Seems just about everybody fantasizes at some time or another about being in a band. The limelight. The sense of belonging. Adoring audiences. Sex, drugs, glamour, fame. Or maybe some people just like playing music. I don’t know really. I mean, I’d have liked to be in a band too, except I can’t sing or play any musical instruments. Not that that stops some people.

Anyway, I was thinking about this recently when I was given a couple of big boxes of band photos that used to be in a newspaper library, along with thousands of other photos of all sort of things that newspapers keep photos of. They’d been stored by a company that stored documents for other companies and organisations that didn’t want to keep their paperwork on-site and were willing to pay a storage fee. Apparently the newspaper company grew tired of paying the storage fee and told the storage guy he could destroy the stuff. The way I heard it, the shredding was well-advanced when the boss noticed what was being destroyed and he intervened to save a tiny portion. A few years later, not knowing what to do with these few surviving boxes, he handed them over to me.

Most of what survived is band photos from the 1980s and 1990s. Most of these are photos submitted by the bands or their publicists – if they had publicists – so the quality is patchy, to say the least. Also, many of them have lines and marks on them, put there by newspaper subeditors. Leafing through these folders full of old polaroids and prints I’ve been amazed at just how many garage and pub bands are in there. So many corny names and so many corny photos and yet the overall effect of seeing them all is really charming and naive and positive too.

Band photography is a language of its own. The cliches are well-known but, tired as they are, they somehow never seem to quite fully wear out. You get the fun-loving bunch goofing off. Or you have the surly, world weary line-up. You can play “spot the lead singer” as you scan the faces of the support crew who are trying hard to look like they wish they weren’t there. Or maybe that is what they really did wish.

I have no idea what to do with this stuff, other than share it in our Facebook group, Rediscovered Newcastle. And make a blog post or two right here, so you can see what I’m talking about. Please feel free to flood me with details about these people and their bands. Here goes:

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