“I literally got into this by accident,” says Gregory Nolan. “One night in 2004, I accidentally poured a beer over a girl and I got chatting to the guy she was with, who was starting a new club night that very weekend.” The guy in question was Jay McAllister, AKA the indie-folk artist Beans on Toast, who wanted some original artwork for the walls of his club. As an amateur yet aspiring photographer, Nolan offered his “subpar, A-level art photos”.
Connections were made and this led to Nolan getting a gig photographing the weekly London indie club night Frog. Soon he found himself immersed, seven nights a week, in a world of sweat-soaked moshing crowds, dingy backstage rooms, sticky floors and mountains of Red Stripe. Nolan would capture the spotty faces of a burgeoning generation of indie musicians: the Killers, Amy Winehouse, Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Mark Ronson, Devonté Hynes and countless others. “It was nuts,” he says. “I never had any money, no one had jobs and we were all living on other people’s floors but I’d often be jumping on tour buses and going on crazy tours with bands.”
Nolan’s work is now collected under the digital project This Was Our Scene, which includes over 6,000 of his photographs. Surveying a landscape of backstage parties in venues that no longer exist, Nolan’s work captures something of a last hurrah. It’s a world before smartphones, rampant social media use and the endless documentation of everything. “I think there’s more video footage of rave culture and Britpop than of this era,” he says. “Because everyone was used to the technology of having a camcorder with tapes, then suddenly we had the shift to memory cards. And those memory cards were 16 or 32 megabytes, and you could record video for, what, eight seconds? So while technology made a massive jump, it also didn’t. It left a kind of a digital black hole where no one could document this period except for someone with a decent camera.”
Nolan’s photos depict the messy, naive, hedonistic air of those times. “I don’t know how some people pulled through the car crash that was the 00s,” he says. “It was a wonderful car crash but I know people that went downhill so quickly and some people have since died, of course. Although thankfully, a lot came out the other side, too.” Nolan took a staggering 120,000 photographs of the era, narrowing it down for this collection, so he’s been very selective with what he reveals. “There’s no photos of people doing drugs in the collection because it doesn’t add anything,” he says. “Other than [a shot of] Pete Doherty taking a hit from a crack pipe, because he encouraged me [to take it].”
Instead, it’s the raw, gritty, intimate photos of bands up close, along with the elation in the audience’s faces, that Nolan has gravitated towards. And as a result, he’s really starting to feel the impact of documenting this black hole era that no longer exists. “There is real posterity here,” he says. “Someone wrote to me saying these are the only photos anyone has of them from that period in their life. That felt really good. You realise these photos are a total time capsule for people.”
This Was Our Scene is available on the digital mapping platform Soot
Indie centre of it all: five images from This Was Our Scene
Amy Winehouse
“This was shot in Koko in Camden two months before Back to Black came out,” says Nolan. “I didn’t even notice it was her until later – I was just photographing people. Looking back, she still seems quite shy and in herself. I don’t think the hard lifestyle had started yet as she looks so healthy.”
Girl watching Dirty Pretty Things
“I turned to see what was going on in the crowd and I see this girl,” says Nolan. “People are moshing all around her but she’s just standing, staring up, completely lost in Carl Barât’s stage presence. I really see this as the connection between fan and band; nothing could have broken that gaze.”
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Florence Welch
“This was in an old Irish pub. There was no beer in the taps, you had to bring your own and pay £1 per can to drink it there. The sound was terrible and the stage was next to the toilet. This was supposedly the night Florence was discovered. No one knew she could sing and she just got up and it was amazing. Like, absolutely incredible.”
Babyshambles
“This was backstage at Frog. I just like how it’s framed with Pete in the middle and the scene all around him and that massive bottle of vodka. It’s all just very grimy and filthy, and I think it just captures the whole scene really well.”
Crowd surfing
“I call this my renaissance painting. It’s absolute chaos. It was an all dayer, an eight-band bill, and the crowd was like that the whole time. Just amazing energy. It’s like someone just poured a bunch of people out of a jar and that’s why I love it.”
Source: theguardian.com
