THE FIRST THING you see upon entering “Sweet Harmony”, a new exhibition dedicated to rave culture at the Saatchi Gallery, is a Lotus Elite car spinning upside down to the sound of four-on-the-floor beats. This strange and disorientating artefact, created by Conrad Shawcross with music by Mylo, immediately (if obliquely) stirs the memory of anyone who can recall the early days of rave. It is intended to evoke the hours spent on motorways seeking out parties in fields, the location only disclosed shortly before the gathering began. As an artwork it makes no sense, and it makes perfect sense.

Rave was perhaps the last forward-looking British subculture, certainly the last music-based one, to become a national and generational event (Britpop, which followed it, stemmed from a retrogressive impulse and paid homage to British music of decades past). While the sixties counterculture and punk rock had an impact disproportionate to the relatively small numbers directly involved, rave became a mass movement, so much so that the British government was moved to proscribe it in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. Rave permeated popular culture and caught up young people in their tens and hundreds of thousands in a shared experience. It brought together inner-city youngsters with suburbanite hedonists, hardcore anarchists, football hooligans and, happily for the curators of this exhibition, artists, photographers and writers.

Juan Rincon, the curator, reflects on the formative importance to rave of industrial architecture while Liam Young, a film director, offers eerie video art which transforms cities, roads and woods into moving meshes of light and colour. Colin Nightingale and Stephen Dobbie’s installation, titled “Getting To The Rave”, immerses the visitor in the dark and furtive adventure of it all: the petrol stations where would-be ravers would congregate to wait on word; the phone boxes and clunky mobile devices; the designs printed on ecstasy tablets; the walks through unlit surroundings, suddenly opening up into light and music.

The more straightforward documentary work of Vinca Petersen, a photographer who maps her life in rave culture across a whole gallery wall, represents another strand in which “Sweet Harmony” excels: visual records of how rave emerged, adapted and has continued to thrive. Dave Swindells’s marvellous photos provide a fashion history of the movement, while Matthew Smith’s show its politicised side.

In these terms, “Sweet Harmony” has done an excellent job of evoking both rave’s evolution and its influence. For those who experienced rave’s first flowering in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it supplies one Proustian rush after another. What is admirable is that the show does not depend on nostalgia, nor does it simply rehash events. Most of the viewers making their way through the exhibition’s ten rooms appear too young to have known rave at first hand (you would need to be at least 45 or so), and if the exhibition does not make it come alive for them, it can only be considered a qualified success.

You can make out the older visitors by their response to the music. In the “Play” room, they throw shapes at the listening posts where playlists track the progression from Kraftwerk to the present day, via the house-music explosion that was rave’s Big Bang. On the opposite wall, huge prints of Ewen Spencer’s photographs chronicle a similar journey. It is notable, in both cases, that instead of today’s anodyne, highly commercialised genre of EDM (“electronic dance music”) being posited as rave music’s natural successor, that role is allotted to grime—which, like rave, is a grassroots form. Mr Spencer’s pictures move chronologically from rave via dancehall and garage to grime. Early on their subjects are predominantly white; gradually, they feature more diverse faces. Yet in atmosphere the images are all but indistinguishable, and it is very hard to tell where one music scene becomes another.

One of the most striking things about rave culture is that, even three decades after it peaked with the “second summer of love” in 1988, relatively few horror stories have emerged from it. Its core values of egalitarianism, communitarianism and respect held good more often than they did not. Its joys were deep and real, and “Sweet Harmony” makes the visitor feel them once again.

“Sweet Harmony: Rave | Today” continues at the Saatchi Gallery, London until September 14th