We Can Be Heroes – the crowd-funded punk book
Two weeks ago, while searching my poor, overloaded inbox (14,000 emails and counting, no time to even think about pruning them) for an email from Blitz London, I rediscovered one from The Blitz Kids. This site is a charmingly rough-n-ready resource for ’80s club culture-related info and photos – from Boy George to Lizzie Tear to Anna Piaggi. While reacquainting myself with the site, I clicked the link to Graham Smith and Chris Sullivan’s Unbound book project.
The book, We Can Be Heroes, boasts thirty years of punk and post-punk photo imagery by Graham Smith that until now has been languishing unloved in an attic. Ain’t that always the way? Coming to his senses and realising the value of these negatives (negatives! not even contact sheets!), Smith contacted fellow scenester Sullivan to add his wordy recollections to these evocative images, which are now being published via crowd-funding site Unbound.
There’s been a bit of a PR push, with a radio interview with Robert Elms and a Boy George article in The Guardian. Being kids of ’76, it made perfect sense that Smith and Sullivan would go the DIY route to getting their book published – wasn’t that the whole ethos of punk after all? So I have pledged my £30 to make this project happen. Not least cos it will be a bloody good read.
