So if you could give me an introduction to yourself and how you got to bringing out your books?

My name is Chris Brickley, I live in Edinburgh and I have done since the year 2000 but i’m a Glasgow boy. Most of my gig going years and teenage years were spent in Glasgow during the 80s up to 1990. Since then I’ve spent 25 years working the art world putting catalogues together and I thought somebody ought to do a book with the unpublished materials that float around on social media and online. We get used to seeing certain images by professionals or people who’ve come to be household names and their stuff is collected but my worry is that, particularly looking at the punk period, that demographic people are passing on and the material is being lost or damaged or just thrown away. It’s ephemera but it’s important. I think youth culture goes fast and is very much underrated within the cultural lexicon so having worked in fine art and being used to print catalogues I’ve got the skills to put this together. I’ve got some friends with really good collection that were a wee bit older than me, I feel I missed out on that really key period, I was too young for what I think was the most interested period when post punk happened. So that period 79, 81, I was focusing on and the big book I did covered 16 years of gigs in Scotland. I wanted to start before punk and go through it just as everything gets going. I found that the interesting stories weren’t just in Glasgow and Edinburgh but also Aberdeen and punk scenes were popping up in Paisley. People were starting their own scenes and that to me is the most interesting aspect of it, people don’t know that stuff happened in these places. So that’s what the book is covering.

I managed to raise the money largely through contacts and a bit of crowd funding, it wasn’t done as a money spinner, it was done to make sure if there was only one book it had to be comprehensive. When it came out it was well received and paved the way to my new book which is more focused on Glasgow and Paisley in the Punk period of 77 to 81. It was based off new photographs that I got from a guy who was in a band at the time. They took photos hanging out with other bands and gigging around. So most of the material in these books is unpublished, although there are some professional photographs to offer a context. I love the crowd shots where you see everyone in the room and the band before it was just focusing on the band from a good vantage point. You can see as well the shapes of the rooms change. It’s very interesting, I’ve enjoyed doing them and people have enjoyed them having been done.

What scenes were you into when you were young? Was it always punk focused or was it a journey to get there?

I was sort of 11 when The Specials and Madness appeared. I remember punk and I had punk records but I was too young to be actively involved in that. 2 Tone was great for younger kids and had this positive message, Glasgow was still a very old fashioned city in many senses, it wasn’t particularly multicultural like other cities but there were communities and it was very much democratic. That’s the great thing about Glasgow, you meet all sorts of people from all backgrounds. 2 Tone appealed to me greatly not just for the music but the fashion as well was very accessible. When I started going out when I was at school and trying to get into licensed premises, there were some great venues that would never get licensed now. This was the Goth period and going as a youngster and seeing all these people dressed up in really exotic flamboyant ways, I loved it, it was a great period for going out. So the Goth period was when I started going out. 

So I was always into more alternative music, I always liked punk but I think it was it  becoming more diverse and experimental that I really resonated with. Yes I liked Punk but I saw it hand in hand with the Goth stuff and I was also very much a sixties fanatic and electro stuff, very diverse. But as I say, part of the reason I did these books is I was to young for that most interesting period, I didn’t have any older siblings or friends who were older, doing these books allowed me into it. You’ve got the sounds and you’ve got the visuals, you don’t even need someone to write about them, it’s enough. The book gives a valuable experience if people are interested and it seems a lot of people are.

What was the mood of the gigs at the time? How did it mirror or differ from the mood in Glasgow during the late 70s early 80s.

It’s easiest to answer that from my own experience and then I can give you an opinion from the period which I wasn’t part of directly. Glasgow had and has the reputation of people being sociable, humorous, open and warm but it can also be very aggressive and has a very hard drinking culture. So it could be quite hazardous going out and about in Glasgow as it is similar in many cities. Especially if you had long hair and wore eyeliner but when you were in the right club you felt fairly comfortable. It was a great melting pot for people from all sorts of backgrounds, there were students and nurses all in the goth scene. I met people from all sorts of backgrounds and I think that’s a great thing. I think particularly in those days people used scenes as their uniform, as a means of finding friends or finding an identity. They’re also a way of covering up, in a place like Glasgow which has always been a fashion obsessed city, if you’re not particularly affluent there was always a way you could do it yourself. 

To speak generally the vibe of gigs would be pretty good and healthy, quite alcoholic and inexpensive. Most of the gigs I went to you could just turn up to pub gigs and always get a ticket last minute and relatively affordable. The Punk period from people who were there around 77/78 it was much more hazardous depending where you went. Some venues if you went with a camera you might get chucked out and the bouncers could be very heavy handed. It could be dangerous because there were a lot of people wandering around the city centre who did not understand the different means of self expression.

In the early to mid eighties ou could go anywhere in Scotland and somewhere in the town you could find in the corner of the pub some goths. It was remarkable as a means of discovering each other or finding friends but we weren’t capturing it because we just weren’t carrying cameras with us on nights out. That’s what makes these so precious, they’re such rare things.