Ewen Spencer took this picture at a Sunday club night called Twice As Nice at The End in London’s West Central Street in 1999. He’d been a regular there back in the days when it was held at the Colosseum in Vauxhall, south of the river. The move to the West End signalled that its garage music was becoming more a mainstream part of culture. Spencer, who grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne, had been documenting underground party nights for a decade by then for magazines such as the Face and i-D. He was a soul boy at heart, and saw in garage culture similar attractions: “It was working-class kids dressing up for a big night out,” he recalls, “quite different from acid house, for example.”
Spencer’s picture is included in a new Hayward Gallery touring exhibition After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024. Spencer was influenced by north-east based photographers such as Chris Killip and Graham Smith; he wanted to make authentic pictures that captured “some of the moves and female-heavy love and jubilation of those nights”, he says.
On the particular night he took this photograph, he’d arrived with a different kind of energy. “I’d been set upon by a couple of guys in Essex Road, while waiting for the 73 bus,” he remembers. “We had a fight in the middle of the street, stopped the traffic. That wasn’t that unusual at the time. We were laughing while having a real go at each other and I came out of it all right. I ran and jumped on a bus going the wrong way, and – classic London – no one said a word.” Of all the pictures he took in those years, this is one of his favourites. “It’s so intimate,” he says. “I’m trying to work out a way to have it blown up really huge and have it on my living-room wall.”
After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024 is at Stills, Edinburgh, 21 March to 28 June
