![\"Ray](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Ray-Mighty-Smith-Mighty-on-Campbell-Street-1985-credit-Beezer-1024x689.jpg\")
Ray Mighty (Smith & Mighty) on Campbell Street, 1985 \u2013 credit Beezer<\/p>\nEncyclopaedic in the old-school sense of multiple hefty sets that run the risk of giving your postman lumbago: Until Now comprises two 400-page books, and it\u2019s only the first volume of a planned three. Andy \u2018Beezer\u2019 Beese, a Bristolian photographer, has been doing his thing for over 40 years, but there\u2019s a pretty strong argument that the early shots collected here \u2013 a lot of which feature his mates, or characters with limited recognition factor outside their locale \u2013 are his most iconic.<\/p>\n
The identity of the mates help, it should be added. If you\u2019ve an interest in Bristol\u2019s music history, you may well thrill to images of DJ collective the Wild Bunch, members of whom later formed Massive Attack. They and other soundsystems are captured at the St Paul\u2019s Carnival, one of the city\u2019s definitive events to this day; the more rock-centric, long-defunct Ashton Court Festival is given similar space in its mud-spattered, stoutly local state.<\/p>\n
From further afield, ample space is afforded to Beezer\u2019s work with Ari Up \u2013 formerly of punk band The Slits, this era was a creatively fallow one for her, yet these photoshoots capture her wild on-record abandon \u2013 plus future TV chef Andi Oliver and Comic Strip actor Keith Allen, pictured with their respective playgroup-aged daughters Miquita and Lily.<\/p>\n
Ray Mighty (Smith & Mighty) on Campbell Street, 1985 \u2013 credit Beezer<\/p>\n
Although Beezer\u2019s main beat isn\u2019t really documentary photography of the Martin Parr ilk, there\u2019s work here which does approximate this genre and to illuminating effect. He attends fetish clubs and football clubs, strip bars and street protests: Until Now starts a little after the notorious St Paul\u2019s riot of 1980, but it hangs over a fair portion of this book culturally speaking, as Beezer outlines in his intro to a chapter focusing on the district. And the mid-80s graffiti scene, whose standout Bristolian exponent was another future Massive Attack member Robert Del Naja, is largely taken for granted now but was alien and countercultural at the time; moreover, as Beezer points out, pieces would often be removed so soon after their creation that he was the only person there to photograph them.<\/p>\n
This and a wealth of other subjects, some less in the \u2018Beezer image\u2019 than others (1985 live shots of a remarkably fresh-faced Pulp, for one), add up to 800 pages that by accounts have taken a king-sized effort to assemble. Until Now is being sold in various formats, including with a choice of four dubplates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Encyclopaedic in the old-school sense of multiple hefty sets that run the risk of giving your postman lumbago:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":550403,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8818],"tags":[176416,176417,176418,381,748,97136,393,4884,10961,176419,176420,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-550402","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bristol","8":"tag-andy-beese","9":"tag-ari-up","10":"tag-beezer","11":"tag-bristol","12":"tag-britain","13":"tag-buzz-book-review","14":"tag-england","15":"tag-great-britain","16":"tag-massive-attack","17":"tag-noel-gardner","18":"tag-pc-press","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115496430976791098","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/550403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}