Take up space

I think a lot about how people occupy space.

In life so much rests on our ability, and willingness, to take up space. How we occupy the spaces we encounter matters. Have you ever been in a busy club and fought your way onto the dance floor and wondered how you will ever find a space to dance? Thirty years ago I learned a principle that I still use today, whether I’m at a packed swimming pool, getting on a train, or at some kind of event: take space and people will make space! Nine times out of ten it really does work. But you have to do it in a non-aggressive, collaborative way. A big smile on your face and hands where people can see them. No sudden movements. Be predictable. Like when you drive a car. It works in physical spaces but it also works in other situations such as at a job interview or in a slightly hostile work meeting. 

The appeal of a philosophy that says if you take up space people will give it to you is obvious. But away from trivial examples like the above, is it true? 

Maybe. Sometimes.

I'm interested in spaces of all kinds, from the physical spaces of home, play, activity and culture, to conceptual territories in our minds, our perception and our imaginings. Some spaces are as ancient as the hills, the oceans and the stars. Others came into existence in response to how and by whom spaces were occupied and used at that moment. Over the last few centuries many of our most contested spaces have become heavily mediated and tied either directly or indirectly to capital and property (also spatial concepts).

A sentence is a unit in space as well as time. So is a beat.

Design involves the direction of space to create a sensation, a connection or a disconnect.

All art is a response to the spaces around it.

The ritual of a minute's silence is observed to give space in commemoration to some lives but not others.

**

From the moment we are born we take up space. In fact we take up increasing quantities of space throughout the nine months preceding birth, and for many parents and would-be parents the imaginative and cognitive space a baby occupies long predates conception.

As humans it is our birthright to take up space. How we go about this activity is what we call life.

As artists, as communities, as planners and public servants, as occupants of this planet, our existence is entirely dependent on the spaces available to us. A poisoned lake ceases to be a viable habitat for a fish or a bird that relies on that fish. A bombed out building was once a school, a theatre, a hospital, a workplace, a brothel, a data centre or a home.

These developments may or may not be reported or widely observed by a population and the attention given or attention-deficit is among the most contested space of our time. What those with influence decide is deserving of space feeds the value we give to certain ideas, individuals and groups. The algorithm is a spatial instrument that shapes your personal digital landscape, with or without your consent.

The question of who gets to access a particular space and the influence that space may hold occupies much of our politics, social and philosophical bandwidth. Migration debates take up considerable space within this as people displaced by war, ecological catastrophe or economic collapse and stagnation search for viable spaces to live. At the same time, static populations feel their space is ever more compromised and under constant threat of being taken from them. Meanwhile, Real Estate grabs have turned our most populated and congested spaces into commodities where the lives of current inhabitants are reduced to entries on a balance sheet or not even considered. Add to this the speed at which AI has entered into every space of human endeavour while governments and regulators cede more and more ground to big tech and its backers who colonise these emerging spaces in much the same way that previous generations colonised indigenous populations — and we have what i call a crisis of space.

Yet at the same time there are pockets of resistance and creativity. Space is being reclaimed and out of this new spaces are forming.

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A working note, mid-project

I want to be a bit less prescriptive. I'm not really trying to sell the line — (client name) will have introduced it along with the magician positioning. What I want to add is a layer of nuance about the language: the warmth, the restraint, the magician's craft of appearing straightforward without getting drawn into explaining yourself. I want to allow them to make the links from the verbal language to the visual language so that they feel a sense of ownership rather than "here's a writer overstepping their remit and telling us how to do our jobs". It's opening the door to the collaboration, leading them in the direction I want them to go without drawing attention to the steer.

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Existential dashes — grammar as a character trait 

While developing a story about a copywriter wrestling with how to make their own (non-AI-generated) writing sound less like AI, this thought surfaced in relation to writing propulsive fiction. 

I think that propulsion is in all my work — readers have commented on it, I've just never named it before. I love John Grisham but also I'm drawn to the Cusk register, as I am to the music of Steve Reich or Catherine Lamb, alongside rather than instead of, pop (dance music, daytime radio etc.). But it's the collision of these registers that makes me excited. In the literary world authors like Percival Everett and Colson Whitehead and maybe Kurt Vonnegut occupy this sort of territory. In music it’s far more common and accepted to collide registers in this way (Pet Shop Boys, Madonna, SOPHIE...). And it is the em dash — and not, as is commonly supposed, the hyphen — that best represents (grammatically) what these artists are doing with their multiple registers. The writer worrying about the em or en dash (as an AI tell) would become a comic metaphor for an existential question.

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On dancing, Dada, and the sane response

30 January 2026

ONE

Videos can't capture this, I remember thinking as I lowered my phone. One of a handful of moments during a long Berlin night when the urge to make some kind of record of the experience and the desire to stay pure and in the moment tilted towards documentation. 10 seconds for posterity. 10 seconds to remind myself later that this actually happened. Memory is a slippery beast and defensive postures soon take hold. I was just caught up in the moment, the energy, the dancing, the drugs etc etc. We live in a culture that trivialises this as straight up hedonism and inspires this collective amnesia: what goes on tour stays on tour, complex emotional responses reduced to a vacuous hands-in-the-air photo.

But tonight all the textures and nuances are on show in this room that feels like every room I've entered and never quite left these last thirty years since my friend Jess took me to my first Metalheadz rave, aged fifteen, held at the local community hall, 160 bpm all night long, a portal not so much to another world but to a future we were building together right there and then.

This feels akin to that.

The music is intense, uncompromising. Jagged synth stabs strike strange intervals in the darkness. A 909 snare snaps once, twice, prowling—inherited sounds, reborn in a world gone wrong, orphans of a lost rave. The patience of the build belies a maturity and tastefulness I had not expected, and I am humbled: I've been gone too long and the scene has carried on without me.

It comes unbidden, entering through the structure of the metal beams, the sliced and diced chords, the boxes of light flexing and distorting on the screen, the way the exposed shoulders of the person in front of me move, the recognition in my own muscles though I have never to my knowledge heard anything quite like this music, this particular sonic sequence before, or seen a graphical interpretation of sound so in step and at the same time so human and independent. It comes hard and fast and unapologetic, rolling through whole eras of aesthetic impulse in minutes—minimalist electro, industrial, disco, Bhangra, hip-hop and happy hardcore; throbbing shapes and the old Test Card from childhood TV, manga creatures and kitschy CGI depicting surf waves and fireworks like some fucked up Ed Ruscha painting let loose in the club. There are cheers and whoops as the crowd grasps what is going on; the jokes buried in jokes and the sheer joy and outlandishness of the performance. This is something to behold. These two people are working at a whole other level. This is fresh. In a world that feels more unstable and mad by the day this 21st century Dada stands out for its refusal to play the game, its refusal to comply with the requirement to make sense, its wily anarchy and its abundant spirit. Tonight feels sane. My world is bigger for this existing.

TWO

Far away, across an ocean, gangs of masked gunmen roam the frozen streets, stopping people at random, their trigger fingers on the pepper spray, going at anyone who dares to ask Is this, what you're doing, legal? Is this still my country? Do you have any humanity? What is wrong with you? They execute the man. They move on. The people in the most powerful offices of the land say he had it coming. They all had it coming. We all have it coming to us. We are the enemy. Wrong. Crazed. It is exhausting. The naming. The narrativising. The violence of word. Sticks and stones. The violence. The pepper spray. The shooting. The impunity. The inhumanity. There is no remorse. No mercy is shown. We move on. We move on.

This is what is happening, right now, not far from where the music, the music we love, was born. That this is happening under our watch is not our fault but we stand guilty for letting it go on because these masked men are human and so are the people who give them their orders and tidy up the mess when someone gets excited and starts killing ICU nurses and poets and people we don't know because they no longer have names, no longer exist, no longer ever existed, and as Woody Guthrie sang all those years before, they won't know your name when you ride the big airplane, for all they will call you will be deportee.

This was happening, on that day, on the night in question, as I danced in a Berlin warehouse and looked around at the room full of strangers-not-strangers being pulled and lit up by sound and vision and communion and I believed with all my heart in that moment that hope is not all gone, that there's more in the tank yet.

THREE

I was raised on Enid Blyton's Famous Five adventure stories and while I knew the books were full of casual racism, bigotry and straight up sexism, to my ten year old taste they promised an enticing world order where the baddies get their comeuppance and the kids (and their dog) get their adventure along with lashings of ginger beer and whatever delicious treats were in the picnic basket that Aunt Fanny packed for them. The combination of daring deeds and cosy domesticity met two connected yet contrasting needs in me and millions of kids like me. We wanted something (anything!) to happen—by which we meant something exciting, something that demanded courage and resourcefulness and quick-thinking. At the same time, against the backdrop of nuclear proliferation and the tail end of the Cold War, we needed reassuring that things are going to be okay and responsible adults will protect us (Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin, our social democratic traditions, the post-1945 international consensus, etc.). The action and excitement was embodied by the character George, who despite being a girl was brave and stubborn and slightly androgynous, and who didn't mind getting her clothes dirty. Her opposite in Team Girl was Anne. While the others took on pirates and international criminals, Anne took on the domestic duties. "Anne made house." This line must have appeared fifty times across the series of books. It neatly sums up Anne's character, her purpose, her entire worldview, in just three words.

These are the words that come to me when I watch how media outlets and politicians respond—here in Germany, in the UK, in America and around the world—to the latest outrage, the latest attack on international law and humanitarian norms, the latest act of misdirection and theatre.

The room on Saturday night was not making house. It was not pretending everything was fine, not retreating into nostalgia or comfort or commercial spectacle. It was facing the moment—with noise, with bodies, with joy, with defiance.

Meanwhile, elsewhere: Anne makes house. The BBC makes house. Social democrats make house. The nostalgia circuits and heritage DJ bookings make house. Cosy, competent, utterly inadequate.

FOUR

Music will not save the day, nor dancing, nor the words "those who fail to remember the past are condemned to repeat it" projected onto the wall of a club. Yet these things hold power that can be applied to our current crises.

First, common ground. Art can summon and organise not just a crowd but a community: it articulates for us a set of values we can all get with. This is true of apparently apolitical art such as techno or animation design. Creative and aesthetic values can be a proxy or even a bridge to values that are harder to articulate and near-impossible to fully align on. It's not about making overtly political work but recognising that all work exists in a political moment.

Second, community. Friendship and communion ward off the divide-and-conquer politics of today. Humans are pack animals. When we are isolated we are weak. Our individuated consumption experiences strip us of the opportunity and the ability to connect with a stranger where no transaction is involved. We feel helpless. Feeling part of something in an immediate and physical way breaks the barriers to connection.

FIVE

Tonight's headliner Blawan has been a prominent underground figure for two decades, making tracks that invariably catch the curve of where techno is headed while retaining a signature sound that could fit into almost any DJ set. His productions are clean, inventive, and frequently banging. The latter quality probably explains why it has taken me this long to actually hear him spin in a club. While I've always played and admired techno from both sides of the pond, I'm a house kid at heart, a sucker for its warm grooves, its swing and bounce, and rich palette of moods and colours. Generally I don't want a pummelling. Within a few minutes it's clear Blawan is a class act. The mixing is sumptuous. He's doing some complex things up there, juggling two beats like a battle set, playing to the pulse rather than on the nose (which is what the machines can never quite do and why sync buttons suck for live performance), sculpting the sound with a level of precision and care that makes you feel seen rather than pandered to. He's only doing what good DJs do but what a joy to hear it done with such precision, flair and grace.

DJing is still a young art and its relationship with commerce, technology and popular perception is more fraught than the adjacent art forms of music production and live instrumentation, pop, opera and musical theatre. Throughout its short history, people have often wondered whether DJing (such an awkward verb) is really an art or even a creative pursuit. The situation today is intensified by the phenomenon of the Instagram DJ, the DJ as social media star, with clips of bombastic drops and choreographed euphoria edited into snackable content leading many observers to the conclusion that modern DJ culture is purely extractive and symptomatic of a wider malaise spreading through our societies in the seemingly endless race to the bottom. Characterising DJs as self-regarding idiots is a good way to beat down on the broader dance music community, which (surprise, surprise) is historically entwined with LGBTQ+ communities, people of colour and those on the political left. And so we find ourselves inserted against our will into a manufactured culture war that has proved so effective for far right populist movements. Those familiar with the history of disco may spot a pattern here. The ritualistic burnings of disco records that took place almost half a century ago were never really about the music so much as the coding—disco was too black, too gay, too open, too Woke. Yet what the anti-disco vigilantes told people was disco was not the disco that was being played in places like the Paradise Garage and The Loft. It was the sugar-pop coated, often cynical spin-offs that were being put out by major labels trying to cash in on an underground movement. Fast forward four decades and we have Business Techno and the brave new world of AI music extracting from today's underground communities and making them more attackable, less loved, more divided, more suspicious. The dance floor has always carried politics, sometimes in the shadows, other times in the speakers, or the walls, or the bodies.

SIX

I am dancing. My body remembers. This is the medium. Not the music or the visuals or the spectacle but the communal experience of dancing in a shared space simultaneously. The layers of connection create a forcefield that holds us together for long enough to experience something increasingly rare in our atomised lives. I will carry it forward into other kinds of rooms, different shared experiences, into my work, into my relationships with my young children, my family, my friends, my neighbours. This is how it works. As Arthur Russell once sang, This is how we walk on the moon.

In the days that follow I will walk across frozen municipal sports fields, nestled in behind the backs of the tenement housing, watched over by Berlin's Big Tech towers, looming above the city. The streets in my neighbourhood are treacherous. On the broken sidewalks ice collects, thaws, becomes slush, then re-freezes. It's just weather. Still I can't shake the image of the snow on the ground while the man who had been holding up the phone lies dead, shot by the people entrusted to protect the citizens.

And now, collectively and individually, we face a choice. Do we try to keep making house, carry on pretending that the old order will shield us, return us from the brink to somewhere cosy and familiar? Ought we to be thankful for the bountiful picnic basket and the ginger beer? Or do we draw a line, a line in our culture, a line in our hearts? Would we have the courage and the fortitude to hold it and not crumble? Will we have the imagination to keep going, that from this line new spaces may emerge, new structures form? This is the hope. This is what humanity directing the machines, dancing with the machines rather than beholden to them, can achieve, can pass on, can embody.