In 1989, I stood, aged 22, on a balcony at the iconic Hacienda nightclub, in Manchester, awestruck at the sight of the British house-music scene unfolding before me. House music and rave culture consumed a generation. My generation. Tomorrow, my diaries are published. It would be a disappointment to my 22-year-old self that it details how I spent most of the last decade in the House of Commons, not in a nightclub.

At first glance, politics and rave culture have little in common, and I certainly never mistook parliament for a hedonistic pleasure dome. But, if you scratch beneath the surface, house music has a political aspect that is not immediately apparent to those who recoil in horror at electro beats. It brings people together in collective activity, and, when it began, it had nothing to do with image or style, and everything to do with the substance of the music, the emotion and the connection. It wasn’t about money, clothes or status, it was about a shared experience. The French anthropologist Emile Durkheim, widely considered the father of sociology, described dancing as “the ritually induced passion or ecstasy that cements social bonds”. House music brought people together in a more intense way than ever before.

I’m not saying that going to a party during the second summer of love (1988) was akin to joining the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, but, for many young people, it came to epitomise a rejection of 1980s individualism. On the dancefloor, at least, there was clearly such a thing as society.

And it was a society without a lot of the hang-ups and prejudice that discoloured life on the street. I knew this intuitively from spending a lot of spare time on the dancefloor, but it was only when I visited the devastated remains of New Orleans in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, that the political side of music hit home: in the poorest areas, where people had, literally, been left for dead, the first help to arrive came not from the federal government in Washington, but from the hip-hop movement in New York. It was DJs and MCs who stepped in when the politicians failed. It was a community linked to music that was dynamic enough, strong enough and caring enough to provide emergency relief on the ground. When people talk about the power of music, they forget that this can mean real power to act.

Of course, all good things come to an end. By the early 1990s, a lot of the rave scene had been taken over by well-organised criminal gangs peddling drugs. The early orbital adventures around the M25 in search of secret parties, chased by the police, were ditched in favour of the more comfortable surroundings of the superclubs, such as the Ministry of Sound. That’s where I spent my wedding night, in July 1994. The only thing my husband and I were 110% agreed on was that we loved house music, so it seemed obvious that we’d spend our wedding night out clubbing.

Like many of those first involved in the underground house scene, we were pleasantly surprised, then deeply irritated, when the world embraced a new theme tune, and house music became a global industry. Where once it was cutting-edge and innovative, today it is ubiquitous and inescapable, the planet’s chosen soundtrack. Virtually everything today has a house beat – the 4/4 beat known by its disco antecedents as “four on the floor”. Its raw energy is used and abused by admen around the world, emasculated and sanitised. Whether it’s a newer car, an older monarch (the Queen’s golden jubilee) or a bigger hamburger, in the background there’s always bastardised house music, buzzing about like an electronic mosquito.

Back when it began, I was gripped by its vibrancy and the way it brought people together. For many of us, it’s no exaggeration to say it was the most spiritually uplifting thing we ever took part in. For some, it was just about drugs. Those were the ones who jumped off the rails, popping pills like Smarties as they went. And there’s no getting away from the fact that millions of British young people took, and continue to take, ecstasy every weekend. That’s the saddest legacy of the second summer of love, and it’s a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. We don’t know what the impact of this long-term drug misuse will be on the physical and mental health of the rave generation when they hit middle age and beyond. The original ravers are now heading into their forties – and, for some, it’s not a pretty sight.

So, what is the positive legacy of the house-music scene? A lot of people loved the music in its own right, and used it as a positive force in their lives. For many of them, it became their culture, their inspiration, their family. When you speak to the DJs and key players, as well as the clubbers, the thing they mention again and again is the unity of the dancefloor. The fact that it was a social leveller, that it transcended class and race barriers in a way that nothing else had. House music made interracial, interclass socialising a mass experience in the way that a million speeches on equality by politicians never could. The equality issues around race, gender and sexuality, which so crippled Britain in the cold light of day, vanished on the dancefloor. And, the next day, that social interaction spilt over into everyday life.

As Barbara Ehrenreich, the journalist and historian, wrote of 19th-century revellers in Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, “From an elite perspective, there is one inherent problem with the traditional festivities and ecstatic rituals, and that is their levelling effect, the way in which they dissolve rank and other forms of social difference”. The elite in 1980s Britain certainly took fright. By the early 1990s, the criminal justice bill was heading for the statute book. I wish I’d been in the House of Commons then, just to witness the grey men in suits trying to define rave music. They sat in committee rooms, surrounded by Pugin wallpaper and Hansard volumes, where the nearest you come to a beat is the division bell ringing for the vote.

These MPs thought long and hard, then settled on a definition of house music as “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. That, in a nutshell, is why it’s difficult to try to define in writing the power of music. Dry words cannot do justice to the amazing emotions those beats brought to life. Since those early years, house music has splintered into a thousand sub-genres, from tribal to trance, breakbeat to ambient, sometimes dumbed down, sometimes sexed up, but always with common antecedents found in the summer of love. That time was a statement of youth culture that reverberates today. I will always be grateful that I was in the right place at the right time, on that balcony at the Hacienda, to see the British house-music scene spring to life.

House Music: The Oona King Diaries is published tomorrow by Bloomsbury at £12.99

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