The Stool Pigeon

Nothing in Britain stays underground for very long. There’s too much media and the country’s too small. It’s freak culture one day and then it becomes mainstream. You too may be sick to the fucking back teeth of these 30 years of punk exhibitions / pyjama parties/ commemorative plates? And you know that next year we’re gonna get a face-full of 20 years of rave crap.

It’s not much different in the States but local can still stay local, even after a city throws up a Nirvana and the A&R men goose-step in. For those that find it cosy, the underground will always be underground and outsiders need to wait for something like this - an unfussy and superb photography book called Silent Pictures - to try and unlock some of the mystery.

These are pictures taken by Pat Graham, a Washington DC snapper (now London-based) who started turning his lens on the local music scene in the early nineties, just as it was morphing into many different forms. Matey with Minor Threat/Fugazi man Ian MacKaye and the bands associated with his Dischord Records, he naturally scored many shots of them - live, posing, off-guard doing nothing in particular. And then he started travelling catching Modest Mouse, Dead Meadow, The Black Heart Procession, Elliott Smith, Ted Leo and countless others on the road across the US and Europe.

His book is a story of Washington DC when it was last truly alive with music and of groups who shared their ideals. They’re unstylish, raw images full of uncultivated energy and bliss that make you feel alive and included. “There are photos of other people’s experiences taken in a way that makes me feel as though I was there,” MacKaye writes in his intro, “ but also a picture of my guitar (one that hung on my shoulder over 15 years) so intimate that I almost don’t recognise it.”

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