Ali Smith’s 90s New York punk scene – photo essay | Art and design

New York in the 1990s was off-kilter, unfiltered, and out of focus. We – artists, musicians, punks, underground dwellers – lived in neighbourhoods the police largely let police themselves, below the radar of mainstream society, carving lives out of the city’s bedrock with our bloody fists. Long before the immediate feedback loop of social media, our creative ideas bubbled in a cauldron of diversity and inspiration until they could no longer be contained.

Then we’d run electrical cords from the bases of streetlamps to power PAs and amps, playing shows in abandoned buildings. We walked the runway for underground designers in repurposed synagogues and empty churches, relics of the immigrants who had moved through the Lower East Side and Alphabet City before us, leaving their mark and culture.

Downtown Manhattan is where my scene gathered in a relatively small number of blocks. Creative people from all over passed through these streets, either chasing their dreams or being chased out of their small towns for being different. Icons, future icons, and the unwashed masses of working artists drank together, recorded together, pressed lips together, and stumbled home at dawn through Tompkins Square Park.

Verta-Ray’s apartment on Ridge Street is where he built the studio that launched the torrid career of my band, Speedball Baby. Passing through were James Chance, Kid Congo Powers, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Eugene Hütz, Mick Collins and acres of others whose raison d’être was to create, create, create. No permission asked, nor granted. The clean, controlling, corporate world stayed far away from downtown’s gritty streets.

I lost camera lenses to swinging fists in the mosh pit at CBGBs and even managed to pour an entire 40oz (two pints) beer into my only camera body, leaving it sticky and hobbled, but continued to use it as I couldn’t afford another.

I straddled worlds: sometimes, camera-wielding-observer, other times, subject – the only woman on the stage, in the van, at the police station, surviving the slings and arrows society reserves for women who refuse to comply.

Despite what music history, as it is written, will tell you, there was not just a small handful of female artists who mattered. Without the many who grabbed ferociously for the mic or guitar or drums when those were not being offered, we would not be hearing the powerful, unapologetic voices who control their own narrative now. Karen O. Billie Eilish. And history goes back like that, to the women who broke ground for us.

In writing about this world and this long-gone time in my memoir, The Ballad of Speedball Baby, I’ve laboured over the right word choices to help the reader smell the city (spoiler: it didn’t smell good) and experience how it felt to be part of an underground movement that – while it was hard to survive it – gave meaning to the lives of those, like me, who did.

New York in the 1990s was off-kilter, unfiltered, and out of focus. We – artists, musicians, punks, underground dwellers – lived in neighbourhoods the police largely let police themselves, below the radar of mainstream society, carving lives out of the city’s bedrock with our bloody fists. Long before the immediate feedback loop of social media, our creative ideas bubbled in a cauldron of diversity and inspiration until they could no longer be contained.

Then we’d run electrical cords from the bases of streetlamps to power PAs and amps, playing shows in abandoned buildings. We walked the runway for underground designers in repurposed synagogues and empty churches, relics of the immigrants who had moved through the Lower East Side and Alphabet City before us, leaving their mark and culture.

Downtown Manhattan is where my scene gathered in a relatively small number of blocks. Creative people from all over passed through these streets, either chasing their dreams or being chased out of their small towns for being different. Icons, future icons, and the unwashed masses of working artists drank together, recorded together, pressed lips together, and stumbled home at dawn through Tompkins Square Park.

Verta-Ray’s apartment on Ridge Street is where he built the studio that launched the torrid career of my band, Speedball Baby. Passing through were James Chance, Kid Congo Powers, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Eugene Hütz, Mick Collins and acres of others whose raison d’être was to create, create, create. No permission asked, nor granted. The clean, controlling, corporate world stayed far away from downtown’s gritty streets.

I lost camera lenses to swinging fists in the mosh pit at CBGBs and even managed to pour an entire 40oz (two pints) beer into my only camera body, leaving it sticky and hobbled, but continued to use it as I couldn’t afford another.

I straddled worlds: sometimes, camera-wielding-observer, other times, subject – the only woman on the stage, in the van, at the police station, surviving the slings and arrows society reserves for women who refuse to comply.

Despite what music history, as it is written, will tell you, there was not just a small handful of female artists who mattered. Without the many who grabbed ferociously for the mic or guitar or drums when those were not being offered, we would not be hearing the powerful, unapologetic voices who control their own narrative now. Karen O. Billie Eilish. And history goes back like that, to the women who broke ground for us.

In writing about this world and this long-gone time in my memoir, The Ballad of Speedball Baby, I’ve laboured over the right word choices to help the reader smell the city (spoiler: it didn’t smell good) and experience how it felt to be part of an underground movement that – while it was hard to survive it – gave meaning to the lives of those, like me, who did.