We’ve seen plenty of these books and exhibitions before but, as Boy George puts it, “for once it has been put together by someone on the scene”. As a fully paid up member of the burgeoning club scene that transformed London’s nightlife and launched the careers of the aforementioned Culture Club frontman, Spandau Ballet and Sade; Graham Smith – who also designed album covers for those stars – was never far from the action, and always armed with a camera.
25 years later and upon turning 50 Smith has exhumed his archives to deliver a tome of some 500 photographs and 30,000 words of text from fellow scenester and frontman of the wildest band of the period, Blue Rondo a la Turk, Chris Sullivan. We Can Be Heroes is due out 8th December on Unbound, a UK based crowd-funding publishing site where donations of £30 to £350 can see you receive anything from a cloth bound coffee table book to a deluxe edition limited to just 50 copies.
The project is currently at 82% of funding and runs for just 15 more days, so act fast as this incredible document of decadence is one we’d really love to see the light of day.