COLD LIPS

Some people earn the tag of legend - and for five decades Derek Ridgers, the London-based photographer has captured the Dark Carnival of the British underworld in our most radical club nights, from Blitz and Skin Two through to today’s Wraith Club.  Growing up in the 60s, and making his name photographing punk clubs, and taking rock shots of the world’s greatests, he is a hero to many working photographers and fans of subculture, alike.   Humble, brilliant, and with a rock n roll gallows humour to match his dark lens, now 70, in this Goth Shop X Cold Lips podcast, it’s a pleasure to have a conversation attempting to span his archive, and talk about voyeurism and documenting the cultural politics of the underground.

Derek Ridgers stands alone in his preservation of the fleeting expressions of the night.   His limited silver bromide and C-type signed and numbered Derek Ridgers Editions are available via the wonderfully curated Goth Shop:

Recorded September 2020, on a balcony in the east, looking down towards the spree river with Berghain between.  I’m sitting with Rob Doyle, the author of my favourite book so far this year, Threshold.  It's published in the UK and the US by Bloomsbury, so he takes throne as a leader in a new school of digital existentialist modernists, who take a post-millenial ego, and ask questions about the Author’s physical space on the page.

Rob Doyle is very tall, he appears at the door wearing a black polo neck and black pegs, looking total jazznik, because later tonight he’ll be on stage with a strain of the Fat White Family in Neukolln, playing percussion at a reassuringly fun evening, where the super-spreading qualities of the flute can be ignored, as we travel in an alt reality, away from the claws that birthed us all. Ex pat life, where universal globalisms of Me Too, BLM, Terf-wars, squish in the Q-Anon malestrom of denial and manipulations of the maleducated grip for sense and logic mean the novel has not felt as relevant and required in counterculture in my lifetime.

Threshold sits as a hologram, in an era where the individual is manipulated into the spectrum of hashtag identity politics, and good/bad - like/dislike polarisations mean we are the product, smashed beneath a data-driven duvet in a privatised society. 80% predictable, asking if that too is corrupted as any other statistic,the novel remains relatively data-proof, its nuance its strength, the unsearchable, between the lines facts being far truer than any single sentence or status update.

Recorded February 2020, at Studio 65 in Wedding, Berlin, when Cold Lips released Martyn Goodacre's Whos Fuckin Planet book to accompany his exhibition as Das Gift

This interview was recorded in St Giles churchyard in Camberwell, London, 3 July 2020.

Berlin legend, Mark Reeder - moved from working class Manchester in the late 70s, to rep Factory Records, and put on illegal punk gigs in East Berlin, which led to him being recruited as a GDR producer, after being grassed by Stasi friends.   In the seminal film, B-Movie - he explores the 80s in Berlin, but here he speaks candidly to Kirsty Allison about  his McLaren-type Svengali effect on subculture, shaping the sound of New Order, trance in the 90s, and how he's currently impacting China with his new act, Stolen.

Recorded on the rooftop of The Union Club in London's Soho,  accompanied by martinis, before a Polaroid session, which adorned the second edition of Cold Lips,  prior to headlining the legendary launch party at Hoxton's Courtyard Theatre in 2016, the mighty Dr John Cooper Clarke raps with Cold Lips' founder and editor, Kirsty Allison

TRICKY IS THE OLD SCHOOL OVERLORD OF BRITISH HIP-HOP - his new book Hell Is Around The Corner is out now - and it is splendid.

It's rare to meet iconoclasts on the level of Tricky - born Adrian Thaws - mother dying of suicide/epilepsy at 4 - and it’s an honour to learn and be infected by people like this.

I’m a huge fan, and I remember first meeting him for DJMag in a flat, opposite Sketch, he answered the door in a white dressing gown, and I was in a bluesman palace - with as much dope as a Howard Marks'  green room. 

The other time I interviewed him was for the BBC, he took me on a golf buggy all around the back of a festival before flaming up a dressing room, and doing a hypnotising performance on the level of Iggy Pop.