Gallery: 80s and 90s Rave Flyers
Recently I've been trawling through the archives of raveflyers.co.uk to see how religion was represented in rave and acid house in the UK. In between all the pictures of aliens, flying saucers, early 90s wireframe CGI landscapes and op-art there's a fair amount of religious symbolism. I've quickly comped together a gallery of some of these images.
Some of the images are quite subtle but others are downright offensive/shocking. The images of Jesus holding a giant pill capsule seems in particular bad taste but also sums up some of the attitudes and the distance between rave and religion in the UK (especially when you explore the close parallels of gospel and house in the US only a year or two earlier). The Persecution flyer with the tag line "persecution of a dance nation" certainly identifies some of the attitudinal aspects of the rave scene at the time, and combines the text with Dali's Corpus Hypercube canvas. Other, less offensive but equally interesting, examples include the two from Genesis, some from Raindance, and a flyer from Utopia reminiscent of Shoom or The Loft.
