Poster by Barney Bubbles for Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!! (1980).

Adelita, the publishers of Reasons To Be Cheerful: the life and work of Barney Bubbles, announced this week that Paul Gorman’s essential collection of BB graphics has been named Book of the Year in Mojo magazine:

Reasons To Be Cheerful – the acclaimed study of the life and work of the late graphic genius Barney Bubbles – has been declared Book Of The Year by the UK’s leading rock monthly Mojo magazine.

Described as “fascinating and definitive” by the Sunday Times and “moving and lovingly researched,” by GQ editor Dylan Jones in The Independent, Reasons To Be Cheerful was written by Paul Gorman (author of style bible The Look and Straight with Boy George) and published by British independent popular culture imprint Adelita (sales and distribution through Turnaround Publisher Services).

Mojo will name Reasons To Be Cheerful Book Of The Year in its January 2010 issue (published November 27) with an exclusive interview with Factory Records designer Peter Saville praising its publication.

A quarter of a century after he took his own life at the age of 41, Reasons To Be Cheerful has transformed Barney Bubbles’ cult status by elevating him into the pantheon of graphic design greats. Among fans of the book are such prominent musicians as Paul Weller, Jah Wobble, Mick Jones, Nick Lowe and Billy Bragg.

Reasons To Be Cheerful is the first and definitive exploration of this important visual artist’s body of work, with more than 600 images including student sketchbooks, private paintings, product, brand, underground and music press and examples of the hundreds of record sleeves, posters, adverts, promotional items and music videos he created for the likes of the Rolling Stones, Hawkwind, Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Squeeze, Depeche Mode, The Specials and Billy Bragg.

Reasons To Be Cheerful has also spawned a spectacular online presence featuring fresh interviews, information and rare and previously unseen images (see http://barneybubbles.com/blog) and has been well received in the UK and US (where it is distributed by D.A.P). Author Paul Gorman will also curate a Barney Bubbles exhibition to be inaugurated at London’s Chelsea Space gallery during Design Week in September 2010.

By coincidence, two days after Mojo appears the All-Day Barney Bubbles Benefit Memorial Concert will be staged at the 229 Club, Great Portland Street, London. Bands featured include various members of the Hawkwind/Hawklords family led by Nik Turner. There’ll also be the return of Turner’s post-Hawks outfit Inner City Unit, for whom Barney created some of his last designs, and the resurrection of the Imperial Pompadours, a one-off rock’n'roll collaboration between Nik and Barney. That’s happening on 29th November and Turner’s website has all the necessary details.

The Elvis Costello poster above comes from a feature about the Get Happy!! album at Paul Gorman’s BB site. I was never a great fan of Costello’s records but the designs Barney created for those early releases were outstanding and represent the peak of his career. (See the Armed Forces sleeve design for a real eye blast.) Paul’s post shows how much work went into creating a range of integrated graphics for the album, singles and promotional material, and he also has some exclusive material which didn’t make it into Reasons To Be Cheerful. The BB book has been a continual treat to look through this year, and the book design I happen to be finishing has not only been inspired by Barney’s example but also manages to make passing reference to him inside. More about that later.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hawk things
• Who is Heeps Willard?
• The Sonic Assassins
• Reasons To Be Cheerful, part 3: A Barney Bubbles exclusive
• More Barney Bubbles
• Reasons To Be Cheerful, part 2
• Reasons To Be Cheerful: the Barney Bubbles revival
• 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

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

This delightful piece of Art Nouveau-inflected grooviness is one of the new T-shirts designed by Nigel Waymouth for The Look via Topman. Waymouth, as some readers here may know, was part of Hapshash & the Coloured Coat in the late Sixties, London’s leading group of psychedelic poster artists. In addition to design, Waymouth and Sheila Cohen opened the legendary Kings Road boutique Granny Takes A Trip (named after its stock of antique clothes) in 1966. That shop’s fame inspired a one-off single by Stockport group The Purple Gang in 1967 which the BBC banned for alleged drug references, although the trip in question concerns an elderly woman journeying each year to Hollywood. Waymouth’s flyer for the single, of which the shirt design is a variant, can be seen below.

The Look Presents Nigel Waymouth – in-store and online at Topman from Friday August 8

“Sepia tints and flouro tones…darkly psychedelic graphics for the 21st Century…”

Nigel Waymouth is a legend of British rock fashion and design.

Not only did he found the wild 60s Kings Road boutique Granny Takes A Trip (whose ever-changing shop design attracted the likes fo the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Anita Pallenberg, Brigitte Bardot and Marianne Faithfull), but his graphic design company Hapshash produced eye-popping designs, posters and record sleeves for the The Who and Jimi Hendrix.

Original Hapshash artwork is highly prized in collector circles and Granny’s clothes are seriously sought-after on the vintage market. Now Nigel Waymouth makes his re-entry into fashion via The Look Presents – http://thelookpresents.com – with a contemporary t-shirt range reflecting the original Granny’s aesthetic by delving into decadent psychedelia replete with sepia tints and flouro tones.

The first five t-shirts are available in-store and online at Topman from August 8, with the launch party on August 14 at the George and Dragon in Shoreditch.

The Look Presents Nigel Waymouth is the second collection from the creative hub formed by author Paul Gorman and Soho boutique owner Max Karie. Our first, a collaboration with rock & roll brand Wonder Workshop, proved a great success earlier this summer and this autumn we launch The Look Presents Priceless, a menswear capsule collection with couturier to rock royalty Antony Price.

The shirts are priced £20 each. I rarely wear T-shirts on their own but I’ll probably have to get one of these, for the associations if nothing else.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The New Love Poetry
• Dutch psychedelia
• Family Dog postcards
• The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream revisited

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

Philip Castle’s poster design. Castle also created the artwork for Full Metal Jacket.

Searching through old magazines whilst researching the epic Barney Bubbles post turned up this, a short reaction by Anthony Burgess to the success of Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange. Burgess became increasingly ambivalent about the attention brought about by Kubrick’s adaptation, not least because of the way it dominated the rest of his career; some of that ambivalence is already in evidence here.

Juice from A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess

Rolling Stone, June 8th, 1972

WHEN IT WAS first proposed about eight years ago, that a film be made of A Clockwork Orange, it was the Rolling Stones who were intended to appear in it, with Mick Jagger playing the role that Malcolm McDowell eventually filled. Indeed, it was somebody with the physical appearance and mercurial temperament of Jagger that I had in mind when writing the book, although pop groups as we know them had not yet come on the scene. The book was written in 1961, when England was full of skiffle. If I’d thought of giving Alex, the hero, a surname at all (Kubrick gives him two, one of them mine), Jagger would have been as good a name as any: it means “hunter,” a person who goes on jags, a person who doesn’t keep in line, a person who inflicts jagged rips on the face of society. I did use the name eventually, but it was in a very different novel—Tremor of Intent—and meant solely a hunter, and a rather holy one.

I’ve no doubt that a lot of people will want to read the story because they’ve seen the movie—far more than the other way around—and I can say at once that the story and the movie are very like each other. Indeed, I can think of only one other film which keeps as painfully close to the book it’s based on—Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. The plot of the film is that of the book, and so is the language, although naturally there’s both more language and more plot in the book than in the film. The language used by Alex, my delinquent hero, is called Nadsat—the Russian suffix used in making words like fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—and a lot of the terms he employs are derived from Russian. As these words are filtered through an English-speaking mind, they take on meanings and associations unknown to Russians. Thus, Alex uses the word horrorshow to designate anything good—the Russian root for good is horosh—and “fine, splendid, all right then” is the neuter form we ought really to spell as chorosho (the ch is guttural, as in Bach). But good to Alex is tied up with performing horrors, and when he is made what the State calls good it is through the witnessing of violent films—genuine horror shows. The Russian golova—meaning head—is domesticated into gulliver, which reminds the reader he is taking in a piece of social satire, like Gulliver’s Travels. The fact that Russian doesn’t distinguish between foot and leg (noga for both) and arm and hand (ruka) serves—by suggesting a mechanical doll—to emphasise the clockwork-view of life that Alex has: first he is self-geared to be bad, next he is state-geared to be good.

The title of the book comes from an old London expression, which I first heard from a very old Cockney in 1945: “He’s as queer as a clockwork orange” (queer meaning mad, not faggish). I liked the phrase because of its yoking of tradition and surrealism, and I determined some day to use it. It has rather specialised meanings for me. I worked in Malaya, where orang means a human being, and this connotation is attached to the word, as well as more obvious anagrams, like organ and organise (an orange is, a man is, but the State wants the living organ to be turned into a mechanical emanation of itself). Alex uses some Cockney expressions, also Lancashire ones (like snuff it, meaning to die), as well as Elizabethan locutions but his language is essentially Slav-based. It was essential for me to invent a slang of the future, and it seemed best to come from combining the two major political languages of the world—irony here, since Alex is very far from being a political animal. The American paperback edition of A Clockwork Orange has a glossary of Nadsat terms, but this was no idea of mine. As the novel is about brainwashing, so it is also a little device of brainwashing in itself or at least a carefully programmed series of lessons on the Russian language. You learn the words without noticing, and a glossary is unnecessary. More—because it’s there, you tend to use it, and this gets in the way of the programming.

As the novel was written over ten years ago (and planned nearly 30 years ago), and the age of violence and scientific conditioning it depicts is already here, some people have been tempted to see it as a work of prophecy. But the work merely describes certain tendencies I observed in Anglo-American society in 1961 (and even earlier). True, there was not much drug-taking then, and my novel presents a milk-bar where you can freely ingest hallucinogens and stimulants, but I had only, just come back from living in the Far East, where I smoked opium regularly (and without apparent ill effects), and drug-taking was so much part of my scene that it automatically went into the book. Alex is very unmodern in rejecting “synthemesc”: his aim is to strengthen the will to violence, not enervate it. I think he is ahead of his time in preferring Beethoven to “teeny pop veshches,” but Kubrick’s film shows a way (especially in the record-store scene) to bridging the gap between rock music and “the glorious Ninth”—it is a clockwork way, the way of the Moog synthesizer.

* * *

Apart from being gratified that my book has been filmed by one of the best living English-speaking producer-directors, instead of by some pornhound or pighead or other camera-carrying cretin, I cannot say that my life has been changed in any way by Stanley Kubrick’s success. I seem to have less rather than more money, but I have always seemed to have less. I get odd letters from cranks, accusing me of sin against the Holy Ghost; invariably, I should think, masturbators, who, having seen the film, have discovered the book, used it as a domestic instrument of auto-erotic release, and then fastened their post-coital guilt onto me. Generally I am filled with a vague displeasure that the gap between a literary impact and a cinematic one should be so great, not only a temporal gap (book published 1962, film released ten years after) but an aesthetic one. Man’s greatest achievement is language, and the greatest linguistic achievement is to be found in the dramatic poems or other fictional work in which language is a live, creative, infinitely suggestive force. But such works are invariably ignored by all but a few. Spell a thing to the eye, that most crass and obvious of organs, and behold—a revelation.

I fear, like any writer in my position, that the film may supersede the novel. This is not fair since the film is only a brilliant transference of an essentially literary experience to the screen. Writers like Mailer and Gore Vidal—who have seen novels of theirs turned into abominable pieces of film craft—are not in this position. But I can console myself by saying that A Clockwork Orange is not my favourite book, and that the works of mine that I like best are so essentially literary that no film could be made out of them.

As Kubrick’s next film is to be about Napoleon, I find myself now writing a novel about Napoleon. God knows why I am doing this; there is no guarantee that he will use it, or even that the book will be published. Just the fascination of what’s difficult, or an expression of masochism that lies in all authors, or a certain pride in attacking the impossible. My Napoleon novel will be very brief, and to write a brief novel on Napoleon is far more difficult than to write War and Peace. But you can take this present labour as a product of the Orange film, and by God it is a labour.

Otherwise, my life is unchanged. What really enrages me is two minor dimensions—it is people referring to both film and book as THE Clockwork Orange. Can’t the bastards read? No, they can’t, and that’s what all the trouble is about.

* * *

All works of art are dangerous. My little son tried to fly after seeing Disney’s Peter Pan. I grabbed his legs just as he was about to take off from a fourth story window. A man in New York State sacrificed 67 infants to the God of Jacob; he just loved the Old Testament. A boy in Oklahoma stabbed his mother’s second husband after seeing Hamlet. A man in Kansas City copulated with his wife after reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover. After seeing A Clockwork Orange, a lot of boys will take up rape and pillage and even murder—The point is, I suppose, that human beings are good and innocent before they come into contact with works of art. Therefore all art should he banned. Hitler would never have dreamed of world conquest if he hadn’t read Nietzsche in the Reader’s Digest. The excesses of Robespierre stemmed from reading Rousseau. Even music is dangerous. The works of Delius have led more than one adolescent to suicide. Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde used to promote crafty masturbation in the opera house. And look what Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony does to Alex in A Clockwork Orange. If I were President of the United States, I should at once enact a total prohibition of films, plays, books and music. My book intended to be a delicious dream, not a nightmare of terror, beauty and concupiscence. Burn films—they make marvellous bonfires. Burn books. Burn this issue of ROLLING STONE.

Take the story as a kind of moral parable, and you won’t go far wrong. Alex is a very nasty, young man, and he deserves to he punished, but to rid him of the capacity of choosing between good and evil is the sin against the Holy Ghost, for which—so we’re told—there’s no forgiveness. And although he’s nasty, he’s also very human. In other words, he’s ourselves, but a bit more so. He has the three main human attributes—love of aggression, love of language, love of beauty. But he’s young and has not yet learned the true importance of the free will he so violently delights in. In a sense he’s in Eden, and only when he falls (as he does: from a window) does he become capable of being a full human being. In the American edition of the book—the one you have here—we leave Alex dreaming up new acts of violence. We ought to feel pleased about this, since he’s now exhibiting a renewal of the capacity for free choice which the State took away from him. The fact that he’s not yet chosen to be good is neither here not there. But in the final chapter of the British edition, Alex is already growing up. He has a new gang, but he’s tired of leading it; what he really wants is to have a son of his own—the libido is being tamed and turned social—and the first thing he now has to do is to find a mate, which means sexual love, not just the old in-out in-out. Here, for a bonus, is how that very British ending ends:

That’s what it’s going to be then, brothers, as I come to the like end of this tale. You have been everywhere with your little droog Alex, suffering with him, and you have viddied some of the most grahzny bratchnies old Bog ever made, all on to your old droog Alex. And all it was was that I was young. But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes.

But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is like all sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there and your old droog Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate. And all that cal. A terrible grahzny vonny world really, O my brothers. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip-music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex what was. Amen. And all that cal.

America prefers the other, more violent, ending. Who am I to say America is wrong? It’s all a matter of choice.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Further back and faster
• Penguin book covers
• Clockwork Orange bubblegum cards
• Alex in the Chelsea Drug Store

Mick Jagger by Cecil Beaton (1968).

Donald Cammell thought Mick Jagger to be a more provocative rock star than Elvis Presley because Jagger was willing to experiment with his masculinity. Elvis, although extraordinarily erotic to a generation of young women, never did. What this difference suggests, among other things, is that Mick Jagger’s appeal is not Elvis’s—and never was. Critic Greil Marcus has argued that what Elvis did was to purge the Sunday morning sobriety from folk and country music and to purge the dread from blues; in doing so, he transformed a regional music into a national music, and invented party music. Elvis popularized an amalgam of musical forms and styles into “rock’n'roll,” a black American euphemism for sexual intercourse. What the Rolling Stones did to rock music, some years after Elvis made sex an integral part of its appeal, was to infuse rock with a bohemian theatricality, at first through Brian Jones, who was the first British pop star to cultivate actively a flamboyant, androgynous image. For a time, Brian even found his female double in Anita Pallenberg. Brian Jones and the Stones thus re-introduced into rock music its erotic allure, and hence made it threatening (again).

From an excellent piece by Sam Umland for PERFORMANCE: A Photographic Exhibition featuring the work of Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg at the Drkrm. Gallery, Los Angeles, opening on January 20th. Umland wrote the recent biography of Donald Cammell with Rebecca Umland (published by Fab Press) for which I designed the cover. Featured in the exhibition are prints from the Del Valle Archive, including eleven photographs of Mick Jagger taken by Cecil Beaton when Performance was being filmed.

“When are Warner Brothers going to do the right thing and release Performance on DVD?” I asked in April last year. Well now they are, although it remains to be seen which version of the film has been used; several exist, some of them shorter than others. Release is scheduled for February 13th in the US and March 12th in the UK.

PERFORMANCE: A Photographic Exhibition
featuring the work of Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg
January 20-February 24, 2007
Drkrm. Gallery
2121 San Fernando Road
Suite 3
Los Angeles
CA 90065

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Quite a performance
• Borges in Performance

Well…new for us. Glo Spot Records have reissued Psyche-Delia’s scarce KPM album, Electrosonic (1972), in an edition that will quickly become as scarce itself: 500 copies on green vinyl.

Order it (or hear clips) from Boomkat.

The great BBC documentary about the Radiophonic Workshop, Alchemists of Sound, can now be found on YouTube. Lots of archive footage of Delia and her collaborators showing how they extracted extraordinary sounds from primitive equipment.

Delia Derbyshire is best known as the woman who created the sound of the original Doctor Who theme. This one piece is so globally famous that it has overshadowed the wide ranging work of one of the most creative women working in the 1960s and ’70s. Delia collaborated with many of the most significant figures of the era and was admired by many more. Her story involves such names as Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, Pink Floyd, Anthony Newley, Frankie Howerd and The Rolling Stones, in addition to work with the National Theatre, seminal electronic innovators and, of course, the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop. Since her death in 2001, Derbyshire has gained cult icon status and her influence over artists who weren’t even born when she made some of her groundbreaking recordings has never been stronger. John Cavanagh (BBC Radio, Phosphene, author of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn etc. etc.) has found a rare album Delia recorded with Brian Hodgson (the man who created the sound of the TARDIS) and Australian mood music composer (who also scored some Doctor Who episodes) Don Harper in 1972. This was originally an lp of what is known as library music and was only made available to film, tv and radio organizations when originally issued. Cavanagh has licensed these recordings and the album—Electrosonic—will be released commercially for the first on his Glo-Spot label.

Electrosonic (1972)
Label: KPM
Cat: KPM1104

1 Quest
2 Quest – fast
3 Computermatic
4 Frontier of Knowledge
5 The Pattern Emerges
6 Freeze Frame
7 Plodding Power
8 Busy Microbes
9 Liquid Energy (a)
10 Liquid Energy (b)
11 No Man’s Land
12 Depression
13 Nightwalker
14 Electrostings
15 Electrobuild
16 Celestial Cantabile
17 Effervescence
18 The Wizard’s Laboratory
19 Shock Chords

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A playlist for Halloween
• Ghost Box

Beyond Bowie and Frankie, there’s a whole secret history of gay pop, reports Alexis Petridis

‘Wilder, madder, gayer than a Beatle’s hairdo’

It was the love that dare not sing its name—or was it? Beyond Bowie and Frankie, there’s a whole secret history of gay pop, reports Alexis Petridis

Tuesday July 4, 2006
The Guardian

The year 1966 is known as rock’s annus mirabilis. It was the year the right musicians found the right technology and the right drugs to catapult pop into hitherto unimagined realms of invention and sophistication: the year of the Beatles’ Revolver, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. But the most astonishing record of 1966 did not emanate from the unbounded imagination of Brian Wilson, or from an Abbey Road studio wreathed in pot smoke. Instead, it was the work of hapless instrumental combo the Tornados.

By 1966, the Tornados’ moment of glory—with 1962 number one Telstar—had long passed; they hadn’t had a hit in three years and every original member had departed. The single they released that year, Is That a Ship I Hear?, was their last. Tucked away on its B-side, the track Do You Come Here Often? attracted no attention, which was probably just as well. A year before the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, the Tornados’ producer, Joe Meek, had taken it upon himself to record and release Britain’s first explicitly gay rock song, apparently undaunted by his own conviction for cottaging in 1963.

There had been vague intimations of homosexuality in a few 1960s rock records, not least the Beatles’ You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away, but Do You Come Here Often? was something else entirely. Opening with a dementedly perky organ instrumental, it’s topped off with two male voices, seemingly recorded in the toilet of a gay club, trading camp badinage: “I’ll see you down the ‘Dilly!” “Not if I see you first, you won’t.” Quite what the Tornados made of their pill-maddened producer’s latest wheeze, let alone anyone who heard the song in 1966, is an intriguing question—but four decades on, it still sounds remarkable.

“It’s almost like a hidden track, because you’ve got these two minutes of instrumental music, you’re thinking, ‘OK, and?’ Then suddenly it happens,” enthuses author and journalist Jon Savage, who spent 20 years trying to track down a copy of the single. “I think Joe Meek wanted to get a slice of gay life on to a record. Nobody bought it. It was completely hidden, but it was still released on EMI.”

Best known for his celebrated punk history, England’s Dreaming, Savage has recently developed a sideline in compiling acclaimed CDs of forgotten music, most notably Meridian 1970, which sought to disprove the theory that said year was a musical wasteland. His latest collection, on which Do You Come Here Often? is just one of a string of revelations, comes with the self-explanatory title From the Closet to the Charts: Queer Noises 1961-1978.

Even by Savage’s standards, this is an extraordinary album. There are a sprinkling of well-known tracks, including the Kinks’ oblique 1965 hit See My Friend and Sylvester’s out-and-proud disco anthem You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), which provides the collection’s crescendo and cut-off point. Mostly, though, it’s concerned with exposing the secret gay history of rock and pop.

Among the revelations uncovered by Savage are a lesbian-themed glam-blues 1973 single by Polly Perkins, best known as a star of short-lived BBC soap Eldorado, and the vicious early 1960s drag queen Jose, whose albums appear to have been sold to a straight audience as risque adult party accoutrements (”These naughty subjects are tickling America’s funnybone!” cries one sleeve, promising “a fantastically funny insight into the lives of ‘those fellows’”). Among various early 1970s gay singer-songwriters is Peter Grudzien, purveyor of “overtly gay country music”. Then there’s LA rent-boy punk Black Randy, who seems to have come to the conclusion that the Ramones’ famous paean to male prostitution, 53rd and 3rd, was too demure for its own good. “Schools and factories make me sick,” he snarls. “I’d rather stand here and sell my dick.”

Not everything on the compilation is a lost masterpiece. “If you’ve never heard any of this stuff, it’s probably with good reason,” chuckles Savage. And yet, it is, by turns, fascinating, touching, funny and startling—and occasionally you find yourself listening with your jaw hanging open.

The latter is certainly true of the track that started Savage collecting gay records 15 years ago. Released in 1967 in a crude handmade sleeve, Kay, Why? by the Brothers Butch features a string of double-entendres about lubricant jelly over a sub-Beatles backing track. “A friend gave me a copy. I wasn’t aware that stuff like that existed,” Savage says. “You think: why did somebody pay somebody to go into a studio and do this? I can only assume that by 1967, there was a firmly established, very limited market for explicit gay records. Presumably they would have been advertised in the back of early gay magazines or in gay shops or gay clubs. It wasn’t made with any hope of great sales, so it’s very direct.”

A similar sense of mystery surrounds Queer Noises’ other big revelation—that, in the mid-1960s, California had a gay record label, Camp, which advertised its wares as: “Wilder, madder, gayer than a Beatle’s hairdo!” Not even queermusicheritage.com has been able to uncover who was behind the label’s 10 pseudonymous singles and two albums, but Camp was certainly ahead of its time. A decade before the Village People, The Shower Song (I’m So Wet) revealed precisely what “hanging out with all the boys” at the YMCA might entail.

“It’s quite an explicit slice of early 1960s gay life,” says Savage. “They put out a song called Down on the River Drive, about a guy going cruising and getting arrested by a plain-clothes cop. Someone must have been convinced that there were enough gay people with enough money to buy this stuff.”

Camp’s releases went unnoticed by the wider world, but a decade later, things had changed: fuelled by David Bowie’s “I’m gay” interview in the Melody Maker, glam rock was the sound of pop finally coming out. But Savage’s album largely eschews glam in favour of a more obscure early 1970s musical development, in which straight black soul artists began giving hearty endorsement to the gay lifestyle in song. Harrison Kennedy of Chairmen of the Board weighs in with the cheery Closet Queen, while, on Ain’t Nobody Straight in LA, the post-Smokey Robinson Miracles inform the listener that “most everyone is AC-DC”, then elect to spend the evening in a gay bar, on the grounds that “some of the finest women are in gay bars”. “Hey, but dig, how you know they women?” protests a troubled Miracle. “Gay people are nice people too, man!” avers one of his bandmates sternly. That seems to settle it: off they go, for an evening with “those fellows”.

If you were being cynical, you might suggest that Kennedy and the Miracles had taken note of the burgeoning demand for black music from the nascent, primarily gay disco scene and made a pragmatic decision to court their new audience. Savage isn’t convinced. “The Miracles were just telling it how they saw it,” he says. “You wouldn’t get a major R&B act recording that now, would you? Things have actually gone back from the 1970s. The point of this album is that it’s about the struggle of gay people to get out of the closet, out of the ghetto into the mainstream, and they successfully did that on their terms with Sylvester. Gay people won freedoms, but they’re very fragile freedoms.”

He has a point. A few years after Sylvester’s triumph, explicitly gay music—Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Bronski Beat, the muscle-bound thud of high-energy dance music—was accepted into the British charts in a way that Joe Meek or the shadowy figures behind the Brothers Butch and Camp Records could never have anticipated. Twenty years on, Radio 1’s breakfast show presenter is using the word “gay” as an insult.

“Lad culture has been a disaster for pop music,” says Savage. “That definition of a heterosexual man—beer and football, Nick Hornby—is so restrictive. It’s important that pop musicians play around with gender and sexual divergence. The fact that it’s gone back to Oasis from the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger being very camp, is just pathetic, it’s a complete failure. People are scared of nonconformity in music, so this album is a less-than-fragrant reminder of a time when pop music was less sanitised than it is now.

“A friend of mine said, ‘Fucking hell Jon, I thought it was going to be quite tasteful, but there’s some real horrors on here.’ I said, ‘Yes, it’s time to unleash the beast.’”

From the Closet to the Charts: Queer Noises 1961-1978 is out now on Trikont (via Shellshock).

tracklist
01. Jose: At The Black Cat 02:09
02. Rod McKuen: Eros 01:42
03. Mr. Jean Fredericks: Nobody Loves A Fairy When She’s Forty 03:56
04. Byrd E. Bath & Rodney Dangerfield: Florence of Arabia 03:40
05. B.Bubba: I’d Rather Fight Than Swish 03:16
06. The Kinks: See My Friend 02:40
07. The Tornados: Do You Come Here Often? 03:53
08. The Brothers Butch: Kay, Why? 03:13
09. Teddy & Darrel: These Boots 02:22
10. Zebedy: The Man I Love 03:09
11. Curt Boettcher: Astral Cowboy 02:18
12. Harrison Kennedy: Closet Queen 03:43
13. Polly Perkins: Coochy Coo 03:19
14. Michael Cohen: Bitterfeast 03:09
15. Jobriath: I’m A Man 03:30
16. Chris Robison: Lookin’ For A Boy 03:57
17. Peter Grudzien: White Trash Hillbilly Trick 02:56
18. Valentino: I Was Born This Way 03:20
19. The Miracles: Ain’t Nobody Straight In LA 03:43
20. The Ramones: 53rd And 3rd 02:19
21. The Twinkeyz: Aliens In Our Midst 03:17
22. Dead Fingers: Talk Nobody Loves You When You’re Old And Gay 04:30
23. Black Randy & The Metro Squad: Trouble At The Cup 01:53
24. Sylvester: You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) 03:45

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Gay book covers

The Rolling Stones, You Can’t always Get What You Want, 1969

How much Stanley Kubrick trivia can you stand? One of the delights of DVD over VHS tape is the ability to step frame by perfect frame through any given film sequence without the picture being disturbed by noise. This reveals a lot more detail should you wish to scrutinise a favourite scene like the single dolly shot in A Clockwork Orange where Malcolm McDowell makes a circuit of the “disc-bootick” before chatting up a couple of devotchkas.

The location as it is today, rendered safe and banal courtesy of McDonald’s.

The scene was filmed in the then very trendy Chelsea Drug Store on the corner of Royal Avenue and the King’s Road, London SW3. Since the whole film was shot using the same approach as Jean-Luc Godard in Alphaville, with selective views of the contemporary world standing for a fictional future, there’s no attempt made in this scene to disguise any of the cultural products of 1971.

Throughout the Eighties and Nineties A Clockwork Orange was unavailable on video or TV in Britain due to a bizarre embargo by the director. This means that Kubrick fans like myself who were too young to have seen the film in the cinema had to rely on bootleg videos of depressingly variable quality that did no justice to John Alcott’s superb photography or to the great soundtrack. Especially frustrating was spotting Tim Buckley’s Lorca album on one of the shelves in the record shop scene but not being able to make out what else might be there. This might seem like a rather fatuous complaint but there aren’t many places you get such a pristine snapshot of a British record emporium in the early Seventies. More to the point, you have a chance here to enjoy some sly Kubrick humour. So what does the DVD reveal?

Before Alex appears we can see two albums in the racks, Livin’ the Blues by Canned Heat and The Time is Near… by the Keef Hartley Band.

When Alex wanders in he passes a large rack of albums, some of which elude my occasionally sketchy knowledge of Seventies’ rock. I can recognise these: 1) U by The Incredible String Band, 2) Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd, 3) As Your Mind Flies By by Rare Bird, 4) Get Ready by Rare Earth and 5), the one that started it all, Lorca by Tim Buckley.

Alex passes a booth stacked with magazines and newspapers. The one at the lower right is a popular film magazine of the time, Films and Filming.

As he passes the other side of the magazine booth he picks up a magazine and leafs through it as he walks. I’d never paid much attention to this before until I was stepping through the scene again and recognised the cover as a copy of Cinema X (The International Guide for Adult Audiences), a rather scurrilous title that existed solely to show people stills of nude scenes in any films currently doing the rounds. This is Kubrick’s first joke since Cinema X is exactly the kind of magazine that would attract Alex’s attention (even though he discards it a few moments later). The only reason I recognise the magazine logo is because I have a single copy, volume 4, no. 6, which has as its main feature……. A Clockwork Orange.

Alex leafs through the mag and passes a poster for Ned Kelly, a film starring Mick Jagger who’d sung about the Chelsea Drug Store only a couple of years before. No idea how I recognised this, it was a lucky guess.

Two more Kubrick jokes and a possible appearance from the man himself. On the left there’s a copy of the soundtrack to SK’s earlier film 2001: A Space Odyssey at the front of the album racks. On the right there’s a gentleman who looks remarkably like the director did at the time, browsing what appear to be classical records since there’s a Deutsche Grammophon cover visible lower down on the rack. I’ve not read a refutation anywhere that this isn’t the director so I’ll continue to consider it so, not least because right by his face there’s another joke, the sleeve of the Missa Luba album by Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin. This is an album of gospel songs sung by an African school choir that was released in 1959. The reason it’s there? The ‘Sanctus’ song from side two was played throughout Lindsay Anderson’s brilliant film If…. which featured Malcolm McDowell in his first major role playing another figure of rebellion. It was that role that landed him the lead in A Clockwork Orange so we can see Kubrick giving a nod to the earlier film here.

Alex ditches his Cinema X and passes a copy of the first album by Stray.

Arriving at the record booth we can see a number of albums on display. On the upper shelves there are copies of Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles and another copy of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother. In the racks at the front there’s a more prominently displayed copy of the 2001 soundtrack (in a different sleeve) next to John Fahey’s “fake” blues album, The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death.

Lastly, that big graphic swirl above the booth is the label from Vertigo records.

Places like the Chelsea Drug Store were the magical homes of music before the corporations moved in and turned high street stores into warehouses flogging albums in bulk. In some ways A Clockwork Orange serves less now as a warning of the future and more as a window on a world that’s disappeared.

Listening to the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers recently had me musing about the great cover design by Andy Warhol, probably his most well-known after the first Velvet Underground album. The music may sound better than it ever did in the Seventies but CD reissues can’t reproduce the brilliant sleeve which included a real metal zipper on the front of the jeans. The Seventies were the golden age of cover design, popular music had evolved considerably since Sgt. Pepper and the “album as artform” meant that bands were searching continually for new ways to exploit the medium of the record sleeve. Gatefold sleeves became commonplace, then expanded into multiple foldout affairs; expensive gimmicks like the Stones’ zipper arrived pretty swiftly and there were other striking novelties like the first Faust album, a clear vinyl record, in a clear plastic sleeve.

Significantly, Warhol’s Velvet Underground design was also a) gimmicky, with its peel-able banana skin, and b) similarly phallic-oriented, as the banana beneath the skin was a pink one. (Original copies of this album are easy to spot in shops since they’re nearly always missing the skin). Joe Dallesandro is supposed to be filling out the trousers on the Stones’ album, a refreshingly homoerotic moment in the often resolutely sexist world of rock graphics. Nice of the Stones to be so daring but then Jagger at least didn’t mind dancing along the boundaries of sexuality in Performance and it was about this time that they were playing their scurrilous rent boy song, Cocksucker Blues. It’s also quite a macho image, of course, and aggressively sexual, so they get to have their cock cake, and eat it, as it were.

Fancy album sleeves fell out of fashion somewhat when punk came in but there were still things like the first Durutti Column album with its sandpaper sleeve intended to destroy the records it was stored with. I was fortunate to be able to do some vinyl design when I was starting out in the early eighties, even if I wasn’t allowed to design anything quite so elaborate. Some of the designs for the Alan Moore and Tim Perkins CDs take advantage of different booklet arrangements but it’s not the same as having all that space to play with. Now that music is thoroughly digital the visual component is reduced even further. A 300 x 300 pixel image in iTunes is a poor substitute for the tactile (and erotic…) pleasures of the album as artefact.