’Light fantastic

They say if you can remember the ’60s you weren’t there.

The inverse is true of the 1980s. If you were around, you’ll remember everything – especially when it comes to pop music. Because pop stars were omnipresent: from Duran Duran larking about on a yacht in the video to Rio to Boy George on a TV chat show saying he preferred a cup of tea to sex (not sure what this says about the quality of ’80s tea).

As many of the megastars of the day were British, London’s clubland was a celebrity playground. And for a while, the place to go was Limelight, a nightclub that opened in 1985, housed in an abandoned 1880s church on Charing Cross Road.

Because publicity is everything, the club asked a young photographer, David Koppel, to take pictures of its famous clientele. “I said I didn’t like nightclubs, I didn’t drink, I wasn’t interested in celebrities, and I was a ‘serious’ photographer,” he says. “They said, ‘We’ll pay you for one night.’ That one night lasted a year and paved the way for a decade on Fleet Street.”

Now, Koppel’s images – all of which are black and white – have been collated in a new photobook Limelight. Here you’ll find the likes of Boy George, the Beastie Boys, Johnny Rotten, George Michael, Kim Wilde and Billy Idol being outrageous. It’s no accident that Bob ‘Live Aid’ Geldof had his stag do at Limelight before marrying Paula Yates.

“Every newspaper and most pop magazines hadn’t yet discovered colour.”

Looking back at his Limelight years, Koppel says: “Every newspaper and most pop magazines hadn’t yet discovered colour. There was no internet, no mobile phones, no digital cameras. It seems unthinkable now.”

Which makes these images not just hugely enjoyable, but a relic of bygone, and fast-disappearing, age.

Limelight by David Koppel is published by Pap Art, davidkoppel.co.uk

“Every newspaper and most pop magazines hadn’t yet discovered colour.”