The surviving punk generation can be divided into two groups: those who’ve got all of the stuff curated here mouldering in their loft, and those who’ve thrown it all away. Toby Mott, The Mott Collection’s keeper is clearly one of the former. Unprepared to keep his careworn punk ephemera (flyers, ‘zines, newspaper snips, posters etc) to himself, he’s decided to publish it in a fat, floppy, newsprint-tastic tome.
Students of graphic art may soon find this on their reading list. It’s a gold mine of ingenuity and influence, but essentially an exercise in nostalgia, a Denis Norden’s Looks Familiar Annual for the blank generation, history’s hardest demographic to please. Take me, bang in the middle of its target market, livid that my fanzine isn’t in it.
