Suburban subversion: the DIY post-punk heartbeat of Bromley
Everyone remembers the Bromley Contingent. Almost nobody remembers what happened next — on the actual concrete of Market Square, in the racks of Bonaparte Records, and in Church House Gardens on the day of the Royal Wedding.
To the outside world, Bromley in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a quiet, leafy suburb of south-east London. To the mainstream media it was famous only for the “Bromley Contingent” — the glamorous, art-school inner circle around the Sex Pistols, who had already moved on to the West End clubs. But on the ground, a second and far more democratic wave of underground culture was being born.
It wasn’t driven by major label scouts or kingmakers in Soho offices. It was driven by us: local teenagers, DIY outsiders and street-level operators who wanted to document our own world, in our own voice.
The view from 31 Market Square
Born just up the road in Beckenham and raised in Bromley, my youth was soundtracked by the hiss of photocopiers and the crackle of vinyl. Looking for a way to capture the raw, urgent energy of the local kids who didn’t fit the glossy mainstream mould, I started Alternative fanzine.
Our headquarters was the street itself. We hung around inside and outside Bonaparte Records at 31 Market Square, a legendary independent shop that was the local subculture’s entire ecosystem. Bonaparte wasn’t just where we bought records — it was where we sold our fanzines straight out of our bags, traded gossip, and found other people who felt the same way.
Armed with a camera, we walked the local streets photographing ordinary kids, documenting what they were wearing and writing about their style. Years before i-D or The Face reached international newsstands, Alternative was doing it purely for the love of the local culture. We were holding a mirror up to Bromley’s youth, proving you didn’t need to be in Soho to be at the cutting edge.
From Bromley With Love, 1981
The fanzine grew into a record label, Alternative Music. In 1981 I set out to compile a sonic time capsule of the talent bubbling under the surface of our town. The result was an 18-track compilation LP, From Bromley With Love — catalogue number ALT 007A.
It bypassed the slick, commercialised post-punk of the era for a fiercer mix of DIY post-punk, power pop and minimal synth. Eighteen tracks squeezed onto one twelve-inch — the sound quality suffered for it, and nobody cared. A deeply local response to the suburbs: a record made by the neighbourhood, for the neighbourhood. Original pressings still change hands among collectors today.
Sleeve artwork © Alternative Music, 1981
Side A
- Story A Only Dreaming
- 20:20 System Dresden
- Hepatitis Risk Wet Dreams (Beyond the U Bend)
- Easter and the Totem Nothing There
- Easter and the Totem One
- Thin Men Exercise
- Acid Drops Distance
- Blueprint It’s Not Easy
- Aquila Without a Care
Side B
- Praxis The Insect Within
- Telegents I’ve Snapped
- Telegents Touch and Go
- Ekofisque Tide and Bound
- Ekofisque Maybe Tomorrow
- The Contacts Magic People
- The Locusts Lost Fight
- Burlesque Collision of Sex
- The Limit A Tidy State of Mind
29 July 1981: Rock Against the Royal Wedding
While the rest of the country was glued to the television watching Prince Charles marry Lady Diana Spencer, we were planning a deliberate act of subversion. We took over Church House Gardens and threw a grassroots counter-festival: Rock Against the Royal Wedding.
As the Union Jacks waved on screen, our festival gave a loud, chaotic and necessary sanctuary to the kids who wanted no part of it. The lineup caught the UK underground exactly at its turning point.
The Tourists played for us — Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart, sharp power-pop and new wave, and a considerable buzz in the park. Worth pausing on what that means. Their debut Eurythmics single had crept to number 63 that year and nobody had heard it; In the Garden was still three months away, and they would not tour under the Eurythmics name until after it. In July 1981, in a park in Bromley, they were still the band who had taken “I Only Want to Be with You” to number four. We booked Annie Lennox roughly a year and a half before “Sweet Dreams”.
Splodgenessabounds headlined, fresh from their top-ten hit “Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, Please” — written by Max Splodge after he was refused service at the Crown, just down the road in Chislehurst. They delivered exactly the anarchic performance the day deserved.
Preserving the suburban underground
Today a Snappy Snaps stands where Bonaparte Records used to be on Market Square, and original copies of Alternative are rare ghosts of a pre-digital age. But the history remains. What we built in Bromley wasn’t a footnote to the punk explosion — it was a blueprint for independent, hyper-local street culture. We didn’t wait for permission. We went outside, picked up a camera, pressed the vinyl, and changed our corner of the world.
Church House Gardens is a three-minute walk from where our coaches set down on Church Road. Some of our Bromley trips still end there.