Blitz Club Era Archives x 'TRAMPS!'

Unravel Productions consulted on the documentary film ‘TRAMPS!’ by director Kevin Hegge licensing Blitz Club era imagery from the archives of renowned subculture photographer Derek Ridgers and photographer and anthropologist Ted Polhemus.

Images: 1 - 12 © Derek Ridgers '/ Images: 13 - 17 © Ted Polhemus

Rising from the nihilistic ashes of the punk movement in the late 1970s, a fresh crowd of flamboyant fashionistas, who would later be christened the New Romantics, began to materialize on the streets of East London, England.

TRAMPS! is a feature-length documentary that looks at how, in London in the 1980s, an onslaught of art students arriving in the city resulted in a unique cross-fertilization of British art, fashion, music and film which created a flourish of creative output, culminating in a group known as "The New Romantics".

Repositioning the New Romantics as an art movement rather than an exclusively pop-cultural one, TRAMPS! provides a genealogy of like-minded artists that predated the 1980s, such as the influential Derek Jarman, and illustrates how they laid the foundations for the creative subcultures that followed.

The decades of creative resilience described by the generation-spanning subjects of TRAMPS! act as a direct message of hope to artists at a time when it's needed most.

• Film screening Friday 27th January 2023, at Rebel Reel Cinema.