Nightlife is an ephemeral thing. For all the joy and chaos of a big night out, our memories are often left behind on sticky dancefloors, bulldozed by hangovers or washed down the drain the following morning along with the sweat and the makeup. In the cold light of day warehouses converted into illicit dancefloors return to anonymous industrial sites, and in recent years the UK’s bars and clubs have faced the triple-pronged threat of the pandemic, the cost of living crisis and the relentless Pret-ification of high streets.
This is what makes photographs of nightlife culture so mesmeric, and so important: they record for posterity the fleeting magic and mayhem of temporary scenes. The following archives and photographers help document the many fabulous and debauched faces of the UK’s clubs, pubs, raves and DIY venues, providing a window to generations of party animals.
Linden Archives
Bored during lockdown, Stuart Linden Rhodes began uploading some of the thousands of photographs he’d taken of the gay scene in northern England in the 1990s on to his Instagram account. Rhodes started out as a nightlife photographer for All Points North magazine (terrible pay, but he got free entry to clubs), and later worked as the northern correspondent for Gay Times.
By night, he travelled to venues across the country, photographing gay bars, Pride events and club nights, as well as the occasional celebrity. Lily Savage, the drag persona of Paul O’Grady, Julian Clary and young, Lycra-clad members of Take That can be found among the revellers.
By day, Rhodes was a teacher in Harrogate. “It was madness,” he says of his moonlighting. “I would get back to Harrogate, and the first thing I had to do for the Gay Times was pop the films in a jiffy bag, go to the post office at the railway station and deposit the film so it could get on the first train to London. Then I’d go home, go to bed and go to work.” Because this was the era of Section 28 – the homophobic law brought in by Margaret Thatcher’s government that pushed countless staff and students into the closet – Rhodes used his middle name, Linden, for his photography work. But his colleagues in the staff room knew about his second career. “I used to take the mickey by saying that they were going home to do their gardening and play with train sets. There I was loading up the car with cameras and friends and heading off into the night.”
Rhodes stopped photographing the club scene in the 2000s. By then the “drug culture had taken hold”, and the music had got too intense for his tastes. (Too much hardcore, not enough Donna Summer.) These days he posts a new photograph on @linden_archives every day, and the account has become a kind of collective photo album, where followers can take a trip down memory lane and comment on people and places they recognise.
Out and About with Linden, a queer archive of the north, will be republished in 2023 by Pariah Press.
Museum of Youth Culture –
The Museum of Youth Culture has a similar nostalgic appeal, collecting photographs of people in Britain between the ages of 15 and 25 taken over the past 100 years, and inviting the public to send in their snaps. Among the submissions are fuzzy photos of raucous pre-drinks at home, women smoking cigs in social clubs, house parties in Manchester and pints and hairspray in Essex nightclubs.
Originally a photo archive, the project was established in 1997 by Jon Swinstead, co-founder of the 90s fashion magazine Sleazenation. Unimpressed by the corny stock images of youth subcultures, he created the Photographic Youth Music Culture Archive (PYMCA), working with photographers to build a bank of images that he licensed to newspapers and magazines. In 2015, realising the potential of the collection as a public archive, the agency was relaunched as the Museum of Youth Culture.
Today the museum is nomadic, popping up in different locations across the UK. A current exhibition at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery includes a scanning station where visitors can add their photos. Its Instagram account @museumofyouthculture, which combines the work of professional and amateur photographers, is a treasure trove of big looks and big nights out through the decades. There are photos of groovers on the soul scene, raven-haired goths at Soho’s legendary Batcave club, pilled-up ravers with dummies and whistles round their necks and boozy nu-metal fans looking knackered post-mosh.
Grown Up in Britain: 100 Years of Teenage Kicks is at the Coventry Herbert Art Gallery & Museum to 12 February.
Liz Johnson Artur
Born in Bulgaria, celebrated chronicler of Black British culture Liz Johnson Artur has been documenting nightlife since she arrived in London in the early 1990s, photographing MC battles, teenage raves, Notting Hill carnival and ad-hoc club nights.
In the 2000s, she started following the clandestine instructions issued by London’s pirate radio stations for getting to illegal parties. “We’d meet a man at a garage and he’d take us to some backstreets or up some roof,” she says of adventures that eventually led to a dancefloor.
Part of the appeal of Artur’s photographs is their generosity. She always shows her subjects in a positive light: relaxed, part of a community, living their best lives. When I ask if she has a strategy for putting people at ease, she says there is no technique, only trust. “In a club, people are in a place where they feel safe enough to let go, and there has to be an understanding. If people allow me in, I’m happy to take what they give me.”
Artur describes herself as old-fashioned and dedicated to the craft of manual photography. (She still uses one of the cameras she had upon arrival in the UK.) Her daughter helps with her Instagram account, @lizjohnsonartur, where you can see photographs from Artur’s formidable back catalogue alongside recent glitzier photos of Black celebrities such as Marcus Rashford and Michaela Coel.
Works by Liz Johnson Artur make up one of the 13 displays of the ongoing Artist and Society exhibition, showing at Tate Modern, London.
Chaotic Nightclub Photos
Pictures of the past often slip us into the warm bath of nostalgia – it seems easier to mythologise and cannibalise days gone by than it does to look the present in the eye. For readers wanting a distinctly unromantic view of recent British nightlife, Chaotic Nightclub Photos (@ClubPhotos) is the place for you. The Twitter account specialises in images of the kind of debauched and disgraceful goings-on you might expect to find in the corner of a Hieronymus Bosch painting: a man taking a secret wee while ordering a drink at a bar; someone projectile vomiting in the background of a group photo; a person passed out in the trough of a urinal; a woman attempting to swallow her own fist; police peeling people off the pavement after closing.
Since it launched earlier this year, Chaotic Nightclub Photos has amassed more than 1 million followers. While the photos have no explanatory captions, and some appear to come from international clubs, other destinations are recognisable by the watermark logos of venues around the UK, suggesting they’ve been taken by in-house photographers. The images record the sloppy carnage familiar to every nightclub in every town and on every university campus, and the perverse joy of looking is only tempered by the fear of finding yourself in the background, pissed as a fart and doing something utterly regrettable.
Dirty Little Club Babe
As a teenager in Hackney in the 2000s, Roxy Lee began taking pictures in order to remember nights out. The capital’s squat-party scene has a long and anarchic history of turning boarded-up pubs, warehouses, office blocks and other abandoned buildings into improvised venues. Squat parties, Lee says, “were always such temporary spaces. I’m a very precious person, I’m a bit of a hoarder. I’m like that with my memories as well.”
Eight years ago, when Lee was in her early 20s, she turned her lens on London’s queer scene. Her desire to keep a record of her social life was strengthened by the ongoing closures of many much-loved pubs and clubs: over the last decade, 60% of London’s queer venues have closed, in part due to soaring rents and rampant property development.
The photos Lee posts on her Insta account @sausageandcustard are a riot of ripped fishnets, mirrorballs, jockstraps, outrageous outfits, poppers and drag queens, and an irreverent celebration of the hedonism and creativity that continues to flourish in spite of punitive economic conditions. What makes a good picture of a night out? “Sexiness, in the broadest meaning of the term,” says Lee. “I love what people wear and how they present themselves. But fundamentally, the biggest thing is people just being themselves.”
