“Bristol at that time was another slice of urban Thatcher misery. The free parties brought some relief to the dull, downbeat mood at the time.” Photographer Andy Beese, better known as Beezer, was born in Bristol in 1965 and grew up in the city during the 1970s and 1980s – a time when, like other British cities, Bristol saw its fair share of unrest, rioting, mass unemployment and general social teething issues. But, with an interest in photography and childhood friendships with a few local lads who went on to change contemporary music, Beezer looked towards a different landscape: the rich, eclectic melting-pot that was Bristol’s underground music scene.
From the very early 80s onwards, Beezer was close friends with a mixed-race, St Pauls sound system crew calling themselves the Wild Bunch. This group would later go on to great things: one, Nellee Hooper, as producer for the likes of Madonna, Bjork and Soul II Soul, others as the seminal Massive Attack. From these friendships, Beezer found himself documenting at close quarters the city’s burgeoning culture of sound systems, free parties, music and graffiti. He even spent several years as a snapper for this very magazine.
Years later, some of his finest images of the time went into a book, ‘Wild Dayz’ – released, curiously, only in Tokyo where Beezer was by now resident (there’s a big market for Bristol culture in the Japanese capital – one record shop, Disc Shop Zero, majors in the city’s musical heritage). The book features pictures of the fledgling Wild Bunch and other crews, alongside graffiti-covered walls, breakdancing black kids in stonewashed denim and sportswear, sound system parties, Carnival scenes and much more. There are images from Glastonbury Festival, from Bristol backstreets and youth club meets and, of course, from the scene’s epicentre, the seminal and much-loved Dug Out club on Park Row. ‘Wild Dayz’ has now been re-released for the UK market by Bristol publishers Tangent, while an accompanying exhibition capturing the 1980s scene goes up this week at the City Museum & Art Gallery.

“The Bristol scene was a mix of the various musical scenes bubbling away at the time: punk, funk, post-punk, reggae… basically, anything with a kicking bass line,” Beezer recalls now. Alongside this all-embracing musical eclecticism, the scene’s chief characteristic was its DIY ethos. “The first big parties were soundtracked with just one record deck – or even just a cassette deck. Afterwards, twin decks and a mixer became standard, but at the beginning it was outside everyone’s budget. We were all skint.”
With the arrival, in 1984, of Technics’ twin DJ decks, “suddenly all my friends were DJs,” Beezer recalls. “They would play all kinds of records - funk, punk, post-punk, the hip-hop and electro stuff that was just coming in from the States. The Bristol sound system crews would put on big warehouse parties – illegal events attracting hundreds of people to a freezing cold warehouse with a bathtub full of beers and a massive sound system. The vibe was incredible – almost mystical.” One such was 1985’s Red House Jam, for which some 700 partygoers filled a ramshackle Georgian squat in Portland Square. Another seminal moment was the jam presided over by the Wild Bunch and New York crew Fearless 4, in the Crypt of St Barnabas Church, Ashley Road.
Centre of the scene, though, was the Dug Out – and, in particular, the Wednesday Wild Bunch sessions. “It was a melting pot of different characters. Some came for the beer, some for the music, some for the girls. There were all sorts of characters, from the older black guys smoking weed to the hip-hop kids. There were students, there was [flamboyant promoter] Sapphire and his boys. And there were plenty of other good DJs and crews on the scene besides the Wild Bunch: 2Bad Crew, UD4 (featuring Roni Size’s brother), FBI and others. There was nothing glamorous about the Dug Out: it was all sticky carpets and bad ventilation. But it always welcomed all styles and musical tastes, and it was always peaceful.”
It was also a remarkably self-sufficient scene. Later on, the first and second waves of Bristol’s music and graffiti scene would have a global impact – Massive and the trip-hop genre they spawned; the stencil art of Nick Walker and, later, a certain Banksy. The mid-80s, though, were still the darkness before the dawn, and Bristol’s unique cocktail of punk, funk, reggae, dub and graffiti art was little known outside the city limits. “We had no idea of how it would escalate,” Beezer recalls. “It was unpretentious, and totally unrepresented by the national music media at that time. That gave it an underground vibe.”
But what was it about Bristol at that time that produced this particular cultural moment, and this ferment of activity across art, music and DJ culture? Chris Burton, author of another new Tangent tome documenting the era, ‘Art and Sound of the Bristol Underground’, uses two factors to explain the scene’s strongly underground nature. “The city-centre night clubs were playing stuff like Kajagoogoo and Wham! – if you wanted to hear something different you had to go to underground parties. And these guys organised the parties themselves in any building that was available, which was possible then as there were a lot more empty and abandoned properties in Bristol.” Beezer puts it more succinctly still: “It was a multicultural scene, open to all races, ages and classes. The free parties and sound systems were the meeting point, the catalyst.” 

Bristol Wild Dayz is at the City Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol from 12 Dec-31 Jan.Wild Dayz will be published by Tangent Books on 11 Dec. See www.tangentbooks.co.uk ffi.For more info on Beezer see www.beezerphotos.com