Stuart Griffiths Cordially Invites You to Attend the Pigs Disco

Our friend Stuart Griffiths, the guy who shot Liverpool’s youth gangs, mangled British troops, and more recently Siberia’s disintegrating drug casualties, has a new book out this month. Myth of The Airborne Warrior is made up of his photos taken during his deployment to Northern Ireland with 3 Para – we spoke to him about the book, the photos, and all the depressing shit that comes with being a British soldier in Belfast. VICE: So, these are the photos from your time in Northern Ireland, when you were a young Paratrooper?
Stuart Griffiths: Yeah. It's all photos and also some ephemera. It's more about the experience of being a British soldier, the reality of it. It's quite different from what Photoworks have done before, I think they wanted to do something like Broomberg & Chanarin and their book, Fig. A move away from the very traditional photo book, I suppose. Did they play a large part in the editing process?
Well, yeah – they went through it all. They were really interested in these folders of old photos I had, even thought the quality was awful. They're just old machine prints, shot on an Olympus Trip or maybe a Sureshot. My stepdad bought me a camera and I only used it then because I suddenly thought, ‘actually, this is quite interesting’. In retrospect, I do wish I had taken more, of course. There were so many things I didn't shoot. Especially things in my bed-space – you know, guys shagging girls after the Pigs Disco.

Er, what is the 'Pigs Disco'?
Oh, well, the Pigs Disco was the disco we had at Palace Barracks every Sunday. It was all the girls from local areas that had been vetted through the security people and were cleared to come on base and go to the disco, where they'd get absolutely wankered with a load of British paratroopers. I used to feel pretty sorry for them to be honest, all the guys used to sit there and do the pig sounds, I wanted to warn them… some of them were really nice girls. I mean, they weren't from the republican hard areas, they didn't know what they were letting themselves in for. I wanted to tell them 'You are going to hell, in five minutes'. So the book has a fair bit of that off-duty stuff in it then?
Oh yeah, paratroopers love getting their kit off and dancing about naked in vomit and so on. I would have been about 18 when I started taking those photos. You take it all for granted at the time, but you are never back in that situation again. I remember once coming back from the disco and Speds, this black guy, was shagging a girl while he had his respirator on. I should have got a photo of that.

There are a lot of pictures of patrol too. Hopefully they capture how mundane a lot of military life was. It's a fairly subversive viewpoint of the British army in Northern Ireland. How dull and depressing it was at times.

So the whole thing of no-one wanting you there, you not wanting to be there, and the day-to-day grind of it all – that comes across in the book, does it?
Yeah, totally. It was originally going to be called The Northern Ireland Archive, but you know, that was boring. So the actual title – The Myth of the Airborne Warrior – that conveys some of the sarcasm of it. It was very boring, 95% of it was tedious and waiting for something to happen. That’s the reality of the myth. And you know, people needed that myth to keep young troops excited, but it wasn't the reality. Luckily, nothing ever really did happen to me. Though very nearby we had an incident with some joyriders. What happened there?
Well, we used to have a lot of problems with joyriders, there were quite a lot of them about and they would often panic when the came to a checkpoint. Anyway, A Company were involved in an incident, they shot some joyriders. The car sped towards the checkpoint, one guy fired and then everyone else did – I think it was a boy and a girl; teenagers. They were shot and A Company were moved off and we replaced them in time to take all the flak from the locals in the morning. Sounds great. Did the army ever want to vet your photos? How did that work?
In the beginning they totally ignored me – it was just: 'there's Griff taking his holiday snaps'. I was a young private soldier, known as a ‘tom’, no one cared. Later I became a bit more prolific, I was regiment photographer, people started to notice me. They wanted my film handed in to the guard room at the end of each go. It was all sent off to Lisburn and I never saw most of it again. They used to get annoyed, because I shot a lot of black and white and they wanted colour, but it was my film, so fuck them.

As for censorship, there aren't really any official secrets in there, you know. I mean, what is an 'official secret'? It touches on those issues of bullying and drug use maybe, but no; I have never really had issues with censorship. It's more that it exposed that myth of 'the army' life.

I guess that ties in with your more recent work about people after the army, and the impact the army has had on their lives?
Yeah. I mean, a lot of people leave the army and have a terrible time adjusting. I had a real wake up call when I had to go to court on drugs and firearms charges, which sounds a lot more exciting than it was, but it made me get sorted. I saw it happen to a lot of people, the effect of being in the army, traumatic events. But even if they never went out on patrol, it could still change them, all the bullshit and regimentation, sleep deprivation, etc. I used to find myself pissed in a town centre on a night on leave, stopping cars at imaginary checkpoints… People back home thought we were baby killers back then, public opinion was tired of Northern Ireland and the bombs. The conflict was nearing its third decade, so at that point I felt that no-one was bothered to hear my stories, and I had to suppress those feelings.

But you're glad to be un-supressing them now?
Yes. There are 500 copies of Stuart's new book, The Myth of the Airborne Warrior, you can pre-order one of them here.