Skipping to Armageddon: Current 93 & Friends

More than 100 iconic photographs of key players in the English musical post-punk underground, taken by Ruth Bayer.

"Like much of the music made by the artists who entrusted her to reflect their mercurial spirits, Bayer''s pictures are magic."
--from the introduction by Michel Faber

This book brings together, for the first time, the music photography of Ruth Bayer, who has documented key players in the English musical post-punk underground since the mid 1980s. With unprecedented access and intimacy, Ruth has photographed luminaries and legends including Marc Almond, Little Annie, John Balance, Peter Christopherson, Cyclobe, Shirley Collins, Baby Dee, Norbert Kox, Tony (TS) McPhee, Steven Stapleton, David Tibet, Tiny Tim, and many others, in a career spanning three decades.

Skipping To Armageddon offers a unique collection, featuring more than 100 timeless and iconic images of some of the most influential, eccentric and sometimes controversial musicians of their times.

Ruth Bayer is an Austrian photographer, based in London, whose work has been exhibited at galleries all over the world. Her photographs have appeared in numerous music and style magazines over the past two decades and most recently in the book The Play Goes On: The Rituals of the Rainbow Bridge.

Founder of the long running cult band Current 93, David Tibet is widely known as an artist and songwriter. His song cycles present a rich vein of ethereal imagery, arcane reference, and the supernatural, creating their own sound-worlds of heartfelt and mysterious poignancy.

Novelist and short-story writer Michel Faber was born in Holland.He moved with his family to Australia in 1967 and has lived in Scotland since 1992. His short story ’Fish’ won the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition in 1996 and is included in his first collection of short stories, Some Rain Must Fall and Other Stories (1998), winner of the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award.His first novel, Under the Skin (2000), was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and he has also won the Neil Gunn Prize and an Ian St James Award.Other fiction includes The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (1999), a novella, and The Courage Consort (2002), the story of an a cappella singing group. The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), is set in Victorian England and tells the story of Sugar, a 19-year-old prostitute. His collection of stories, The Apple (2006) continues the tale of some of the characters from The Crimson Petal and the White.His most recent books are Vanilla Bright Like Eminem (2007), a further short story collection, and the two novels The Fire Gospel (2008) and The Book of Strange New Things (2014), which he says will be his last novel.