Wicked and wild and versatile with pure style

it may be that no one will thank me, or Steve McQueen, for reminding them of yet another important aspect of being alive that we have all been missing since the beginning of this dismal year. (We, that is, who haven’t yet made it to one of these fabled “illegal raves” we hear so much about; if you’re reading, give us a text next time?) But it wasn’t until a rainy lunchtime in September, as I sat at home with my laptop, headphones on, that I really felt, for the first time, the loss of something fundamental: the joy and release of a proper party.

My disco diva days, you’ll be surprised to learn, are mostly behind me. But I do love a knees-up. When the mood takes me I am first on the dancefloor, last off. The stiff-jointed reserve that our forefathers were famous for skipped a generation — my generation — thanks to the spectacular outburst of hedonistic shape-throwing and collective befuddlement that took hold of so many of us who grew up in 1980s and 1990s Britain. We were, I’m sure, terrible at lots of things, and you couldn’t get a word out of us on Wednesdays, but we were good at weekends, good at having fun — and some of us still are. Or were, until the pandemic restricted late nights of reckless abandon in the company of glamorous strangers to early evenings jigging round the kitchen with our nearest and dearest. Which is lovely, and to be cherished, but not the same thing.

To those who share my yearning for loud music, for flashy clothes, for social proximity, I recommend a viewing of Lovers Rock, a new film by Steve McQueen, director of Hunger and 12 Years a Slave, and other astonishments. It is cruel, perhaps, to be forcibly reminded of a basic human right that has been denied us for so long, but there is a vicarious consolation to be had from watching others do what you can’t, especially if they’re doing it really, really well.

Lovers Rock is an outrageously enjoyable, richly evocative, intricately choreographed realising of a house party — a “blues” — at the close of the 1970s, in west London. Outside: stiff, miserable, racist Britain. Inside: bodies in motion, black Londoners dressed to thrill, gathered to dance and smoke, drink and eat, show off, hook up, get down.

Here is sensual film-making of rare power, McQueen’s visual flair and fluency of ideas allied to the urgency and intensity of purpose that he has brought to his work since he first broke through in the 1990s. Watching Lovers Rock, you can smell the spliff and the sweat, taste the spices and the Red Stripe, feel the bassline vibrating the floorboards through the soles of your slip-ons.

That’s what I was watching that rainy day. Fifteen minutes in, I was on my feet. By the time McQueen’s DJ selected Janet Kay’s “Silly Games”, I was gyrating around the coffee table, laptop aloft. Here is a rush of euphoria — and we must take those where we can find them. Here is sex and danger, jealousy, seduction, preening, pride: all the elements of the dance. When it was over, I gave it a rewind.

I am by no means an expert but Lovers Rock is, I think, as vital an assertion of black