....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