‘You got it or you didn’t’: the sweat, smoke and sonic excess of the indie scene pre-Britpop

A new photography book captures the ramshackle squats and grimy venues that were a playground for confrontationally uncommercial early-90s bands like My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab and Silverfish

A while back, photographer Joe Dilworth found himself talking to the drummer in a currently successful British rock band. He asked how they got started, expecting to hear about low-rent gigs, and was startled to find the drummer talking about their business plan. “He told me they’d got loans, from their parents I think, and they paid themselves 20 grand a year until they got signed.” Dilworth laughs. “They’d treated it like a startup. They’d viewed playing small gigs as a kind of loss leader.”

It was a conversation from which you could infer a lot about the state of music in the 21st century, but it got Dilworth thinking about the bands he’d photographed in north London in the late 80s and early 90s: pictures of tiny, unruly gigs (“the band were always in cigarette-lighting distance of the audience”), dingy pubs, and what you’d politely describe as rudimentary living conditions. These are now collected in a book, Everything, All at Once Forever.

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‘You got it or you didn’t’: the sweat, smoke and sonic excess of the indie scene pre-Britpop

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