“Sometimes couples would be rolling around on the floor snogging.”
– Derek Ridgers
Gazs Rockin Blues @ Gossips, 1980
In Hello, I Love You, British photographer Derek Ridgers dips into his archive to share pictures of people snogging each other’s faces off. “I used to find that the ragged end of the night was when you got the best photographs, when most people had gone home,” he says.
Much as Tom Wood did with his brilliant pictures of nights at New Brighton’s Chelsea Reach nightclub, Ridgers was in London’s Camden Palace, Gossips, the Lyceum and other nightclubs in the UK watching the country’s many youth tribes having fun.
That was then. Things changed. In today’s gentrified, homogonised and expensive London, there is a dearth of small clubs where people of a like mind can be themselves, experiment and feel free and not judged. “The little clubs were crucial in nurturing those subcultures simply because things could gestate slowly away from the critical gaze of the general public,” says Ridgers. “If one of those subcultures were to come along now, I think they’d be subject to so much criticism and online derision that they’d most probably never get properly started.”
Snogging at Flicks in Dartford, Kent
“When I first started going out with a camera in the 1970s, public displays of affection seemed like much more of a thing. As to why I was drawn to capturing those moments, it probably has much more to do with my own personality. I’m far too buttoned up and reserved to ever engage in that sort of palaver myself, so I think it might be predominantly a vicarious thing.”
– Derek Ridgers
On the Tube platform in Hammersmith, west London
“It’s not just the clubs, bars and festivals that have changed but everything else in London as well. The vast majority of the small, subterranean Soho club venues have gone now and you have to be rich to go to rock festivals like Glastonbury these days. A lot of the young people I photographed in the 70s and 80s were living in squats or were unwaged.”
– Derek Ridgers
Planets, Mayfair, 1980
“A lot of the little clubs I used to shoot in were dark, dingy and often quite scruffy places. Sometimes couples would be rolling around on the floor snogging amongst all the fag ends, crumpled beer cans and other detritus.”
– Derek Ridgers
Sloane Square, 1982
Camden Palace, 1982
Le Beat Route club, Soho
“They may have been kissing people they’d never met before and who they may never meet again, they might have been going out kissing several people in the same night, just to find out who they were compatible with. I suppose nowadays you can pick a date online. You can find out a certain amount about compatibility in the confines of your own home.”
– Derek Ridgers
Dovehouse Green Chelsea
Snogging at the Lyceum
Published by IDEA Books, his Derek Ridgers monograph celebrates the joy of reckless youth and love.
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