Pathways (1973). A slightly reworked version of the original painting.

“Science fiction is unfortunate in having a most unsatisfactory framework of existence—it’s considered literary kitsch. I believe it should be the mainstream of literature because all the books that have become important down the generations of civilisation have been books about ideas. Superficially, science fiction would seem to offer the most scope for idea content, but the promise is unfulfilled. Good ideas and good writing rarely coincide. All too often the medium is used for entertainment alone and its potential beyond this should be obvious to everyone. I don’t just mean in the sense of fantasy technology. The potential for anticipating human evolution is there and perhaps the means to bring it about and definitely the means to bring about a social evolution.”

Roger Dean, interviewed in Visions of the Future (1976).

If popularity is often a curse as well as a blessing, it’s been Roger Dean’s curse to see his work dismissed along with many other products of a decade with more than its share of cultural heroes and villains, the 1970s. Music journalists in Britain have for years given the impression that the arrival of the Sex Pistols in 1976 swept away all that preceded them, in particular bands such as Yes whose album covers had helped raise the visibility of Dean’s art to an international level. This is not only a lazy assumption, it’s also wrong. When Yes released Going For the One in 1977 it was their first studio album in three years yet despite the punk explosion it went to no. 1 in the UK album charts, while a rare single release from the band made the UK top ten. Yes were playing sell-out tours in Europe and the US in 1977 and 78, as were Pink Floyd whose The Wall was massively popular worldwide in 1979. Punk didn’t sweep prog away, what happened with its advent was that progressive rock and everything associated with it—Roger Dean’s art included—became critically disreputable almost overnight, such that no journalist would dare say anything good about it. That disrepute has persisted for thirty years despite a lasting and indelible influence; this is an old argument but certain facts often need restating anew. *

Views (1975).

I was 13 in September 1975 when Roger Dean’s first collection of his illustration and design work, Views, was published. At that time, I hadn’t heard any of the music to which his paintings and drawings were attached, and I didn’t even see a copy of the book until February 1976 when I happened to be in London on a school trip and found a big pile of what I guess was the second edition in Foyle’s book shop. This appeared at exactly the right moment; I wasn’t listening to the music but I was reading a lot of science fiction and was starting to notice and imitate the work of various paperback artists. I recognised many of the pictures in Views from the covers displayed in the window of our local record shop, Cobweb, whose shopping-bag logo was a cowled magician figure à la Dean or Rodney Matthews. It’s difficult to say what struck me about Dean’s work at the time since you rarely articulate your preferences at that age. I think I liked the consistency of vision and the invention which blended the organic and mechanical, the architecture which looked at once ancient and futuristic, and the flat landscapes which put lone pine trees into rocky terrain familiar from Japanese and Chinese prints. For a teenager his style was also relatively easy to imitate if you forgot about basic things such as imagination and finesse, and I spent a year producing a lot of badly-drawn reptiles posed against lurid watercolour skies.

Motown Chartbusters Vol. Six (1971).

Dean was packaging many different kinds of bands and styles of music throughout the early Seventies, most notably Yes, for whom he also helped design stage sets, but also various folk rock artists on the Vertigo label, turgid rockers like Uriah Heep and Budgie, and Afrobeat groups like Osibisa and Assagai; he even did a cover for a Motown compilation. But he remained resolute throughout in using the album cover to explore his own obsessions and design concerns. It was this latter aspect of his work which surprised me when I finally got my hands on a copy of Views late in 1976 and discovered that these weren’t mere illustrations but were often coming out of his explorations of furniture and architectural design. In that respect, his work is a lot less like the artists he’s usually grouped with—fantasists such as Rodney Matthews or Brian Froud, or the popular sf illustrators of the decade like Chris Foss—but is closer to the speculative industrial designs of futurist Syd Mead. The outsized reptiles and surreal moments in Dean’s pictures tended to obscure the architectural speculation, whilst being the very elements which made him so popular. That popularity coincided with a boom in poster art which made him easy to dismiss later on as part of the reprehensible hippy froth of the era. What people missed then, and continue to miss when he’s branded as merely another illustrator, is the obsessive reworking of vistas and visual motifs—dragons, Asian rock formations, pine trees, floating islands—whose origin is the same psychological impulse which birthed the internal landscapes of the Surrealists or the jungles and deserts of JG Ballard. Dean’s landscapes are frequently depopulated and appear dream-bright, awaiting the arrival of a new breed of colonists for their porous architecture. It’s no surprise that his work in recent years has caught the attention of filmmakers and games designers.

Yessongs (1973).

The success of Views had one lasting benefit in that it launched the Dragon’s Dream/Paper Tiger publishing imprints which made the work of many science fiction and fantasy illustrators available in lavish book form. Among the early run of titles was the first proper study of album cover art, The Album Cover Album (1977), produced in collaboration with Hipgnosis, and a Syd Mead collection, Sentinel (1978). When I started hanging around the Savoy bookshops in Manchester in the 1980s I was surprised to see Roger Dean’s autograph on the wall of what used to be Bookchain in Peter Street. His scrawled name and accompanying dragon head had been left there in 1979 when he turned up to sign copies of Views along with three of the artists from the Dragon’s Dream volume The Studio—Mike Kaluta, Berni Wrightson and Jeff Jones—who also signed the shop wall.

Dean’s 1969 logo for Harvest Records, a division of EMI.

Dean’s art has been out of critical favour for so long that it’s difficult to discuss it positively without sounding overly defensive. While many other shunned aspects of the pre-punk era have been rehabilitated—folk music, psychedelic drugs, flares—I’ve yet to see anyone mount a serious reappraisal of Dean’s artwork despite his furniture and architecture designs having been exhibited at the V&A. There’s a certain kind of critic, usually male and British, who finds the exercise of a Romantic imagination to be a suspect and unwholesome activity. That suspicion often sees a single “story” being told in art history which skips from Impressionism to Cubism and ignores the Symbolists and Decadents; it dismisses Dalí’s work after the 1930s and won’t even look at the paintings of HR Giger, Ernst Fuchs or Mati Klarwein; it’s a suspicion which marginalised Mervyn Peake almost to the year of his death in 1968, which scowls at genre fiction and ignored JG Ballard (always a proud science fiction writer) until his Booker Prize nomination in 1984. Minimalism and restraint is favoured over exuberant invention, and a blokey cynicism is favoured over any kind of visionary impulse which is seen as tasteless or kitsch, with “kitsch” in this context almost always meaning “whatever I dislike”. For every Marina Warner, Michael Moorcock, Clive Barker or China Miéville who assert and promote the value of the imagination, you’ll find a vocal crowd who find the whole thing to be unpalatable and juvenile. It’s an older argument than punk versus hippy, going back at least to the nineteenth century debate between Realism and Romanticism. It’s also a peculiarly joyless English attitude; the French have shared the debate as far back as Zola but are generally a lot happier for serious intellectual dialogue to sit side-by-side with comics, movies, science fiction and fantasy.

Blue by John Dummer featuring Nick Pickett (1972). One of Dean’s die-cut sleeves for Vertigo Records.

I’d argue that it’s the perceived “bad taste” quality of Dean’s work, and his guilt-by-association with a disreputable period of music, which has delayed any reassessment of his art and cover designs. Barney Bubbles was a great graphic designer exactly contemporary with Dean—both worked for Vertigo in the early Seventies—but as an illustrator Bubbles’ work is nearly always playing riffs on styles or motifs borrowed from elsewhere, and is less original as a result. Bubbles escaped the wrath of punk dismissal by being personally evasive, dropping the hippy elements from his work and becoming house designer for Stiff Records in 1976. Roger Dean, meanwhile, simply carried on being Roger Dean and the powerful illustration side of his art continued to overshadow his design interests. Since design critics are nearly always the ones who write the histories, they tend to favour graphic design over illustration; design is the intellectual component, it’s functional and has a job to do. Illustration, on the other hand, is often treated as mere decoration. The attitude of writer and designer Jon Wozencroft, discussing album cover design in The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (1988), is typical:

Work done by Roger Dean for the group Yes cannot really be counted in this category, for although his cover design posters adorned many bedroom walls in 1973, their content was no more challenging than an airbrushed greetings card.

I wonder whether Wozencroft has seen Dean’s 1971 sleeve for Motown Chartbusters Volume 6, whose beetle spacecraft certainly challenges expectations for how a pop/soul compilation should look? As for challenging the form of the album package, there’s the elaborate die-cut sleeves which Dean was creating for Vertigo at this time, and his design for Dutch band Earth & Fire which had some of the artwork printed on the inside of the sleeve envelope and therefore largely hidden from view. With a few rare exceptions, graphic designers usually only influence other graphic designers whereas the influence of a good artist or illustrator permeates the wider culture. Singularity of vision counts for a lot, whether it’s HR Giger’s creations for Alien or Syd Mead’s work on Blade Runner and Tron. I happen to rate Dean as a graphic designer in his own right, for his beautifully simple Harvest Records logo, for those die-cut Vertigo sleeves, and for his elegant and futuristic extensions of Art Nouveau lettering and the typographic stylings of the San Francisco poster artists. But it’s the body of his artwork which has the lasting influence. Nearly every review I’ve seen of James Cameron’s Avatar has referred to its visual character as resembling a 1970s album cover, by which they mean it looks like a Roger Dean painting. Accusations of plagiarism have proliferated once people realised that Dean’s floating mountains, looped rock formations and flying reptile fauna predate Avatar’s by many years. That Dean’s work can represent an entire decade is a measure of its significance even if the theft of his landscapes and the use to which they are put—a backdrop for more of Cameron’s simple-minded belligerence—is something the artist wouldn’t want.

Morning Dragon.

Dean’s influence will continue not least because new generations don’t care about the old battles and unexamined prejudices of the punk era. With the wholesale fragmentation of popular culture, artists today curate their influences based more on their own interests and obsessions than on the dictats of critics, and what critics there are have become smaller voices struggling to be heard in a global discussion. Views sold over a million copies and is still in print along with Dean’s subsequent books; his work is easy to find even if few care to examine it seriously. The writings of JG Ballard and Philip K Dick gained widespread popularity when the world began to more closely resemble their fiction. In Roger Dean’s case, technology is now better able to bring his imagination to life. Over the past decade we’ve seen the creation of buildings which resemble his organic designs while his holistic approach to architecture and the environment is more widely accepted than it was when Views first appeared. Hollywood and games designers have the means to create the kinds of worlds Dean was imagining thirty years ago but as the technology accelerates in scope and power the visions it might render remain in short supply, hence the recourse to a Dean or a Giger or a Syd Mead whose Tron designs return in a sequel later this year. Dean’s art was never intended to épater le bourgeois and he wasn’t aiming to be the El Lissitzky of the 1970s; to berate him for failing this not only misses the point but ignores the singularity and lasting quality of his work.

* Progressive rock’s disrepute has been so ingrained that it’s taken Alan McGee over thirty years to admit that it might be okay to listen to some post-Barrett Pink Floyd. In a similar vein, The Wire is the most open-minded of all the current music mags but the King Crimson and Yes reappraisals in their December 2009 issue were the first substantial pieces they’ve run on either band.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?
• The art of Mati Klarwein, 1932–2002
• Guy Peellaert, 1934–2008
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

top row: The Division Bell by Pink Floyd; A Rush of Blood to the Head by Coldplay.
bottom row: London Calling by The Clash; Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield.

The Royal Mail follows its series of British Design Classics postage stamps with a series dedicated to what they call “classic” album covers. The design classics in the earlier series deserved the term—a  Mini motor car, a Penguin book cover, the London Underground map, etc—whereas here we have the word “classic” being used in its lazy journalist sense where it becomes a synonym for “popular” and “familiar”, two attributes which often diminish with time.

top row: Parklife by Blur; Power, Corruption and Lies by New Order.
bottom row: IV by Led Zeppelin; Screamadelica by Primal Scream.

It should be noted that the choice of cover art was limited to releases by UK artists, and the designs had to be readable at the very small size of a postage stamp. Even so, I can’t help but regard this as a missed opportunity. There was no need to feature the Beatles since they’d been given their own set of stamps in 2006, but I’ve never thought of the cover of Let It Bleed (below) as a classic, even though musically it’s one of the best Stones albums. I’d rather choose Andy Warhol’s cover for Sticky Fingers but you can imagine the upset at stamp users being forced to lick a picture of a bulging pair of jeans. As for Pink Floyd’s Division Bell, it’s a typically striking design from Storm Thorgerson but does anyone really think it’s more classic than earlier Floyd covers, not least the Dark Side of the Moon prism which even people who hate the band can instantly recognise? Nearly all these choices seem confused or compromised; the Clash cover is the token punk offering—Royal Mail wouldn’t dare choose Never Mind the Bollocks—but Ray Lowry’s design was copied from an Elvis Presley sleeve; Led Zeppelin’s IV is a great album but other releases had far better covers; Primal Scream, another great album but the whole sleeve design is perfunctory; the Blur choice is merely bewildering.

left: Let It Bleed by The Rolling Stones; right: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie.

As far as designers go, Hipgnosis (via Storm T), Peter Saville (New Order), and Stylorouge (Blur) are included here but there’s nothing from Barney Bubbles, Malcolm Garrett, 23 Envelope, Neville Brody, Designer’s Republic or any of the other pioneering British designers of the past 30 years. The trouble with those names, of course, is that many of the artists they worked for aren’t popular or familiar enough to the average British stamp purchaser so their work can’t be deemed “classic”. A best of British, then, which could have been a lot better.

Classic Album Covers will be issued on January 10th, 2010.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• British Design Classics
• Stamps of horror
• Endangered insects postage stamps
• James Bond postage stamps
• Please Mr. Postman

Mighty Baby (1969). Illustration by Martin Sharp.

Yet another album cover prompts this post, part of an occasional series. Mighty Baby were a British rock band who formed out of psychedelic group The Action in the late Sixties, and their music is fairly typical of the period, being “heavy” without any of the psych trappings which—for me—often make everything from that time a lot more interesting. This was a journey undertaken by many groups at the end of that lurid decade, a junking of the playful and evocative side of what was now called rock music in favour of a denim-clad earnestness. This album isn’t one I like very much—I’d rather listen to their earlier incarnation—but the cover painting by psych artist Martin Sharp is certainly a startling piece, being a violent mutation of one of the most famous Tarzan drawings by comic artist Burne Hogarth.

Tarzan by Burne Hogarth (194?).

Hogarth was drawing Tarzan for much of the 1940s and this particular panel showing the Ape-Man attacking Numa the lion dates from the latter part of his run on the series. I wish I could pin this to an actual year but I don’t have a complete set of the comics and that detail eluded me. If anyone knows the date, please leave a comment.

Reverbstorm 7 (2000).

Readers of the Savoy comics series, Reverbstorm, which David Britton and I created in the 1990s, will be familiar with its many references to Hogarth and other artists (some of which were catalogued here). The image of Tarzan and Numa was reworked on three separate occasions. The first was a double-page piece in a long run of pages which are the most excessive and outrageous things I’ve drawn to date. Burne Hogarth saw some of this work, including this spread, and while he wasn’t impressed at all by the violence he had the good grace to say some very flattering things about my drawing.

That image of Lord Horror on the solar-phallic lion was reworked for the cover painting in a style intended to resemble the work of Frank Frazetta. This version also tries to match Hogarth’s original more closely.

Near the end of Reverbstorm #7 one finds this panel showing Jessie Matthews astride Picasso’s bull from Guernica (1937) in the midst of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884). How the story gets to a point of such intertextual confusion would involve far too much explanation; the curious will just have to buy the comics, or wait for the definitive book edition to appear.

I’m fairly sure I’ve seen other reworkings of Hogarth’s drawing aside from the Sharp version. If anyone knows of others, please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #10: Victor Moscoso
• Design as virus #9: Mondrian fashions
• Max (The Birdman) Ernst
• Design as virus #8: Keep Calm and Carry On
• Design as virus #7: eyes and triangles
• Design as virus #6: Cassandre
• Design as virus #5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus #4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders
• My pastiches
• A premonition of Premonition

Continuing an occasional series.

A recent post at A Journey Round My Skull is a stylish series of Indian book jackets from 1964 to 1984. These impress partly for the way they rework western design approaches, and they consequently look very different from the florid visuals one might (lazily) expect of Indian cover design. Western culture borrowed more than enough from India in the 1960s, from clothes to music, so it only seems right that the sub-continent should be free to take something back.

Luna Toon by Victor Moscoso (1968).

Will at A Journey Round My Skull mentions the above cover design as reminding him of this Krautrock bible, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, a book which happens to be my favourite repository of musical geek-dom. The cover reminded me more of the weirdly abstract comic strips created by artist and graphic designer Victor Moscoso for the early run of Zap Comix in the late Sixties. Moscoso was one of the most graphically revolutionary of the West Coast poster artists, and his approach to comics looks surprisingly fresh today next to the work of fellow artists like Robert Crumb. Those limitless vistas go back to Giorgio de Chirico but it was Salvador Dalí who made deserts raked by evening shadows reflect interior landscapes of his own, and it was Dalí’s immense popularity that in turn popularised that endless plane as a stage for surreal events. Moscoso borrows from the Surrealists and comic artists like George Herriman as much as he borrows from Disney; in his posters he was one of many artists taking motifs or whole designs from Art Nouveau. Our Indian egg may well be an original work but the first example in Will’s post is a very Saul Bass-like hand, so I’m guessing that the designers of these books were looking around for inspiration. And that eye-in-a-hand? Moscoso had done that as well.

Blues Project Poster by Victor Moscoso (1967).

While we’re discussing Victor Moscoso, it’s convenient to draw attention to a slight mystery connecting his poster art and the great album cover designer, Barney Bubbles. The poster above was one of a number that Moscoso made incorporating Victorian or Edwardian photographs, and two at least of these use antique erotica as their central image.

Space Ritual interior, design by Barney Bubbles (1973).

This particular photo always stands out for me. The woman is familiar to anyone who’s seen the interior of the fold-out sleeve Barney Bubbles created for Hawkwind’s Space Ritual album in 1973. Barney spent some time in San Francisco in the late Sixties and was undoubtedly familiar with Moscoso’s work, as he was with all the great designs coming from the West Coast at that time. What surprises me is that he should have somehow found the same image to use as Moscoso did. Was there a popular book of Edwardian erotica which everyone was familiar with? Did he ask Moscoso where he’d found the photo? Did he find it by chance? Barney Bubbles experts don’t know the answer (I’ve asked) and the question is in any case a rather trivial one. But I’m still curious… As early porn photos go it’s a particularly fine one and I’d like to know whether there are more like it and where it came from. Needless to say, if anyone knows more about this, please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #9: Mondrian fashions
• Design as virus #8: Keep Calm and Carry On
• Design as virus #7: eyes and triangles
• Design as virus #6: Cassandre
• Design as virus #5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus #4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders

A photograph of the control room of Battersea Power Station, London, by Michael Collins, one of a series which will shortly be on display at the Royal Institute of British Architects.

The images show Battersea Power Station as what Collins describes as a “twentieth century ruined castle” – a building that was built to last, with a high quality structure and interior, including Art Deco walls and ceilings.

Giles Gilbert Scott’s enormous temple of heavy industry continues to sit decaying on the banks of the Thames while property developers come and go. The latest of these, Real Estate Opportunities, has fallen into debt which means proposals to develop the site are once again on hold. A part of me likes the idea of the building sitting there unused and purposeless year after year, like some vast Steampunk Stonehenge; Giles Gilbert Scott’s other Thames-side power station, Bankside, was successfully transformed as Tate Modern, but we know from various proposals that the fate of Battersea, whether as theme park or shopping centre, is likely to be a lot less edifying.

It took redevelopment to transform Bankside from temple of industry to temple of culture but Battersea’s unmistakable presence has a powerful cultural history of its own. Everyone knows the Hipgnosis sleeve design for Pink Floyd’s Animals (1977); less familiar is the photos of the control room which Hipgnosis used for Hawkwind’s Quark, Strangeness and Charm the same year. I tend to prefer the back cover of this sleeve to the front; that octagonal readout device is more interesting than the rather unconvincing sparks and exchanges of energy. And speaking of energy, my former employers are still active, unlike the rancorous Floyd.

There’s a page here listing other uses of the power station, including its many film appearances which date back to the 1930s. That list mentions the control room’s use as a background for the “Find the Fish” sequence in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) but they omit an earlier Monty Python appearance when you briefly see the building in operation during And Now for Something Completely Different (1971). It was closed down a few years later. So here it is, then, belching fumes over west London on a profoundly gloomy winter afternoon.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Sonic Assassins
• The Bradbury Building: Looking Backward from the Future

Moldover’s CD case: a working theremin.

In May this year, Brian Eno was writing in Prospect magazine about the current state of the music business as it continues to be assailed by digital technology. Among the things Eno discussed was the packaging of music:

The duplicability of recordings has had another unexpected effect. The pressure is on to develop content that isn’t easily copyable—so now everything other than the recorded music is becoming the valuable part of what artists sell. … That suggests to me the possibility of a refreshingly democratic art market: a new way for visual artists, designers, animators and film-makers to make a living. So, as one business folds, several others open up. (More.)

Having started out as an album cover artist (I wasn’t a designer back then), and working still as a CD designer, this is naturally an attractive thesis. Earlier this week John Walsh in The Independent wrote a potted history of the album cover and noted that the big record companies are also realising again that contemporary music as an artform is more than merely a collection of audio tracks:

Apple, creator of the iPod and the iTunes store—the sworn enemies of commercially-packaged music—is getting into bed with the four largest record labels, to help them stimulate album sales. They’re working with EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music Group on something called “Project Cocktail” that will produce all manner of extras to go with albums: interactive booklets, sleeve notes, photographs, lyric sheets, even video clips. Buyers will be able to call up album tracks through the interactive booklet, while leafing through pictures of the band and trying to make sense of the lyrics.

This, however, seems to be missing the point. Absolutely anything digital can be copied and passed on, and that applies equally to album extras as to the tracks themselves. What can’t be copied, of course, is a desirable object which contains the music. The lavish album sleeves of the 1970s were very much desirable objects which contained music, and no end of facsimile CDs of Physical Graffiti will match the impact of Peter Corriston and Mike Doud’s design for the vinyl release.

Which brings us to Moldover’s extraordinary light-operated theremin-in-a-CD-case, a beautiful design and a really clever use of the wretched jewel case box. The music on Moldover’s accompanying CD may be swapped around illicitly but no one is going to copy the hardware. The “Awesome Edition” of this work costs $50 and can be ordered here.

Moldover’s theremin is only an adjunct to his music, albeit a delightful one. Tristan Perich, on the other hand, like Fm3’s Buddha Machine, makes the case and the instrument one, and in Perich’s case (so to speak) possibly takes the 8-bit/chiptune thing to a definitive extreme. This is the kind of invention we could use more of, not some lazy Flash applications appended to a pop release then dumped onto the iTunes Store as an “exclusive”. It’s notable that the one thing all these works have in common is that they’re the inventions of no-budget independent artists, not big record labels.

While we’re on the subject of the Buddha Machine, the guys at Mountain*7 noted this YouTube loop work which extends the drone-loop idea into the audio/visual realm.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Buddha Machine Wall
• God in the machines
• Layering Buddha by Robert Henke
• Generative culture

Okay, so it’s not all Fifties’ design—the Moog album is from 1974—but these are more choice Flickr postings from a set devoted to album sleeves of the Easy Listening variety. Much of the music would no doubt erode my patience very quickly but there’s some nice (uncredited) design work going on. Viva! Percussion! has a distinct Saul Bass quality while The Sound of Chris Cross looks like something from the Designers Republic 20 years before its time. The Bolero album I picked solely out of shameless nostalgia. My mother used to have this among her collection of light classical albums and I’d completely forgotten about it until today. This recording would have been the first I heard of any of Ravel’s works. My sister and I used to find the cover slightly rude due to the red points on the ends of the model’s steel brassiere.

Lots more great sets at the same Flickr account; go and lose yourself. Thanks to Thom for the tip!

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exotica!

Elly Jackson of La Roux in the recent video for Bulletproof. I’ve been enjoying La Roux’s debut album a great deal in the past week. The jacket she’s wearing is designed by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac and features the black stripes and primary colours used by Piet Mondrian (1874–1942) in his Neo-plasticist paintings of the 1920s.

Castelbajac’s jacket (above left) is from a collection his website calls JC in the sky with diamonds!!!, a collection which also borrows Jackson Pollock’s paint drips and Disney’s Mickey Mouse for some bold Pop Art effects. Further Mondrian inspiration is in evidence on other outfits but the Dutch painter’s influence on the fashion world goes back at least as far as 1961 with a dress design by Ann Klein, followed shortly thereafter by Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian day dress (above right).

Twenty years later, French bicycle racing team La Vie Claire used Mondrian as an inspiration for their distinctive jersey designs. This flourishing in the Eighties makes Elly Jackson’s choice of clothing particularly apt since La Roux draw so much on Eighties’ music and style. The sight of the racing jacket reminds me of Eighties’ band Age of Chance who liked to wear similar cycling gear and whose video for Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Noise incorporates some Mondrian background patterns, possibly via The Designer’s Republic who were designing their record sleeves at the time.

You can still buy replica copies of La Vie Claire clothing even though the racing team no longer exists. The woman’s dress above was another derivation produced a couple of years ago by Urban Outfitters.

Mickey Mondrian (1976).

I’m sure these aren’t the only clothing designs to be found. Tracking the full extent of Mondrian’s influence today is an impossible task, as well as being a great painter he’s inadvertently become one of the most influential graphic designers of the 20th century. Those abstract patterns get everywhere; Mondrian Espresso, anyone? So I’ll end with a witty painting by artist and designer Mick Haggerty whose Mickey Mondrian managed to collide the Dutch painter with Disney’s mouse three decades before Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #8: Keep Calm and Carry On
• Design as virus #7: eyes and triangles
• Design as virus #6: Cassandre
• Design as virus #5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus #4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders

This 1979 Picador edition of The Beckett Trilogy is one of my favourite paperback cover designs. The “illustration” (as it’s described on the back) is a photograph of an artwork by artist/designer Russell Mills and the minimal credit gives no indication as to whether it was Mills who was responsible for the striking type layout. I’ve noted previously the equally striking Picador designs by the Quay Brothers who were responsible for both art and layout on their covers. Mills extended his work into graphic design later with album cover designs (and some book design) for Brian Eno, David Sylvian, David Toop and others so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt in this case.

The Picador edition of Murphy was published in 1983 and comprises part of this week’s book haul. The three small Mills paintings suit the novel but I prefer his sculptural and collage works. I’ve taken to collecting more of these older Picador editions in recent years since they don’t turn up secondhand as often as they used to. As with the Quay Brothers and Italo Calvino, I wonder now how many Beckett covers Mills produced for Picador. The books list More Pricks than Kicks and Company in addition to these titles. He was still working for them up to 1986 when he and Brian Eno collaborated on the graphics for Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Unlike the world of Penguin collecting, this area lacks adequate documentation; further investigation is required.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Thursday Afternoon by Brian Eno
• Crossed destinies revisted
• Beckett directs Beckett
• Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino
• The art of Shinro Ohtake
• Not I by Samuel Beckett
• Film by Samuel Beckett

Premature (2003).

It’s difficult to avoid the word “dreamlike” when looking at Anthony Goicolea’s carefully-staged tableaux, all of which use the artist himself as their subject, redressed and multiplied by Photoshop into an army of clones. The artist-as-model isn’t a new thing—Cindy Sherman has been doing this for years—but the possibilities of digital manipulation still seem rather under-explored in the contemporary art world; whether that’s down to a lack of the necessary aptitude on the part of artists or simply avoidance of a medium more commonly associated with advertising and illustration is hard to say.

Poolpushers I (2001).

Goicolea certainly has the aptitude, many of these images have the same slightly hallucinatory quality as the photo-collages which Hipgnosis produced for album covers in the 1970s. When you add the inevitable narrative speculation which any staged photo generates—what exactly is happening in these pictures?—and a gay subtext which quite often becomes a very overt text, you have something very intriguing indeed.

Cannibals (2001).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Jason Driskill
• Toxicboy

The results of the Figment album art competition have now been posted and you can see my choice of the winner on the left here. You can see the rest of the winners and read my comments on the Figment site. The winning design reminded me of the famous cover for the first King Crimson album, In the Court of the Crimson King (1969), a painting by Barry Godber. Both have an arresting quality which make you wonder what it is that’s being witnessed beyond the picture frame.

King Crimson’s debut is one of the key moments when British music abandoned the silliness of psychedelia and got down to the serious business of becoming progressive rock. For some people this means it’s also the moment when rock music Went Wrong but I’ve no time for such Spartan sophistries; Robert Fripp rules. Digressions aside, I’ve not finished with the present psychedelic obsession (no, you don’t escape that easily), and the other piece of news today comes with an alert from Valis whose radio show of psychedelic music, Trip Inside This House, runs for two hours every Tuesday morning on KBHX, St Louis, from 5am to 7am. There’s archived shows on a blog of the same name and that site currently features an interview with Matt Piucci, ex of the fantastic Rain Parade, for my money the best of the Paisley Underground bands of the 1980s. If you haven’t yet heard their finest moment, No Easy Way Down, then your life is quite simply a hollow sham.

Continuing an occasional series.

The poster at the top left is the unused Ministry of Information design created to maintain Britain’s resolve after war had been declared in September 1939. This simple slogan struck a chord recently among Britons sick of the climate of fear, security theatre and authoritarian coercion which, deliberately or not, appears to benefit politicians and the agents of the State more than the populace who pay their wages. The BBC asked whether this was the greatest motivational poster ever. The Guardian noted the popularity of the slogan and its inevitable commercial exploitation:

…one day in 2000, Stuart Manley, co-owner with his wife Mary of Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, was sifting through a box of hardbacks he had bought at auction when he saw “A big piece of paper folded up at the bottom. I opened it out, and I thought, wow. That’s quite something. I showed it to Mary, and she agreed. So we framed it and put it up on the bookshop wall. And that’s where it all started.”

The reworked version at the top right is one of the opening pages from The Black Dossier (2007) by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. The crown is replaced by a portcullis and Gill Sans is dropped in favour of Edward Johnston’s sans serif typeface which has been used throughout the London Underground system since the 1930s.

The original poster has been undergoing numerous redesigns, from the jokey to the serious. The green design is one of the better variants by designer Matt Jones.

The blue design is part of an advertising campaign by the British Home Office intended to promote their new “Policing Pledge”, “a set of promises to local residents that not only gives more information about who their local neighbourhood policing team is, but also ensures that communities will have a stronger voice in telling the police what they think is most important and what they are most worried about.”

Laudable as this intention may be, I was very surprised when I saw this poster on a bus shelter earlier in the week. While the Home Office and its advertising people are fully entitled to reclaim a design which originated with the State in the first place, one of the reasons the original poster strikes a chord is because it runs counter to anti-terrorist nonsense like this. It speaks, among other things, to people sick of being lied to by politicians and spied on by police and security services. To see a forgotten design experience a swelling of grassroots popularity then be co-opted by the State itself is as depressing as it would have been had Richard Nixon used psychedelic posters to campaign for his re-election. To see a campaign use slogans which treat the rights of defendants as flippantly as the poster remixers when this present government has spent the past ten years undermining the rights of its citizens is simply a disgrace.

Update: A Flickr pool catalogues the variations.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #7: eyes and triangles
• Design as virus #6: Cassandre
• Design as virus #5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus #4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders

Another authorless design: Vertigo #6360 616 (1973).

Things we did (or didn’t) learn about album cover design this week.

• The jury is still out as to whether Barney Bubbles designed the covers for the UK releases of Kraftwerk’s third and fourth albums, Ralf and Florian and Autobahn. BB experts Rebecca & Mike did clarify a few points with Kraftwerk designer and collaborator Emil Schult, however. This matter requires further research if only to satisfy my own curiosity.

• The Guardian finally caught up with the CD Cover Meme which was discussed here last year. “Labels spend fortunes on what you lot have managed in minutes” says the paper. By the same rationale anyone who keeps a blog is, de facto, a journalist because all that either involve is writing down a few words. Clever.

• Taking the DIY theme one stage further, Figment is a site where you can invent your own band and promote them via imaginary album sales on the site. You can also create your own cover art, of course, and Figment have asked me to judge an album cover contest with the very real and worthwhile first prize of the latest edition of Photoshop and a copy of Paul Gorman’s excellent Barney Bubbles monograph, Reasons To Be Cheerful. The contest is running now until April 3rd, 2009, if you’re interested.

Update: Cover versions: How Hipgnosis created some of the most memorable images of the Seventies. The Independent on the new Hipgnosis book.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?
• The CD cover meme

Autobahn by Kraftwerk; Vertigo #6360 620.

Colin Buttimer was in touch last week to let me know he’d copied my Barney Bubbles post (with my permission) to his excellent new site, Hard Format, which is devoted to the art of music design. In the intro to that piece he repeats something he’d mentioned to me earlier, namely his belief that Barney Bubbles designed the UK release of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn album in 1974. I thought this unlikely at first but the more I’ve been thinking about it the more possible it seems. So here’s a quick run through the evidence in the hope that someone out there may have more information to either confirm or deny the theory.

The 2004 version from the unreleased The Catalogue.

Firstly it should be noted that the original German sleeve was a painting by the group’s regular designer, Emil Schult, who also helped write the title track. Schult’s painting/collage seems at odds with the group’s later rigorous aesthetic and it’s surprising that the design has persisted alongside the UK design. Something which complicates the theory here is that the German painting and cover design exist in several variations, with a car dashboard visible in the early pressings and—crucially—the German autobahn symbol (similar to the UK motorway symbol on the UK release) superimposed on the painting. I have one of the later vinyl reissues with Schult’s painting on the cover and the motorway bridge printed on both sides of the inner sleeve. But someone in the UK still made the decision to make the appropriated road sign the focus of the design for its first UK outing. The previous Kraftwerk album, the wonderful Ralf & Florian, also has at least two different cover designs while their first two albums—featuring their distinctive traffic cone trademark—were repackaged as a double set by Vertigo in 1972. That design takes their stencil lettering and applies it to an oscilloscope wave. Like the Vertigo Autobahn sleeve the design is uncredited, as were a number of other Vertigo releases.

Kraftwerk on stage in 2005.

So where does Barney Bubbles fit in?

1) He was one of a number of designers working for Vertigo in the early Seventies. Marcus Keef produced many of the covers for the folky/prog side of things while Hipgnosis and Roger Dean were among the other talents given an early start by the label. There are two covers credited to BB under his Teenburger name, the first album by Cressida in 1970 and, more significantly, Gracious! by Gracious, also 1970. The stark simplicity of the latter’s giant italic exclamation mark runs counter to anything else on the label at that time.

2) The Gracious! design is printed on bubble-textured card while the white areas of the Autobahn design are embossed onto the sleeve. Texturing isn’t unique to the Gracious album, however, so this factor is circumstantial. Vertigo’s designers used a number of elaborate effects from die-cut sleeves to packaging which opened out to a much larger size, a trick BB famously used later for his Space Ritual and Armed Forces sleeves. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality album was designed by the Bloomsbury Group and that cover uses a similar embossing.

3) The typography. This is probably the clincher for me. The title design for Autobahn is a very odd variant of a Herbert Beyer Bauhaus-style typeface although ITC didn’t produce their Bauhaus face until 1975. It isn’t the earlier Beyer-derived Blippo either, several of the characters are different shapes and several have also been extended slightly. The Bauhaus reference is a clue for me simply because it fits with Barney’s knowledge of design history and also his sense of humour—Germans! The type layout on the back of the sleeve is even more telling. Typography is often like a signature and BB was very sharp with his use of type; he was also very fond of using Futura and the album credits are indeed set in Futura (another German type design incidentally). After this release Futura became the default Kraftwerk typeface until they began using computer-styled designs. You want more? It’s difficult to tell from a low-res jpeg but the word Gracious! on his earlier sleeve looks to me like it was set in the bold condensed oblique weight of Futura.

The Autobahn titles as reproduced on the UK cassette release.

ITC Bauhaus Heavy designed by Edward Benguiat and Victor Caruso (1975).

Why does this matter? For a start there’s still more of Barney Bubbles’ work to be brought to light, so this can be considered one part of an ongoing investigation. It’s an important piece of graphic design which nonetheless remains uncredited. Peter Saville has frequently mentioned this sleeve design as a formative influence. In #231 of The Wire magazine he said:

Not only did the music have a profound influence on me, the sleeve made a lasting impression—the appropriated road sign symbolising the excitement and romance of travelling through Europe. It was my introduction to semiotics, and inspired a use of visual codes that I would develop later through Factory Records.

The person who introduced Saville to Autobahn was designer Malcolm Garrett who later worked with Barney Bubbles. Both Garrett and Saville acknowledged the importance of Barney’s work in Paul Gorman’s recent book, Reasons to be Cheerful. Saville was later designing sleeves for OMD whose music owes a huge debt to Kraftwerk. It would be surprising if all these disparate threads could be traced back to a single design source.

As always, if anyone has any further information please leave a comment.

• Vertigoswirl.com | A very thorough guide to all the original Vertigo releases.

Update: added the 2004 CD version.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Old music and old technology
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

Or why Barney Bubbles rules… The Rumour were a Seventies band I never had any interest in, being part of the Stiff Records’ pub rock axis along with Nick Lowe and others; not weird or noisy enough for petulant moi. This is a shame since the Barney Bubbles design for their albums shows him at the pinnacle of his powers with an integrated, multi-media approach to packaging and advertising.

The pictures and text here have been very generously supplied by Paul Gorman whose BB monograph, Reasons To Be Cheerful: The Life & Work Of Barney Bubbles, is now on sale. This is an expanded extract from part of the book with the NME ad and Vinyl Factory graphic being exclusives to this posting. If you need to know why we keep raving about the man, simply scroll on down, bearing in mind that this was only a clutch of releases from a single band. Barney was pulling together work like this all the time for a host of different artists.

For more BB goodness there’s my original, sprawling post, further samples from Paul’s book at his site and also David Will’s blog which features all manner of rare historical material, including a feature about the Brian Griffin book referred to below.

Over to Paul…

An important yet overlooked Barney Bubbles design project of the post-punk period sprang from an unlikely source: the album with the unprepossessing title Frogs Krauts Clogs And Sprouts, released by Graham Parker’s backing band The Rumour in March 1979.

The pre-PC name took its cue from the album track Euro. Bubbles chose a less prosaic route in realising a remarkable and thematically-linked design package predicated on the ceremony and colour schemes of EEC officialdom. This was very much in the news in 1979, ahead of the first European elections held that summer.

The result of a collaboration with Brian Griffin, this exercise in graphic and photographic abstraction is trademark Bubbles, in that it also draws in a range of coded references from heraldic and numeric to political and astrological.

Bubbles’ practice when working with photographers was to art-direct, but it is a mark of his respect for Griffin that he did not involve himself in the shoots; for this cover he gave over the entire floor of his Old Street warehouse studio and left Griffin to his own devices.

Griffin says that he “constructed a sculpture” using one of his regular models, Charles Woods. Rigidly posed behind velvet ropes and set against the national flags of the countries indicated by the title (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany with the addition of the UK), Woods presents a soil sampler to the viewer.

“My idea was that Charles had plunged it into the earth and – like the grades of coloured sand I got in glass phials as a kid on holiday in the Isle Of Wight – produced a cross-section of the national colours,” says Griffin.

Obliterating the band’s pub rock scene roots (some of the members had been close to Bubbles for several years as part of Brinsley Schwarz), the angular band logo is constructed from straight lines and curves, further developing the symbols Bubbles provided for Griffin’s book of the previous year, Copyright 1978 (above).

In Blissful Company album booklet.

Bubbles’ bespoke record label features the logo with the label copy enlivened by ellipses. These, which recur in Bubbles’ record sleeve designs, made their appearance on his very first, In Blissful Company by Quintessence (1969).

A graphic of five spear-points, which is repeated in variation across the campaign, bursts forth from the album title on the cover, simultaneously evoking an aerial display at an official occasion and the tips of the flag banners.

The arrowheads also zip away from the song titles on the reverse, where Bubbles enlarges a section of Griffin’s photograph, showing the soil-sampler in detail. A section is again enlarged on one side of the inner sleeve, and the reverse of that carries yet another enlargement (as well as an enigmatic short story), so that the image is driven to abstraction. “Barney took my photograph and went into it to reveal the basic dot structure, just like the sampler going into the ground,” says Griffin.

The cover of Frozen Years, the first single to be released from the album, shows Woods running on the spot on a snow-covered terrain, in front of five tiny flags stuck in the ground.

The reverse replaces photography with the spear-pointed fly-past and an illustration of the five flags created from the repeated silhouette of a face. These not only represent the five nations central to the functioning of the EEC, but also the number of members in The Rumour.

Some of the accompanying music press ads present unforgiving monochrome close-cropped portraits of individual band members, complete with oblique lines and arrows and information appropriate to the musician’s astrological sign.

The close-up of bassist Andrew Bodnar in the full-page ad in NME March 17 1979 is captioned: “Aquarius deals with democratic communication with human beings who look on each other as brothers; it’s ruler Uranus governs electricity.”

Such was Bubbles’ fascination with the cosmos and star systems; for example, a few years earlier as part of his set designs, he arranged on-stage performance positions for Hawkwind according to their star-signs.

Another press ad (from NME March 3 1979) has The Rumour logo spiked by the tower of an industrial plant (similar in execution to the “vinyl factory” on the back cover of The NME Book Of Modern Music published a couple of months earlier). Five rows etched into the front of the building are reflected in another fly-past, while the tour dates are set in an elongated version of the silhouette from the back of Frozen Years.

The sleeve for the second single from the album, Emotional Traffic, is relatively unadorned. Set in black on the front and white on the back with the addition of a love heart, traffic light roundels in red, green and amber indicate the three colours of vinyl in which it was made available. In each, there is a die-cut circle revealing the colour of the record contained within.

The campaign for Frogs included five collect-the-set album posters (each is headed with a word from the album title). On these a telecommunications tower/microphone head is seen from different perspectives and set against the colours of the French and German flags as the five arrows swoop and swirl. Cropped sections of the central image also appear at random in the press ads featuring band member faces, thus completing the cross-fertilisation of the design package’s main elements.

Bubbles’ visual progression and innovation of the original concept for the album cover remains a source of wonder to Brian Griffin.

“When it came to this album, I think Barney wanted me to give him something which he hadn’t been involved in, and then take it over,“ Griffin adds. “I didn’t care. My image was OK but what he did with it was incredible. Everything he did with my stuff improved upon it.”

This is an adapted extract from Reasons To Be Cheerful: The Life & Work Of Barney Bubbles by Paul Gorman, published by Adelita, £24.99.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More Barney Bubbles
• Reasons To Be Cheerful, part 2
• Reasons To Be Cheerful: the Barney Bubbles revival
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

If book collecting is frequently a waiting game, some waiting periods can be longer than others. In the case of Mati Klarwein’s God Jokes, my patience and hope have sustained themselves for 28 years until I finally acquired a copy this Thursday afternoon. God Jokes was the second book of Mati Klarwein’s work, published by Harmony Books, New York, in 1976, a slim catalogue-style collection of his paintings, some of which were featured in the early issues of Omni magazine. In 1979 and 1980 God Jokes turned up in a chain of UK remainder shops and for a while it seemed like everyone I knew owned a copy which possibly explains my unaccountable decision to avoid buying one myself. As the years passed and I became increasingly enamoured with Mati Klarwein’s work I came to regret that decision, not least because the book seemed to disappear completely. Copies have turned up since on Abe.com but at bizarrely inflated prices (£50 for a 56-page art book?!). I paid £4.99; patience sometimes pays off.

Abraxas by Santana.

Mati Klarwein’s work has been most visible via the album sleeves of the Sixties and Seventies which borrowed his pictures for their covers. Chief among these is one of the best Santana albums, Abraxas (1970), which used his stunning 1961 painting The Annunciation (and a lettering design by Robert Venosa), and one of all-time favourite albums, the Miles Davis masterpiece Bitches Brew (1970). Miles Davis was a great Klarwein enthusiast for a while and commissioned new work for his Live-Evil album in 1971.

Live-Evil by Miles Davis.

It’s not necessary to go into detail describing Mati Klarwein’s work when you can go to the web gallery maintained by his family and feast your eyes there. Klarwein is one of the few 20th century artists to have taken Salvador Dalí’s photo-realist painting style and make of it something unique to himself; his work is always immediately recognisable. That this work is still known mainly for its illustrative connections tells you more about the iniquities of the art world than it does about the value of the paintings as works of art.

The most curious thing about having to wait so long to find a copy of God Jokes was that I ended up working with a picture of Mati Klarwein’s three years before I found the book; I would have expected to find the book one day but the latter eventuality was far less predictable. In 2005 Jon Hassell asked me to design his new CD, Maarifa Street, and Jon was keen to use a tiny video detail he made of a huge and incredible Klarwein painting, Crucifixion (1963–65). The detail is the rectangle in the centre of the cover, juxtaposed against some Hubble galaxies: the very small against the very large. We used the painting itself and further details inside the digipak. Jon was another of those who used Klarwein’s art for his album sleeves (for Earthquake Island, Dream Theory in Malaya and Aka-Darbari-Java/Magic Realism) and the two men became great friends as a result.

Crucifixion by Mati Klarwein.

Jon Hassell writes about Bitches Brew—and Mati Klarwein’s sleeve art—here. His site also includes a 1998 Mati Klarwein interview from The Wire in which the painter discusses his life and work. If you want a copy of God Jokes for yourself, be prepared to wait…or pay over the odds.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers
• Visions and the art of Nick Hyde
• The poster art of Marian Zazeela

Diamond Dogs (1974).

Many people know this classic album sleeve even if they don’t recognise the name of the Belgian artist who painted it. Guy Peellaert died this week and this is easily his most famous picture. I remember being very struck by its appearance in the local record shop window which always displayed gatefold album sleeves opened out as above. By then the notorious dog’s genitals would have been removed from the picture to protect the delicate sensibilities of Bowie’s fans; the copy here is from a later CD reissue.

Taxi Driver (1976).

Peellaert’s work was very visible in the 1970s, especially his book of rock star portraits, Rock Dreams, a ubiquitous pop culture item along with Roger Dean’s Views and Alan Aldridge’s psychedelic whimsy. I always liked the Bowie cover, it hinted at weirder music than the rather mundane post-Velvets/Mott the Hoople rock which the album contained, but much of the work in Rock Dreams seemed garish and awkward. Far more successful was Peellaert’s painting for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, undoubtedly commissioned on the strength of his earlier work but superior to nearly everything in his book.

Peellaert’s official site has several galleries of his paintings.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Continuing this occasional series. The above motif is the Golden Dawn’s Wedjat or Eye of Horus emblem as reproduced in the hardback edition of The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, an “autohagiography”. Crowley was under discussion here a few days ago and the eye in a triangle symbol can also be seen on the sleeve of the single featured in that posting, forming a part of the seal of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the occult order which Crowley joined in 1910. Crowley’s use of the eye in a triangle caught the attention of writer Robert Anton Wilson and the first part of his Illuminatus! trilogy (written with Robert Shea) is titled The Eye in the Pyramid. That latter symbol appears on the reverse of the American dollar bill, of course, and some of the conspiracy theories surrounding that usage are explored in the novel. Wilson went on to make the eye in a triangle something of a personal symbol and his obsessive use of the motif caught my attention in turn when I began reading his books.

All of which leads us to Hawkwind and a person whose name keeps turning up on these pages, designer Barney Bubbles.

Hawklog cover (detail) by Barney Bubbles.

The booklet which BB designed for Hawkwind’s second album, In Search of Space (1971), featured a version of the dollar bill symbol on its cover. This is the only eye in a triangle design I’ve seen among Barney Bubbles’ work although he was so prolific there may well be others. When I began producing my own significantly inferior Hawkwind graphics in the late Seventies I incorporated eyes in triangles partly as a way of avoiding having to draw hawks all the time but mainly because of Robert Anton Wilson. BB had already established a precedent and it so happens that the eye in the Golden Dawn/Crowley version is the eye of a hawk-headed Egyptian god.

Church of Hawkwind booklet (cover detail).

My first published work for Hawkwind outside fanzines was in another album booklet, for Church of Hawkwind in 1982. The first three pages each feature the eye in a triangle motif.

Church of Hawkwind booklet (detail).

The design above may be crudely drawn but it went on to have a life of its own, as we’ll see below. Be thankful you’re spared the rest of the shoddy drawing.

Church of Hawkwind booklet (detail).

This more finely-rendered illustration surprised me when it turned up in the 1989 RE/Search book Modern Primitives (below) which catalogues contemporary tattooing and piercing trends. I’ve no idea whose arm this is, the only credit is for the tattooist, “Morbella in Amsterdam”. That makes me wonder just how many tattoo versions there are and whether it was one of the tattooist’s available designs or something brought in by the tattooee.

Browsing in a record shop in 1992 I came across a pair of Hawkwind and Kraftwerk compilations on a new American label, Cleopatra, and was surprised (again) to see my crudely drawn eye from the Hawkwind booklet being used as the label logo. They never asked me about this and I doubt they asked Dave Brock either. Not that I’m too concerned, it was rather satisfying to see something of mine on a Kraftwerk release (below) and on their later reissues of the Chrome albums, a cult band of mine for many years. The label is still active and still using a a slightly more streamlined version of this eye design as their logo.

Kraftwerk: The Model—Retrospective 1975–1978 (1992).

One of the Cleopatra Chrome reissues (1996).

The other eye in a triangle from the Church of Hawkwind booklet was resurrected next in digital form in 1994 on the cover of 25 Years On, a 4-CD Hawkwind box set from Griffin Records. If nothing else this seemed to confirm that the symbol had become one of the secondary Hawkwind icons after the ubiquitous hawk silhouette.

Out, Demons, Out! (2004).

And so to my most recent dalliance with this ancient symbol which brings us back to the dollar bill pyramid. This was my cover illustration for issue 13 of Arthur Magazine with its feature on the 1967 exorcism/levitation of the Pentagon. I wouldn’t say this was necessarily the last appearance of the eye in a triangle in my work either. As the examples above demonstrate, some things creep back into your life in the most unexpected ways and some symbols are far more durable—and more flexible—than others.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aleister Crowley on vinyl
• Design as virus #6: Cassandre
• Design as virus #5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus #4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders
• Chrome: Perfumed Metal
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer
• Robert Anton Wilson, 1932–2007

For those who’ve been eagerly awaiting Paul Gorman’s Barney Bubbles monograph, here’s the latest. Readers in the UK may also like to know there’s a feature about the book in the current issue of The Word. By coincidence, if you turn the page in the magazine there’s another feature about the Rob Gretton book I designed recently, 1 Top Class Manager. And for coincidence overload, designer Peter Saville turns up in both volumes.

Reasons To Be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles
By Paul Gorman

“Barney Bubbles is the missing link between pop and culture” Peter Saville

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL is a lavishly illustrated celebration of the creative legacy of one of the most mysterious yet influential figures in graphic design: Barney Bubbles.

Bubbles – who died 25 years ago – links the colourful underground optimism of the 1960s to the sardonic and manipulative art which accompanied punk’s explosion a decade later.

Producing extraordinary artwork under the shroud of anonymity and a number of pseudonyms, in the 60s Bubbles created early posters for the Rolling Stones, brand and product design for Sir Terence Conran and psychedelic lightshows for the Pink Floyd.

He was also responsible for the art direction of underground magazines Oz and Frendz and the masthead for rock weekly the NME, and is best known for a plethora of stunning record sleeves, logos, insignia and promo videos for musicians and performers, from counter-culture collective Hawkwind to new wave stars Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Nick Lowe, Graham Parker, The Damned, Billy Bragg, Squeeze, Depeche Mode and The Specials.

Meticulously researched with 600 images, REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL is the first and definitive investigation into Bubbles’ life and work, with interviews and contributions from family and close friends, college pals and workmates as well as collaborators including pop artist Derek Boshier, author Michael Moorcock and photographer Brian Griffin.

Incorporating many previously unpublished images, REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL is also the only comprehensive collection of Bubbles’ output over a 30-year period: every important record sleeve, poster and advertisement as well as examples of his excursions into abstract portraiture, book design and furniture, supported by student sketchbooks, working drawings, film proposals and personal photographs and correspondence.

Singer-songwriter Billy Bragg has contributed the foreword, graphic designer Peter Saville an essay on the significance of Bubbles’ oeuvre and his contemporary Malcolm Garrett a personal memoir.

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL is published on December 4 2008.

Trim size: 280mm x 230mm
Binding: Hardback
Pages: 224
Words: 55,000
Images: 600
RRP: £24.99

And while we’re on the subject, Barney Bubbles enthusiasts Rebecca & Mike left news on the original BB posting about a forthcoming exhibition of work by photographer Brian Griffin.

On show will be the newspaper ‘Y’, the books ‘Copyright 1978′ and ‘Power’, and associated posters, including the ‘coat hanger and scarf’ poster for Brian’s photo show in 1980. All of these (apart from ‘Power’) will be available to buy too (we think)… so, if you want to, you can bag yourself an early Christmas present (and help put some turkey on Brian’s table!)

Here’s the details: Brian Griffin, 15 November – 8 December 2008 , Monday – Saturday 11 – 6, at ‘England & Co.’, 216 Westbourne Grove, London W11 2RH.

The ‘Y’ newspaper’s got a real chunky red button on the cover (in a little plastic bag); symbolic of the nuclear button we-thinks, and there’s a great concentric circle graphic on the cover too, which is reminiscent of a few things, like the back of the not-used Dury ‘4000 Weeks Holiday’ LP sleeve design and also the front of the never released ‘Station BPR’ LP sleeve (which was due to be the second release on Billy Bragg’s ‘Utility’ label). There’s also an illustration in ‘Y’ by Nazar Ali Khan of ICU fame.

The ‘Copyright 1978′ booklet is cool too; with nearly every one of Brian’s photos in it being accompanied by thumbnail graphics by Barney, which contain cryptically encoded comments. The one that always sticks in our mind is the one that questions whether it is good or bad to receive awards for your work.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Reasons To Be Cheerful, part 2
• Reasons To Be Cheerful: the Barney Bubbles revival
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

Poster by Adolphe Mouron Cassandre for L’Intrangigent, a Paris newspaper, 1925.

Uncredited sleeve art for the second album by The Elektrics, 1981. Found whilst browsing this Flickr collection.

Signed to Capitol/EMI during the new wave/power pop boom of 1979 and 1980, this East Coast quintet fronted by vocalist Carl Worner, released their debut album Current Events in 1980. Though the album showed that the band was stylistically diverse and creative, the album sold poorly. State of Shock, their second album released in 1981, was a huge leap forward, yet didn’t garner the band many new fans or much radio play. After being dropped by EMI, the band split.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus #4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders

Clearing junk today turned up some obsolete artefacts one of which (the Kraftwerk) has been kept for purely sentimental reasons. It’s been amusing the past few years watching the vinyl disc refuse to crawl onto the scrapheap of history despite its death having been announced many times over by journalists who—as usual—should know better. Several of the CD releases I’ve designed recently have also been brought out in vinyl editions. Meanwhile the audio cassette really is on the way out: “Sales of music cassettes in the U.S. dropped from 442 million in 1990 to about 700,000 in 2006″ says Wikipedia. I certainly won’t mourn its passing; portability aside, I always hated these things. Music sounded shitty unless the tape was chrome or some other high-quality format and whatever the quality they were all subject to mangling by cheap cassette players.

What struck me looking at the Kraftwerk cassette next to the BEF one (below) was the difference in presentation. The Kraftwerk release is a good example of perfunctory jobbing-out—the type inside looks like it was applied using Letraset—and as such is quite representative of the way record companies treated cassette releases. And the small size did nothing for the artwork, of course. I remember being transfixed when I saw the vinyl sleeve of Autobahn in a shop window. This was the first time an album cover struck me as being a good design rather than merely an interesting illustration. Subsequent releases reverted to a variation on the original German sleeve but the band seem recently to have accepted the traffic sign design as the ideal one.

Music for Stowaways (1981) was the first release by BEF (British Electric Foundation), aka Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware, post-Human League and pre-Heaven 17. Marsh & Ware were keen on the audio cassette as a future listening medium, especially in portable cassette players; “stowaway” was apparently a name (which I never heard anyone use) for what Sony called the Walkman. As a result they intended this to be a cassette-only release although it did appear as a vinyl version entitled Music for Listening To.

In a rare reversal of the usual state of affairs, the packaging for the cassette was a considerably better than the vinyl edition. This is still one of the best cassette packages I’ve seen, hence the reason for keeping it. (Click on the images above for larger versions.) The design is credited to BEF with Bob Last.

Printing on the plastic was a more durable solution than paper labels.

This short instrumental album, pitched musically between the Human League’s avant garde electro-pop and Heaven 17’s white funk (Groove Thang was (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang minus vocals), remains a great collection of analogue electronica and, together with Heaven 17’s Temptation, I reckon it’s the best thing Marsh & Ware did. Anyone interested in the more intelligent music of this period should track down the CD which might lack the smart design but which does contain two extra tracks.

For more on the early Human League and Marsh & Ware’s projects, there’s the excellent Blind Youth site.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score
• Aerodynamik by Kraftwerk
• The genius of Kraftwerk

New York magazine, April 8, 1968. Design by Milton Glaser.

Part of an occasional series.

It’s probably only coincidence that the sleeve of the second High Llamas album resembles the cover of the first (?) issue of New York magazine. But many of the other High Llamas albums feature design elements borrowed from the Sixties and Seventies and the music on this one owes much to American music of the period, notably Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys.

New York magazine celebrated its fortieth anniversary this year. I tried my hand a couple of years ago at designing the magazine’s High Priority graphic for an online competition. I didn’t win but I did make the runners-up list (along with 120 others).

Gideon Gaye by The High Llamas (1994). Art by Kevin Hopper, design by André & Brown, Tony Lyons.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders
• High Priorities 2
• High Priorities

Dilettantes by You Am I (2008). Illustration and design by Ken Taylor.

Dilettantes is the eighth studio album from Australian band You Am I which is released this week sporting a very creditable Beardsley pastiche by illustrator Ken Taylor. Sleevage has more details about the creation of the CD package, including preliminary sketches. Those familiar with Beardsley’s work may see in the cover drawing references to The Peacock Skirt and the colour print of Isolde. I like the way Beardsley’s peacock has been exchanged for a more suitably antipodean lyrebird. This isn’t Beardsley’s only influence in the musical world, of course. A few more examples follow.

left: The Peacock Skirt from Salomé (1893); right: Isolde (1895).

Revolver cover by Klaus Voorman (1966).

The over-familiarity of Klaus Voorman’s collage/drawing for the cover of Revolver by The Beatles tends to obscure its Beardsley influence but that influence is certainly present in the stylised faces, the figure details and the rendering of the hair. The Beatles themselves were enthused enough with Aubrey to put his face among the pantheon of “people that we like” on the sleeve of Sgt. Pepper a year later. I’d thought for a while that Voorman might have been inspired by the landmark Beardsley exhibition which ran at the V&A in London from May–September 1966. Some correspondence with Raymond Newman, author of Abracadabra, a book about the album, disabused me of that when Raymond confirmed that Voorman in 1966 had already been a Beardsley fan for a number of years.

As well as being possibly the first Beardsleyesque album cover, I wonder whether this was also the first major album release to drop the name of the artist from the front of the sleeve.

Everyone went psychedelic in 1967, even tough mods like The Who. This Hapshash and the Coloured Coat promo poster for I Can See For Miles (incidentally my favourite Who song) is one of Hapshash’s more overt Beardsley borrowings. The sun (or moon) in the background is a variation on Beardsley’s The Woman in the Moon from Salomé (the face is Oscar Wilde’s) while Pete Townshend’s florid sorcerer’s cloak owes much to Aubrey’s incredible cover design (blocked in gold on the book) for Volpone.

The Woman in the Moon (1893).

Volpone (1897).

From the sublime to the ridiculous. Cathy Berberian was the mezzo-soprano wife of avant garde composer Luciano Berio, with a long career as a singer of serious classical and contemporary classical works. Her rendition of Berio’s Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)–an electroacoustic setting of the “Sirens” prelude from Ulysses–was one of the tracks on the 1967 electroacoustic compilation Electronic Music III discussed here in April. She also had a separate career as an operatic interpreter of pop music and this collection of Beatles songs dates either from 1968 or 69, depending on which source you choose to believe. Whatever the year, the designer pulled off a decent enough copy of the Revolver sleeve. For a taste of the Berberian style, there’s a sample here. And if you’re desperate for the entire album, this page has a copy.

I’m sure this doesn’t exhaust the Beardsley influence in sleeve design, there must be others between 1968 and 2008. Once again, if you know of any further examples, please leave a comment.

Humble Pie by Humble Pie (1970).

Update: Added Humble Pie’s self-titled third album. The illustration this time is Beardsley’s own, The Stomach Dance from Salomé.

Dreams by Gabor Szabo (1968).

Update 2: Therese discovered this great sleeve for an album by the Hungarian jazz guitarist. No credit available for the artist, unfortunately, and this is the largest copy I could find. Not AB but a great drawing nonetheless.

Witchcraft by Witchcraft (2004).

Update 3: Another addition, the debut album from Swedish metal band Witchcraft which uses Beardsley’s Merlin vignette from the Morte D’Arthur. Thanks to Cyphane for the tip.

Molly Moonbeam by Coach Fingers (2007).

Ballade Of Tristram’s Last Harping by The 17th Pygmy (aka 17 Pygmies) (2007).

Update 4: Added a couple of new discoveries. The 17th Pygmy album apparently includes further Beardsley pieces in its booklet while the Coach Fingers single also has a label featuring designs by Beardsley’s contemporary, Sidney Sime.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Look presents Nigel Waymouth
• Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert
• The New Love Poetry
• The Avant Garde Project
• A splendid time is guaranteed for all
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé

Evening: Fall of Day by William Rimmer (1869–70).

This curiously sexless figure is a good example of a work by an artist whose reputation may not have been as elevated as many of his contemporaries but who nonetheless created an image which speaks to future generations. Rimmer (1816–1879) was an American artist who produced a number of pictures along these pre-Symbolist lines. This particular drawing (a blend of crayon, oil and graphite on canvas) became hugely familiar in the Seventies when it was chosen by Led Zeppelin as the basis for their Swan Song label logo (below).

Swan Song was launched in 1974 with designers Hipgnosis handling the artwork. The reworking of Rimmer’s picture was by Joe Petagno, an artist most associated these days with his many Motörhead cover designs. Seventies’ rock has a well-deserved reputation for sexism but there was more of this kind of imagery around than you’d expect…or maybe it’s just me noticing the naked men. Whatever the reason, shortly after Swan Song appeared you could see Rush’s “Starman” logo, their Hemispheres album cover and also the cover of Going For The One by Yes (another Hipgnosis design).

And so to the present with this updated version by photo artist David Vance. Vance has a number of creations along these lines in his “Spirit” series. Am I the only person who finds it ironic that it takes a homoerotic artist to give the figure a set of genitals and make this icon of rock finally look like a real man?

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Saint Sebastian in NYC

CBS 73059; construction by Karenlee Grant, photo by David Vine (1972).

A1 Timesteps (13:50)
A2 March From A Clockwork Orange (7:00)
B1 Title Music From A Clockwork Orange (2:21)
B2 La Gazza Ladra (5:50)
B3 Theme From A Clockwork Orange (1:44)
B4 Ninth Symphony: Second Movement (4:52)
B5 William Tell Overture (1:17)
B6 Country Lane (4:43)

Viddy well the stuff of obsessions, O my brothers: Kubrick, cover design and electronic music in one convenient 12-inch package. Those of us in Britain who were too young to see A Clockwork Orange during its initial run had to wait a long time for its re-release after Stanley K withdrew the film from circulation. Until bootleg VHS copies started to turn up in the Eighties I knew the film mostly from the MAD Magazine parody and the soundtrack album which was ubiquitous in secondhand record shops. Having become familiar with the score, an extra layer of frustration was added when it became apparent that two soundtrack albums had appeared in the Seventies, the “official” one, which was a mix of the orchestral and electronic music used in the film, and another which contained all the music Walter (later Wendy) Carlos recorded.

The Wendy Carlos music was the principal attraction for this electronic music obsessive and I fretted for a long while trying to find a copy of her Complete Original Score album which was paraded in all its elusive glory on old CBS vinyl inner sleeves. Half the tracks are present on the official release but the omissions are crucial: Timesteps, the incredible composition which accompanies Alex’s first deprogramming session was edited down from thirteen to five minutes, there was Carlos’s Moog version of Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra (an orchestral version is used in the film) and also an original piece, Country Lane, intended to accompany Alex’s police brutality session at the hands of his former droogs. This score was one of the first projects to successfully incorporate a vocoder into electronic compositions; Carlos’s regular collaborator Rachel Elkind provided the vocalisations. Finally securing a copy was no disappointment, in fact I was overwhelmed. This is still my favourite Wendy Carlos album and one of my top five favourite analogue synth albums. The transcription of La Gazza Ladra is nothing short of miraculous, thundering away with the power of a full orchestra yet created by laboriously recording one note at a time. (Wendy Carlos’s very thorough website goes into detail about the recording process.)

The original Human League, circa 1979.

I wasn’t the only person to take note of this, the album had already made a big impact on Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh in Sheffield, whose early electronic music as The Future, and later The Human League, owed much to the early Carlos Moog albums. Albums such as this were important to the electronic groups that came to prominence later in the decade for the simple reason that there was little music of this quality around. Cross the Wendy Carlos ACO with Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk and The Human League is the result.

The Future were keen to create cut-up lyrics à la David Bowie, who’d been swiping William Burroughs’s writing techniques several years earlier. Rather than chop up notebooks as Bowie was doing, the Marsh and Ware approach was effected using a (no doubt rudimentary) computer system which they named CARLOS: Cyclic And Random Lyric Organisation System. Some specific connections to A Clockwork Orange came following their 1980 split from The Human League when their post-League band, Heaven 17, took its name from Burgess’s novel (the group is also mentioned in the film’s record store scene). A brief post-League incarnation as the British Electric Foundation had them include on their releases a 30-second BEF ident, composed by Malcolm Veal “in the style of Bach and Purcell”. Wendy Carlos’s first synth album was Switched-On Bach, of course, and the title music to A Clockwork Orange is based on Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary.

David Pelham’s classic Penguin cover for the 1972 paperback edition. Kubrick’s film has the droogs wearing white but this cover honours the description of their coloured outfits. The film has come to dominate later representations of Alex and company and the current Penguin edition continues Kubrick’s white-on-white minimalism.

The original 1972 poster and a 1973 paperback edition of Alexander Walker’s Kubrick study.

It’s always gratifying when an album you like a great deal has good sleeve art and the illustration for the Carlos ACO I still rate as one of the most successful designs based on Burgess’s novel, with its focus on the themes rather than Alex’s character. Kubrick’s film and the official soundtrack is still promoted with variations on the original poster art by illustrator Philip Castle (above). I’ve yet to discover who designed the fat Seventies-styled title lettering.

The Carlos cover was the work of Karenlee Grant, a CBS designer and cover artist. Of the other designs of hers that I’ve been able to trace this is easily the best, alluding in its combination of collage and perspex case to the work of American Surrealist Joseph Cornell.

Close scrutiny reveals a wealth of clever detail, not only the obvious juxtaposition of clock parts and an orange slice, but elements such as the eye caught in a vice and the medical drips labelled “yes” and “no” which refer to Alex’s treatment.

This detail below crams a huge amount of reference into a small space, from Ludwig Van’s “thunderbolted litso” in the background, snared by a Helvetica numeral, to the Freudian motifs in the foreground.

Another of Ms Grant’s designs from this period was a self-titled release by the Jeff Beck group, not an especially notable design apart from the curious detail of the orange among the photos. No oranges are mentioned in the songs, as far as I’m aware. Given that the album was released five months after Kubrick’s film, was this a strained attempt to cash-in on the huge publicity the film generated?

Jeff Beck Group by the Jeff Beck Group (1972).

Glenn Gould: Consort of Musicke by William Byrd & Orlando Gibbons (1971); The Hollies’ Greatest Hits (1973).

A couple more Karenlee Grant covers obliquely related to the ACO sleeve, with another constructed object as the focus of one and a collage work for the other. Glenn Gould offered the highest praise to Wendy Carlos’s earlier Bach recordings so I imagine he would have appreciated ACO as well. What Karenlee Grant did after the mid-Seventies is unknown, I can’t find much work mentioned after this period so I’m guessing she left the music business.

Wendy Carlos’s album was reissued on CD in 2000 on the ESD label, a superb edition which added a couple of minor outtakes. My only gripe was that Karenlee Grant’s cover art wasn’t reused for the cover (it’s reproduced in the booklet) but I have to accept it wouldn’t have been the same reduced to CD size; some album sleeves were intended to be seen in their 12-inch glory.

For anyone interested in Wendy Carlos’s oevre, this album is the place to start. For anyone interested in the history of electronic music, this is an essential purchase.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• White Noise: Electric Storms, Radiophonics and the Delian Mode
• Juice from A Clockwork Orange
• Penguin book covers
• Clockwork Orange bubblegum cards
• Alex in the Chelsea Drug Store

Metamorphosis by Bridget Riley (1964).

Mademoiselle ad (1965).

From this Flickr set. Thanks to Aristan for the tip.

Hallucinations: Psychedelic Pop Nuggets From The WEA Vaults (2004).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders
• Chrome: Perfumed Metal
• New Bridget Riley

My long and rambling post about the work of Barney Bubbles in January 2007 generated a considerable flurry of renewed interest in the great designer and ended by saying “We’re overdue a decent book-length examination of his work and his influence.” Just over a year later, here we are…. Paul Gorman was one of the contributors to the lengthy comments thread and I’m really pleased to see him take up the challenge to bring Barney’s work to a wider and, one hopes, new audience. Reasons To Be Cheerful (title borrowed from an Ian Dury song) is scheduled to be published by Adelita in November 2008.

left: Doremi Fasol Latido by Hawkwind (1972).
right: Ian Dury & the Blockheads logo design (late 70s).

“He was so good I couldn’t have really competed with him.”
Sir Peter Blake

Reasons To Be Cheerful is a celebration of the life and work of one of the greatest designers of recent times: Barney Bubbles.

Bubbles—real name Colin Fulcher—was a giant of graphic design whose prodigious output is revered by musicians, artists, fellow designers and music and pop culture fans.

Reasons To Be Cheerful is published November 2008 to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the artist’s death. Author Paul Gorman is also curating a companion exhibition with Sir Paul Smith.

Barney Bubbles’ body of work included early posters for the Rolling Stones, brand and product design for Sir Terence Conran, psychedelic art with poster maestro Stanley Mouse, layouts for underground magazines OZ and Friends and collaborations with many bands and performers, from counter-culture collective Hawkwind to new wave stars Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Nick Lowe, Graham Parker, The Damned and Billy Bragg.

Bubbles links the colourful underground optimism of the 60s to the sardonic and manipulative art which accompanied punk’s explosion from 1976 onwards, and influenced a generation of design talent including Neville Brody, Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville.

The lavishly illustrated Reasons To Be Cheerful will contain hundreds of images and many full-colour plates.

About the Author
Paul Gorman is a popular culture historian and author of The Look: Adventures in Rock & Pop Fashion, and the top ten bestselling Straight with Boy George.

• Paul Gorman’s The Look: Adventures in Rock and Pop Fashion

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4: Combine all three elements in your photo editing software.

5: Share

Et voila! Without further ado I give Someone or Something Else by Tolnaftate, that well-known Berlin Techno outfit.

Someone or Something Else by Tolnaftate, Feuilleton Records, 2008.

For the record (as it were), Tolnaftate is “a synthetic over-the-counter anti-fungal agent. It may come as a cream, powder, spray, or liquid aerosol, and is used to treat jock itch, athlete’s foot and ringworm”, and the quote, I’m pleased to say, was from HL Mencken, “All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.” The pylons were unwittingly supplied by this Flickr user. Flickr has a pool devoted to this meme and they encourage you to add your own creations.

Via Sleevage which features some choice examples.