Beginning in Liverpool’s independent music scene in the late 1980s, Mark McNulty went on to photograph Quadrant Park, Cream and clubs across Britain, documenting how house music and nightlife changed during the 1990s.
Mark McNulty began taking photography seriously in Liverpool during the late 1980s, photographing bands, gigs and independent club nights. His parents had bought him a camera when he was fourteen—he thinks it was a basic Praktica—but his first all-access pass came at the Earthbeat Festival in Sefton Park over the August bank holiday weekend of 1987.
He was also there to play with Eat My Dog, whose Friday afternoon set proved to be his first and last appearance with the band. The pass gave him the rest of the weekend to photograph The La’s, other musicians and the festival audience.
At The State, McNulty photographed bands onstage, although taking a camera onto the dance floor did not yet seem an obvious thing to do. One of the first dance nights he photographed was 8 Orgasms at Macmillan’s, organised by Peter Coyle of The Lotus Eaters. Bands and performance shared the programme with house records played by resident DJ John McCready.
Photo © Mark McNulty, all rights reserved.
A commission from Avant, a North West magazine edited by Stephen Kingston, sent McNulty to Quadrant Park in Bootle. The magazine ran for nine issues during 1990 under the strapline “What’s sorted in the North West”, covering music, clubs, photography, art and design. Its covers featured work by Michael Spencer Jones, Central Station Design, Jamie Reid, Knopov and Paul Jones.
Quadrant Park was unlike the smaller Liverpool clubs McNulty knew. He remembered people arriving from across the North and dancing throughout the warehouse: “There was no dancefloor because the whole place was the dancefloor!.”
On his first visit, he took relatively few photographs, concentrating on the crowd, raised hands and people dancing on the speakers. He later explained that he had seen little comparable photography himself and had no benchmark to work from. The bands had previously given him a subject on a stage; here, he had to find his pictures among the dancers.
Quadrant Park’s all-nighters attracted people from well beyond Merseyside during 1990 and 1991. Its size and travelling audience were already changing the scale of a night out, several years before the club brands of the mid-1990s became established.
The State, The Underground, warehouse parties and Quadrant Park all preceded Cream, which opened at Nation in October 1992. McNulty’s work follows that Liverpool history across several venues, rather than beginning with the city’s best known superclub.
Photo © Mark McNulty, all rights reserved.
Photo © Mark McNulty, all rights reserved.
After the Quadrant Park assignment, McNulty sent photographs to i-D, The Face, Mixmag and DJ Magazine. Editors began commissioning him outside Liverpool, and music press work took him around Britain during the rise of the superclub and the superstar DJ.
His assignments included Golden in Stoke, Ministry of Sound in London and Back to Basics in Leeds, as well as Universe in Bath, Pandora’s Box in Leicester and Rezerection in Edinburgh.
Photo © Mark McNulty, all rights reserved.
Photo © Mark McNulty, all rights reserved.
Photo © Mark McNulty, all rights reserved.
Recalling Golden, McNulty recognised something of Northern Soul in the night, while Back to Basics was among his favourite clubs. His memories of Rezerection were of a large marquee event on the edge of Edinburgh, with white gloves, whistles and fancy dress.
By the middle of the decade, the biggest clubs were advertising nationally, booking multiple DJs for several rooms and extending their names through records, tours and overseas events. McNulty’s photographs were part of the magazine culture through which readers found out about the clubs before visiting them.
McNulty photographed Full On at Cream in 1995, when Nation was attracting visitors from across Britain and accommodating several rooms of music. Cream had opened in Liverpool only three years earlier, but its audience already extended far beyond the city.
Coaches brought clubbers from Scotland and London, while Cream’s name appeared on clothing, records and tours taking its resident DJs to other cities. McNulty also photographed Cream at Amnesia in Ibiza, as the operation developed an audience beyond Britain.
Across the decade, Cream expanded into recordings, tours and festivals. The photographs from Nation document the Liverpool venue during that expansion, when a club night could become a name known well beyond the people who had attended it.
Photo © Mark McNulty, all rights reserved.
Photo © Mark McNulty, all rights reserved.
Bugged Out began at Sankeys Soap in Manchester in November 1994, after Jockey Slut editors Paul Benney and Johnno Burgess had organised a series of Disco Pogo parties. The connection between the magazine and the club was direct: the people writing about electronic music were also booking artists and putting on nights.
The early programme brought together house, techno and live electronic music, with The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, Green Velvet and Derrick Carter among the artists associated with Bugged Out’s first years. Its organisers’ account describes Chicago house and Detroit techno as central to the Friday nights.
Photo © Mark McNulty, all rights reserved.
In Liverpool, McNulty would finish a shoot at Cream and head around the corner to Voodoo. He later named it as his favourite club night, preferring its smaller scale and techno nights to the larger set-ups he was usually commissioned to photograph.
Voodoo began in 1993 and held nights at several Liverpool venues including Le Bateau. Dave Clarke was among its residents, while its guest bookings included Jeff Mills, Richie Hawtin, Laurent Garnier and Carl Cox.
Photo © Mark McNulty, all rights reserved.
Photo © Mark McNulty, all rights reserved.
Photo © Mark McNulty, all rights reserved.
McNulty photographed Daft Punk at The Heavenly Social in 1996, before helmets became central to the duo’s public appearance. The portrait shows Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo during their early club years, rather than through the visual identity with which they later became associated.
It also belongs to the artist and DJ portraiture McNulty undertook alongside his club assignments. His subjects included Andrew Weatherall and Portishead, while his Björk photographs accompanied Dom Phillips’s interview for Mixmag’s November 1993 cover. The magazine work could require him to photograph a musician for a cover as well as the audience at a club.
Photo © Mark McNulty, all rights reserved.
The growing interest in club photography changed the way McNulty worked. He recalled magazines asking photographers to stop people, ask about their clothes and collect answers to a question of the month. Clubbers, too, became more aware that a photograph could put them in Mixmag.
McNulty preferred to photograph people while the night continued. Working from the middle of the floor allowed him to include the lights and the surrounding crowd, rather than isolate someone against a wall. He also wanted to show people without deliberately making them look bad, a distinction he drew when discussing his work in 2018.
The photographs include people absorbed in dancing and others responding to the camera. Across Quadrant Park, Cream, Bugged Out, Voodoo and the wider national circuit, that exchange remained part of his work as clubbing became a much larger business. His assignments documented the superclub years through the people attending as well as the names on the bill.
McNulty’s work is included in Tate Britain’s forthcoming The 90s: Art and Fashion, alongside photographs by other British Culture Archive photographers.
