[The Guardian] ‘It’s all just very grimy and filthy’: Gregory Nolan’s photos of the 00s indie scene

‘It’s all just very grimy and filthy’: Gregory Nolan’s photos of the 00s indie scene

The photographer gathered 6,000 images he took at the era’s centre, which offer a hedonistic window into a pre-smartphone era that remains relatively undocumented

“I literally got into this by accident,” says Gregory Nolan. “One night in 2004, I accidentally poured a beer over a girl and I got chatting to the guy she was with, who was starting a new club night that very weekend.” The guy in question was Jay McAllister, AKA the indie-folk artist Beans on Toast, who wanted some original artwork for the walls of his club. As an amateur yet aspiring photographer, Nolan offered his “subpar, A-level art photos”.

Connections were made and this led to Nolan getting a gig photographing the weekly London indie club night Frog. Soon he found himself immersed, seven nights a week, in a world of sweat-soaked moshing crowds, dingy backstage rooms, sticky floors and mountains of Red Stripe. Nolan would capture the spotty faces of a burgeoning generation of indie musicians: the Killers, Amy Winehouse, Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Mark Ronson, Devonté Hynes and countless others. “It was nuts,” he says. “I never had any money, no one had jobs and we were all living on other people’s floors but I’d often be jumping on tour buses and going on crazy tours with bands.”

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