New Age: Stonehenge to Jungle
1973/2000
‘New Age: Stonehenge to Jungle’ is a comprehensive collection of iconic UK rave, jungle, sound system and warehouse party flyers dating from the early 1973s to 2000. The book is sourced and curated from the Mott Collection – an extensive archive that gathers paper ephemera of British popular culture from punk to rave – curated by artist and collector Toby Mott.
Crammed full of 575 entries of flyers and other collectables, New Age is a visual feast that charts the origins and progress of a series of youth rebellions that were to last for a generation. The book looks beyond the music into the fantastical visual language that propelled this subculture, offering a global perspective on how British party culture shifted through the decades.
New Age opens with an extensive array of iconic flyers created for the early 1970s free festivals of Stonehenge and Windsor. It then moves into the 1980s, when the boom of illegal London warehouse parties gave birth to acid house – visually embodied by its iconic smiley face, then evolved into sound system and dub clashes. As rave culture takes over, the designs of the flyers become more complex, unveiling a craving for dystopian experiences and surrealistic universes forged by the vision of masters of flyer art.
The book traces the rise of jungle music and more widely the aesthetic of the 1990s, digging into its Jamaican roots and bringing together reggae, rave and sound system culture, giving insight into the profound, and yet often overlooked, impact of the Black British community on rave music.
