Still lookin

Tom Wood’s Looking for Love is without a doubt one my favorite photo books of all time. I first picked it up in the college library in Farnham circa 1992 and my belly rolled over at the greatness of it; I often think I should have stuck it up my jumper while I had the chance and a taste for casual thievery as when I finally got round to buying a copy last year it cost me nearly £300, the original £9.95 label pristine on the back laughing at me. If as David Chandler alludes to in his essay Looking for Love was to be compared to a pop song it might indeed be something like ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There’, blinding hypnotic beautiful rhythmic uplifting though like the very best love songs rooted in longing and melancholy, a howl in the void for love and comfort, the yearning to transcend filling the pages and like the Four Tops smash, irrefutably a classic, never failing to touch.

Now these years down the line I find myself in the unexpected position of collaborator and publisher of this new interpretation of the work. I had been up in Chester doing a talk to Tom’s students when a post work pint turned into a late night bender. The next morning on the train back to London and spectacularly hung over I fished my newly signed copy of Looking for Love out of my bag and started going through it picture by picture word for word in an attempt to eclipse my suffering. I found myself totally immersed in the collages at the front of the book, studying the irregular images under my photographers magnifying loop like a slightly crazed jeweler mesmerized by the facets on raw and precious gems that until this moment had somehow escaped his attention. When I got home I scanned the collages in, cutting the individual images out in Photoshop, placed them on plain white backgrounds, made a rough maquette and posted it to Tom with the proposition that we made a new book. He said yes.

Regarding what happened to the people in these pictures I can only speculate but perhaps like the people I knew they joined the dole queue or became students or apprentices, became parents and joiners and accountants, teachers, soldiers, artists, bank clerks, shop assistants, went to the docks or the shipyards, became builders and policemen and women (bent and otherwise), crooks, drug dealers, musicians, promoters, DJ’s, alcoholics and addicts, mental patients, suicides, murderers or murder victims, prisoners, émigrés, became rich, became poor or poorer or all of the above, who the hell knows. What I do know is that this is a glimpse of British nightlife on the cusp of one of the most significant and mythologised youth cultural phenomenons the country has ever seen – the acid house movement and the birth of the ecstasy generation.

I never set foot in the Chelsea Reach but I have been to plenty places like it, Sparkles down the road in Carrick, The Coach in Banbridge, The Crescent on Sandy Row and the king of them all, Kelly’s in Portrush. I remember the pints of lager, the smoke, the sticky carpets and slippery dance floors, the fake ID’s to get past the aggro bouncers, screaming to be heard above the music and you can’t fucking move it’s so packed, the smuggled quarter bottle and a five deal of hash, and talking about it all on Monday morning at school coz we were only 13 or 14 when we started. I remember the clothes and the hairstyles and the music, I see the faces of my childhood friends and adversaries. I see my sister in a skinny black tie, white buttoned down shirt and a perm, I see the girls I kissed, the unrequited loves and lost sweethearts, my own and everyone else’s. I see Skimmer who would start unbuttoning his trousers to the first beats of Man 2 Man Meets Man Parrish’s Male Stripper and then spending the next half hour prancing about in a pair of C&A undies. I see the older girls who wouldn’t look at you twice and the nutty boys who would beat you good looking. I see Julie and Cara and Diane and Shirley and Lee and Jackie, oh Jackie, Jackie… I see Logey and Geordie and Blurt and Ricky Doyle and Kelleher and Meeky and Starsy and Aeppli getting filled in yet again for being too funny and good looking and weird. I see the exuberance and hope and frustration and fragility and defeat of youth all mixed up in one boozy, smoky, hormonal stew swaying spinning groping snogging shouting laughing. I see the queue at the chippies and smell the burger vans, the inevitable fights and tears and flashing lights, a hand-job if you’re lucky, a party, the walk home, the lift, the coach, someone’s bed or couch or floor or cell.

I remember when seemingly on mass we all started taking strange little pills and powders and squares of perforated paper with tiny pictures of smiley faces and oms and strawberries printed on them, when we started wearing baggy clothes and growing our hair and freaky dancing and hugging strangers till dawn and telling each other we loved each other and smoking big spliffs on the comedown talking shit and walking home at noon the next day or the day after that listening to the birds sing and putting all our old records and cassettes under the bed coz we knew we weren’t gonna need them anymore and getting in cars to drive round the country and putting on nights and doing deals and reading Mixmag and The Face and ID and saving up for a trip to Ibiza and thinking just maybe anything’s possible after all. There was gonna be no more slow dances for us, no more lights on and getting your coat at 1am, no more drunken fights and sausage suppers, we were going raving, and so was everybody else.

It hard for me not to look back at these pictures without a warm sense of nostalgia, but then simmering though that, comes a great anger and disappointment for what has been lost and for what lies ahead for young and old alike. Over 25 years on, and the Criminal Justice Act of ’94 ancient history, with our every mouse click and phone called spied upon, corporations writing our laws and controlling our systems of information, the NHS up for sale and Citizens Advice banjaxed and Legal Aid dismantled, and the 2011 riots dismissed as ‘apolitical’ (but lets not mention the chasmic economic disparities and social inequalities, or the housing crisis, or endemic police corruption and brutality, stop and search, or kettling, or profiling but their lives somehow more valuable than yours or mine… ) but don’t worry coz you can post ironic comments about it on Facebook or Twitter or borrow a few hundred quid off Wonga or its ilk and boogie on down to the corporate festival of your choice, onsite police force resplendent with sniffer-dogs and strip-cells in a state of the art pop up processing suite, ‘Drug use will not be tolerated here! … unless of course its this pint of warm piss for five English pounds thank you very much’… We find ourselves lorded over by criminal oligarchs and the billionaire wideboys who are deified by sneering lapdog don’t the price of a pint of milk politicians whilst we struggle in the midst of banking induced austerity, with student fees, and workfare, and slim to no chance of a trade, or an apprenticeship, mass unemployment with part-time and zero hour contracts blurring the figures and if even if you get one forget about any rights and the papers and telly full of lifestyle bile, food & property porn masquerading as culture, bookending vilification of the needy and disenfranchised ‘lock up the poor, be a grass, be a tout, dial this number, you’re not like them fuck em’ until it’s you their coming for, and I don’t know about you but I kinda stop and ask myself. Where IS the love?

Gareth McConnell