The Punk Rock Birdwatching Club
Where have all the ravers gone? Following his debut, Flower Factory, Richard Foster presents a new batch of psychedelicized, autofictive fairy tales from the Netherlands. The Punk Rock Birdwatching Club introduces a diverse cast of voices – from addicts to grandmothers – who narrate eight short stories dealing with the major social changes that country underwent during the mid-noughties.
We learn of the upheavals brought on by the Euro and the influx of Polish workers alongside the slow disappearance of the British and Irish worker-raver tribes post-Schengen, all set against a backdrop of rising costs, political murders and foreign wars. We also learn of the shock of new party snacks, like asparagus sticks wrapped in ham. Like Flower Factory, The Punk Rock Birdwatching Club is set in the southern part of the Dutch Bollenstreek: an agro-industrial district that is always changing, but somehow manages to stay exactly the same.
Richard Foster
Richard Foster is a writer and artist living in the Netherlands. Richard is best known as a writer for The Quietus and Louder than War, and for his work at the famous avant-garde cultural centre, WORM, in Rotterdam, where he is communications manager and the booker for music, talks and radio. His work on Dutch post-punk has been published over the last decade by a number of academic titles and he has appeared as a guest on national radio stations in Germany, Lithuania, Estonia and on BBC Radio 3. He runs The Museum of Photocopies in his spare time.
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