Peacocking in clubs has been a practice – and a core subcultural definer – within British culture ever since punks began their counter-culture takeover in the 70s. Photographer Derek Ridgers has seen first-hand the cultural evolution of these ostentatious dressers, having been lensing New Romantics, Punks, Soul Boys, Disco Queens, Goths and Ravers for over five decades, which has now been filtered into one book: The Dark Carnival: Portraits from the Endless Night.

Ridgers’ cynosure were people expressing themselves in eccentric forms. Clubbers getting lost with other like-minded souls, and experiencing a shared countenance for peculiarity and visual pith, was a sort of providence for tomorrow’s reality that existed outside the club’s walls. Capturing those fleeting moments was Ridgers’ purpose.

Outsider reactions, style tractions, and fractions of personality within these hubs of progressive assertions compelled the photographer, attracting his attention and charming his creative eye.

Portraits signify the fantasy-laden ideals that drove many youths to clubs, and a notable yearning to exist in the intermediate – dark, decadent, anti-reality – state between dusk and dawn.

Lewis Firth: What compelled you to begin photographing the peacocks and show-offs in clubs?
Derek Ridgers: I’m an only child and my parents were never very outgoing people. The result was that I grew up not very outgoing myself and when I was younger I thought of myself as an introvert. I’m pretty much the last kind of person that would have made a very good Punk or New Romantic and I’d never have found joining any gang or social group easy. I was always essentially a loner, and content to watch events from the margins.

So, I think the answer to the question is that photography gave me the chance to intrude on, and gaze into, other more interesting lives. With a camera, one can stare at people without it being perceived as rude or intrusive and having a camera gives one the legitimacy to approach people in the first place.

LF: Were you a peacock yourself? Did you see something of yourself in them?
DR: Yes, I did see something of myself in them all but it was a side of me that could never have been fully expressed.

When I was a schoolboy I would very much have liked to have been fashionable but my parents never really had the money to buy me a lot of different clothes. They were resistant to me expressing myself in that way anyway. My dad was always on at me about my hair and my clothes as it was. Also, if I’m honest, I didn’t really have the gumption to be one of society’s peacocks.

For a brief period, in either ’64 or ’65, I had some very cool Mod-type clothes: a striped blazer, some large-check hipster trousers, a big wide belt and a pair of two-tone blue-suede shoes. I looked like one of The Small Faces, except I was tall. This outfit was financed, bit by bit, by my rather malleable grandmother, much to the chagrin of my parents. But I found I was uncomfortable being stared at in the street by people I didn’t know. When 1967 came and I grew my hair long and went to art school. I was always getting shouted at by lorry drivers asking, sarcastically, if I was a boy or a girl. Getting stared at and shouted at in the street was not a comfortable thing for me.

Behind the camera, rather than in front of it, was always likely to be my destiny.

LF: What kind of editing process did you follow with curating the imagery for your book, The Dark Carnival?
DR: To be honest, it wasn’t so much an editing process as evolving one. I’d been thinking about doing a book like this for about fifteen years and, from that point, the main question I had was when it was going to end.

About half the photographs in the book were in a show at Hull’s Museum Of Club Culture in 2012. So I’d had an opportunity to see what they looked like as a whole entity and also to receive some feedback on my choices.

For the book, I expanded the choices from that show a bit and obviously brought it all up to date. I wanted each photograph to be a good photograph in it’s own right and have real graphic strength – not just pick a lot of photographs that covered every club or every night-clubbing genre. There are quite a few photographs from the same few clubs and many gaps. I never saw it as a project until I was half way through and I never ever wanted it to be comprehensive. It was always going to be very, very subjective. Having said that, I did try to choose photographs that would also tell something of a story. But it was always just going to be ‘my story’.

LF: What was your core focus when photographing these night owls? What were you trying to capture?
DR: My focus was always one of finding the most interesting, outgoing personalities. Rather than focusing simply what they were wearing or in many cases in the book, not wearing.

Whenever I got into a club I would always spend a while with my camera hidden away in my bag and just watching. In many clubs, the peacocks and the shows offs will announce themselves somehow anyway, so one doesn’t really have to do much searching.

But there are also people who will reveal aspects of their personality which are not so readily obvious for a bloke with a camera. So one does have to remain responsive and aware and really concentrate. This is why when people meet me in a nightclub I’m never that keen on socialising.

My first show was at the ICA in London. It was called ‘Some Punk Portraits’ and that was in 1978. So that gave me a great start. Those photographs now comprise my new book.

LF: What was the energy like between culture shifts of Punk and New Romanticism? Was there something particularly memorable from shooting the club kids at Blitz compared to Punks, for example?
DR: The energy in those early Punk clubs was palpable. There were often fights and some very raucous behaviour. Everyone was there searching for something and I’m not exactly sure what it was and they probably didn’t know either. But the final years of the ‘70s was a very odd time anyway, it was quite different to now in so many respects.

The early New Romantic clubs had a lot of the same energy as the Punks but there was not so much fighting or spitting. Many of them had nice clothes, and they’d try to protect them as they had to go back to the hire shop the next day. A lot of the New Romantics were ex-Punks anyway. As was Steve Strange.

But great clubs the world over always seem to be very similar. They are often loud, dark and sweaty. Full of young people, drinking, dancing, snogging and enjoying themselves.

LF: Do you think that the diversification that once existed in clubs has been adulterated by popular and celebrity culture? Do you think clubbers’ outward-showing personalities has become homogeneous?
DR: Yes, very much so. Once, something new could be started by a few like-minded individuals (like Bowie Night at Billy’s) and it could grow and draw in other like-minded young people. If it was something that had legs, it would grow more and possibly eventually get media attention. But that was not usually until it had gone through a period of gestation.

Most things are adulterated and homogenous these days but there will probably always be individuals who rise above the pervasive culture or use it to spark their creativity. I would be surprised if it’s ever been much different.

LF: Do you think subcultures have died off? Why do you think they’re not as prominent as they once were?
DR: Nowadays social media is so all pervasive that things have changed a lot. No one has to wait to read about something in a newspaper or a magazine. If you or I do something interesting this afternoon, the whole world could know about it by this evening.

By tomorrow people will be copying it. By the day after people will be snapping it on their iPhones and parodying it and making fun of it on YouTube and Facebook. By the weekend it will all be old hat. By next week the revivalists will start it again. Things get old very quickly these days.

I suppose there will always be people and groups who come along and react against all that. But I imagine it will be much harder for them now than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

Derek Ridgers’ The Dark Carnival: Portraits from the Endless Night is available now.