THE SKINNY
Sketching a Scene Clubs
From early Slam events to pre-pandemic parties, we delve into the visual history of Scottish club culture with help from some notable club flyer and poster designers in the final part of our series platforming emergent writers, produced in partnership with Edinburgh International Festival Interview: Chiara Wilkinson
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Slam Splashdown
Haçienda in Manchester, and the queues were enormous,” Helliwell recalls. “We only got in by the skin of our teeth. There was a bit of ticket fraud meaning that some of the genuine ticket holders were refused entry.” Another standout from Helliwell’s collection is an early Sub Club poster for the only Scottish date on acid house icon Adamski’s 1989 tour. It has a strikingly bright turquoise background, juxtaposed with an abstract splattering of gold paint. “Adamski wasn’t massively known at the time,” Helliwell says. “The night was just a complete sweatbox. You left and you were soaked to the skin.” Playing with Pop Culture “At the start of the 90s, people were really into ripping off movie posters,” says Paul Hagan, a 46-year-old flyer collector from Aberdeen, who set up a Facebook community group called Scottish Classic Club Culture just over a year ago. He references a poster from a 1991 Friday the 13th house and techno party in Inverness, featuring a typical horror movie graphic complete with an 18 film certificate. Hagan’s collection reveals that there was a lot of pop culture referencing going on in poster design at the time – be that logos, labels, or famous records – often because they were so easy to alter. “People did things like scan a videotape cover and manipulate it using some really primitive Microsoft Office thing,” he says. “Some of my friends would cut words out and stick them to flyers then photocopy them millions of times.” One of his posters – from a Disco Frenzy 90s night in Aberdeen’s Cotton Club – plays on the classic album cover for Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Meanwhile, the poster for a 10,000-capacity Hogmanay party at Edinburgh’s Royal Highland Centre in 1998 is based on a whisky bottle. Famed for being the home of Bass Generator’s happy hardcore, the poster depicts a frightening cartoon version of Father Christmas underneath the name of the event series, The Rezerection. Sci-fi Stereotype Memories of early rave flyers will more than likely conjure up images of aliens, UFOs, and loved-up robots. Dance music’s wholehearted embrace of the sci-fi aesthetic was in part due to design trends at the time, but also because of the futuristic event experience that promoters were determined to sell. “In the
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Image: Courtesy of the artist and Paul Hagan
Back to Basics The house and techno explosion that was born in the United States made its way over to Scotland in the mid-1980s, back when posters disguised as adverts for car MOTs disclosed vital details for illegal raves. By the end of the decade, the underground electronic dance scene had fully infiltrated the commercial world. Block colours, geometric shapes, and simple motifs were popular in posters, and balancing a huge amount of event information with an eye-catching design was essential. Wendy Helliwell is a mixed-media artist from Edinburgh with a vast collection of original flyers from late 80s and early 90s club nights. She references a poster for a 1989 Slam Splashdown all-nighter at Tramway in Glasgow. “I’m pretty certain that was one of Scotland’s first legally organised raves,” she says. The poster is dense with information, packed with every ticket vendor in the country, coach departures, line-up listings, as well as promises of candy floss, a juice bar, and a ‘NASA weightless simulator’. “There were bus loads coming up from the Image: Courtesy of the artist and Wendy Helliwell
August 2021 — Feature
ometimes we are transported back to a particular night without warning. It might be spurred on by a dog-eared ticket found down the back of the sofa, or the remains of a poster peeking through a papier-mâchéd wall on the Cowgate. It could be an illustration you see while scrolling through Instagram, or the face of a stranger who once handed you a soggy flyer on Sauchiehall Street. Providing visual references for nights that may otherwise feel hazy with memory, graphic designers form an integral part of the clubbing ecosystem. Gone are the primitive days of posters made exclusively with felt tip pens and a photocopier; as digital design software has become more accessible, club artwork has grown increasingly varied and innovative.
The Rezerection
