The Design of Rave In Underground Flyers
With Chelsea Louise Berlin
Chelsea’s passion has always been design in its many forms. As an art student in London during the eighties Chelsea would collect whatever she could use as reference points and inspiration that she could find for free. Going to clubs 3 nights a week meant a constant supply of flyers were being delivered to Chelsea, demonstrating the latest styles and techniques of graphic design.
The flyers are always unique, sometimes playful, witty or sometimes avant-garde and alluring but they all evoke personal memories and an invitation into the underground.
Interview by Esta Maffrett | 17.03.23
How did you get into the rave scene?
Like most people at the time I was clubbing and I was mostly into Hip-Hop, Rap, Reggae, Dub, that type of thing. I was at art school from 82-84 and I had just left home before then so I got into clubbing very young. I was taken by people in their 20s who I was meeting and they would take me to lots of clubs and carnival, I also met a number of DJs and other artists who dragged me along to whatever the new and happening place would be. At the same time I was creating drawings of people in clubs whilst I was in them and that led me to doing banners for the Opera House Nightclub and putting pictures on the walls. The Opera House nNightclub was in the old Piccadilly Theater. It was mostly Rap and Hip Hop but it was the early days of Chicago House, so probably around 86-early 87, I was in a position where I was friends with promoters through doing my drawings and then I was invited to more places and meeting more people. That’s really what led me into the scene, I was clubbing 2 or 3 nights a week most weeks. When you would come out of a club you get handed a flyer and if you were in the right place at the right time that flyer would lead to another club and those clubs were the precursor to the early rave clubs. So that’s sort of how I got dragged into the rave scene. By 88 clubs like R.I.P at Pink Street, and Shoom at the Southwark Aquatic Centre & Gymnasium and Delirium which was at the Astoria Theatre and then Heaven got started. There was also a restaurant called Bill Stickers on Greek Street in Soho that was like the Limelight which was the church on Shaftesbury Avenue, there was also one in New York and they got converted into clubs and bars and restaurants. And I spent a lot of time in the Limelight Piano Bar, the VIP bar with friends because my next door neighbours uncle owned it so we would get free drinks and hang out with people that we would never normally meet otherwise. These were the places where DJS started to play these early tracks before they got to the clubs.
What art school were you at?
Chelsea school of art was an eye opening and wonderful experience. Although I was probably too young to be there so I don’t think I really made the best of it because I was a complete rebel and going through my own personal situations but I still found it an incredible experience. I did a diploma in art and design which I passed so I had something coming out of it. I’ve always been a bit of a sponge, I’m known for taking in the most ridiculous amounts of information and then somewhere along the line i’ll come out with it when it’s needed. I was there during the mid to late 80s and socially, politically, economically there were a lot of problems and societal breakdown in so many directions that it was a real mixing pot. Being at art school with all this change going on was just incredible. Nearly all our lecturers were working artists or designers or architects so you were touching on subject matter with people who were producing very creative and up to date work. That allowed people like myself to throw that straight back into the work and projects we were doing.
“Some people have photographs and when they look at a photograph it takes them straight back to where they were and who they were with and how they felt. I love photographs for that reason, however for me a flyer does more.”
So design was something you were always interested in?
As a kid I was mad on 2 or 3 different things, one of which was architecture and interiors. I was one of these kids that split my time between doing the usual sporty stuff outside and then being inside creating room sets for action men and dolls, getting cardboard boxes and creating whole rooms including all the furniture and pictures on the walls, bedding, sofas. I wanted to be creative all the time. I got into thinking about animation and remember my dad bringing me these big teach yourself animation books that had pictures of cartoon characters you would draw from five different sized eggs in different directions. Everywhere we would go I was never without this book and a sketch pad drawing these animated characters all the time. When I realised it was like seven years to do architecture and seven years to do animation I thought I need to be an artist now! I left art school for the wrong job but it was in the creative world, I stayed for five years after art school into the early 90s, living as a bohemian artist and squatting in London. So it was the design that got me into the art world.
When people ask me what type of art I do I would suggest i’m more on the conceptual side, although I use sculpture and painting and drawing as part of what I do. I have my books, I have archives, I do installation work, my latest piece is a book which has a dress that goes alongside it as a sculptural piece. So yes design is my passion and where I come from but design incorporates everything. For example when you paint a portrait or a landscape you have to design how you see each section of the drawing or painting.
My very first book before I did Rave Art or Tart Art was a book called The Bench. I spent four years on Hampstead Heath every night taking photos of a single bench on Parliament Hill. 10s of 100s of photos of people just sitting on the bench at sunset, all in silhouette. People said I was a photographer and I said ‘No”, I’m a creative and the camera is no different to me than a marker pen, spray can or a pencil, It’s just the medium I happen to use that enables me to express that thought process.
You have this incredible flyer collection. Was collecting something that was natural to you or did you decide to start collecting after seeing the flyers?
I think it was a bit of both, My father is a collector, he has a museum quality collection of antique Victorian and Edwardian writing equipment. As a child he used to take me around antique markets, when he would come and see me on a Saturday, that would be our day out. Alexandra Palace, Camden Market, Camden Passage, Portobello Road. I think the collecting bug got in me from him, the challenge of searching something out, finding it and fitting it into a space in a collection and enjoying the history of it and where it came from.
When I started keeping items for myself, it was mostly through necessity. I was a poor struggling artist coming out of art school, I had no money. Most of the time I was squatting, I didn’t even have a home. The things that interested me that I did spend money on were comic books. I have a large collection of comic books and books, but what I couldn’t afford were magazines. In those days way before mobile phones, way before social media, way before the internet, the way we communicated with each other and the way we found out about what was fashionable, what people were doing, what artists and filmmakers were doing was through magazines. So I started keeping any copy of a magazine I could lay my hands on whether it was the i-D, The Face, Blitz or GQ, I’ve got tons of old Vogue magazines and Elle. I’d go to a doctor surgery or a dentist or hospital and if they were throwing out magazines I would just scoop them up and take them home. I never cut things out, never tore pages out of them, I just kept them in little towers and would use them as reference material. I didn’t have any money to buy coffee table books which would have been my reference. Now I have a wonderful library, piles of books in every direction in every room. But I still keep magazines and I still have that need for reference material. That was what started me collecting the flyers rather than just ripping them up for roach material or writing notes on them to stick on the fridge. They became my reference material. Once I had started collecting them the graphic content and the social history became more and more interesting to me. It started becoming a collection but it probably wasn’t until about 2010 that I really saw it as a collection rather than just a reference library.
What do you think makes a good flyer?
That’s interesting because over the last few years i’ve watched how flyers have become valuable on eBay and Facebook, there’s people buying and selling them all over the place. I have sold 100 or more flyers for DJ friends of mine but mine are not for sale. I would never part with my collection. Unless someone wants to buy the entire installation from Saatchi gallery as a single piece of art then it might be for sale for the price of my mortgage.
It’s hard because some of them graphically I love for the complexity of the graphic design or the brilliance of the art work. But actually some of my favourite ones are the early, simple hand drawn one sided scraps where somebody’s photocopied a bit of an A to Z page and drawn a little arrow on it. Those are the ones that I really love. Some of the simple ones or when someone plagiarised Batman or a Keith Haring picture and put it on the back of a coloured piece of card, it tells a story because it has all the information on it. They are very secretive, the smiley face might be on there, it might just say acid or underground. Some people have photographs and when they look at a photograph it takes them straight back to where they were and who they were with and how they felt. I love photographs for that reason, however for me a flyer does more. It gives me more information, the flyer alone will remind me of exactly who I was with and what we did, where we were, whose car we went in and where we parked. There are some beautiful flyers where the artwork is amazing and I have a few favourites. There’s one delirium flyer which is like a CD, I’ve always loved this one, it’s great because it’s a laminated flyer so from the lamination point of view it’s quite cool. The front images just says discotheque and it’s got a smiley face but it’s a pirates smiley face. For me that says so much, If you just saw that you would know exactly what that club was about.
What does rave mean to you?
Rave was more than the music or the fashion or even the design, rave is a culture in the same way that punk was a culture. I grew up just a little bit too late to be a proper punk, I was more of a new waver. The first thing that I bought was God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols in 77, by 1980 it was New Wave, Post Punk and Electronica. So that culture of accepting others was becoming the most prevalent of the music. Rave was more than just the fashion and design that marked you out from the rest of the society but it was the culture that went with it. Friends of mine still see me as punk even though I would probably call myself a raver because of my attitude to the world. Rave during the summer of Love years had the Punk attitude when it was at its peak in 77/78. The individual nights might have the same DJ or be in a different warehouse but it was all about the cultural impact on society that they were trying to create.
There was a real unification of youth cultures. I say cultures rather than culture because it was a melting pot. Whether you were part of the LGBTQIA+ community, whether you were from the Caribbean community or Asian community, or whether you were an immigrant, everybody was there doing the same thing and looking out for each other. It was only the criminal aspect of the scene, and wherever money is created you’re going to get that negative side of it, but it didn’t affect the dance floor. Hooliganism on football terraces and at matches in the late 80s was terrible but opposing fans would be on the dancefloor hugging and dancing together. To some extent hooliganism and the vitriol and the fighting on the terraces ended because of ecstasy although it never ended completely it did dissipate and that’s partly down to love and peace and harmony which was part of the culture of the rave scene. I mean Promised Land which was the ultimate song of 88 is all about unifying every man, woman and person on the planet.
If you could put one object into the Museum of Youth Culture what would it be and why?
Probably the Keith Haring colouring book that I got from this store on Lafayette Street in New York in 1986. I think there were maybe a thousand ever handprinted. It’s one of my most prized possessions and Keith Haring is one of my absolute icons, I think he was revolutionary in his work. He’s still really underrated as an artist, what he did was so simple but deep and meaningful. The white chalk and murals in muted prime colours were just revolutionary. I think I would want people to see that piece which is just blank and ready for colouring in.
