The Crucial 3-0 Post Punk Liverpool

Liverpool’s notorious post-punk past lives again, as veteran NME photographer Kevin Cummins pays homage to the scene in his latest exhibition.
Running for a month from May 22nd the show coincides nicely with the opening of the new film based on Kevin Sampson's cult novel, Awaydays. Both film and exhibition pinpoint the height of the football casual era and the seething music sub-culture that reined throughout Liverpool in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

The exhibition takes it’s name from Cummins’s relentless documentation of notorious band The Crucial Three, whose counterparts later enjoyed world-wide fame, including Ian McCullohs formation of Echo and The Bunnymen. The show itself presents 30 intimate and definitive prints of the influential era, featuring a recurrent backdrop of the gang’s infamous haunt, Eric’s. This was the club from which so many legendary bands emerged, a place Awaydays director Kevin Sampson claims inspired his film’s leader-of-the-pack character: “Elvis embodies the spirit of ‘Eric’s’ – a council estate wastrel with poetry in his soul and Berlin on his mind.”

The exhibition runs until June 22nd at The Hard Days Night Hotel Gallery in Liverpool, and Awaydays, in case you missed all the tube posters - opens tomorrow!

All this reverence of post punk Liverpool style should inspire the design inclined to enter jotta’s latest competition. Recreate the promotional imagery for the film Awaydays and win a placement in the wardrobe department of the director’s next film.
Read more here

By Esther Bradley