The prevailing habit of documenting Dublin’s youth has always been
to roll out tales of stale bread, carbolic soap, ten to a bed and death by TB
before the age of 5. The stuff of hard spuds, hard warts and hard guilt in the
grey old parish of Ireland reached well into the 1970s and still makes for
column inches, not-so-great Irish novels and short filler TV series. There’s no
doubt whatsoever that these depressing vignettes of a pitiful past are
important, but the endless waves of them suggest that nobody in Dublin had
anything but hemp sacks and a mantle of drudgery to wear until some time around
1979 ( when they all got clothes because the pope was coming ). For those of us
who have childhood memories reaching beyond that, there’s always been a
niggling that this might not actually be the case: observing weird hair do’s
and strange shoes in old family photos, finding Byrds albums in your friend’s
dad’s record collection or recalling that large piece of bootboy graffiti on a
boundary wall of the green pebbledash portacabin national school you went to.
Covering Dublin youth culture or street style in any media sense
was often limited to in the realm of novelty: the odd picture of punks on
Grafton Street in a national newspaper or auld dears on the radio reminiscing
about gangs of skinheads in St. Anne’s Park in the early 1970s wreaking havoc by
pushing innocent roller skaters down the hill into the pond. Prior to that, who
knows? – But it must have been a daunting task digging into a world of sepia to
find out.
In this highly impressive 304 page photo book, life crawls out of
the pondweed and into the Brylcreem some time around 1956. It’s a world of
moderately content expressions, floral print dresses, pencil skirts, primitive
quiffs and suggestions that the first wave of rock’n’roll migrated here in a
staggered but orderly fashion. The late 50s and early 60s are punctuated by
newspaper clippings about the evils of teddy boys and later, ads for BSA
motorbikes, reflecting reliance on imported cultural ideas. This is also
indicative of the first era of disposable income and a slightly widening gap
between childhood and adulthood. Smarter dress creeps in towards the mid 60s
and there’s and abundance of street photographer shots capturing young couples
( in what was probably their only finery ) on O’Connell Street. By ’65, the
girls hemlines and hairstyles appear shorter and shorter and the boys, when not
suited up, start to look like low rent versions of the pop stars of the day,
eventually graduating towards the trappings of beat fashions. This is the point
at which something of genuine individuality seems to finally come alive and
includes a lot of looks that have been exhaustively reheated as “vintage” many
times since.
The dawn of the 70s brings with it the first skinhead and
bootboy photos. One in particular, of 3 kids in Weaver Square, Cork street ( pg
98 ) has a gloomy but fascinating Dickensian air about it, more Oliver Twist
than Fred Perry. There’s also a spread of photos from a motley bunch called the
Bridge Boot Boys, apparently notorious in their day and some other watered down
versions of the same look as the 70s move on into long hair and denim. This
seems to be the enduring pattern until the short lived habit of safety pins
through cheeks signals Dublin punk in it’s infancy. For several pages this wind
of change is illustrated to varying degrees of understanding, culminating in a
tendency towards a toned down street style rather than early shock clichés as
the decade closes. There are also small glimpses of concurrent trends: Dublin’s
rock’n’roll revival, mods and powerpop/skinny tie types.
These elements of youth culture spill over well into the 80s
section of the book in advancing forms. Certainly, punk fashions take on a
harder edge which outlast the decade, as do successive generations of
scooterboys, metallers, and skinheads and rockabillies. What comes new with the
era are brief glimpses of new romantics ( ...maybe there just weren’t that many
around. Good. ), some great photos of breakdancers ( both in competition
capacity and as young suburban hopefuls with a square of lino ), mid 80s
B-boys and goths/cureheads. The later seem grossly underrepresented given the
volume of them that were kicking about at the time. The same can be said for
trashers who, apart from one page, have suffered severe revisionism. Or perhaps
they just never had cameras.
What’s interesting about the 90s is that very little is new at
this point. Tribal demarcation mostly remains the same until much of it is
swallowed up by dance culture and homogenized into a glut of ecstacy sweat, Vicks
Vaporub, whistles and some sham selling you a wrap of athletes foot powder. Elements of many older subcultures still carry
themselves through successive generations and waves of popularity in the 90s,
albeit in smaller pockets.
There’s a hazardous tendency towards romanticism when it comes to
such an impressively curated wealth of images. While the photos don’t squabble
about facts, neither do still snapshots of the past explain how shit things
might have been at any given time. Most of the people pictured as they are here
have moved on, some haven’t, others are deceased. If there’s any common
thread from beginning to end, it would be difficult to compress it into a single digestible
sentence. Perhaps there isn’t one other than the evolution and devolution of
tribal affiliation, but where a greater text / anecdotal content might have
augmented this to great effect, it would take another book the same size or
larger to explain everything. As it stands, it’s a compelling, obsessively foraged
and beautifully presented archive. - BOZ
The first run of WHERE WERE YOU in hardback format is apparently
sold out so steal off a friend or wait for a reprint.
( ISBN: 978-0-956949-30-1 )
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