New book captures London’s “era-defining” late-1980s club culture

I’d first started taking nightlife photos at one or two of my brother’s club and warehouse party events in London in 1983. 

I was studying English Literature in Sheffield, but my brother Steve had been one of the early ‘one-nighter’ club promoters hosting clubs like The Lift and Jungle, which were polysexual before that word was invented. Most of those early photos were rubbish, as it took time for me to learn how to use flash and take photos after dark.

I moved to London in 1984, but through my brother (again) I got a job working behind the bar at Fouberts in Soho and later at The Embassy in Old Bond Street. 

Eventually I got fired after being caught taking photos when I was supposed to be collecting glasses, but by then I’d approached i-D magazine and started doing photos for them, so I was back at The Embassy a couple of weeks later to take pictures. 

No, it was actually Future, Paul Oakenfold’s club night. I’d already been hearing exciting stories about Shoom, so once I’d experienced the carefree abandon of the dancers at Future, I made sure that I went to Shoom on the following Saturday. 

The atmosphere there lived up to what I’d been told, and at the same time there was so much great house (and Balearic Beats) music that had hardly been played in London. 

Clubbers were dressing to dance in baggy tops, Smiley T-shirts, dungarees and Converse trainers, so there was already a new look, too. It had all the ingredients to be era-defining.

By 1988 I was using a Canon A-1 SLR with 50mm and 28mm wide-angle lenses. Mostly I used the wide-angle lens to get in close and be part of the action, with a simple wide-angle diffuser on the flash to spread the light. 

I had a cord so that I could use the flash off-camera, as I preferred more directional lighting. I wanted to include as much ambient light as possible, so I used to vary the exposure time up to a couple of seconds. It was basically guesswork, so of course it didn’t always work, but the multiple strobe flashes could add to the drama of the image. 

I liked using Fuji slide film and during that year there were one or two events where there was enough light to dispense with the flash and use 1600 ISO fast film. 

The heat and humidity were intense, but fortunately I’d been to soul weekender events before so I knew that the camera body just needed time to warm up to room temperature, and I usually carried a couple of lens cloths, too. 

Once the camera was ready to use I had to hope that they weren’t about to blast a lot more smoke into the room, and that the strobe light wouldn’t be on incessantly. 

There was rarely enough light to focus, so I used white marker pens to highlight the 1m and 3m distance indicators on the lens, and if there was UV light, that worked really well. 

The most obvious stand-out shots are the street party photos, because in those moments the energy and euphoria of acid house couldn’t be contained in the clubs. 

The street parties happened on the Strand and in Trafalgar Square (after Spectrum at Heaven) as well as on Tottenham Court Road after the Trip, and in a way they were a precursor to the massive raves in fields and aircraft hangars that happened in the summer of 1989 as the scene expanded out from the cities. 

I often danced while carrying the camera, which I thought was a totally pro thing to do [laughs], or I’d sit the camera on top of the bag and dance around that if the music demanded it, partly because as a photographer you don’t want to be a total pest, blinding people with the flash all the time. 

The lighting in clubs could change all the time, but by 1988 I’d been getting fairly reliable results for about three years, and because I was shooting regularly it meant that it worked more often than not. 

I didn’t study photography, but I learned how to develop and print as part of a photography club at university, and the rest was down to trial and error. 

You tend not to see the errors, but thanks to Photoshop (other software is available, of course) pictures that were horribly over-exposed can be made to work 30-odd years later!

I only shot in black and white at Future because at that time it was necessary to get a negative made before a colour slide could be printed in black and white in the magazine, and of course that took time. 

I wanted those shots to be in the following week’s issue so I shot a roll of Ilford FP4 that night. 

I really like black and white and I love the drama of those Future shots, but subsequently I wanted to photograph in colour because it was a really colourful scene. 

The popularity of the acid house story meant that during that summer I was sending the slides to Sweden and Spain, France and Germany, and that’s probably why quite a few got lost.

For quite a while I wasn’t really satisfied about it, because I only seemed to be recognised for the acid house and rave pictures, although I had photographed so many other scenes and styles over 30 years. 

But of course, it’s lucky to be recognised at all, and in this book I wanted to bring together the photos I had and include many shots that hadn’t previously been published, while also ‘reclaiming’ photos from old magazine tear-sheets (where the original slide had been lost), so I photographed the magazine tear-sheet. 

As an aside, like a lot of photographers, I prefer photographing slides with a 1:1 macro lens rather than using a flatbed scanner, as the quality is better. 

The last rave I photographed was in 2018 and that was using a Mamiya 6 medium-format film camera, which is the way I’d be likely to go now in order to shoot more portrait-style photos.

There’s still a place for candid photography at events, but it’s harder to shoot when so many people want to control the way that their image appears, sometimes even grabbing the camera to delete images that they don’t like. That’s not photography, it’s public relations.