Interview With Rave Flyer Collector - Dave Nicholson
On a strangely sunny afternoon in the suburbs of Essex, Dave Nicholson sorts through his impressive collection of rave flyers. Not many people can say they have a whole room dedicated to their hobby, but Dave can, with boxes and filing cabinets full to the brim with both new and old flyers.
Dave has such a friendly disposition, the type of guy that you would talk shit to for hours on a night out, and in the morning just remember laughing with this man but not a word that was said.
His story starts in the South coast city of Plymouth where he grew up, “I guess I started getting into the raves back in 1991/92 when I was too young to go out, I was only 13 back then. We used to go round record shops and take all the flyers. My mate pulled out a couple of fantasia flyers and I thought that’s wicked artwork, and I thought wow, what’s this? A new culture, a new scene I’ve never heard of.” Not many people can say that at the age of 13 they were admiring artwork!
After Dave’s first encounters with the scene through these rave flyers you could say he never looked back, “Then we got some Acid House tapes and really liked it, we were into rock and hip hop at the time but when we heard this rave music we thought it was much better. My cousin used to send me down boxes of flyers from Essex from a record shop called The Bass Box, they used to do warehouse raves too, because there are so many more raves in London and I used to get hundreds and hundreds each week. We would plaster them all over our walls, like wallpaper.”
Filing cabinets, multiple boxes and flyers scattered on the double bed in the ‘spare room’, which of course is no longer really spare and acts as Dave’s shrine purely for flyers. But it’s all so organised, folders with lettering to indicate what flyer is where. Even the various piles dotted around Dave knows exactly what they are. Shuffling through his collection he brings out his favourites to show me, “The Pez ones are some of the best artwork because he done it all himself. Although I’ve never been too keen about babies on a rave flyer but they seem to work quite a lot. My favourite design is probably the World Dance ones. You get no information on it only phone numbers and never a venue. The police actually cancelled this one and intercepted it, one of them says ‘we tried desperately hard to do it all legally but were blocked at every turn and refused to sanction the rave’,. It’s funny because a company like World Dance is so big and then for three years they disappeared and then came out again in 1992 using the same artwork.”
The flyers act as mini pieces of art and it can give an insight into the way raves were organised in the past, and of course offers some nostalgic pleasure. Dave mentioned that, “Tony Coulston Hayter did a lot for the scene he did the 20,000 raves with proper DJs and live PA’s. His events like Sunrise can go for over 100 quid on Ebay. This was a really famous rave, but the image is taken from stock art, which a lot of people didn’t realise. You don’t really realised until you start collecting properly where the arts from. At the moment there seems to be quite a big market for flyers, all these around here are my doubles that I’m trying to sort out and sell while the markets good to try and catch in on it. Normally we just sit on them and do nothing with them.”
Out of roughly 15,000 flyers Dave shows me the first that he collected, “So these are Alpha raves, I was too young to go to any of these, I didn’t really start raving until end of 1993, these flyers are 1991/92. These are from Plymouth, where there was a real bustling scene for rave back in the day. We had two clubs, one like the Camden Palace (KOKO) like an old theatre and another one that was an old cinema so both of them could fit 2,000 people in. It was so weird because Plymouth is only really known for fighting and The Navy but you would get like 2,000 ravers coming out the nightclub at 2 in the morning and just blocking the whole road, people wouldn’t really know what was going on, haha.”
Amongst the archive of flyers is some artwork done by Junior Tomlins, who has a long lasting connection with the rave scene having designed posters for promoters during the late 80s and into the 90s. “He designed for One Nation which is still going. Back then it all had to be done by hand, so those have been airbrushed on canvas, and then he would give that to the promoter. He said that once a promoter came back with one of these canvases, rang his doorbell and when there was no answer shoved it through his letter box! They would be worth thousands now. This is some of his other work that I prefer, but this one got cancelled by the council because they said it looked like an E going into a mouth.
But like with most things art has changed with the times which is also something that interests Dave, “I’ve been looking at companies like One Nation and how they have progressed. You get these, which are a bit more boring these days, there’s no fun left in the artwork. I don’t know if that reflects in fashions really because I don’t go out raving but from what I see on Youtube clips, you get people like ‘wow, everyone’s dancing like how they want to dance, there’s no one judging you, no one standing there and staring’ it kind of sounds like it’s gone full circle because that’s what rave broke away from.” This is the unity that perhaps our generation needs, rather than a selfie stick for Christmas.
Although Dave hasn’t been out raving since ‘Dreamscape 21’ on New Year’s Eve in 1996, the community of rave flyer collectors have the ultimate memorabilia to remember the good ol’ days. And has been a medium through which he has made many friends. “Raveflyers.co.uk that’s Weeds website, his was the first sort of forum for rave flyer collectors back in late 90s, the internet wasn’t as developed as it is now but that’s how I got to know a lot of other people through that forum, basically just a message board really simple but I go to meet a lot of other people like Sam and Beach and we just like swap collections, and find out there’s a lot of flyer geeks like yourself.”
Dave’s own website, Phatmedia.co.uk, has been going for 15 years and is the largest online database for rave flyers. “I started it as a college project back in the late 90s. I think it was a company called Home Serve which basically did the templates then you put pictures on it. And then I built it myself on dream weaver at college, after teaching myself. Someone just uploaded flyers onto it today which is what I like because not enough people do it!”
If the rave flyers are anything to go by the raves themselves must have been an explosion of psychedelic colour, pure happiness and up beat vibes. Some look back to the glory days, others appreciate the current scene more now than ever. “There’s so many people for and against back then and today, people saying ‘ah I wish It was like that now, there’s nothing like that around here’, but then you get people saying ‘there is stuff going on still’, and there is! Out in the country, these new warehouse clubs etc. I think you can still find that buzz, if you look hard enough.”