Liverpool photographer Mark McNulty has collected more than 550 images from four decades of clubbing.
These days, it’s difficult for me to talk about club culture without falling into “old man yells at cloud” clichés. Namely, that when I was young in the 1990s, everything was better, faster, more fun, more vivid… You get the idea.
In the 90s, older people said the same things to me about the Swinging London of the 1960s. Millennials are no doubt saying the same things now to Gen Zers about the 2010s era. Everyone thinks their youth culture was better than everybody else’s. I get it.
At the same time, though, there’s no denying that the 90s rave scene was kind of special. And a new book by Mark McNulty brings this out better than I’ve ever seen to date.
Better still, though, it doesn’t just stop at 1999 and get off the bus. It keeps going, and going, and going right up till the modern era.
Four decades of dance
The Liverpool-born photographer has certainly put in the hours. As evidenced by this heavyweight book, he’s been an eyewitness to a range of dance eras, from the early days of acid house through the superclub boom. Now, In Clubland: 35 Summers of Love brings it all together in more than 550 photographs across 240 pages.
After-hours party in a car park in Birmingham, 1992. All images: Mark McNulty
Berlin Love Parade, 2003
Published on 5 November by Modern Sky, it arrives while Mark’s work is on show at Tate Britain, as part of the British Culture Archive’s exhibition The ’90s: Art & Fashion, alongside work by Damien Hirst and Vivienne Westwood.
From the inside out
Mark is best known for documenting the music world, but he was once part of it himself. In 1987 he was briefly in a Liverpool band called Eat My Dog, whose first gig was at the Earthbeat festival in Sefton Park, on a line-up that also featured a young Stone Roses and Pulp. He quit after playing the first three songs of a four-song set.
“I was holding them back, and fifteen minutes on the wrong side of the camera was enough to put me off for a lifetime,” he recalls in the book. “So I put down the guitar, used the photo pass to get back in on the Sunday and inadvertently took up a day job.”
He never had any formal training beyond a short documentary photography course. From there on, Mark simply shot what was happening around him, while pestering magazines such as The Face and i-D “to try and get my new friends into their pages”. Soon, they were commissioning him.
Dance like nobody’s watching
His first time photographing a party in full flow was at Quadrant Park in Bootle, Merseyside, in 1990. Thanks to a loophole in the local licensing laws, this was actually the UK’s first legal all-nighter, drawing people from all over the north of England.
Cream at Nation, Liverpool
Cream at Nation, Liverpool
“The saying ‘dance like nobody is watching’ is used a lot these days, but this really was the case here, with the exception of me, maybe,” he writes. “The weirdo who’s taken a camera to a nightclub. They weren’t watching the DJ, and they weren’t watching each other, and they definitely weren’t watching me.”
That sense of being invisible runs right through the book. Mark went on to shoot for Mixmag and DJ Magazine, work that took him from dive bars to power stations, across the UK and beyond. These images are full of colour, motion blur and raw, unselfconscious joy.
Cream to Eurovision
Liverpool’s Cream plays a starring role, so it’s perhaps surprising that Mark didn’t even take his camera to its opening night in 1992. “It was just another club night, and there was no concept of thinking that this might go down in history as being one of the most important nightclubs to have ever existed,” he recalls. Within a few years, though, Duke Street was “a traffic jam of coaches” every Saturday night.
Beyond Liverpool, there’s BackIIBasics in Leeds, which Mark calls “the greatest nightclub of all time” (although he adds: “ask me on another day, and I’ll say Voodoo in Liverpool”). There’s also Berlin’s Tresor, The Haçienda and Nottingham’s Heavenly Social, where an unmasked Daft Punk and The Chemical Brothers make cameos.
Garlands, Liverpool, 1990s
Herbal Tea Party, Manchester, 1993
We get shots, too, of Berlin’s Love Parade between 1995 and 2006: for me, a 2003 shot of a reveller in a rainbow wig and peacock feathers sums up this legendary event’s anything-goes spirit.
The story doesn’t stop with the 90s. It moves through Bugged Out! in the late 90s and Club EVOL in the 2000s, takes in soul all-nighters in Southport and the Creamfields festival, and ends with Eurovision 2023 in Liverpool and the all-female DJ line-up Girls Don’t Sync.
The disco doesn’t stop
How does Mark still do it? Turns out, he doesn’t – well, not in the way he used to. “My nightclub years are well and truly behind me, and late-night capers are mostly a thing of the past,” he admits. “The time I used to go out is now the time I go to bed, and the photographs of the places I went to, played in, danced in, and photographed are starting to appear on the walls of museums and galleries.”
He’s philosophical about it, though. “People of all ages are still going out at night, and the scenes that we thought were ours have just evolved and changed,” he writes. “The world carries on, and the discotheque most certainly doesn’t stop for anybody.”
Kaos in Leeds, 1992
Revolution at The Lakota in Bristol
That’s what I love most about In Clubland. It makes me nostalgic, but in no way is it a nostalgia trip. Instead, it’s a tribute to a culture that began decades back and is still thriving today.
It’s also a reminder that the best documentary photography often comes from the inside, rather than an outsider peering in. As Modern Sky’s Dave Pichilingi puts it: “This isn’t someone writing about club culture from the outside looking in; he lived it.”
