Craig McCarthy
ISBN 978 0 500 2787682
£12.95
Thames & Hudson
Review by Jareh Das
Everyone must relate to leaving a gig/club and upon exiting being bombarded with flyerers. Flyering can be a bit of a nuisance for two main reasons, the first is that you are bound to hoard them in your bedroom and miss the night or the fact that you get so many you're obliged to dispose in the nearest bin, tube, bus, taxi or wherever you pass through on your way home (none of which I partake in being an ex flyerer myself I feel obliged take every flyer given to me home!). My flyers are in various places (storage, under my bed, Manchester etc) but Craig McCarthy, unlike me, did something rather genius with his flyer collection. He has created a collage photo book Fly By Night: The New Art of The Club Flyer, from his days studying art at Camberwell and beyond (his collection spans 10 years between 1998-2008) documenting the subversive underground club nights/happenings and performances taking place in London Town.I can't imagine how many flyers the author owns (lots by the looks of it) but ponder over the difficulty he would come across in deciding on his selection for the book. McCarthy makes it apparent his selection is based on memories of the nights he visited/visits but he also renders the flyers a sense of immortality as a lot of this nights cease to exist, but by looking at an old flyer one is transported back to a specific time/place. For instance, in his footnote for Junk Club, McCarthy reminisces about being there, 'You Missed It. I was there so were The Horrors, These New Puritans, The Violets etc'. It's almost as if the flyer now represents a photograph/an insight to an experience few have encountered and many have missed out on. I especially liked the fact that the author put a lot of visual as well as contextual reasoning into this collage ensemble. He speaks about Kaos (promoters of underground parties) flyers being speedy flights to the underworld, and Dice Club (which I have frequented, so definitely relate to) flyers which he arranged in oscillating patterns around his room and captures in the book. McCarthy's book also draws on the fact that he is friends with promoters of most of the nights whose flyers he collects, and a lot of these centre around a certain east London kind of indie-electro scene, with popular scenster nights like Sexbeat, Club Motherfucker, Durr, Trash and Beat Club making appearances.
There are a few surprises, like renowned photographer Wolfgang Tilmans photographing/designing a flyer for Wednesday nights at Ghetto, You Me Bum Bum Train, Fanzine and Antisocial. Flicking through the pages one realises a lot of these nights have ceased to exist but the flyers create a parallel universe of what used to be, and I have to agree with McCarthy's notion of making flyers immortal as they do offer a window into night time subculture and a lot of them quite unjustly end up as backies or in then nearest bin. Next time you're out look closely at the effort, detail and creativity put into flyers and don't just discard...they will serve as a memorabilia for future years to come.
