I was reading the NY Times this morning when I ran across this obituary for rap DJ Mr. Magic.  I’ve always liked old school rap, but I must admit I’m no rap historian and I’d never heard of Mr. Magic or his radio show.  What caught my attention more was the role he played in getting rap music on commercial radio.  I had no idea.  I follow hip hop music a bit, but I must admit not as closely as rock.  Mr. Magic was clearly a key player in the early days of rap, but my ignorance regarding his contributions goes to show you that there are many people (DJs, tastemakers, journalists, publicists, etc.) who contribute to a genre’s success with little or no recognition beyond the most avid followers.  So the next time you see another band on Figment succeeding in an area you feel you carved out or helped promote, don’t be jealous, know you did your part to make it happen and in doing so created more opportunity for your existing bands or ones you’ve yet to dream up.

R.I.P. Mr. Magic

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once said

“Music is the universal language of mankind.”

He also said,

“It is foolish to pretend that one is fully recovered from a disappointed passion.  Such wounds always leave a scar.”

Only one of these quotes from Longfellow was directly referencing music, but you could easily see where both could apply.   While it is true, music is the universal language of mankind, only some of us speak it eloquently and the rest are left only to appreciate those who can.

I was struck by this very fact, when I read a quote by Kieron Gillen in regard to his Image comic “Phonogram”,

“It’s my love letter to music. It’s an honest letter – I’ve been shacked up with her for long enough to know that she’s a bitch with a cruel tongue and will happily destroy people on a whim – but it’s still hopelessly in love with her.”

Hmm…sure sounds like Longfellow and Gillen are talking about the same thing…right?  Music can be a bitch, but an intoxicating one that many of us will never master.  So how do we express our love for it?  Well, it depends.  Some of us become avid fans, others write about it, and still others use it as a form of inspiration to create other forms of expression.  Phonogram is all of those things put together.

So what is Phonogram and who is Kieron Gillen?  Phonogram is a comic book created by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie and published by Image Comics.  Gillen and McKelvie have described it as “Hellblazer meets High Fidelity“, and it’s deeply inspired by music in much the same way the fake bands you create on Figment are.  What’s really interesting about it though is that it manages to express through words and pictures what makes us all so passionate about music – its’ magic.  Gillen and McKelvie describe it in this way,

“Music is magic.  You know this already.  You’ve known this from the first time a record sent a divine shiver down your spine or when a band changed the way you dressed forever.  How does something that’s just noises arranged in sequence do that?  No-one knows.  It’s just…magic.  Everyone knows that.  It’s just that some realise that it’s more than metaphor.”

Clearly these guys have a passion for music, but yet they aren’t musicians.  Instead, they are writers and artists who convey their passion for music in a medium best known for superhero’s and villains.  Hey, maybe we are talking about the music industry after all?  But seriously, Phonogram may not be music, but it is without a doubt inspired by it, and in its own way creates a little of its’ own magic.  With that in mind we thought it might be interesting to find out more about what goes into creating Phonogram and how it applies to what we’re doing on Figment, so we tracked down Kieron Gillen to ask him a few questions.

Figment News:   Tell us little bit about Phonogram and how you got involved with the project.

Kieron Gillen:  Phonogram is pretty much the story of me deciding not to become a music writer.  So instead of actually letting all this stuff off a tiny drop of mental-fluid at a time, I built up into an enormous septic sore which I lanced in one go. It’s distilled putrefied thoughts on music.  And jokes.  Always jokes.

I had the idea as something I’d like to do in comics, met Jamie and somehow talked him into it. I was very lucky.

FN:  What are Phonomancers and Retromancers, and how does magic play into the Phonogram storyline?

KG:  We use magic as a metaphor for whatever music does to people – it’s a device to highlight the effects. So rather than Dungeons & Dragons Harry-Potterisms, we have these low-level, often very subjective effects.

The example I normally use is the second issue in series 2. The basic plot involves a guy walking into a club and a record plays. Suddenly, time freezes and he’s suddenly confronted by an Ex who forces him to relieve a painful memory involving her and the record. Effectively, he’s been cursed by the record. Of course, we’re using it to highlight that gut-crunching moment we’ve all experienced.

FN:  The artwork is terrific.  Is that all the work of Jamie McKelvie?

KG:  In the first series, yes. In the second, he was joined by Matt Wilson – who Jamie worked on his own Suburban Glamour with – as colourist. Colour adds so much to it, y’know? As well as the main story, we also have back up strips in each single issue, where we’ve bullied as many of our friends and peers as we can to provide. It’s just a big cross-section of everything we love in comics.

FN:  In keeping with the theme, the cover art for Phonogram’s first series “Rue Britannia” is all based on real album artwork from Brit-pop bands of the 90’s.  For the second series, “The Singles Club”, each issue was influence by a single from more current bands like The Pipettes, TV on the Radio and The Long Blondes.  Was that part of the plan right from the beginning and were the bands involved at all?

KG:  The plan we have is cheerfully rough, and normally conceptually re-jigged from series to series. For the first, we wanted to have a deconstruction of all these album covers, which tied into the whole story being a deconstruction of Britpop. For the second, set in a single club night, we were inspired by club-flyers for each, highlighting each member – and the story itself was normally inspired of one single by a band in the year the story’s set (2006). Sometimes it’s a very tangential inspiration, admittedly.

FN:  Your second Phonogram mini-series “The Singles Club” is seven single-issue stories, each following a single Phonomancers experiences in the same club on the same night.  What was it like combining all of these interlocking stories?

KG:  Hard work, in short. Bloody hard work, in less short, but more rude.  Basically, it involved a lot of flow-charts. Who’s in the toilet right now? Who’s on the dance floor? What’s playing? Since it’s quite intricate, what I actually did was hold most of it in my head – like a hologram of a story – and write it all as quickly as I could. And then when it was all done, I hammered it until it actually stuck to a time-line. There’s some subtle subjective cheats in there to help it too.

Jamie does a lot of work too – as he’s got the pages done, he’s forming an enormous chart of each scene in time order:

So yeah: bloody hard work.

FN:  You have a background as a music journalist.  How useful was that past experience when creating Phonogram?

KG:  It provided the thinking. When I said I didn’t become a music journalist earlier, what I meant was a full-time day job. As it was, I stayed in the zines and underground mags like Plan B, so it was just practicing analysing and thinking and obsession: all the things which power Phonogram.

I really consider Phonogram as music journalism in narrative form. The inspiration coming from a set band or song is at the key part of it. I mean, the last short story I wrote is just inspired by a conversation with a mate when dancing to Once In A Lifetime. Music is easy inspiration for me.

FN:  You also work as a gaming journalist.  Was working as a comic book writer something you always wanted to do, but journalism paid the bills?  Or was it just a natural extension of your work as a journalist.

KG:  I’m a bit mental. All the writing sort of forms a whole in my head. It’s all about processing reality. If you’re looking for a theme across my work, the obvious one is about humans’ subjective relationship with art. That’s always been there.

FN:  You’ve now bridged out to work-for-hire for Marvel.  How does that differ from creating a book on your own?  And is working with some of the classic characters of comic books harder than creating your own?

KG:  Phonogram’s ludicrously hard, so almost anything is actually easier than doing it. It’s a great thing to have done first, because it steels me for even the most strenuous of tasks. Getting to play with all these splendid Marvel characters is a joy.

FN:  On Figment, our users are required to rely on their imagination to create every aspect of their fake bands, from back-story to album description and song titles. Any advice for our budding imaginary rock impresarios on how best to create an imaginary musical character?

KG:  I used to play fantasy bands a lot. You can see a bit of that in Lloyd, in the second series, who spends most of the time trying to recruit people for his post-Pipettes/Spankrock concept piece.

I’d always looked at the world of music, and see what’s missing. What combinations make sense, but don’t exist. The final time I played bands, our concept was the – still awesome, sez I – Mogwai/Wu-Tang cross. That still sounds fun. Someone do it.

FN:  Clearly music influences your work on Phonogram, but is it also an inspiration for your work for Marvel?  And if so, what bands are currently influencing you?

KG:  I tend to root around for an album to fit the mood of the piece. The Thor stuff has a certain epic melodrama heart-on-sleeve-ism to it, so I’ve dug back to the Arcade Fire’s Funeral.

Ares is this snarly, acerbic brutally smart aggression, so I dug out the Sisters of Mercy Vision Thing.

S.W.O.R.D. Is a lot of The Go! Team’s first album.

FN:  You’ve also created comics purely for the web.  How does that differ from creating a book and do you think that’s where everything is moving?

KG:  Interesting and huge question. I think it’s certainly part of the future. I also think with the web, the fetishistic power of objects become more important. People are less interested in just the thing, and more the totemic object. You start creating physical comics as art objects. Stuff like the Asterios Polyp which came out is a fantastic thing. The physicality counts. Writing for the web, you start thinking about the lack of physicality, and what that means. And I’m not giving an answer to that, because there’s so many.

FN:  Graphic design plays a big part on Figment, because it’s often the fake band’s album cover that grabs someone’s attention first.  How big a part do you play in working with Jamie on the artwork that goes into Phonogram?

KG:  We love the covers. They’re probably the single element of Phonogram which we’re most satisfied with.  We’re proud of huge chunks of it but the covers are…well, they’re the closest to actually what we want things to be.  The britpop deconstructions of the first series set the fairly dark, critical tone of the first series.  The Club-Flyer/portrait approach of the second focuses in on the importance of each lead.  And by having two totally different approaches, we’re trying to show that we’re about trying new stuff and pushing.  There’s been an increase in record-derived covers since the first Phonogram series – which some people, complimentarily, have said was due to us.  For the second, there was no way we were going to do that again.  Culture has to move forward, and covers are the first attempt to contextualise the art it contains.

FN:  Have you ever created a fake band?  If so, tell us a little about it.

KG:  All the bands I’ve been in have been pretty fake bands. I mentioned the Mogwai/Wu cross – which also did a lot of things with suits and fake-on-stage-arguments, which was meant as a critique of the lad-stuff kicking around in the 97-98 period this was happening. We were cheery wankers like that.

But I schemed up a few. That band originally started as a one-off punk band, aiming to make a 20 minute set of Nation-of-Ulysses-esque stuff, somehow blagging onto the best support I could find, doing that one gig and never doing anything ever again. Just to get it out of my system.

Actually, it was always a bit of a kick when I saw a band who broke through who seemed to basically be what I was dreaming up. It was cheery justification – and also, a quiet pleasure in knowing there’s people out there who love pop music in the same way.

FN:  What advice would you give someone who has an interest in creating comics but has never done it before?

KG:  Do it. It’s the cheapest visual medium on the planet. You go from where you’re sitting now and publishing your first web-comic in a handful of clicks. And it’s best to start as soon as possible, because the sooner you do, the sooner you’ll get good.

FN:  See any bands on Figment that would be good fodder for a comic?

KG:  Actually, Phallic Acid reminds me of the first band I was ever in. Mid-teenage punky-metal thing called Phallusy.  Yes, we were very mid-teenage.

——————————————————-

If you’d like to find out more about what Kieron and Jamie have planned for Phonogram check out their blog by clicking here.

I thought you might all find this article on the guy who designed the cover for the new Pearl Jam record “Backspacer” interesting.  Goes to show you how a designer can always apply his/her work to a new medium.  Dan Perkins, who writes and draws the political cartoon “This Modern World” under the name Tom Tomorrow, was tapped to create the cover art for the new Pearl Jam record after his cartoon strip was dropped by the Village Voice Media chain of alternative weekly newspapers.  Not only has the cover been a boost for his career (leading to the design of concert posters for Pearl Jam as well as the cover of a special issue of Spin Magazine which features the band), but it also got him his job back at the Village Voice.  So if you’re looking for some inspiration I suggest you give this NY Times article a read or check out his cartoon “This Modern World”.

Larry passed this great feature from the Word Magazine’s website along to me the other day and I haven’t stopped playing around with it since.  It’s a map of locations where album covers were taken.  You can click on an album title on the right or just hit the random generator and it will provide you with the location of the cover shoot and other interesting tidbits on the album.  For instance, did you know that the rear cover of AC/DC’s classic album “Highway to Hell” was shot on a piece of closed highway in Staten Island?  Staten Island standing in for hell?  Go figure.

I think it’s a great source of inspiration and a great way to peer behind the curtain to see how some of these now legendary images were created.   So give it a try and if you’ve got the info add one of your favorites!  And if you get a chance check out Word Magazine’s website – it’s a great read too!

Having a hard time figuring out the album cover design for your fake band’s next album?  Looking for a source of inspiration?  Well, fret no more and look no further, I have a website for you to check out.  Hard Format is a site devoted to the celebration of music-related design.  From old to current the site covers the spectrum of great music-related design whether it was created for vinyl, CD, DVD, Online or even music-related books.  Check out collections from great designers like Susan Archie, Tina Frank, Barney Bubbles, Mark Farrow, Stanley Donwood, Hipgnosis, Peter Saville, Jamie Reid, etc.  It’s an incredible resource and a real vault of inspiration!  So take some time and check it out.

We’re only a few days away from April 17th when we’ll be announcing who won our Figment Album Cover Design Contest.  With the big moment right around the corner we thought it might be a good idea to introduce you a bit more to John Coulthart who will be picking the winner and four runners up.   John is a very successful graphic designer who has designed artwork for a variety of mediums including album covers, book covers and graphic novels.   Although his work speaks for itself, he was kind enough to take the time to talk with us about it.

Figment:  How did you get started as a graphic designer?  Was it something you always wanted to do?

John Coulthart:  When I was at school in the 1970s I was interested more in book illustration initially although record sleeves were a big inspiration. That decade was a great time for cover design, especially in Britain where you had people such as the Hipgnosis team (Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey Powell, Peter Christopherson and others), Barney Bubbles, and Roger Dean designing very lavish and inventive covers. When punk happened in 1976 you got a change of direction which brought in a new range of creative influences and a new generation of designers–Neville Brody, Malcolm Garrett, Peter Saville et al–who went on to make a big impact in the 1980s.

The earlier group of designers got me interested in the pictorial content of a record sleeve, I bought Roger Dean’s Views book and later the first Hipgnosis book. Roger Dean’s style was illustrational while Hipgnosis used collaged photographs to create surreal scenes; Barney Bubbles could illustrate as well as produce amazingly inventive pure design. But I was mainly looking at things from the outside, I didn’t have much idea about how the world of print operated. The Hipgnosis book goes into some detail about the creation of a piece of design including the typographic elements so that told me something about the print process but design still wasn’t something I really wanted to pursue, I was more interested in illustration and image creation. It was only when I started looking at Neville Brody’s work that I began to get a proper sense of graphic design as an integration of pictorial content and typography. This was still only an outside interest, however, I didn’t have any intention of pursuing this as a career. For a variety of reasons, I left school at 17 with no intention of going to art school or college so I never gained any of the qualifications which would have got me a place in a design studio.

Figment:  What was your first commissioned project?

JC:  In 1980 I had a temporary job printing T-shirts and by chance met someone who knew Hawkwind. I mentioned that I’d been doing some illustrations inspired by their songs (and by Barney Bubbles’ graphics for the band) so he sent copies of my work to Dave Brock. That led to the illustrations which appeared in the Church of Hawkwind album booklet in 1982. It was a lucky break especially since a lot of the things I did for them were very amateurish.

Figment:  How did you begin working with bands like Cradle of Filth and Steve Severin?

JC:  Cradle of Filth contacted me when lead singer Dani Filth bought a copy of The Haunter of the Dark, my book of HP Lovecraft comic strips and illustrations. Steve Severin got in touch after I helped put together a book of his poetry for Oneiros Books. He’d been doing a few solo CDs of soundtrack music and needed a new one designed.

Figment:  How collaborative a process is album cover design in general? Do the bands provide you with any input or are you allowed complete creative control?

JC:  This varies widely from project to project. Some artists have a very clear idea of what they want; work I’ve been doing recently for various dubstep acts tends to begin with my being sent a selection of photos which the artist wants used. I choose the best ones and place the type over these. Metal bands on the other hand may only have a vague idea in mind which we then thrash out in back and forth discussion. My being able to do a quick sketch of something often helps narrow down the range of options. The Jon Hassell album I worked on, Maarifa Street, went through several very different stages until we got something which we were both happy with.

Figment:  Is listening to a band’s music part of the conceptualization and ultimate design process?

JC:  Occasionally but it’s more important to be aware of the music genre which the album will be a part of. That can dictate the nature of the design even if you’re reacting against it, you might want to create something which doesn’t look typical, for example. Lyrics and the album theme (if any) tend to be more important than the music. I’ve done albums for Cradle of Filth and Turisas which had elaborate storylines evolving from song to song. In both those cases it was this which directed the artwork more than the music. The Steve Severin album was music for a theatre production of a Japanese story, The Woman in the Dunes. Again, it was the story that dictated the design.

Figment:  What do you think is the key to creating the right cover for an album? Any tips you can pass along to the budding designers on Figment?

JC:  That’s a difficult question since an album cover is only limited by the margins of the artwork, within that you can do anything at all. People can often find or create a good enough image, the greater challenge comes with the choice of typefaces and where they’re placed. You need to think carefully about how the typeface relates to the design, whether the type elements are too big (a common problem) or too small and where they should be positioned. There’s often pressure from artists (and record labels) to have all the relevant information placed at the top; that isn’t always the ideal solution. Many famous sleeve designs–Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd, Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division–have no words on the front of the album at all.

Figment:  What tools do you use to create your designs?

JC:  I use Photoshop for processing photos or creating the kind of detailed photo-collage work I produce for metal bands. Illustrator is used for all the typography and preparation of the print files. As far as the artwork itself is concerned, anything goes. I’ve used bits of painting and drawing collaged into some designs and also use elements from my own photos. A couple of title designs such as the Turisas name started life as hand-drawn pieces which were then polished in the computer.

Figment:  Art and commerce are often at odds, but what part do you feel album cover design plays in both? Do you think a good album cover design can actually enhance both the art (the recording) and/or the sales of a recording?

JC:  Led Zeppelin heard some music business wag joke that they could sell their albums even if they were packaged in brown paper bags so that’s what they got Hipgnosis to do for their final album, In Through the Out Door; a very detailed photo shoot was printed on the sleeve then the whole thing sold in a brown bag with the album title stamped on the front. That didn’t affect their sales at all. Successful bands sell whatever the package looks like. For unknown bands a good cover design is far more important since they want their work to stand out. Beyond that, a very striking or unusual design can make people curious about the music and help garner additional publicity. Peter Saville did this with his sleeve for New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies which had no words on its cover but used instead a colour coding system you needed to decipher. The cover picture of a still life painting by Fantin-Latour also bore no relation to the music.  Coldplay did a similar colour coding thing on the cover of X&Y and generated a lot of discussion about the album as a result.

Figment:  You also do a lot of design work for book covers and graphic novels.  How does that type of design work differ from your work with musicians?

JC:  The general process is very similar–authors often have a say in how they want the cover to look–but in other ways book covers are quite different. For a start you may have to create a hardcover dustjacket and a paperback design for the same book. Then there’s the way that book covers get replaced very quickly and vary from country to country. Album covers rarely get changed at all once the album is released and the artwork becomes permanently associated with that release. Very few book covers, if any, have that kind of longevity. It helps to bear in mind sometimes that an album design will be around for a long time.

Figment:  You seem to do a lot of work that is influenced by horror and fantasy type imagery. Is that a personal choice or merely a reflection of the clients you work with?

JC:  That’s the kind of art I was inspired by as a teenager. I have an aptitude for creating certain kinds of horror and fantasy imagery so I regularly get asked to do that based on past examples of my work.

Figment:  “The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases” is to fantasy medical conditions what Figment is to fantasy bands. How did you get involved in that anthology project and what’s your favorite fantasy medical condition?

JC:  Jeff VanderMeer was the co-editor of that collection and I’d already provided some designs for his earlier book, City of Saints and Madmen. The Lambshead book was a lot of fun to work on, especially in the parts where I was doing pastiches of book design from earlier eras. My favourite piece is the Michael Moorcock one, Samoan Giant Rat Bite Fever, a very funny parody of Victorian magazine articles.

Figment:  You’ve done a lot of illustrations for Savoy Comics – The Lord Horror Reverbstorm series, etc. Are you a comic book geek at heart?

JC:  Not really. I started adapting some HP Lovecraft stories as comic strips mainly as a chance to illustrate the whole of a story. That coincided with the sudden flush of interest in comics in the late 1980s so for a while I was working at the edges of the mainstream comics medium. I lost interest when I realised I preferred doing one-off pictures rather than drawing the same character over and over. The best part of that association was getting to know writers like Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta) and Neil Gaiman (American Gods, Coraline) who are now a lot more well-known. I’ve been fortunate to work with Alan on several occasions as a consequence of this.

Figment:  I love the artwork you did for the cover of the book “Finch” by Jeff Vandermeer.  How much time goes into a project like that?

JC:  That took about two weeks altogether. That’s about average for a detailed piece of Photoshop collage work.

Figment:  What projects are you currently working on?

JC:  I’ve just finished an illustration for a short story and I’m doing a T-shirt design for a US metal band called Cyaegha whose album, Steps of Descent, I designed last year.

Figment:  If you had a fake band what would its name be?

JC:  I’ve been listening to a lot of psychedelic music from the late Sixties recently, one of my favourite periods. Many of the obscure Brit bands of that era had ludicrous names like Mandrake Paddle Steamer, Wimple Winch, The Orange Seaweed, Felius Andromeda and so on. I think a silly psychedelic name would be ideal but I’d have to give some thought as to what that might be.

We’d like say thanks to John for taking the time to speak to us.  He’s been a pleasure to work with throughout this contest and we look forward to seeing what design he picks as the winner!  Do yourself a favor and visit his website and buy some of his work.  He’s a great designer.

I opened up my email account the other day and lo and behold there was an email from Paul Gorman, the author of “Reasons To Be Cheerful:  The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles”.  Paul wanted me to know about a new blog post he had just posted on a rare album cover that Barney Bubbles had created.  So here it is:

Seems Mrs. Mills was quite the libertine!  So if your fake band creative powers are waning, you can always look to Barney Bubbles for inspiration.  To read about Barney’s work on this album cover and Mrs. Mill’s hedonistic ways check out Paul’s blog post.

With our Figment Album Cover Design Contest in full swing, we’ve been spending a lot of time at Figment talking about our favorite album cover designers, and one in particular really stands out to us – Barney Bubbles (BB).  Barney, aka Colin Fulcher, was an influential designer, video director and artist who created album covers for such bands as Elvis Costello and The Attractions, Nick Lowe, The Damned, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Hawkwind, Psychedelic Furs, Depeche Mode, Billy Bragg, Graham Parker, and Generation X among others.  In addition, Barney directed videos for bands like Squeeze and The Specials.

I recently picked up a great book on Barney, “Reasons To Be Cheerful:  The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles”, by Paul Gorman (we’re giving away a copy of it to the winner of our album cover design contest).  Paul is a well known English journalist, author, pop historian and owner of the fashion label The Look Presents, and his genuine love and admiration for Barney led him to research and write a book that is the first definitive investigation of Bubbles’ life and work.  I found the book fascinating, and it’s only increased my desire to know more about BB.  So I sought out Paul and he graciously agreed to talk with us about BB’s life, work and the fact that even Barney created imaginary bands!

Figment:  What inspired you to write a book about Colin Fulcher aka Barney Bubbles?

Paul:  I’m interested in people who fast-track cutting edge ideas into the mainstream, and BB is a fine example and one whose achievements across the broad range of media needed to be recognized.

I’d been aware of his work since the early to mid 70s, when he was fully credited as part of the Hawkwind scene.

I’d go and see them and the Pink Fairies etc at the Roundhouse in Camden, north London; I was brought up a couple of miles away and for £1.25 it was a place where a 14-year-old could have an entire Sunday afternoon of mayhem  with several bands playing.

It wasn’t such a hop skip and jump to go see the Flamin Groovies, Patti Smith and The Ramones there a couple of years later.

By that time I was buying singles weekly from Manzi’s Records in Finchley Road (though I had been given the first Stiff single – Nick Lowe’s So it Goes/Heart Of The City – by a chap I bought records off in Soho). The best sleeves were by BB, and I was a major gig-goer and followed artists he worked with; The Damned, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Nick Lowe. I also  adored the oddballs: Humphrey Ocean, Johnny Moped, etc.

Three years ago my wife – who is a graphic designer, Australian and younger than me – became much enamoured by the BB sleeves, old NMEs and posters I showed her, and asked if there was a book about BB. A light-bulb popped. She saw that this was a representative sample of a body of work which demanded to be collated for broad dissemination.

He was also made a bit of a pet secret in the 90s, with the odd article in rarified design magazines and a couple of mentions in a book or exhibition. I have no time for such elitism and nor, in fact, did BB as far as I can gather from those who knew him well.

BB worked at the commercial sharp-end all of his professional career, as have I for 31 years now, so I was determined to blow the gaff and gain for him the widest possible appreciation.

One critic wrote that my attempts to engage with the broader audience are doomed, because they are “less-demanding [and] less design-aware”.  What a cheerless worldview. I credit people with much more intelligence and know they will be as delighted and intrigued with his work as my wife was. They will also, like me, be allowed an entry point into a world of art and design via his references.

I must admit that until your book was published I knew very little about Barney Bubbles, but clearly I knew his work because I own a lot of the albums whose covers he designed.  Do you think that is the case with most people?  And if so, why do you think his work flew under the radar for so many years while other designers, like Hipgnosis, became better known?

Because Roger Dean, Hipgnosis and the rest were the visual equivalent of prog-rock, dealing in grandiose concepts to match the overblown music they packaged. So their (to me pretty unattractive) designs steam-roller you, whereas Bubbles was much more subtle and trained to engage the consumer by not blowing his own trumpet.

This wasn’t a period when designers were particularly celebrated; in terms of the popular music scene, after the performers it was the rock critics and music press writers who might receive attention. Still, sufficient numbers of rock fans knew and recognised the work of, say, Duffy, Neon Park, Guy Peellaert, Andy Warhol or Cal Schenkel.

It’s a convenient misconception that Barney Bubbles was a totally hidden figure in this era, created by those who have come late to the party either because they weren’t sufficiently into the music to recognise him as part of the package then, or were simply not there and retrospectively prefer the romantic view.

Sure he avoided credit from the mid-70s on, and was a determinedly background figure in an industry of attention-seekers, but the fact is that Barney Bubbles’ name was broadcast loud and clear to those who wanted to hear it (and fully credited by bands such as Hawkwind) up until the mid-70s, just 9 years before his death.

Even when he was avoiding credit through the frenetic post-punk period, Bubbles was mentioned in reviews of releases on the Stiff, Radar and F-Beat imprints and also in terms of his contribution to the NME (which takes us up to 1978).

Then there was the interview in The Face in 1981- a pretty influential and widely disseminated publication by that time – which gave a sound career overview and an insight into his “extra curricular” activities.

How did Barney begin working with musicians?

He was part of the British art school boom of the late 50s/early 60s, which gave rise to The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Kinks, the Pretty Things, dammit, nearly every great band of the era.

Some of his friends characterize him as a frustrated pop star, and, in a way, designing for groups enabled him to at least share in the communication of music to a mass audience. Of course he made his own record, the somewhat alarming and experimental Ersatz as The Imperial Pompadours in 1982.

As a student he played a mean 12-string and was a blues and jazz enthusiast. He was also an enthusiastic and life-long dancer, a sign of someone who really connects with music.

His college was in Twickenham, the crucible of the beat and R&B explosion with a few of the crucial venues. So it was a natural step to design posters for gigs by The Stones and (Small Face) Ian McLagan’s first band The Muleskinners.

In the mid-60s he and his pals produced posters and t-shirts for imaginary bands such as the Image and The Erections and in many ways the launch of the Barney Bubbles psychedelic light show in 1967 gave him an entree to being part of the performance at underground clubs such as UFO and The Arts Lab.

In 1969 Bubbles started allowing his friends in the Notting Hill street-band Quintessence rehearsal time in the basement of his Portobello Road house. Since he’d become disillusioned with “straight” design work, it was a natural step for him to contribute a die-cut booklet to their debut album In Blissful Company and he was off.

Was there one group in particular for which his work is best known?

There are a few because he stuck at things, working with Hawkwind in various incarnations from 1971 to 1978, and with Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe from 1977 to 1983.

I believe BB worked best when he appreciated the musicians personally: Nik Turner of Hawkwind because they share spiritual and metaphysical concerns, Ian Dury because of his art-school background, Elvis Costello because they both understood suburban alienation and Nick Lowe because they had a magpie tendency to gather together influences and make them their own.

Barney used a lot of aliases and his work was credited to a variety of pseudonyms.  Why did he do this and how did the name Barney Bubbles stick?

One person says in the book that there is a thin line between arrogance and humility. Barney was shy but uncompromising and sure of his skill-set. So maybe if you didn’t get that it was a Barney Bubbles then you weren’t hip. His explanation was that you don’t see the name of the designer of the Heinz baked beans label on the can so why should you see his on a Nick Lowe album? I’m not sure, but think there were a number of reasons, one of which was avoidance of the taxman. Overall this was a truly alternative artist, a radical thinker who did not, or could not, conform to even the staple artistic stance of signature and recognition.

The name came about because he had chosen the nickname Barney – or sometimes Barnstaple – in the mid -60s as part of his art gang A1 Good Guyz. When he started heating up oils, coloured ink and water to create a bubbling effect via a projector in underground clubs that became the Barney Bubbles Light Show.

I think he did have issues of identity and his early notes and letters talk constantly of escaping humdrum suburbia so believe the name-change was a necessary part of his reinvention.

I also understand he thought his name was ugly so maybe it’s as simple as that.

Designer Peter Saville was quoted in your book as saying “Barney Bubbles is the missing link between pop and culture.”  Do you agree, and if so why?

Peter has cleverly encapsulated in a few words what he discusses in his essay in my book, which is: in grey mid-70s Britain BB communicated aspects of “culture” – Art Deco, Constructivism, concrete poetry, Expressionism, Modernism, whatever – via the mass medium of the record sleeve.

Barney Bubbles designed more than just album covers, can you tell us a little about some of other design and visual art projects he created over the years?

[Takes deep breath...]

BB constantly chafed against his chosen professional course so often ventured into other media such as laying-out, art-directing or redesigning magazines (Nova, Town, Frendz, Oz, Let It Rock and the NME); designing books including Brian Griffin’s Copyright 1978 and Power, The Ian Dury Songbook and the John Cooper Clarke Directory; providing the catalogue and poster for the important group exhibition Lives at the Hayward gallery in 1979; and over the years dozens of logos, idents and letterheads from HP Bulmer’s Strongbow cider and Justin de Blank Provisions to Stiff, Radar, F-Beat and Go! Discs Records.

BB also designed hundreds of music press adverts and came up with stage sets for many Hawkwind gigs, plays by Robert Calvert and the Hawklords 25 Years On Tour.

He directed around a dozen promo videos – including Ghost Town by The Specials – and designed one-off pieces of furniture and rugs as commissioned by his music business friends.

In later years he painted privately, mainly in oils and mixed-media. These were not exhibited, but given away to friends.

Barney designed light shows for a variety of bands, including Pink Floyd, at legendary venues like The Roundhouse in London and the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.  How did he get involved in creating light shows and how do you think he was able to bridge the gap between the counter-culture bands of the 70s and the punk/new wave scene of the late 70s and early 80s??

The scene in London in 1966 and 1967 was abuzz with new groups, clubs, venues, underground papers and boutiques so I think he showed a natural urge to be part of where it was at. This is another key element to understanding BB; he rode the Zeitgeist with ease and would be at the centre of things: Eel Pie Island in 1963, Haight-Ashbury in 1968, Portobello Road in 1970, and punk-rock central (Stiff)  in 1977. He time-slipped but many of his pre-77 compadres just fell by the wayside.

In as much as they were experimental, free-form and multi-media (30s movies would be mixed in with the slide projections) the light show was typically BB. And here’s the key: yet again he was providing contemporary music with a visual identity

Is there one album design that you think best sums up Barney’s design style?

To be honest, no. Although there are qualities which are constant – precision, use of reference, typographic clarity, excellent use of colour, wit, surprising juxtapositions, geometry, cryptography – his work was largely unstylised. This enabled him to problem solve for his variety of clients.

My current favourite is Get Happy!! By Elvis Costello & The Attractions, but last week it was Gracious! by Gracious and next week it will be King Rocker by Generation X because I had a nice chat about Barney with Tony James the other day. The week after that it will be Labour Of Lust by Nick Lowe because I’ve just learnt I’m going to DJ for Nick at the Royal Albert Hall in May!

Barney suffered from bouts of depression and unfortunately committed suicide in November of 1983.  Where do you think his work would have gone had he lived longer?  Would he have continued to design album covers or do you think he would have moved into other forms of design?

He was certainly becoming frustrated with the grind of single/album/music press advert/tour poster and, in his final year, work was rejected as substandard which indicates a distinct lack of interest.

To me it seems his excursions into painting hadn’t been sufficiently satisfying and that his video direction was too way-out to get any more commissions. If successful, his contemporaries were by this time firmly ensconced in advertising and design companies but he was somewhat out on a limb having worked for harum-scarum indie record labels for so long.

It’s extraordinary to consider the timing to his death. In 1983 the CD had really started to kick in. Even though this was an unsatisfactory size for a designer used to the 12″ or 7″ canvas I’m sure that, since he liked to work with scale, the packaging possibilities would have appealed.

1983 also witnessed the first publicly noted redesign of The Face which brought Neville Brody – a BB admirer – to everyone’s attention. 1983 saw the beginning of the lionisation of pop culture designers in the UK.

Peter Saville came up with the seemingly abstruse quote to Fantin-Latour on the cover of New Order’s Power Corruption and Lies, which also featured a colour code to indicate the band names. These have a direct line to Barney’s use of the David Shepherd parody on the cover of Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces and the inclusion of the proof colour code on the front of Costello’s This Year’s Model.

That same year Malcolm Garrett, who worked for Barney at Radar Records, came through to the mainstream as the in-house designer of Duran Duran. All three of these heralded an era of star designers, and were part of the new generation overshadowing his achievements as the decade got underway. But what did BB expect, having refused to sign his work in the first place?

It should also be remembered that the music scene was pretty dire – all high-gloss production, endless 12″ remixes and that awful drum sound – so BB must have seemed as out-of-sync as Ian Dury, Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello, who all released career-low records around that time.

I’m told that he shied away from new technologies such as video-edit suites, preferring to oversee manual edits of his promos, so who’s to know what he’d have made of the Apple Mac which was launched, of course, in 1983.

You’ve got a blog “Reasons to be Cheerful” that further expands on the book and Barney’s career.  What do you hope to accomplish with the blog that haven’t already done with the book?

I see the book as the bedrock on which we can base a range of BB-related and music design activity, starting online. The book is out in the US in the autumn, so the second edition is looking like a reality. That will be even better with added info and images.

We had at least 150 images we couldn’t get into the first edition because it would have become unwieldy so the prospect of getting tucked into these – which range from sketches and notes to albums posters and magazines from 1960 to 1983 – was too tempting to resist.

Also I have interviewed more people who have come out of the woodwork and been given a great deal more archive material. Where it is not personal and speaks to the work, all of this will be made public over time.

If you had a fake band what would its name be?

Highly Flammable Boots

I don’t know about you, but I often wonder where some indie bands these days get their names.  While some bands go for the ordinary, “Spoon”, others go for obtuse, “The Sea and Cake”, or scholarly sounding “Architechture in Helsinki.”  Now this isn’t to say I don’t like these bands or their names, because I do, but it does make you think about what led them to the name they selected and whether or not it’s hurt or helped their careers.  A new article by Beat Crave takes a look at the latest name obsession – animal names – and dares to point out which ones are overused.

When picking a name for your fake band, make sure you pick one that stands out from the crowd but still matches and sums up the sound you envision for the band.  Since there is no sound involved with a fake band it’s important that you connote as much of a feel for the band as you can with every detail you provide.  After all, if you pick the wrong name or one that’s doesn’t catch someone’s attention you’re likely to get lost in the shuffle.  So spend some time thinking about your name, because on Figment sometimes it is ALL in the name.

Good Grief…did Charles Schulz place hidden messages in the Beethoven music that Schroeder played in Peanuts strips?  According to William Meredith, the Director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University, he did.  No really, I’m not making this up, it’s in the NY Times.

Just imagine what Schulz might have had Schroeder backmask if he’d been listening to Zeppelin!