New York Art Book Fair 2022: Toby Mott Signing

New Age: Stonehenge to Jungle is a comprehensive collection of iconic UK rave, jungle, sound system and warehouse party flyers dating from the early 1970s to 2000.

The book is sourced and curated from the Mott Collection – an extensive archive that gathers paper ephemera of British popular culture from punk to rave – curated by artist and collector Toby Mott.

Crammed full of 575 entries of flyers and other collectables, New Age is a visual feast that charts the origins and progress of a series of youth rebellions that were to last for a generation. Through its chapters, the book looks beyond the music into the fantastical visual language that propelled this subculture, offering a global perspective on how British party culture shifted through the decades.

New Age opens with an extensive array of iconic flyers created for the early 1970s free festivals of Stonehenge and Windsor. It then moves into the

1980s, when the boom of illegal London warehouse parties gave birth to acid house – visually embodied by its iconic smiley face, then evolved into sound system and dub clashes. As rave culture takes over, the designs and graphics of the flyers become more complex, unveiling a craving for dystopian experiences and surrealistic universes forged by the vision of masters of flyer art, the likes of Pez and Junior Tomlin – also known as the Salvador Dalí of Rave.

The book traces the rise of jungle music and more widely the aesthetic of the 1990s, an urban sound digging into its Jamaican roots and bringing together reggae, rave and sound system culture, giving a unique insight into the profound, and yet often overlooked, impact of the Black British community on rave music and its scenes.

Featuring interviews with influential flyer designers such as Pez, Kaos, Junior Tomlin, and Dave Little, the book is also a journey through the golden age of paper flyer art and its evolution before the wholescale adoption of digital, documenting how it popularised innovative techniques such as airbrushing and how its themes influenced early computer art during the advent of the digital era.

Further contributions include seminal countercultural figures like documentary photographer Alan Lodge, record producer Chris Peckings, DJ and Spiral Tribe member Ixyndamix, Mutoid Waste founder and artist Joe Rush, founder of Ibiza Records and jungle promoter Paul Ibiza, and artist and New Age traveller Vinca Petersen.

To order a SIGNED copy of New Age: Stonehenge to Jungle by Toby Mott