Posts from the “Music” Category

Michele Saunders & Tina Paul: The Last Nights at Paradise Garage

Posted on August 19, 2019

From 1977 to 1987, Paradise Garage reigned supreme over New York’s downtown nightclub scene. Located at 84 King Street, the Garage was home base for resident DJ Larry Levan (1954-1992), whose signature style of dance music became the definitive sound of New York—popularized by West End Records founder Mel Cheren (1933-2007), who financially backed the club.

Over a customized sound system designed by Richard Long, Levan would weave spellbinding tapestries of house, disco, rock, and pop tracks that kept revelers coming back for more. The Garage regularly hosted live performances by the hottest artists of the era, featuring everyone from Grace Jones to Whitney Houston, Sylvester to Divine, Klaus Nomi to New Order, Gwen Guthrie to The Clash.

Modeled on David Mancuso’s legendary invitation-only parties at The Loft, where no liquor was served, the Garage was a members-only club that curated its attendees as carefully as Levan selected his records. The three decades after the club closed, it remains an icon of New York’s nightlife hey-day, living on as the annual Paradise Garage Reunion, to be held this August 30 and 31 at Elsewhere in Brooklyn. In advance of the festivities, Garage members Michele Saunders and Tina Paul look back at the last weekend at the legendary club.

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

Categories: 1980s, Document Journal, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Janette Beckman: Raw Punk Streets UK 1979-1982

Posted on August 5, 2019

Ladbroke Grove, London 1979 © Janette Beckman

In the mid-1970s, British photographer Janette Beckman tells VICE, she left her home in London to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. “I decided, ‘I’m leaving home. I’m going to be an artist and take drugs!’” she says with a laugh, sitting in the kitchen of her Manhattan loft.

She moved into a semi-squat in Streatham filled with art students and rented a floor for the impressive fee of £5 a week from an eccentric professor who taught at London University. “He was a spiritualist and was in touch with his dead wife,” Beckman reveals, before going on to recount summers spent at the professor’s nudist camp just outside the city, where they grew weed in the backyard.

Beckman completed her studies at the London College of Printing, then got a job teaching photography to teens at the Kingsway Princeton School for Further Education in 1976 just as punk exploded on the scene. Entranced by the raw energy taking aim at the establishment, Beckman found the perfect subject to launch her four-decade photography career.

With the publication of Raw Punk Streets UK 1979-1982 (Café Royal Press), Beckman delves deep into her archives, unearthing never-before-seen images of the UK punk scene in its formative years. We catch up with Beckman to discuss the D.I.Y. ethos that became the basis for punk—and her life’s work, which includes photographs of everyone from the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and X to Debbie Harry, Dee Dee Ramone, and Siouxsie Sioux.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

Punk Girl, London 1979 © Janette Beckman

The Islington Twins, London 1979 ©Janette Beckman

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Music, Photography, Vice

Lee Stuart: Street Dreams – How Hip Hop Took Over Fashion

Posted on July 7, 2019

Jamel Shabazz. Young Boys, East Flatbush, Brooklyn, NYC 1981

“Rap is something you do! Hip hop is something you live!” KRS-One memorably said. Born in the Bronx in 1973, hip hop is not just music, dance, and art; it is a way of being in the world.

“I am a child of hip hop,” says Lee Stuart, Brand Director of Patta, a Dutch streetwear brand, who has curated the new exhibition Street Dreams: How Hip Hop Took Over Fashion. Organised chronologically, the exhibition presents the visual legacy of hip hop through a series of 30 songs and illustrates them with the art, fashion, and photography that defined the era.

“We’re not trying to be historians,” Stuart says. “We are trying to immerse people in these images, show them and make them part of this energy.”

To select the songs, Stuart did what all heads love: he gathered his team and debated the merits of each track. He then chose corresponding work by artists including Nick Cave, Kehinde Wiley, Jamel Shabazz, Janette Beckman, Dana Lixenberg, Hank Willis Thomas, Kambui Olujimi, and Earlie Hudnall.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Earlie Hudnall, Gucci Brothers, 3rd Ward, Houston, TX, 1990 Courtesy PDNB Gallery, Dallas, Texas

Jamel Shabazz. Rude Boy, Brooklyn, NYC 1981.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, Music, Photography

Zak Ové: Get Up, Stand Up Now

Posted on June 27, 2019

Armet Francis, ‘Fashion Shoot Brixton Market’, 1973.

Jenn Nkiru, ‘Still from Neneh Cherry, Kong’, 2018.

“I was raised by a village,” says artist Zak Ové of his upbringing in West London. “It was a very outspoken black and West Indian community, [and I was] understanding how assertive one had to be to be seen.”

As the son of an Irish Socialist mum and acclaimed black filmmaker Horace Ové, the artist was raised with strong ideals that have guided him throughout his career: “Politics within the arts has always been very integral from my father’s generation onwards. [It helps us] attain equality, honesty, and perspective towards our own history.”

Now, Ové is honouring those who laid these foundations in Get Up, Stand Up Now, a new landmark exhibition which celebrates 50 years of Black creativity in the UK. The exhibition features historic artworks, new commissions, and never-before-seen work by 100 artists working in art, film, photography, music, literature, design and fashion. This includes the Black Audio Film Collective, Chris Ofili, David Hammons, Ebony G. Patterson, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Lubaina Himid, Althea McNish, Steve McQueen, and Yinka Shonibare.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Ajamu, from ‘Circus Master Series’, 1997

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Music, Painting, Photography

Sex, Frocks and Rock & Roll

Posted on June 18, 2019

“Sometimes reality is the strangest fantasy of all,” a deep voice slowly says before the pitch-black screen explodes with a heavy guitar riff and a montage of scenes beautiful and bizarre in the original trailer for the 1966 film Blow-Up — the ultimate art house tale of sex, frocks, and rock & roll.

We enter into a day in the life of Thomas (David Hemmings), a fashion photographer modeled on 1960s bad boys David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy. Produced by Carlo Ponti for MGM, Michelangelo Antonini’s first English language film deftly combines aestheticism and existentialism to flawless effect, giving us everything and nothing — much like the troop of mimes that bookend the film.

We first encounter Thomas dipping out of a doss house at the break of dawn and hopping into his Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III Drop Head Coupé, offering the first of many stark contrasts between the artist and his subject. Though set in Swinging London, the city is eerily empty, quiet, and perfectly manicured — an unnerving sense of alienation at every turn.

Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage

Categories: 1960s, Art, Fashion, Jacques Marie Mage, Music, Photography

Kim Gordon: Lo-Fi Glamour

Posted on May 22, 2019

Sound for Andy Warhol’s Kiss LP cover

At age 13, Kim Gordon and her best friend would put “Heroin” by the Velvet Underground on the turntable and give it a spin. Pretending to be high, they’d start to nod, moving in slow motion until the choreography left them lying on the floor.

Restless in West LA, Gordon looked east to Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory – the artist’s famous New York City studio – for inspiration while growing up. She was unaware of the future that was to come, which included, among other things, an invitation to re-score Warhol’s 1963–64 silent film Kiss, which features appearances by Jane Holzer, Gerard Malanga, Marisol, and Pierre Restaney.

The project became the centrepiece for a new exhibition, titled Kim Gordon: Lo-Fi Glamour. Featuring paintings, drawings, and never-before-seen female figurative works, the show highlights Gordon’s lifelong love of the artist.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Music

Phil Knott: Didn’t Know You Cared

Posted on May 8, 2019

In the early 2000s, British photographer Phil Knott photographed Amy Winehouse at the very outset of her career, before the world discovered the majestic talent swaddled in the addiction and pain that fuelled her art — and the tabloids’ bloodthirst. Dead at the age of 27, Winehouse had become a symbol of the fallen woman, denied redemption for bearing her wounds and scars openly, without shame.

Years after her death in 2011, Knott rediscovered the photographs he made of Winehouse and organised an exhibition of 27 prints for Didn’t Know You Cared to honour the life and legacy of a singular talent whose light was extinguished far too soon. Knott’s encounters with Winehouse predate her rise and fall, giving us a glimpse of a pure, innocent soul bound for a tragic destiny.

Knott, who has photographed everyone from Aaliyah to A$AP Rocky over the past 30 years, almost named the exhibition “Amy, I Love You” – a sentiment that is infused in every one of his photos. With the images now on display at New York City’s MixdUse Gallery until June 9, Knott shares his encounters with Winehouse and provides a portrait of the artist as a young woman on the cusp of fame.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Music, Photography

Gavin Watson: Oh What Fun We Had!

Posted on May 1, 2019

By the time Gavin Watson had left school at the age of 16, he had already amassed more than 10,000 photographs of his friends, taken at a council estate in High Wycombe, during the time the second generation of British skinheads were coming of age in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Watson first encounted the Two-tone movement – which fuses ska, punk, and new wave – when he was 14, when he caught Madness on TV in 1979. 40 years on, Watson has come full circle with his new book Oh! What Fun We Had (Damiani), which launches at Donlon Books tonight and features never-before-seen photographs chronicling the rough-hewn kids who transformed skinhead culture into a global phenomenon.

“What’s crazy to me is I took so many pictures,” Watson says on the phone from his London studio. “I couldn’t afford to do it. No one ever paid me to do it. No one ever saw the pictures. I just took them for no real reason, except that I enjoyed taking them.”

Watson’s images have stood the test of time, and reflect the truth of skinheads – one which contradicts the mainstream media’s conflation of the subculture with the National Front. Here, the photographer talks us through his new book, transporting us back to a time when a group of marginalised youth became a threat to Thatcherite Britain because they refused to kowtow to the status quo.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Music, Photography

Janette Beckman: Los Angeles in the Early 80s

Posted on April 11, 2019

Back in the 1970s, while attending Central Saint Martins, Janette Beckman was living in a squat in Streatham, South London. After her upstairs neighbour moved to Los Angeles, Beckman too travelled to the city in search of some sun. There, she fell in love with the pop Americana she saw and took to photographing neon motel signs at night – an image Squeeze immortalised on their 1979 single, “Christmas Day”.

Hooked, Beckman returned to LA in 1981 on assignment for Melody Maker to photograph R&B icons like Stevie Wonder, the Brothers Johnson, and Patrick Rushen. But it wasn’t until summer 1983 that she went the distance. While staying in the Beverly Hills bungalow of the Go-Go’s manager Ginger Canzoneri, Beckman happened upon a story in the LA Weekly about the Hoyo Maravilla gang in East LA. “There weren’t any pictures,” Beckman says over a glass of wine in her Manhattan studio – and she was determined to get them.

Beckman spent the summer hanging out in El Hoyo Maravilla, a local park, and began hanging out with local gang members and their families. Then, at night, she’d hang out in Hollywood, catching punk shows at the Masque and the Whisky, fascinated by the dark style and sound of the scene.

In the wake of an exhibition of her work at Fahey/Klein Gallery during The Photography Show presented by AIPAD, Beckman shares her memories of the legendary LA underground.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Exhibitions, Music, Photography

Guzman: Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814

Posted on March 29, 2019

Sombre church bells sound as Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 begins. An eerie, unsettled feeling unfolds as Jackson recites the “Pledge” her voice layered to suggest a group who are bound together on this journey as one: “We are a nation with no geographic boundaries, bound together through our beliefs. We are like-minded individuals, sharing a common vision, pushing toward a world rid of colour-lines.”

Then she dropped “Rhythm Nation” and the world would never be the same. On her fourth studio album, Jackson transformed from pop star into an icon.

Forever defiant and entirely her own, Jackson refused to give the record label what they wanted, a sequel to Control. But she had bigger things on her mind, and used her art to make a political statement about issues of race, bigotry, gun violence, poverty, drug abuse, illiteracy, and ignorance.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Music, Photography

Bruno Stettler: Als War’s Das Letze Mal

Posted on March 14, 2019

On October 1, 1977, the Clash played Switzerland for the very first time. Their 15-track set at Kaufleuten in Zürich began with “London’s Burning” and “Complete Control” — and somewhere in the audience, 16-year-old Bruno Stettler was taking his very first concert photographs.

Over the next decade, Stettler would go on to take 20,000 photographs at nearly 100 rock concerts around town, capturing the raw intimacy of live shows long before they became overproduced spectacles.

In his new book, Als War’s Das Letze Mal (Sturm & Drang), Stettler takes us on a magical trip through the looking glass, back in the late 1970s and ’80s, when legends like Bob Marley, David Bowie. Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Nina Hagen, and Kraftwerk called the shots.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Music