The Playful Nineties
With Lucy McCarthy
Growing up in the turmoil of Coventry in the eighties and nineties Lucy McCarthy was immersed in music and community. Going clubbing from the age of fourteen she soaked up nightlife and was attracted to the fun and exciting styles that came with it. Speaking about her playful experimentations with photography and the way music has stuck with her, Lucy tells us her story of growing up in Coventry.
Interview by Esta Maffrett | 10.02.23
How did you get into photography?
When I was young my dad bought me a David Hockney book which had loads of pictures of swimming pools and I really loved swimming pools. I discovered the way Hockney used joiners as a way of helping him create portraits of people because he said the joiners were doing what our eyes naturally do when we look at someone, focusing in on different details in the background and the earrings. So I was young but I was quite inspired by that and I’ve always been interested in images since, it’s always been my language. An image speaks 1000 words and I’ve always communicated better with images than words I think. I had a really good teacher at school when I was studying photography and so it never really felt academic although it was, our teacher created an environment where we could play our own music so I’d play my club music when I was printing out my photographs which was great. Most teenagers can’t wait to run away from school and I wasn’t particularly into maths but photography I wanted to live there,, it was a place that I felt like I could relax in. My teacher understood that I was creative and allowed me to feel at home there so I just got into it. I would process all my rave photographs in the school darkroom, there’s something so magical when the photos are appearing. I was improving technically, at first my photos were really dark, you could barely see the people, but gradually I learnt good exposure with flash and stuff like that. My teacher said he didn’t like these the club pictures but he saw that all the kids loved them and would come over to look at them.
What was the mood in Coventry when you were growing up?
Coventry was a mixed environment to grow up in. During the eighties when I was growing up it was quite celebratory. I remember when we won the FA Cup in '87 although i’m not a football fan it was a really cool atmosphere. Coventry always was community orientated so there was a lot of celebration and fun which created good memories. But then in the nineties with the recessions there were riots and it all became quite grey so that’s why I was quite attracted to the rave scene because it seemed very colourful and playful. I was like 14 when I started going out and It just seemed like this different world that was really cool and really stood out to me. I was drawn to colour in a big way, I was an eighties child so everything was luminous pink and yellow clashing with lime greens, everything in your face and high energy. So it appealed to me in the raves where this colour had been lost from childhood to teen.
In the Grown Up In Britain exhibition you have the bag from my raving days that says Ooosh on it. My sister moved to London when I was about 15 so she used to take me shopping which was just amazing. The fashion was so inspiring and I got this bag from Kensington Market with a speech bubble from like the old Batman cartoons, I thought it was a bit different and it was fun and playful, and it was kind of based on Roy Lichtenstein’s work with the colour and design. I liked things that were about not taking things too seriously which is what the rave culture is about at its heart. I remember the nineties were one of the first eras that looked back at the past, they were looking back at the 60s to the makeup and big hair and the fashions.
When you got into raving did it just feel natural to take your camera with you?
I started going out at 14, my mum let me because we had lodgers in our house who had come to learn English for a couple of weeks and I would make friendships with them and they would take me out to different clubs. I started out going to more mainstream clubs and when I got to 16 I was looking for something different so I was watching Normski on Dance Energy and recording mixes on cassettes that I would listen back over to this new music.
I got into photographing it because I was doing my GCSE photography and one of the briefs was to do a modern day interpretation of Gustav Klimt. There was a lot of gold and quite an ethereal quality ot the images so my mission was to do some kind of portraiture but then to create a montage, that’s why some of my images have got the montages in them and metal work. I have one image of a friend as an angel and also a devil because Klimt used to make people look quite angelic so I tried to take it one step further. I think a lot of his work was about the human psyche and the good and bad elements of life. I was also inspired by the club flyers, the colours in them, so I would paint around the photographs or I would use sequins to add a 3D element. It was a lot of experimenting really but that was what I was there to do. Initially with he camera I was just inspired by the people.
Your photos really capture the individual and the personalities. Was it something you were interested in, the individual over the crowd?
With the club photography I wanted to capture it all but I wanted to hone in on the details. I’ve got a fascination with shoes and the amazing glitter heels and stuff like that people wear and how they express themselves. I’ve taken pictures of crowds but it became apparent to me that people were my interest, what the persons doing and what kind of character they are, what personality they have. The images were shot on a wide angle lens which I like to get that distortion element to the photograph.
Maybe 7 or 8 years after the rave stuff I done a series on Tea Dances where I was really inspired by the people and how they were really passionate about the music, there was a real similarity to ravers in the 90s. I found them to be really interesting characters. I’m really passionate about music and I think the key thing is people but it’s also people’s relationship with music and how they react to it and their experience of it.
When you were growing up did you feel Coventry was doing a good job of nurturing its music scene that led it to have such a rich history of music?
I think Coventry has always been really good at nurturing different subcultures and the growing up in the UK is a lot about what tribe you belong to in terms of subculture because there is a rich heritage there. Coventry is a scene of that. Coventry nurtured music through venues, having as many venues as possible so people felt like they had space to belong. The goths had a place and so did Indie music, they could all feel like they belonged and that’s really important. Places closed but new ones came up and some lasted through time. My auntie and uncle met at a place I was later going to, it’s that community element and friendliness. It’s nice to feel connected to different people in my family through clubs and the love of dancing.
If you could put one object into the Museum of Youth Culture what would it be and why?
I used to have these flip flops in the 90s that had an inflatable bit on them. They were silver, really cool, they were quite heavy and thick and they had an inflatable section over them that had liquid in it with a little sign that would go up and down. They were really comfortable for dancing but they also looked really different and unusual. They were inspired by a designer called Patrick Cox, a famous shoe designer in the nineties who had a pair of jelly shoes that had a plastic finish and the heel was transparent, filled with a liquid snow storm and it had the Eiffel Tower in it. They remind of how playful and subversive the nineties were, the Kevin and Perry attitude of taking the piss out of yourself. I’ve always liked fashion and there were a lot of transparent and space age objects in fashion during the nineties. There were cool brands that done some unusual stuff and I liked anything that tapped into a bit of different and a bit of the unusual.
