Pez: the Hackney graffiti writer who drew rave's golden age
No Photoshop, no shortcuts - every flyer was drawn and painted by hand. Pez turned a photocopied handbill into one of the only visual languages rave ever had.
From Subway Art to Southend
Steve Perry, working as Pez, started writing graffiti in 1986 after reading Henry Chalfant's Subway Art - the book that introduced a generation of British writers to New York's train yards. He was born in Hackney and later based himself in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, still inside graffiti rather than anywhere near dance music.
The move into flyer art came from a single bad flyer. At an early Biology party in Southend, someone handed him a photocopied handbill for the next one - rough enough that he told the organisers straight: he could do better. They let him try, and the next Biology flyer was his.
Raindance, Helter Skelter, and doing it as a living
From that first commission, Pez went on to draw and paint the artwork behind some of the era's biggest promoters - Biology, Raindance, Helter Skelter, World Dance and Rage among them. Every piece was hand-drawn and hand-painted; digital tools existed by the end of his run but were never how he worked. The style drew on science fiction, M.C. Escher and Salvador Dali as much as anything already happening in club flyers, which is a large part of why the work still reads as distinct rather than of its moment.
By his own account there was only one other artist making a full-time living doing this at the time - Junior Tomlin. That scarcity is easy to miss now that the flyers are collected and exhibited, including at The Rave Story exhibition in London in 2016, but at the time it was a genuinely small field: a handful of promoters, and barely more than two people actually being paid to draw for them.