....GOING UNDERGROUND...............

Courtesy of this months ' Uncut ' magazine and the article on the 60's underground press, I have at last come across the archive site for the International Times - http://www.internationaltimes.it/ - the newspaper for the Counter Culture and all those students in the later part of the sixties who really did believe that they - we - could change the world. 

Apart from the content , which was always ' alternative ' if not downright subversive , what I remember was the visual dynamic of the layout - the couple of double-page spreads shown here are from around 1965 / 1966 and are still eye catching , and all done without recourse to anything more technologically advanced than cut&paste.                   

I suppose that to take a stance as an ' alternative ' press you needed a well-defined / conventional / clearly defined society to be alternative to, and this was certainly the case in the sixties . These two spreads date from around 1965 as I said ;  to put this into some form of social context , until 1964 in the UK , when BBC 2 was launched , there were only two terrestial TV channels , and the pirate radio stations didn't start broadcasting again until the mid-sixties. Strange times indeed ......................nowadays everything is diversified, pretty much anything goes , anywhere , anytime , and what underground / counter-cultures there are , are assiduously targeted and courted by the marketing departments.

..............and a nice touch too , to register the web-site out of Italy. As far as I can see pretty much all of the editions are on the site. Memories are now historical archives.                                           



...SEE ME , FEEL ME............

Earlier this week I came across the artwork for the Fleet Foxes new album,' Helplessness Blues '; It looks really nice, but it suddenly occurred to me how much nicer it would be if it arrived as a 12" album sleeve rather than an insert in a 4" jewel case - I might actually be able to see the artwork then.    

With the demise of the LP and its associated album sleeve , a whole tranche of visual design , artwork and career opportunities has been consigned to the past ; given that most designers are music fans it must have seemed like the ideal brief lending visual form to an album of music, a relatively low-end semi/disposable medium. After all, no one ever thought that they were designing history .

I spent my formative years in the sixties spending what money I had on American jazz imports, mainly on the Riverside and Bluenote labels; the Bluenote album covers have long been elevated to iconic status within the history of graphic design and have been well documented . The explosion of pop and rock music in the Uk during that same decade was closely followed by the explosion of designers from the art schools ; the covers for the Beatles ' Revolver ' and ' Sgt pepper ' LPs could never have been created for any other medium other than the album cover , and reduced to the CD format they are just ridiculous ; the whole dynamic of listening to the album whilst gazing at the sleeve has been lost. Simon Garfield in his book  'Just My Type ' equally makes the point that the Cooper Black used for the Beach Boys 'Pet Sounds ' becomes almost illegible as a text font when reduced to the CD format.

Artists too seized the opportunity to design , in sixties terms, a ' multiple ' ; Peter Blake with 'Sgt Pepper ' and ' Stanley Road ' for Paul Weller ,  Andy Warhol with both the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones - the peelable banana and the Sticky Fingers 'zip' cover , Richard Hamilton with the ' White Album' , S. Neil Fujita with ' Time out ' and ' Mingus Ah Um '. Further, album cover design allowed for creative inspiration - the Small Faces' ' Ogden's Nut Gone Flake ' and Bob Marley and the Wailers ' Catch a Fire ' zippo lighter cover, and more than one designer built if not their career then at least their reputation on designing album sleeves. Roger Dean's style became synonymous with ' Prog Rock ' in the seventies ; Vaughan Oliver establishing his own niche with his work for record label 4AD on classic designs for The Pixies, the Breeders and the Cocteau Twins , Peter Saville establishing the house style for Tony Wilson and Factory records . I mentioned my thoughts on this subject to Jonathan @ Artistic Type, who noted that within the last couple of weeks or so he had seen Vaughan Oliver give a talk at Manchester Metropolitan University where he indeed commented on this very subject , saying that the advent of the CD was killing sleeve artwork , and the ' jewel ' box was hardly befitting of the name. 

The  ' boxed set ' CD phenomena , such as the recent Neil Young ' Archives Vol 1 ' or Springsteen's ' Darkness on the Edge of Town / The Promise ' gives designers a chance,I suppose, but it feels very much to me like railing at the dying of the light, and with the advent of downloads then the visual association is lost forever.........listening to a new album whist looking at the gate-fold sleeve becomes something that happened long long ago in a universe far away - and no-one's career model these days is going to be based on designing liners for CD cases.......................

CODA - I suppose you realise that you are getting old when your cultural references become the subject of someone else's PhD thesis. This happened to me as long ago as 1986 when I went to an exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester entitled ' 1966 And All That ' - an exhibition on design in the sixties. I was quite enjoying it until I came across a showcase containing album sleeves , most of which I had ; they looked exactly like dead butterflies pinned out on mounting blocks - historically acurate but devoid of life , artifacts now for academic consideration . I am still playing a lot of those albums and they are not ready to die just yet........

" Listening to you, I get the music; Gazing at you, I get the heat "

 Pete Townshend, The Who

..DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN..........

I had been down to the Longden Gallery in Macclesfield to discuss my pictures for the current show and came across  two small heads in ceramic by Jan Lewis-Eccleston who works out of the gallery .

They looked spooky enough to me, as if someone had just dug them up, and this gave me an idea............I asked Jan if it was ok to incorporate them into an art work and she said 'fine ', so I put together a box suggesting that a certain building had been boarded up in the early 1980's .......a couple of skulls ( and maybe the rest of the bodies ) were discovered under the cellar floor some fifteen years later . Further investigation suggested that a couple of women had gone missing in the area some thirty years earlier. Hhmmmmm......

Jan really liked the idea , so maybe we will collaborate further on a joint project or two............

" There is violence that all individuals inflict on spaces by their very presence, by their intrusion into the controlled order of architecture. Entering a building maybe a delicate act , but it violates the balance of a precisely ordered geometry "   Bernard Tschumi



....MORE SONGS ABOUT BUILDINGS AND FOOD.........

  ......" the discipline of Architecture is a minor branch of cake decoration  "........Bertold Lubetkin, on receiving a gold medal from the RIBA.........

.......A most excellent quotation, I thought , to introduce the current posting and the question of ' The Cake ' . My mother's ninetieth birthday looms, and given that the family are all getting together , a cake was required . Your standard ' Happy Birthday / Candles / Ribbon ' affair just wouldn't cut it - something special is required here , so lets see ........construction - fruit cake or sponge ? hhhmmm , opinion seems divided ...........and what should it look like ? what are her interests ?............well , she has always enjoyed walking. Ok, then , a fruit / sponge cake with a walking theme...............

...........and here it is , courtesy of Kirsty at the Sweetie Pie Bakery in Macclesfield - a most excellent cake that should taste as good as it looks . Kirsty has made over five hundred cakes since she started up three years ago and is now in the nice position to be able to turn away work she doesn't like - specifically wedding cakes , which she finds too stressful and don't give her the room to relax, create and enjoy.

This posting is not just about cakes - it's about the return to hand made / hand crafted products that through the interaction of eye and hand result in a degree of satisfaction for the creator that is not achievable through sitting at a keyboard. Designing via a computer interface is all well and good , but to me it's a bit like doing all your cooking via a microwave; it will produce what is required but hardly provides the same sense of physical well being that actually making something with your hands does. We are increasingly insulated from the physical earth beneath us by rubber tyres , rubber soles - we are becoming increasingly insulated from the physical process of creation via the increasing capabilities of the electronic world and the keyboard .

Sorry - rant over.....................and the cake did taste as good as it looked..........wonder if she can do a cake in the shape of a drawing board for my next birthday ....!

...LITTLE RED ROOSTER .......

...Well, not so much a little red rooster, more like Three French Hens - ok, two hens and a rooster then. It's a watercolour that I have done for a good friend of mine, Liz Cox, as a much appreciated thank you for doing all the framing for me for the show of my works currently on at the Longden Gallery, Macclesfield.

Liz and Kath run their company 'LCT Interior Solutions' out of Chester, specialising in picture framing and providing bric-brac mainly for operations within the leisure industry and have provided an excellent service over the years ...and I have to say are really good fun to work with. Check out their website at http://www.lctinteriorsolutions.co.uk/

I should also point that their rather nice logo was designed by Jonathan who you can contact at Artistic Type.

Thanks again, Liz

..JE SUIS UN ROCK STAR....

Cultural Differences Part Three.......................Having spent my formative years growing up in the late Fifties and on through the Sixties, it was perhaps inevitable that the sound track to my life should be pretty much based on blues and rock.............folk rock , country rock , country blues , urban blues , Dylan , Springsteen , The Stones , Neil Young ,Van Morrison , together with  the more obscure corners of Americana and of course jazz - Armstrong , Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges , Miles Davis , Chet Baker , Billie Holliday and Sinatra .....oh, and The Clash .

Walk into any record shop ( record shop ? ) in the UK - well, ok,  if you can still find one ( it's still difficult to come to terms with the fact that one of the most enduring images of my life , the album cover and the vinyl album , had a life span of less than fifty years  ..... " what are these , Grandad ? They're LPs , James....Oh  - what are they ?  what's a ' record ' ? ) .......walk into pretty much any record shop and most of the floor space was given over to rock, pop , metal , punk.......and with most artists the usual suspects , all very familiar.

Walk into a music department in France and you are lost at sea , a completely alien culture alive and flourishing , names I've never heard of - Mylene Farmer ? The artistes , the musicians that I know from Abba to Zappa are located over in the corner somewhere, filed under ' International ' , and allocated about the same amount of space as ' world ' music or ' independent '. By far the biggest allocation of space is given over to French artistes , most of whom are completely unfamiliar to me. My perception of American blues based music as the fountain-head, the source from which all other music flows , is gone with the wind . Jazz has a solid presence , given its wholesale adoption by the French as part of the zeitgeist of bohemian Paris in the Fifties, but other than that its a different world...........and Mylene Farmer is no local somebody - sales of over 25 million and ten number ones' in France - this is a major artist by any one's standards, an icon in France , probably as big there as Madonna.

Whether it's because that for most of my life - I am of the baby boomer generation - the UK has been firmly looking westwards to the US of A for guidance , culture , aspirations and defence.......a bias that has almost totally effected my entire life........the more time I now spend in France the more I come to perceive the UK as a small and isolated ( indeed, insular ) off-shore island on the edge of a Europe that could quite happily manage - and does - without it.

vive la difference ??

........EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY..................

' Working on mysteries without any clues '.....

......Having spent most of my life developing my skill at visuals , I have occasionally tried watercolours , purely for relaxation . Relaxation ?  it is a lot harder medium to work with than markers , and I never have been too happy with the results , some of which can be seen on my web-site. Last year I thought I might have a go at oils, which then developed into mixed media. But the subject matter............hhmmmm.

    ' Works In Progress - towards buildings as narrative '

Buildings are recorded history , architectural plans and drawings are information data banks , blueprints for the past present and alternative futures , maybe even alternative pasts, all waiting to be decoded. The watercolours are recordings of buildings that have interested me ; the oils and mixed media works are very much exploratory , works in progress as I work towards a method of visually establishing alternative histories for building that may - or may not - have happened.

Reading buildings - mysteries, clues, plans - and visualising them will form the basis  as I take up an

MA course at Manchester Metropolitan University this coming September : investigating and proposing alternative histories and futures for three or four buildings in the city centre - buildings that will have other lives....

........and in the meantime , the works in progress are on show in the Longden gallery in Macclesfield , from February 27th through until March 26th this year . Given that this is the first time that I have actually exhibited since the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in 1967 it should be fun ....and most of the works on show , both watercolours and mixed media , are pictured in the portfolio section in my web-site

" The more enlightened a building becomes , the more its walls ooze ghosts "  

      Italo Calvino