{"id":4551,"date":"2009-03-03T02:47:04","date_gmt":"2009-03-03T01:47:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=4551"},"modified":"2011-11-11T19:37:09","modified_gmt":"2011-11-11T19:37:09","slug":"who-designed-vertigo-6360-620","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2009\/03\/03\/who-designed-vertigo-6360-620\/","title":{"rendered":"Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"autobahn1.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Autobahn by Kraftwerk; Vertigo #6360 620.<\/em><\/p>\n

Colin Buttimer was in touch last week to let me know he’d copied my Barney Bubbles post<\/a> (with my permission) to his excellent new site, Hard Format<\/a>, 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"autobahn-2004.jpg\"<\/p>\n

The 2004 version from the unreleased The Catalogue.<\/em><\/p>\n

Firstly it should be noted that the original German sleeve<\/a> 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\u2014crucially\u2014the 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<\/em>, also has at least two different cover designs while their first two albums\u2014featuring their distinctive traffic cone trademark\u2014were repackaged as a double set<\/a> by Vertigo in 1972. That design takes their stencil lettering and applies it to an oscilloscope wave. Like the Vertigo Autobahn<\/em> sleeve the design is uncredited, as were a number of other Vertigo releases.<\/p>\n

\"kraftwerk04.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Kraftwerk on stage in 2005.<\/em><\/p>\n

So where does Barney Bubbles fit in?<\/p>\n

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!<\/em> by Gracious<\/a>, also 1970. The stark simplicity of the latter’s giant italic exclamation mark runs counter to anything else on the label at that time.<\/p>\n

2) The Gracious!<\/em> design is printed on bubble-textured card while the white areas of the Autobahn<\/em> 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<\/em> and Armed Forces<\/em> sleeves. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality<\/em><\/a> album was designed by the Bloomsbury Group and that cover uses a similar embossing.<\/p>\n

\"autobahn2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

3) The typography. This is probably the clincher for me. The title design for Autobahn<\/em> 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\u2014Germans! 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!<\/em> on his earlier sleeve looks to me like it was set in the bold condensed oblique weight of Futura.<\/p>\n

\"type1\"<\/p>\n

The Autobahn titles as reproduced on the UK cassette release.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"type2\"<\/p>\n

ITC Bauhaus Heavy designed by Edward Benguiat and Victor Caruso (1975). <\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/em><\/a> magazine he said:<\/p>\n

Not only did the music have a profound influence on me, the sleeve made a lasting impression\u2014the 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The person who introduced Saville to Autobahn<\/em> 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<\/em><\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

As always, if anyone has any further information please leave a comment.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Vertigoswirl.com<\/a> | A very thorough guide to all the original Vertigo releases.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> added the 2004 CD version.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The album covers archive<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,29,3,10],"tags":[170,86,1471,430,122,752,1467,753,903],"class_list":["post-4551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-electronica","category-music","category-typography","tag-a-clockwork-orange","tag-barney-bubbles","tag-black-sabbath","tag-hipgnosis","tag-kraftwerk","tag-malcolm-garrett","tag-paul-gorman","tag-peter-saville","tag-roger-dean"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-1bp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}