Lost photos from the heyday of punk and new wave

After his mother died, DB Burkeman returned to the family’s London home to clean out his childhood bedroom. There, he discovered a clear plastic bag filled with some 30 rolls of undeveloped black and white film – artefacts from his brief but wondrous stint as a rock & roll photographer at the turn of the 1980s. ​“I had thrown them into this drawer, thinking I’ll get to them later, but I was a bit of a mess,” Burkeman says. ​“The priority for me was never being a professional photographer. I would tell people that’s what I was doing, but the reality was [something else].”

Growing up in London during the ​’70s, Burkeman remembers how stagnant youth culture had become, as he saw arena rock churning out a generation of clones. ​“Before ​’76, everybody looked the same. It was just a sea of denim, right? It was just flared, flared jeans, jean jackets, and long hair,” he says. ​“Then all of a sudden there was this seismic shift where the Pistols had ripped a hole and changed the perception of what a rock band could be. There were 100 bands in London playing every night, and you only had to pay three quid, instead of £30, to see Eddie and the Hot Rods or the Damned. Everybody cut their hair and got rid of their flares. Everything just changed.”

Inspired, Burkeman dropped out of school at 16. Although he would later become a DJ, bringing jungle to New York in the ​’90s, his musical talents lay dormant in his youth. But all was not lost. He explains, ​“I loved the image of the photographer; it’s almost like being a rock star. You were important, but you were also hiding behind, if not a guitar or drums, a camera.”

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But as a teen, business never came before pleasure, or quite frankly at all. ​“I knew I had a good eye, but I didn’t have the people skills to really be able to pull it off,” Burkeman says. But that didn’t stop him from dreaming of becoming the next David Bailey or having a romp like David Hemmings in Blow-Up – only to discover reality is, indeed, the strangest fantasy of all. 

Although half of the film negatives had been lost to the ravages of time, the images that remained form an intoxicating portrait of the era. With the publication of Crash Bang: Pictures from a Punk (Blurring Books), Burkeman returns to where it all began: his years spent in London, New York, and Los Angeles between 1976 and 1982. 

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As a budding rock photographer, Burkeman was the consummate insider, snapping scenes of musicians in their element. The Ramones rock out at the Rainbow and Alice Bag hangs out at home, while Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen stride proudly out of Westminster Magistrate’s Court with their heads held high. Like many of his contemporaries, Burkeman developed a taste for heroin that eventually brought an end to his time on the scene. 

Today, the lost photographs fill a void in more ways than one. ​“I have a notoriously bad memory,” he says. ​“I did way too much acid between the ages of 14 and 16, and the psychiatrist told me that later in life, it would hurt my memory. I was like whatever, but sure enough he’s right.”

Crash Bang: Pictures from a Punk by DB Burkeman is published by Blurring Books.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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