The changing role of album artwork in a digitally-defined music culture has been much discussed; meanwhile the art of the gig poster seems to be in fairly rude health. But there’s another story to be told; a lesser-examined but tremendously significant area of visual music-related collateral – the flyer.

Chelsea Louise Berlin’s new book Rave Art draws on her huge collection of flyers, invites, membership cards and other ephemera from the early 1980s onwards to celebrate the lo-fi visual culture which was so intrinsically linked to the UK club scene. Not only are these fascinating visual artefacts, they were also vital to the way the scene spread and partygoers communicated how, when and where the next raves would take place.

Chelsea writes in her introductory essay: “The invites would come to us sometimes when we still in the clubs, most often when we leaving in the early hours, on occasion just by passing someone or standing with them in the cloakroom queue and getting into a conversation, but practically all the invites were in the form of printed flyers of one medium or another: paper ones, plastic ones, fabric ones, laminated or even edible ones on the odd occasion (they haven’t survived in good enough condition for this book alas) but of every shape, style and genre you could think of.”