Recession? Let's party!

It was the bleak early-1990s. But the YBAs couldn't care less. In an extract from his new book, Gregor Muir relives a whirlwind of booze, brawls and gloriously ramshackle shows
Gregor Muir and Tracey Emin
Gregor Muir and Tracey Emin in Tracey's studio in the mid 1990s. Photograph: Johnnie Shand Kydd Johnnie Shand Kydd/Public Domain

Leaving art college in the late 1980s was like standing on a cliff edge and being pushed from behind. The rear view mirror revealed an education system that was being stripped to the bone by the Thatcher government. In 1990, the world property market went into freefall and recession started to bite. The future for young art graduates looked very bleak; there didn't seem to be any opportunities out there.

At the time, I was selling postcards in the Royal Academy bookshop. I had studied at Camberwell College of Arts in London, but as much as I liked the idea of being an artist, I was coming to terms with the realisation that I had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had I not spent so much time partying at Camberwell and defected to Goldsmiths instead - where my contemporaries Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume and others had graduated - I could have been up there with the best of them. So what was I going to do with the rest of my life?

In July 1990 I got an invitation to an exhibition called Gambler at Building One, an old biscuit factory in Bermondsey. The show featured artists including Angus Fairhurst (another Goldsmiths graduate) and Damien Hirst. Hirst's piece A Thousand Years, in which flies were hatched on one side of a sheet of glass and killed on the other, stopped me in my tracks. It was beautiful, unforgettable - but more than that, it radiated a kind of certainty about its place in art history. I couldn't hope to compete with this - but I now knew I wanted to spend my life surrounded by art and artists.

The emerging generation of British artists was incredibly driven. They turned the bleak economic conditions to their advantage, opening up group shows wherever property became available - in old factories and warehouses, and in brand new office buildings, too, in spite of their low ceilings, empty desks and neutral grey carpets. As the entire nation tightened its belt, young artists just wanted to show their work: they had no money anyway, and little to lose.

The crowds who attended these openings were unprecedented, and the excitement infectious. By 1992, I was addicted to private views. I had been made redundant from the Royal Academy bookshop and was now on the dole. Totally broke, I would leave my flat with a handful of coins scraped off the kitchen table and a few cigarettes. Whatever the weather, I made my way from one end of London to the other on public transport and then by foot. My socks had huge holes below the shoe line, in the toes as well as the heel, like old-fashioned spats. But it didn't matter to me so long as there was free beer at the opening.

That year Jay Jopling staged an exhibition by the young artist Marcus Taylor in an old warehouse in Farringdon. The show consisted of minimalist interpretations of household objects, fridges and stoves, their basic form rendered in Perspex. After the opening, everyone made their way to the nearest pub, the Coach and Horses. When I arrived, I saw Jake Chapman propped against the bar on crutches, looking pained and uncomfortable. The art kids started to file in, and by about 9pm the place was heaving.

At around 11, the landlady went to pass out a tray of free beer by way of thanking her new customers when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a dark-haired young man walk in. There followed a terse exchange with Jake Chapman, still propped up at the bar. His brother Dinos stepped between them to try to calm things down, but refused to shake hands with the stranger, whose behaviour became increasingly erratic. The man then picked up a beer glass and whacked it into Dinos's face.

All hell broke loose. People were dragging each other in and out of the front door, the landlady's drinks tray went flying and there was an unrelated attack on an editor at Frieze magazine. The police arrived and an ambulance took Dinos to hospital. The rest of us dispersed into the darkness. At the expense of Dinos's nose, everyone now had something to talk about.

My first encounter with Tracey Emin was at a party in King's Cross in 1991. She was prancing around in white pop socks and a short skirt; her idea of dancing seemed to be jumping up and down on the spot while smashing her shoes into the floorboards. She was joyously shouting at everyone to join in, which had the opposite effect of making people cling to the walls. She reminded me a little of Sandra Bernhard - feminine and cute from afar, but still quite a toughie and not someone to mess with.

In 1993, Tracey and Sarah Lucas opened a studio-gallery in a ramshackle house at the top of Brick Lane. At first, the Shop contained very little in the way of products. There was a small, unattractive basement that Sarah and Tracey referred to as The Think Tank, while the ground floor shop unit had bare, uninviting walls. On the first floor, Sarah stored her work in one room while Tracey claimed another as her studio, where she made figurative woodcuts from old floorboards. The room at the top of the house was The Detective Office. It had a noticeboard, a desk and a typewriter, where Tracey could write. (At the time, Tracey saw herself as a writer - the only thing being, she couldn't type.)

Tracey and Sarah took to calling themselves The Birds and started to fill the shelves with bits and pieces: items knitted together from whatever happened to be lying around - beer cans, scraps of fabric. On the empty shelves stood cigarette packets shaped into origami animals and sold on for the same price as a fresh pack. There were Rothko Comfort Blankets, made from tiny squares of burgundy-coloured fabric with embroidered text by Tracey, and Damien Hirst Ashtrays, an ashtray with a cheap black and white photocopy of the artist's face stuck to the base. It was always a little strange, the invitation to stub a cigarette out on Damien's head.

Sitting behind the counter, Sarah would carefully cut around photographs of herself having a mug of tea, or a beer, or smoking a cigarette. She'd then attach these images to wire stalks and arrange them like flowers in a vase. Across the room, a large floppy octopus made from black tights stuffed with newspapers straddled the radiator like a forlorn pantomime prop. I recall one occasion when a gregarious Norman Rosenthal, then exhibitions director at the Royal Academy, put the octopus on his head and started dancing with it.

Weekday openings at the Shop were fairly straightforward, but weekend hours were brilliantly absurd - Saturday 11pm until Sunday 4pm. We'd arrive after midnight, just as the rest of London was closing down, and find the place alive. Everyone brought their own alcohol, and we'd all prance around to Bowie, the Beatles and St Etienne. I would stay overnight and wake in an upstairs room surrounded by huge photocopies from the Sunday Sport and photographs of Sarah in brown leather jacket and jeans, her legs wide open in a deliberately unladylike manner.

One of the highlights of those days was Tracey's birthday party, entitled Fucking Fantastic at 30. They had managed to get drinks sponsorship and there were buckets of beer everywhere. Along with the young scene, Gilbert & George arrived and everyone got completely hammered. I remember Sarah clomping downstairs in her boots the following morning and making her way over to a black plastic bin filled with icy water. She rolled up her shirtsleeve and thrust an arm into the depths. Much to her surprise, she hoisted out a tin of Tennent's Extra, lager of choice for the hardened alcoholic. "Great!" she announced and gulped back the contents.

Artists such as Sarah, with her keen eye for the everyday, were not oblivious to the number of retail outlets being forced to close down during this period. Oxford Street was badly hit, with storefronts boarded up. Once-respectable high street stores now provided temporary outlets for wide-boys selling dodgy stock. The artist Michael Landy, another Goldsmiths graduate, was sufficiently inspired by the downturn to stage the exhibition Closing Down Sale in 1992. With Oxford Street just a short walk away, he presented an installation consisting of shopping trolleys piled high with marked-down goods and Day-Glo signs reading Recession Sale and Gone Into Receivership.

Gillian Wearing captured the mood, too, with a series of photographs entitled Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say (1992-3), a project that involved asking people in the street to write down anything they wanted on a sheet of paper. "A lot of people told me to fuck off, especially in south London," she told me when I interviewed her for Dazed & Confused magazine.

One photograph in Wearing's series stands out. It shows a young businessman, wearing a suit and tie, holding up a sheet of paper that reads, "I'm desperate". I asked Wearing how this moment came about. "I literally had to chase him down the street. He only had time for one photograph and what he scrawled down was really spontaneous. I think he was actually shocked by what he had written, which suggests it must have been true. Then he got a bit angry, handed back the piece of paper, and stormed off."

In 1992, the entire nation was desperate; for once in my life it wasn't just me who was broke. As politicians argued over the use of the word recession, there were times when it felt like an out-and-out depression. Everything was closing down and London was completely dead. There was no rush hour. But while Britain's economy bumped along the bottom, the fortunes of a generation of young artists were on the rise.

Mayfair mayhem: A night with Freud and Hirst ends in A&E

One night the artist Cerith Wyn Evans and I chanced on Lucian Freud at a drinking hole in Mayfair. Cerith had been one of Freud's models. "Lucian!" he announced, twirling his hand in honour of the great man. Freud smiled nervously, but invited us to join him. I told Freud I had spent months bored out of my skull working behind the ticket desk at his Hayward Gallery exhibition in 1988. I particularly admired his Two Plants (1977-80), a painting of tiny leaves depicted in neurotic detail. Freud told me he associated this painting with one of the most depressing periods of his life. I thought it best to shut up.

Another bottle of champagne arrived and then in walked Damien Hirst, accompanied by a friend. They walked straight over and sat down. Hirst lit a cigarette and started to pick Freud's brains. How had he survived the art world for so long? Freud's response was carefully gauged; he wasn't giving anything away. Hirst's pal started to snipe, more or less saying Freud should depose himself and relinquish all power. I said this was ageist. A brief shouting match ensued.

We departed, a band of drunks. Outside, the collector Peter Fleissig was stepping out of a cab. "Peter!" exclaimed Cerith. He went to hug him and missed, smashing his head on the kerb. Not for the first time, I ended up in A&E with Cerith who, not for the first time, asked the nurse to record the cause of injury as "disco damage". He added: "Tell me, does my x-ray show any sign of a heart?"