Celebrating the flyer art that helped define rave and acid house culture

Date
6 October 2014

The changing role of album artwork in a digitally-defined music culture has been much discussed; meanwhile the art of the gig poster seems to be in fairly rude health. But there’s another story to be told; a lesser-examined but tremendously significant area of visual music-related collateral – the flyer.

Chelsea Louise Berlin’s new book Rave Art draws on her huge collection of flyers, invites, membership cards and other ephemera from the early 1980s onwards to celebrate the lo-fi visual culture which was so intrinsically linked to the UK club scene. Not only are these fascinating visual artefacts, they were also vital to the way the scene spread and partygoers communicated how, when and where the next raves would take place.

Chelsea writes in her introductory essay: “The invites would come to us sometimes when we still in the clubs, most often when we leaving in the early hours, on occasion just by passing someone or standing with them in the cloakroom queue and getting into a conversation, but practically all the invites were in the form of printed flyers of one medium or another: paper ones, plastic ones, fabric ones, laminated or even edible ones on the odd occasion (they haven’t survived in good enough condition for this book alas) but of every shape, style and genre you could think of.”

Above

Chelsea Louise Berlin: Rave Art

Above

Chelsea Louise Berlin: Rave Art

Above

Chelsea Louise Berlin: Rave Art

The flyers were key for circumnavigating police surveillance of the illegal parties, but on a more practical level too as some of the venues were very hard to find. Take Chelsea’s description of her first Mutoid Waste Party for instance: “To gain entry to the party you got into the back of a disused and derelict coach partially outside the grounds, scrambled down inside to the front doors and exited through them directly into the event itself. It was a cross between a Mad Max movie set and a dance club with scrap metal sculptures, walls of tyres, fire bins and spinning elements all over.”

Of course through these flyers, Chelsea actually tells the story of a generation who witnessed the birth, the heyday and then the decline of an entire subculture as parties became big business. But each flyer represents a an event, a coming together of people who thought the party would never stop. As one rave wound down these simple scraps of paper carried the all-important instructions of where a new party was just cranking into life.

As Chelsea writes: “We would travel either across town, North or East, or into the suburbs or often beyond, to continue in a warehouse or other commercial building tarted up and fitted out with huge amplified sound systems for the sole purpose of our continued hedonistic pleasure long in Sunday proper.”

Rave Art published by Carlton Books is out this week.

Above

Chelsea Louise Berlin: Rave Art

Above

Chelsea Louise Berlin: Rave Art

Above

Chelsea Louise Berlin: Rave Art

Above

Chelsea Louise Berlin: Rave Art

Above

Chelsea Louise Berlin: Rave Art

Above

Chelsea Louise Berlin: Rave Art

Above

Chelsea Louise Berlin: Rave Art

Above

Chelsea Louise Berlin: Rave Art

Share Article

About the Author

Rob Alderson

Rob joined It’s Nice That as Online Editor in July 2011 before becoming Editor-in-Chief and working across all editorial projects including itsnicethat.com, Printed Pages, Here and Nicer Tuesdays. Rob left It’s Nice That in June 2015.

It's Nice That Newsletters

Fancy a bit of It's Nice That in your inbox? Sign up to our newsletters and we'll keep you in the loop with everything good going on in the creative world.