No Way Back

No Way Back (NWB001) brings together long-lost music and subculture journalism, images and perspectives, from 1977 to 1989. It sources from titles ranging from Village Voice and New Statesman to Smash Hits and Sounds.

This is journalism that lets us read about culture in its rawest form. In-the-moment and before endless layers of post-rationalisation have kicked in. Breakthrough events in dance music, hip-hop and pop – and parallel shifts in art, design and fashion. Inspirational, ground-level creativity and enterprise that set the scene(s) for subsequent decades.

After ‘disco sucks’ and before house – NME at NYC’s Fun House / Neil Tennant writing in Smash Hits about London’s Mud Club / Homeboy fashion and the birth of ‘bling’ in Spin / Cynthia Rose for New Statesman on Jazzie B and London’s emergent ‘Black economy’ / Street style photographer Jamel Shabazz charts Brooklyn and the Bronx / Deep inside New York’s vogue scene with Jon Savage for the Observer.