Curated by... Antenne at The Standard: Crisps & Cocktails

Johnny Banger: It starts with graffiti. In 2008 I was living in Hackney, and I picked up a tabloid rag with a story about an international graffiti gang who had been caught and jailed in the UK. It was the largest conspiracy to commit criminal damage case ever brought to court. Nine mug shots of young men stared back at me, and I wondered about them and their lives. Two years later, one of the faces from the paper was out of prison, and I ended up living with him in a warehouse in North London. Together, we raved our way back into the world and became best mates. I was fed up with work, so I quit my job at a bar in Brick Lane and started bootlegging T-shirts. This was the beginning of Sports Banger, a DIY movement that was all about making the most out of nothing. 

That person I lived with has a best mate, Chris Packet. He now lives in Athens, and his crisp packet collection started when he was painting trains. In the tunnels while he was painting he started to find these perfectly preserved, almost archeological finds, of these crisp packets. In those tunnels there are no street sweepers, there's no sunlight, and that spurred the collection that became the book. 

I had gone out to Athens, where he lives now, to find myself a bit for my birthday. He invited me over to see his crisp packet collection, and as soon as I saw it, I said. “Right, let’s publish this.” About a week later, I ended up getting a train to Liverpool to talk about The People's Pyramid, along with Annebella. We had four hours together, and at the end of that train ride, I said, “Look, I really need an essayist. I'm doing a crisp packet book.” She lost her mind and immediately signed up to be the essayist for the project, to give the social history of what you're looking at in the book.

Annebella Pollen: Everyone's got crisp memories. In a way this is the story of our childhoods, if you grew up between 1970 and 2000. You can't taste the crisps anymore, there are flavours in here that are long gone, but the empty bags people are filled with memories. 

I'm not a huge collector of crisp packets, but I do collect quite a lot of ephemera. I did a book in 2023 which is slightly related to the crisp packet world; I wrote about the paper envelopes that your photographs and negatives used to come in when you had film developed. I've got a collection of about 1000 of those paper wallets, and I started to realise that you could tell an alternative history of photography, over about 100 years, just by using those envelopes. Those envelopes showed us how to be photographers, what to take photographs of, what made a good picture, and what kind of things to avoid. It was like a set of visual descriptions, I suppose. 

Since that book, I've been called on by various paper bag and packet people. I've written an essay about paper bags for the Paper Bag Archive, which is run by Tim Sumner. He’s another person who loves detritus, and who wants to tell a history of the world through the stuff that we throw away, the ephemeral stuff that we’re not meant to keep. What happens if you keep that stuff and look back? It's more than nostalgia. It is a kind of contemporary archaeology, I think, and it's a sort of cultural history. 

Johnny Banger: You can see real moments in time as you go through the book. Obviously, there’s the graphics, lettering, and the characters that appear on the packets. But the book is also a record of a completely unregulated period of our time. The advertising, the targeting of these products to kids, is amazing. 

Annebella Pollen: I’m not a crisp historian, and I learned about the history of crisps from Natalie Whittle’s book, Crunch: The History of Crisps. She doesn’t really write about crisp packets, but I loved the stories she tells in her books. There was a period where you could get crisps hot out of the oven, and there was advertising that promoted eating crisps with every meal, so you could have hot crisps for breakfast. I think we need to bring that back. 

Crisp popular culture didn’t really take off until after the war, and that's when you started to get the big name brands, like Golden Wonder. Crisps were really strongly associated for a long time with a blokey, pub culture. Then there was a move in the ‘60s to get crisps, not out of pubs, but to widen the market for crisps. Companies started appealing to the housewife, so they started to be sold in supermarkets, and this era was all about appealing to kids, too. I was amazed when I saw all those crisp packets together, what a kids culture it is. 

This is a moment that's gone in kids culture, and maybe it's gone for good reason as well; factors like understanding childhood obesity and new regulations about advertising to kids. It was a very unregulated period. It’s very interesting that people were able to market to kids in this way that’s really fun, but also slightly sinister. Something that I found out was that Golden Wonder was financed by Imperial Tobacco. That really shows you that it's about pushing a kind of addictive substance onto kids. It's getting kids hooked on this salty thing. So enjoy your crisps, but enjoy them in moderation. 

Johnny Banger: I don't think you can complete the collection. I was at someone's studio recently who has a lot of collections, collections galore, compiled really nicely in folders. There were these three folders which said ‘Crisp Packets’. He pulled them out, and I didn't look at them. I couldn't look at them, because I felt like I was cheating on Chris Packet. So this is not the definitive crisp packet book. People can get really nerdy and snobby about it, and that's not what this book is meant to be. It's not a study on crisps, just head by the graphics and enjoy. 

Annebella Pollen: It’s one man's collection, and I love the fact that he found them in tunnels when he was painting trains. The story is so beautiful. So it feels like you could do a different thing, which would be a comprehensive archive of crisp packets everywhere, but that would be a different thing. It wouldn't be his story.

Johnny Banger: My favourite one is by a Cornish brand called Smugglers, Contraband. It features a hand holding this ornate gun on the front. It’s funny, when we did the spread layouts of the book, it ended up being beside a Thunderbirds packet, so you had a pirate shooting a soldier. We hadn’t planned for that.

Annebella Pollen: I really like the fact that there are loads of regional crisps in the book. Any history of British manufacturing is always a story of individual companies and brands being swallowed up by transnational companies. There was a whole series done by Smith’s Chipsticks in the 1980s, based on comic postcards, with a lot of sexual innuendo in them. The packet that really stuck in my mind has a sort of eager looking guy with red cheeks looking into the eyes of a busty blonde lady sitting next to him. He says to her, “When, darling?” And she says, “After the Chipsticks.” It seems to me that this is a strangely sexually suggestive packet of crisps, especially when we're thinking about this being kids’ culture. I believe that on the back of those crisps, they also had some information about the history of picture postcards too. I can't think of that really happening now, there's a lot of information on these crisp packets. 

Johnny Banger: There is no rhyme or reason to the book, it’s sort of ordered by brands but we didn't want to page number it or categorise it too much. It's very much about enjoying the graphics. It's an incomplete selection, and then soon we’ll be releasing a blue-covered version, which has got all the packets of Chris Packet’s collection. With that we did have to do an edit still, because we wanted to get the size and pricing of everything right. There were other considerations too, for instance there was a packet which we omitted because it had Gary Glitter’s band featured on it. 

Annebella Pollen: Obviously, when you're talking about packets from the ’70s, you're often having to reckon with some really distasteful stuff as well. I really love this packet that appears to have a kind of Brian Eno figure who's playing a synthesizer. The gendering of that character is really interesting as well, because she appears to have a brassiere and long green fingernails. So she's one of the few female characters who appears in the book. I was quite interested in what a boy's culture crisps were, and that also got me thinking about boy and girl culture, and crisp rituals in playgrounds. I was thinking, this is about more than the crisps, this is about the packets and what people did with them. I can remember doing things like shrinking the packets in the oven, or making jewellery out of them. 

Johnny Banger: When I started out doing Sports Banger I always wanted to publish books, but I didn't really know how to do it. You just do it and learn while you're doing it. The first major book we did was The Covid Letters, which was a project that came out of those government letters to notify everyone that we had gone into lockdown. I realised that every household in the UK had been sent the same blank canvas, which is a letter from the government. I think letters should be a two way thing, so I said, “If you've received this letter and you're under 16, draw on it and let us know how you feel.” We ended up getting so many replies that we had to set up a PO box to get all these letters back. 

We got commissioned by Thames & Hudson to do the Sports Banger book for our 10th birthday, and the book is very much 10 years of work. It begins when I was making T-shirts out of my bedroom, then the next section is the period when I got my first studio on Seven Sisters Road. We started making T-shirts, one of our first T-shirts was a “Team Nigella” T-shirt, during her 2013 divorce case. Then the T-shirts started to work their way up, from raves to politics, pop culture, and fashion. In 2019 we knocked down the walls in our studio so we could do our first fashion show. It’s continued from there. Now we actually get to document this stuff. People have struggled to define what Sports Banger is, and then when we finally put it into the book, it all made sense. The work had finally found a home. 

Annebella Pollen: I've written about five, six books, and when this book came out, one of my academic colleagues said to me, “This is your finest work.” Which is hilarious, I love that. She gave me a ceramic crisp packet sculpture as a gift.

Johnny Banger: I found that too, people saying, “This is your best work.” We both do really good work, and it can feel like no one listens, and then you bring out the crisp packet book… It just goes like that. It did bring a lot of joy to my life. With my work, I can get bogged down in our political voice. With this book, I remembered the power of joy and reverence. It also helped dig us out of a financial hole, and it enabled Chris Packet to set up a website for his business in Greece. So the cosmic power of the crisp.

Johnny Banger: I really like Scampi Fries. I like Nik Naks too. I do remember I was always a salt and vinegar guy, and then at a point when I developed a more sophisticated palette, I started to go for prawn cocktail.

Annebella Pollen: The best crisp in the world is in the Republic of Ireland; Tayto’s cheese and onion flavour crisps. Nothing else tastes like that crisp and it never will again. When I went to Ireland in the ’80s, there was no other crisp that could be bought, but that was fine, because this was God's crisp. So that was fine. I also really like those Spanish fried egg flavour crisps, but you can only eat one or two, because it's like having a whole egg.