Dragon’s Dream – { feuilleton }

Snaps: The Studio tour, 1979

I’d been hoping that Malcolm Whitehead’s Snaps might be made public eventually, and here it is, a 25-minute film documenting the northern end of a British book-signing tour undertaken by three artists and their publisher in October 1979. Not only that, there’s also this shorter compilation of footage that didn’t make the final cut.

The artists were three of the four whose work is showcased in the book known as The Studio: Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Mike Kaluta and Bernie Wrightson. The other member of the quartet, Barry Windsor-Smith, either missed the jaunt to Leeds and Manchester or avoided the tour altogether. The publisher was fellow artist Roger Dean whose success in 1975 with his own art book, Views, prompted him to turn his self-publishing imprint, Dragon’s Dream, into a bona fide publishing company. Views was followed by a short run of art books by prominent fantasy and science-fiction illustrators including Chris Foss, Ian Miller, Bruce Pennington and Syd Mead. The Studio was one of these titles, a collection of the art produced by the quartet working in the communal loft (“The Studio”) they established in Manhattan in the mid-1970s, a space intended for the production of more personal work than the comic art for which they were all known. Malcolm Whitehead’s film is unusual for documenting an event in sound and vision that usually wouldn’t be documented at all beyond a handful of photographs.

New Manchester Review, 1979: Michael Butterworth and David Britton in the Beardsley-papered Savoy office. Photo by Kevin Cummins.

The trail of circumstance that led to the creation of Snaps goes something like this: David Britton and Michael Butterworth were setting up Savoy Books in Manchester at around the same time that Roger Dean was expanding Dragon’s Dream. Both publishers had established co-production deals with Big O, a poster company, distributor and publisher of many pop-culture art books, notably the British edition of HR Giger’s Necronomicon. One of the first Savoy books in 1978 was James Cawthorn’s The Jewel in the Skull, an 80-page comic-strip adaptation of the novel by Michael Moorcock, which was a one-off co-production between Savoy and Big O. In addition to being a fledgling publisher, Savoy at this time also had a chain of bookshops in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool, selling the usual 70s blend of genre and “cult” paperbacks, posters, comics (mainstream and underground), magazines, and so on. The main outlet was Bookchain on Peter Street, Manchester, which is where much of Snaps was filmed. Given the connection between Dragon’s Dream and Savoy I’d guess that Big O suggested the Savoy shops as venues for the Studio signing tour. Dave Britton would have been keen on this even without the extra business the signings generated for the shops. He’d bought some of the posters produced by Barry Smith’s Gorblimey Press, and always spoke highly of Smith’s Studio-era work. As for the film, Mike Butterworth was good friends with local film-maker Malcolm Whitehead, and it was he that commissioned “Malc” to document the signing. Whitehead is best known today for his subsequent involvement with Ikon, the video division of Factory Records. In addition to making Snaps, in 1979 he was also filming some of the live footage of Joy Division that’s been circulating ever since. He later directed a couple of the early New Order videos, and helped with the direction and editing of many video productions by other Factory artists and affiliated groups like The Fall and Cabaret Voltaire.

Snaps is a short and somewhat amateurish film but it’s a valuable record all the same. Anyone today can pull out their phone and record an event like this in high-definition and stereo sound; in the 1980s and 1990s you would have needed video equipment, but in the 1970s you had to have film, and 16mm film was an expensive professional product. Whitehead was using the cheaper option of Super-8 but he did at least manage to organise synchronised sound, something you don’t get on Pirate Tape, Derek Jarman’s Super-8 record of a William Burroughs signing. Mike Butterworth provides the stentorian voiceover for Snaps which he says he now regrets. Equally regrettable is his mispronunciation of the names “Paolo and Francesca” when he’s talking about Barry Smith’s art.

The film opens in Leeds for the first of the day’s two signings, a sequence I can’t say much about since I never visited the Leeds shop. The participants then pile into cars and drive across the Pennines where they pause for a brief Kraftwerk-soundtracked inspection of the landscape. The three Studio artists were Americans so all of this activity must have been very novel and interesting despite the drabness of the cities. The shots in Manchester are the ones I like to see since they capture Bookchain when the place was at its height of popularity. In 1979 I was still living in Blackpool and didn’t visit the shop until early in 1980 when I made a daytrip with friends to explore Manchester. By the time I moved to the city in 1982 Bookchain was set on its gradual decline although it managed to survive until the block of buildings it was part of was demolished in 1999. The basement area looks quite salubrious in the signing footage but I only knew it as a dank and unlit storage area with a toilet that belonged in a horror film. One thing that Whitehead didn’t capture was Dave Britton asking all the artists to sign the wall of the shop near the counter. I was in the place every Saturday when we were working on the Reverbstorm comics in the 1990s, and it was always a strange thing to see Roger Dean’s signature (plus dragon doodle) peeping out from behind rows of dusty shrinkwrapped books and magazines. You never see much discussion of this side of the city’s cultural history in writing about Manchester’s musical output. Yet without the Savoy shops, and other outlets like Percival’s and Grass Roots, Ian Curtis, Mark E. Smith, Howard Devoto and others would have had a harder time finding the fuel for their imaginations.

In addition to being a record of a lost place, Snaps is also a record of lost people: Jones, Wrightson, and Britton are all no longer with us, while Malcolm Whitehead died in 2019. Whitehead’s involvement with Factory Records is documented in a scattering of posts at Cerysmatic. This one seems like a good place to start.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• David Britton, 1945–2020
• Jeffrey Catherine Jones, 1944–2011
• Roger Dean: artist and designer
• Berni Wrightson’s Frankenstein

Weekend links 794

Green Castle (1975) by Roger Dean.

• Roger Dean’s first book, Views, was published 50 years ago this month. The book sold 60,000 copies in its initial run, and was reprinted twice the following year. This extraordinary success gave Dean and his associates at the newly-formed Dragon’s Dream the resources to publish a line of art books by other imaginative artists such as Chris Foss, Ian Miller and Syd Mead. Without Views there wouldn’t have been a Dragon’s Dream, and without Dragon’s Dream there wouldn’t have been Paper Tiger, a publishing house launched by Roger Dean, Martyn Dean and Hubert Schaafsma in 1976. All this activity made a huge impression on me at the time, with books that provided a showcase for artists whose work would otherwise only be seen on the covers of paperbacks or vinyl records.

• At Alan Moore World: 3 novels and The Great When, an extract from a new video interview in which Alan talks about three of the books that have influenced his novels.

• At the BFI: “Dead of Night: 80 years on, Ealing’s anthology horror is still a waking nightmare,” says Edward Parnell.

…Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology was a chimera. It was like the philosophers’ stone of the alchemists: magic dressed in the science of its time, by means of which almost anything becomes possible. I call these oneiric technologies: they do not and quite probably cannot exist, but they fulfil a deep-rooted dream, or a nightmare, or both.

These are not simply technologies of the future that we don’t yet have the means to realise, like the super-advanced technologies that Arthur C Clarke said we would be unable to distinguish from magic. Rather, oneiric technology takes a wish (or a terror) and clothes it in what looks like scientific raiment so that the uninitiated onlooker, and perhaps the dreamer, can no longer tell it apart from what is genuinely on the verge of the possible. Perpetual motion is one of the oldest oneiric technologies, although only since the 19th century have we known why it won’t work (this knowledge doesn’t discourage modern attempts, for example by allegedly exploiting the ‘quantum vacuum’); anti-gravity shielding is probably another.

Philip Ball on unrealistic prognostications in science, from nanotechnology to artificial intelligence

• New music: Rún by Rún; Other Sides Of Nowhere by Underwater Sleep Orchestra; I Believe In You by Ladytron.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Curtis Harrington‘s Day.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Ritualist.

• A View From Her Room (1982) by Weekend | A Private View (1982) by Bill Nelson | Aerial View (2014) by Jon Hassell

Foss, Jodorowsky and low-flying spacecraft

Discovered last week in a local charity shop (and for a fraction of the usual asking price), 21st Century Foss, the Dragon’s Dream collection of Chris Foss paintings from 1978. Foss’s book covers were impossible to avoid in the Britain of the 1970s, often to a ridiculous degree when publishers would stick a spacecraft by the artist or one of his imitators on a book containing no spaceships at all. His ubiquity made him the first cover artist who registered with me as exactly that, an identifiable name whose work suggested that this kind of artistic activity might be something worth pursuing.

I bought a few of the books published by Dragon’s Dream/Paper Tiger in the late 70s/early 80s but many of them weren’t interesting enough to warrant the exhausting of my meagre finances. Ian Miller, yes; Chris Foss, no. Architecture, whether real or invented, was generally more interesting than spaceships, even when the latter were unique designs like the typical Foss behemoth. (There is architecture in many of Foss’s paintings but I preferred Roger Dean’s aesthetics, the fluid and organic buildings, the vehicles modelled on birds, fish and insects.) Foss also suffered from that process of mental evolution whereby you reject an early enthusiasm when you find something that has a more obsessive hold. In musical terms, his paintings were like glam pop, the first music that made a deep impression but which was swiftly displaced by progressive rock and electronic music. Despite the repudiation I still get a weird charge when I see one of his paintings, an instant jolt back to an adolescent mental space. His cover for Midsummer Century by James Blish does this to an excessive degree, being one of a handful of Foss pictures that caused me to attempt some imitative drawings of my own circa 1975. Those drawings, which went astray years ago, caused a minor stir of appreciation among schoolfriends, a reaction that made me realise I was doing something right, however amateurish the attempt.

Ballard’s Low-Flying Aircraft collection is labelled on the rear as “Fiction”, and is spaceship-free, whatever the cover may suggest.

21st Century Foss belies its title by being more than a simple parade of spacecraft designs. There are Foss covers that you never see in internet galleries—pictures of submarines, ships and aircraft from the Second World War—together with a few pieces used on the covers of crank titles. Ballard aficionados may like to know that the cover for the Panther paperback of Crash is reproduced here on a full page. The latter is a good example of the thinking in paperback publishing at the time: “Ballard is science fiction so we need an SF artist for this one!” Foss had earlier illustrated two volumes of The Joy of Sex so must have seemed an ideal match. According to Rick Poynor, the artist hated the novel while the author disliked the cover.

Foss’s book opens with a section about his designs for three feature films: Jodorowsky’s Dune, Superman and Alien. None of his concepts ended up on the screen but it’s good to see the Dune designs in print. This section is also prefaced by two pages of hyperactive hyperbole for Foss and his art from Alejandro Jodorowsky. The same text may be found at Duneinfo but it bears repeating here as a further example of the manic director in full flight. Incidentally, the “English magazine” that’s referred to is most likely Science Fiction Monthly for February 1974, an issue which contained a collection of Foss paintings plus an interview with the artist.

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