You probably know Martyn Goodacre’s photographs – THAT iconic photo of Kurt Cobain, with the bleach bowl cut and the eyeliner. His portraits have graced the covers of many magazines.

Cold Lips are proud to publish Goodacre’s first photobook, a radical autobiographical journey from when he began as a photographer, living in the South London squats of the 80s, to documenting the rise of the New Age traveller movement.

The book catalogues Goodacre’s youthful exploits in South London, shadowed by punk – squatting at the Fire Station on the Old Kent Road, which hosted the first London gigs for Psychic TV, Jesus & Mary Chain, and many more. The book features photos of Billy Bragg, Madness, and is witness to a previously forgotten underground scene. 

It is a story of free land, before the Criminal Justice Act 1994.

Why it’s called  WHOS FUCKIN PLANET (ya, spelt like that) is explained in a conversation recorded a few nights after the opening night in Neukölln, Berlin between Martyn Goodacre, and editor, Kirsty Allison.

Edited by Sebastian Bowden, it is available as a podcast on iTunes, Spotify and many other platforms. Click here for those links.

Whos Fuckin Planet is laid out by Berlin-based Anne-Cathrin Saure, she also worked on Cold Lips 02, designing our Shedville font, and created our first book, Dark Entries by Richard Cabut.  For this second book from Cold Lips Press, we’ve published 100 numbered editions (in the record time of about 2 weeks) to launch aside the debut show curated by Stephanie Hamer at Das Gift in Berlin in late February 2020. The photos in the book are slightly different to the original show, and are carried in an A5 landscape, 68-page, perfect bound, velvet laminate book, which feels like rubber. These collectable and special books are bound by a hand-printed linocut belly band that Kirsty stayed up for a few nights making. (It’s your job to spot where the lyrics are taken from.) Only £15. You can buy it here. 

[Punk and squatting was a] newfound philosophy and opened up a million possibilities, with the help of Hatred: from the Deep Purple and Queen patchouli oil stinking grebos. Plus a soundtrack from John Peel’s late night radio show… Lasting just a few months I found myself one of Thatcher’s 12% unemployed and loving every minute. 

“Just by chance I met up with a friend who’d come down from the Midlands.  He’d morphed from a public school boy Jam fan into a revolutionary liberator of empty council flats in hard-to-let areas where boarded up flats outnumbered the ones occupied. Suddenly I had become a squatter. It was all remarkably easy. Nobody wanted to live in a rough-as-hell estate just off the Old Kent Road where I would meet an assortment of vagabonds, lollopers, scruffy ‘erberts, vicious Sids and psychedelic dandies. It would become my home for twenty-two very full, very stimulating unpredictable years. 

“Life was good on £23.50 a week, sleeping all day and talking all night… LSD became our only affordable luxury, and often the only item in a rusty clanking fridge…The dandy revolutionary had liberated a huge building, which was an old fire station on the Old Kent Road and for some reason called it The Ambulance Station. The building had been liberated from a French anarchist group. An experimental music group called Bourbonese Quark now claim the Station was of their doing but this is an exaggeration.  They also did not organise the Jesus and Mary Chain gig that mythologised into a riot. It was a gentleman called Gordon Dawson who played bass in a band called the Hangman’s Beautiful Daughters.” 

Excerpts from the introduction written by Martyn Goodacre

Follow Martyn on Instagram @martyn.goodacre

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