Graham Smith & Chris Sullivan will be signing copies of the book, reminiscing and playing the best early 80s music from 6.30pm on Wednesday 22nd, at The Sun & 13 Cantons, Great Pulteney Street in Soho. Pay bar. Dancing from 9pm. For more info click here.

We’re a convivial bunch at Unbound and we like to tell you what we’re up to - what new projects we’re launching, that sort of thing. So we’re setting up shop in various of these new-fangled social media spaces. Unlike Tom Stoppard, we now have a ‘Twitter machine’, and a Facebook gadget and a Google+ fandangle.

But we’d always like more people to hang around with. So to encourage you nice people to get involved …

Follow us on our Facebook page between now and the end of February and you’ll be put into a prize draw to win a copy of the excellent We Can Be Heroes. (If you already follow us, don’t worry, we’ll put you in the draw too). So like us on Facebook, and get your friends to do so too, and you could be a winner.

Smith roamed the nightspots, boudoirs and bedsits with an SLR and stash of monochrome film, capturing this elite band of misfits whose dedication to costume, image and good times – against the wasteland of a recession-hit Britain – beggared belief.

We see the likes of Steve Strange, Boy George, Siouxsie Sioux, Spandau Ballet and future broadcaster Robert Elms in career infancy dressed in quilts, frocks, Weimar, Gatsby and martian chic, heads shaven and bewigged, faces slashed with Bowie zig-zags, eyes set in kohl and skin sprayed silver. The book traces the beginning of it all to around 1976 and the liberating force of punk, and contends that punk’s DIY ethos was very much alive as late as 1984. With the onus being on dressing up and adopting an attitude, the doors to clubs like Blitz and the notorious Hell were not open to ordinary Joes, and even the rich and famous had no guarantee of access. Scene mastermind Steve Strange famously refused Mick Jagger entry to Blitz for being wrongly attired, and one image shows an affronted looking Jack Nicholson in trademark sunglasses blocked at the gates…”

Read the rest here...