Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

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Image-heavy post! Please be patient.

Four designs for three bands, all by the same designer, the versatile and brilliant Barney Bubbles. A recent reference over at Ace Jet 170 to the sleeve for In Search of Space by Hawkwind made me realise that Barney Bubbles receives little posthumous attention outside the histories of his former employers. Since he was a major influence on my career I thought it time to give him at least part of the appraisal he deserves. His work has grown in relevance to my own even though I stopped working for Hawkwind myself in 1985, not least because I’ve made a similar transition away from derivative space art towards pure design. Barney Bubbles was equally adept at design as he was at illustration, unlike contemporaries in the album cover field such as Roger Dean (mainly an illustrator although he did create lettering designs) and Hipgnosis (who were more designers and photographers who drafted in illustrators when required).

Colin Fulcher became Barney Bubbles sometime in the late sixties, probably when he was working either part-time or full-time with the underground magazines such as Oz and later Friends/Frendz. He enjoyed pseudonyms and was still using them in the 1980s; Barney Bubbles must have been one that stuck. The Friends documentary website mentions that he may have worked in San Francisco for a while with Stanley Mouse, something I can easily believe since his early artwork has the same direct, high-impact quality as the best of the American psychedelic posters. Barney brought that sensibility to album cover design. His first work for Hawkwind, In Search of Space, is a classic of inventive packaging.

Update: BB didn’t work with Mouse in SF, I’ve now been told.

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Hawkwind: In Search of Space (1971).

It’s fair to say that Hawkwind were very lucky to find Barney Bubbles, he immediately gave their music—which was often rambling and semi-improvised at the time—a compelling visual dimension that exaggerated their science fiction image while still presenting different aspects of the band’s persona. In Search of Space is an emblematic design that opens out to reveal a poster layout inside. One of the things that distinguishes Barney Bubbles’ designs from other illustrators of this period is a frequent use of hard graphical elements, something that’s here right at the outset of his work for Hawkwind.

This album also included a Bubbles-designed “Hawklog”, a booklet purporting to be the logbook of the crew of the Hawkwind spacecraft. I scanned my copy some time ago and converted it to a PDF; you can download it here.

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In print

magazines1.jpgBattling through the Xmas post, two new volumes arrived here this week, from Black Velvet and Black Dog Publishing respectively. First up was Serpenti & Scale, the Italian edition of Snakes & Ladders by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. This has been available for some time in English, of course. The translated version features some of my artwork for the Moon and Serpent CDs by Alan and Tim Perkins in the lengthy interview section that precedes Eddie’s comic strip. Thanks to Smoky Man for that.

Inevitably overshadowing this was 100 Years of Magazine Covers which author Steve Taylor very graciously had sent to me. A heavyweight book in all senses of the word, with a solid cover, thick paper stock and tremendous design by Neville Brody. Taylor navigates the overcrowded field of 20th-century magazine design with great skill, managing to cover all the principal areas of magazine as news medium, fashion journal, literary forum and vehicle of cultural transgression, whether that be the Sixties’ underground, Seventies’ punk or the disparate worlds of gay life and feminism. Illustrations range from the elegance of early Collier’s and Vogue to the garish incoherence of today’s celebrity rags such as Heat. Given such a broad field of study there are bound to be omissions; I would have liked to have seen something from the New Worlds of the late-Sixties, for example, and maybe one of the Non-Format covers for The Wire. But they got Lilliput in there which is pretty impressive considering that magazine now seems to be largely forgotten. Essential stuff.

Previously on { feuilleton }
It’s a pulp, pulp, pulp world
A few thousand science fiction covers
Vintage magazine art II
Neville Brody and Fetish Records
View: The Modern Magazine
Vintage magazine art
Oz magazine, 1967–73

It’s a pulp, pulp, pulp world

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The (low-res) digitisation of the past continues apace on this site which is accumulating cover scans from a host of American sf and fantasy magazines. Oddly enough, I’d been looking for a place with pictures of the early Omni covers just recently, but this site didn’t come up on Google, or if it did, I missed it. I bought most of the first year’s run of Omni so it’s interesting seeing which covers I remember and which I’d forgotten about. Now, where is there a site with a complete run of New Worlds covers? Link via Strange Attractor.

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And an item of contemporary magazine news:
Jonathan Barnbrook designs the latest issue of Adbusters.

Previously on { feuilleton }
A few thousand science fiction covers
Vintage magazine art II
Neville Brody and Fetish Records
View: The Modern Magazine
Vintage magazine art
Oz magazine, 1967–73