallery so I suppose there was something of an obligation to put some art in it. James Alec Hardy's attempt to "trace the history of technology and its use towards perception management" using audio, sculpture, and print left me pretty cold and seemed to be a waste of a few good hammocks.

James Alec Hardy - Untitled

Dave Swindells - Second Summer of Love and 1990 (1998-1990)

While the technology used to create dance music undoubtedly did go on to revolutionise the way we work, the way we love, and the way we live this aspect of the show, for me, was one of the least interesting. Not because that's not an interesting story per se but because the language of it has been co-opted by businesses and corporations.

The relationship between cultural and corporate life can be symbiotic though and, viewed through the lens of architecture, that becomes quite clear. The post-industrial infrastructure that was once the backbone of the industrial revolution and Britain's prosperity was, by the eighties, rotting, rusting, and laying dormant in areas that were often located near city centres, waterways, or major roads.

Places that were easy to access. They're mostly being, or already have been, converted into luxury flats for the wealthy now but before that they served as 'cultural incubators' for a good half a century. Countercultures themselves often arise from neglected, downtrodden, or marginalised parts of society and the same occurs with the spaces that the counterculture grows up. Or grew up. It's a whole other debate as to whether or not there is, in these days of permanent connection, such thing as a counterculture any more.

The neglected buildings of New York, Detroit, Berlin, and Manchester were all put to service hosting parties and sound systems. These buildings rarely turn up on the pages of architectural journals or have critics frothing at the mouth about their 'possibilities' but despite, and probably because of this, they thrived as transcendental spaces away from the glare of the authorities. At least until the scene got too popular.

Seana Gavin's photos for the free party movement from 1995 through to 2003 show how the likes of Spiral Tribe, after being squeezed by the British police and government, moved to Europe and took their parties to Holland, France, Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. Her images show not just the parties themselves but the long hours on the road in between them, living out of mobile homes, and even the aftermaths of the party, the come downs.

Seana Gavin - Free Party Movement (1995-2003)

It looked at the time, and it still does now, like the modern equivalent of running away to join the circus and faced with our current political shitstorm it still looks like a pretty tempting lifestyle. In fact that's the over-riding impression you get from almost everything on show here. It's an alternative to the drab lives, dead end jobs, boring aspirational values, and tedious keeping up with the Joneses by buying new curtains lifestyles that capitalism has sold us.

A chance to live rather than just exist. To feel. To love. To connect. These are not things capitalism or neoliberalism offer us. In fact these are things they deny us. For these systems to work properly we have to be good little consumers. We have to obey. Saying no to this shit feels good. It makes us happy. It makes us free. Look at the photos below from the likes of Shaun Bloodworth (who documented the rise of Rinse FM and took portraits of the likes of Skream, Hudson Mohawke, and Benga), Tom Hunter, New Jersey's Ted Polhemus, Cleo Campert, the excellently monikered Dominc from Luton, and the renowned snapper Derek Ridgers. Look at them and realise these are not people operating in isolation, these are not people fighting each other for flat screen TVs, these are people out having a good time and putting love into the world.

Shaun Bloodworth - Photography (2006-2007)

Tom Hunt - Le Crowbar (1995)

Cleo Campert - Photography (1990-2015)

Derek Ridgers - Spiral Tribe Rave, Uxbridge (1993)

I apologise that they're not all labelled up but, like many raves, things got a bit messy at times. Anna-Lena Krause's photographs, however, were so singular they could not be mistaken for anybody else's. She's taken a series of pictures of people at the end of the night, leaving clubs, and she contends, and I'd agree, that there's an honesty in the exhaustion and elation of her sitters.

Anna-Lena Krause - photographs (2016)

Chelsea-Louise Berlin - Turn On, Tune In, Get On One (2019)

"You could say maybe rave is the last moment where there's something that's so widespread. Geographically, demographically it included a lot of people. Subcultures are always small by their nature but rave was really the last explosive one" - Mark Leckey.

There's a room, about halfway round the exhibition, that's devoted to the clothes that ravers wore, the flyers (Chelsea-Louise Berlin has amassed a huge collection) they used to advertise events, the horns and whistles they blew, and, of course, the pills they took to keep them loved up and dancing all night. There's a contention proposed that raves operated as temporal places of worship, more like stone circles than cathedrals, places that could be visited, worshipped over a weekend, before the flock move on.

This idea's not as far fetched as it initially sounds. In fact it makes a lot more sense to worship music, nature, and each other than it does some phony Abrahamic God figure in the sky. Aida Bruyere, if not actually worshipful of it, is in the business of celebrating the female body. Not idealised female bodies - but real female bodies.

Born in Senegal, Bruyer's work addresses issues of cultural appropriation via the world of dancehall battles, clothes, and attitudes. It's good that Deller has included something that looks at how the dance floor can be an arena where female empowerment and feminism can be expressed but it's a pity that Special Gyalz was Bruyere's sole contribution to Sweet Harmony.

Alda Bruyere - Special Gyalz (2019)

Molly Macindoe - Free Parties, Teknival (1996-2017)

Molly Macindoe, too, is another whose work looks at how the acid house and the free party scene made us look not just outwards but in at ourselves and ask who we really are. What's important to us? While Alda Bruyere was showing that no woman should be ashamed of their body and, in fact, should be proud of it (we're all different shapes and sizes, let's celebrate that), Macindoe (born in Qatar in 1979 to American and New Zealander parents) showed how getting together people who were like minded in their love for music, partying, and art becomes a way of forming a bloc of people who have similar political concerns.

Images of free parties in England, Wales, Spain, Germany, Jordan, and Lebanon give way to police attention and, ultimately, a battered old lorry supporting Jeremy Corbyn. The merging together of parties and politics (but rarely party politics) was something the rave generation had seen their hippy and punk forebears initially embrace before selling out. It was a mistake that many of them would make themselves, children and jobs start to get in the way of idealism, but not before they'd made a dent into the body politic that could never be completely ironed out.

While Vinca Petersen's attempts to "document the extended portrait of the generation's collective identity and emerge from a social and political engagement with underrepresented communities" (The Endless Road video shows a Petersen's eye view of life on the road organising raves as a form of self-exploration, WHEN DID YOU LAST FEEL FREE claims to operate as a "tool for social interaction", and A Life of Subversive Joy asks age old questions about the personal as political and slightly more nuanced ones about if it's possible to have a joyful politics or a politics of joy) are admirable and fun they're also, mostly, a little abstract.

Vinca Petersen - The Endless Road (1992-2019)

Vinca Petersen - WHEN DID YOU LAST FEEL FREE (2014-2019)

Vinca Peterson - A Life of Subversive Joy (2019)

Vinca Petersen - Laughter Aid (2003-2019)

An exception is made for Laughter Aid. A bouncy castle Petersen invited the designer Hardy Blechman of Maharishi to donate that was taken, by Petersen, on road trips around Eastern Europe and Western Africa and inflated in orphanages and schools for children and adults with special needs. She felt the joy kids feel being on a bouncy castle was very akin to that an adult feels at a rave and she simply wanted to share that feeling. A feeling of joy and togetherness,

It was a direct action and it was not the only one - although it was probably the most joyous in the show. Others stemmed as much from anger and despair as they did hope. But without hope they would not have happened and would not still be happening. Adrian Fisk is represented by three series of photographs at Sweet Harmony. Acid City looks at squat parties (which he describes as "a hedonistic rage against the establishment and corporatisation of club cuture", Reclaim the Streets is, as you might imagine, about environment and pollution but it's also about the community spirit created within that movement, and Extinction Rebellion is about nothing less than saving the planet. Prioritising the lives of our children and grandchildren over the ceaseless drive to make money and buy things we don't need. Aspirations to wealth and status count for nothing when we're all dead.

Adrian Fisk - London Acid City; Reclaim the Streets/Extinction Rebellion (1996-2019)

Mattko - Untitled

They capture both the blur of excitement and the intense focus of the movement but Mattko's contribution is even better (and I wouldn't normally say that about black and white photographs). Mattko's work looks at the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Act which made free parties illegal and show people protesting, celebrating, and hugging in Trafalgar Square. Mattko is still at work today, taking photos of the Anti Brexit Soundsystem marches of 2019.

Matthew Wilkinson (a British artist based in Los Angeles) is another who believes there's more to the rave scene than drugs and nostalgia. His take is that "rave was one of the last cultural movements before everything started eating itself and falling in on itself and becoming a postmodern rehash of something else". He sees British dance culture as being simultaneously uniquely of these islands while, at the same time, linking with the bass scene in Miami, the techno scene in Detroit, and the house scene in Chicago. Most of all, he sees the whole scene as a resetting of consciousness. A chance to remember what's really important (love, friends, family, humanity) and to gather in numbers significant enough that we can take on those who seek to undermine basic human rights and freedoms to serve their own nefarious agendas.

Matthew Wilkinson - Baseline (Conscious Reset) (2019)

Immo Klink - Extinction Rebellion (2018-2019)

Friedrich Nietzsche felt in the absence of religion, following the necessary death of God, that music was the one thing that gave life meaning and to look at the photos and to read the testimonies of clubbers and free party goers in Sweet Harmony is to see the truth in this. These people's lives were transformed by not just music but by gathering with friends and strangers to enjoy it together.

Many of them went on to make their living through it, to forge friendships that would last as long as they lived, to find love, and to change the world - or at least make it a better place. You don't need a list of what music was played or what clubs people went to to understand that. The really interesting message of Sweet Harmony, and I like to think the one that Jeremy Deller intended, is that governments and corporations are not going to provide us with the spaces to be ourselves, to experiment, to shape society in our own image. We have to fight (peacefully) to do that and we have to continue fighting all the time because the second we stop they'll take it away again.

Toby Mott - Kraftwerk:Dance Forever

It's fun for an oldie like me to read about De La Soul, Spiral Tribe, and the Mutoid Waste Company (and even Ewen Spencer's photos of the early days of the UK garage and grime scenes date back, in some cases, twenty years) but, ultimately, Sweet Harmony tells a story of how in the dark, conservative dominated years of the eighties something changed. People started to not accept how things were and the way things were done and started creating their own vision for the future, far removed from a Tory vision of everyone knowing their place.

People rioted against the poll tax, they met in their thousands to dance all night, they agitated, they educated, they organised, and, more than anything they proved love was stronger than hate. We don't necessarily need the same music now - but we definitely need that same message and we need it really really quickly. Before Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage drag us even further into their cesspit of their own vanities.