Muñoz-Rojas, Ivar - Underground Babylon - Book

Publisher: La Felguera

Retail price: €23. Hardcover. 190 x 220 mm. 208 pages. “...Do you like punk?” That was the question that launched the great adventure behind this astonishing book. It happened a decade ago at a photocopy shop in Barcelona, where Philomena Winstanley posed the question to a young punk she had just met. Shortly afterward, this mysterious woman gave her a box full of photographs she had taken of famous musicians in all kinds of situations... John Lydon casually drinking beer, Nina Hagen working out on the beach, or Throbbing Gristle in uniform, among many others featured in Underground Babylon. That box, filled with memories and questions, is the starting point of this story, starring Philomena Winstanley and Claude Bessy, a couple who, behind the scenes, helped spark some of the most important cultural movements of recent decades. Along with some friends, they created the legendary magazine Slash, which gave a voice to the birth of the Los Angeles punk scene (with bands such as The Weirdos, Germs, The Bags, The Screamers, X, and Black Flag, among others). Later, ever true to their knack for being in the right place at the right time, they settled in London and Manchester, where Bessy worked for the highly respected Rough Trade label and at The Hacienda, the legendary club where much of the dance culture as we know it today was born. Their journey ended in Barcelona, where the couple lived and became part of the city’s bohemian underground until Bessy died in the late ’90s. Ivar Muñoz-Rojas—a journalist, screenwriter, and musician—has interviewed many of the key artists and figures connected to these different periods, friends of Philomena and Claude (Graham Lewis of Wire, Alice Bag, Jon Savage...), and has flawlessly pieced together a puzzle of energy, rock and roll, and survival in this unusual book, poised between a fierce chronicle set to music and the power of love: the raw story of two figures who always moved behind the scenes, yet were involved in practically everything and with everyone. Because, as Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records and The Hacienda, said, “Some people make money, others make history.”