No more to be said, read the story behind the cover here.
Design
After posting a circular version of the London Underground map earlier this week, this version was bought to my attention. Everyone knows that the traditional map has locations forced into places that they aren’t so as to make them fit a cleaner, clearer design. Mark Noad decided to make a geographically correct version of the map in September 2011 and his excellent website has various versions available for download inc. step-free access, journey times and walking links.
Things have been so manic this weekend that I’ve only just found time to write something about Storm Thorgerson who passed away last Thursday. As part of the design group Hipgnosis, alongside Aubrey Powell and Peter Christopherson (also no longer with us), they pretty much defined the look of the rock album sleeve in the late sixties, seventies and beyond. You will know their work even if you don’t realise it; Pink Floyd‘s ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ being the most famous if not their best (as Storm used to admit). 10cc, Genesis, Led Zeppelin, Scorpions, Peter Gabriel, The Who, Black Sabbath, Yes, ELO, AC/DC, Paul McCartney and many more… without their work it’s doubtful magazines like Mojo and Record Collector would have much to fill their pages with these days :).
Seriously though, it’s hard to think of anyone else who dominated sleeve design more in the seventies with such a distinctive brand of photographic surrealism, all made pre-computer, on budgets most designers could only dream of these days. It was the age of the gatefold sleeve, Led Zeppelin led the way in deluxe packaging and the sleeve as canvas was in its heyday. Even though Hipgnosis disbanded in 1983 Thorgerson made the transition out of the rock seventies and into the flasher, poppier eighties, still designing for Pink Floyd but adding XTC, Def Leppard, The Cult and more to his portfolio. After Hipgnosis he moved into video direction before returning to sleeve design in the nineties and noughties for bands like Biffy Clyro, The Mars Volta, Muse and Dream Theatre, all wanting some of that retro record sleeve surrealism.
Pick up any book of album cover art and it’s a sure bet that he or Hipgnosis will feature, in some cases heavily although he did co-author the 6 Record Cover Album books in the 80’s so that’s no surprise. His sleeves for Peter Gabriel and The Scorpions used to freak me out as a kid first visiting record shops and I absolutely loved the tribal mask constructions on the Ellis, Beggs and Howard ‘Homelands’ LP sleeve. He’ll probably best be remembered for his work with Pink Floyd and I get the sense that he was at his most relaxed and playful with them, especially is the various compilations and re-imaginings of his past work he was called upon to do, the best being the ‘Echoes’ compilation imagery.
These days the art of the record sleeve is getting reduced to a thumbnail, hidden away, then forgotten, in pdf ‘booklets’ attached to download packages and lower resolutions for the web. When budgets are so tight that album design duties are relegated to online competitions for fans to enter, it’s important to remember and recognise how important the work of Storm is and was. He and others like him shaped the visual language of parts of the music industry and showed that artwork can be as important, controversial and powerful as the music it surrounds. * Special mention for the excellent Hipgnosis Covers blog too, I could spend all day there.
This debuted in January this year apparently but I only just saw it, I rather like it as a new take on the standard London Underground map. The redesign isn’t official however but was done by Dr Max Roberts, based on concentric circles, partly inspired by the orbital London Overground. He posted it on the Going Underground blog earlier this year because he felt the regular map was becoming too crowded with the recent addition of new lines like the East London Line. It’s probably not geographically correct but then neither is the regular tube map, it does show however, show unbalanced the South of London is in relation to the North where transport links are concerned.
Tomorrow sees a double whammy in Madrid where I’ve been invited to talk about my design work in general for a meeting at Café Molar. It starts around 7.30pm and should last for an hour with a Q&A session.
Later that night I’ll be playing a 2 hour AV DJ set at the Skills Club before heading back to the UK on Saturday for Record Store Day.
From an issue of i-D magazine dated Aug ’86, this recently turned up in an expedition in the Secret Oranges archive (incidentally it’s Steve Cook‘s birthday today). A rather risqué ad for Sigue Sigue Sputnik‘s debut album, ‘Flaunt It’, which I seem to remember got banned from most publications at the time. I’m a big fan of Sputnik, especially this Giorgio Moroder-produced album and its surrounding singles, so you’ll occasionally see posts about them featured here.
Tony James, band leader and general mastermind behind them recently wrote up their history at length on their newly-launched website and it’s a candid, no-holds-barred read. As with any history, it’s his version of events and I’m sure there’s another side to it but he’s very forthcoming about the failings of the second album and the record industry crap that went with it. There are also all sorts of outtakes and demos up online under the heading ‘Demobomb’ which are pretty illuminating in terms of how they got their sound.
Also below is the news piece from Sounds the week the band signed their ‘million pound’ deal. This was quite something at the time as the band had a lot of hype surrounding them without a recording to their name but had managed to get the sort of double page features in the music press usually reserved for established artists. Also if anyone has a sealed copy of the cassette on card version of this album, (see above) packaged to look like a toy, then I’m still looking for a copy.
The new Demdike Stare 12″ has a nice twist to the packaging and design. It comes in a paper sleeve, housed in a second thin PVC protective cover with an A4 insert and labels that are either black or white for sides A and B. On the front are instructions that customers would see if they had ordered their own set of test pressings to approve before a release.
For those that don’t know, once a record is finished it goes to a cutting house where they make a master ‘lacquer’ of the disc on a large lathe in real time. That lacquer is then sent off to the pressing plant and a small number of ‘test’ pressings are made, usually called ‘white labels’ due to the fact that a white label is pressed onto the centre where the regular label would go. These are then sent to the artist or record label to check that ‘the cut’ was OK and that everything sounds fine before proceeding with the full run of the pressing. It would be foolish to go through such a delicate and variable process without checking a sample copy before pressing hundreds or thousands of discs only for them to all be defective.
The new release is the first in a series of ‘Test Pressings’ by the duo and the cover sets out the various steps you should take when getting such a pressing yourself. Only the catalogue number appears on the front, no titles or even the group’s name (that’s on the insert) and the same thing is repeated in German on the reverse of the sleeve. I think this is their best release in a while, dark and sinister as usual but more beat-orientated this time around, in an industrial meets jungle kind of way.
Getting a copy of this little release has been a mission, by the time I found out about it it was sold out on pre-order. I put it on my Piccadilly Records wishlist and hoped, badgered the label to repress it but they couldn’t afford to. Eyed up copies on eBay but didn’t want to give the flippers the satisfaction but finally succumbed when the label – Sonic Catherdral – put up one of their final copies to raise money for Red Nose Day a couple of weeks back. I think it was the most I’d ever paid for a 7″ (two actually) but it’s going to a good cause so fuck it.
‘A Psyche For Sore Eyes’ is a beautifully realised package, designed by Heretic, to house two coloured 45s, a pair of 3D glasses and a whole heap of psychedelic imagery. The paper engineering is particularly clever in the way it accommodates each component and the glasses aren’t just a gimmick. Rather than have ‘look I can touch it’ 3D the red/green balance works more in an op-art sense, similar to the 3D underground comix designs I posted two years back.
Musically I wouldn’t call it ‘psyche’ as such, – it’s a compilation that swings from indie rock to shoegazing drones to electron-noise. Lead track, ‘The Correspondent’ by Hookworms, is so reminiscent of ‘A Storm In Heaven’-era Verve that it’s hard not to imagine ‘mad’ Richard Ashcroft on vocals. The Vacant Lots have been worshipping at the alter of Suicide but in a good way and the fuzz bass and reverb of Lorelle meets the Obsolete reminds me of both the 60’s and the 90’s simultaneously (see ’60, see ’90, go! anyone?*). Even though it’s hard to find in stores you can listen and buy digitally.
*(bad Bow Wow Wow joke – sorry)
The poster, designed by Luke Insect, for Salon des Refusés V – a pop up shop/gallery initiated by Scraffer, coming this April in West London. I’ll have prints for sale and work on display – more info soon…
Another zoetrope picture disc – this time for Kate Bush‘s Record Store Day release of ‘Running Up That Hill’ (2012 remix). This will be on a 10″ but it’s not known yet how many copies will be pressed or how you’ll actually see this animate on the turntable. The design was put together by Peacock who also did the same for her last year – and check out the lovely homepage for Kate’s site here.
Astrophonica end their trilogy of VIP 10″s with Machine Drum‘s take on ‘Jungle Juke’. It works a treat and sits alongside the other two rather nicely. Each sleeve is screen-printed in two colours, hand stamped and the whole run is limited to 300 of each disc. Fracture and Om Unit head up the first two releases and they can be bought from here.
In other news, Machine Drum just signed to Ninja Tune! 
GOAT tour T-shirt by Luke Insect, available in 3 colours on the band’s US tour.
When the cover image for David Bowie‘s ‘The Next Day’ appeared earlier this year I was firmly in the ‘dislike’ camp. Designer friends raved about it but I just couldn’t agree, although it was nice to have a debate raging over a piece of graphic design – brilliant PR move there. Jonathan Barnbrook‘s defacing of Bowie’s classic, ‘Heroes’, did nothing for me visually despite being a bold move from Bowie for allowing such an act to become the cover of his new album. Supposedly signalling a need to move on and obscure the past from which any artist is always judged, Barnbrook said, “The obscuring of an image from the past is also about the wider human condition; we move on relentlessly in our lives to the next day, leaving the past because we have no choice but to.”
Fair enough, I can get with that but the result is dull and ugly to me, the casual scoring out of the original title and insertion of a white square seemingly designed to provoke. The use of a classic image reminds me of lesser designers who take other’s established icons as part of their own to bolster their visual cred, the equivalent of someone wearing a faux-distressed Led Zeppelin T-shirt they bought in Top Shop last week. The dull typeface across the middle… there’s just nothing to say about it. I would have liked it if they’d have physically stuck a white square with the title onto actual Bowie albums from the past, not just ‘Heroes’ but any of them, that would have had some impact.
The moment passed, as all internet ‘storms’ do, and the first single emerged to rabid fanfare, which I was also unmoved by. I like Bowie but I can’t say I could remember a song he’s done since the ‘Let’s Dance’ era if I’m honest and I stopped checking him out a long time ago. Then, last week, I was at dinner with some friends and one recommended I listen to it as it was, ‘the best thing he’s done since ‘Scary Monsters’. Really? But the single was a maudlin ballad, sung by a man who sounded like he was reminiscing about his glory days – although excessive plays on 6 Music over the past month have softened me to it somewhat. ‘No, that’s the only thing like it on the record, the rest is just a great rock album, said the friend. So I went home and checked the stream on iTunes. My god, he wasn’t wrong.
After hearing the single, the album is a revelation, not only is it full of killer hooks and inventive arrangements, it’s Bowie in full flow. Opener, ‘The Next Day’, kicks straight in and within 70 seconds roars into the chorus with Bowie hollering for all his worth, “HERE I AM, not quite dying, my body left to rot in a hollow tree!” As opening tracks on a comeback album go, that takes some beating and immediately silences all the pundits who were sure the album would be a melancholic glance back at the past by an aging icon. You’d never know it was the same record to feature, ‘Where Are We Now?’, which is a huge curveball of a lead single if ever there was one. ‘Dirty Boys’ skanks along sounding like he’s being backed by Fishbone at a New Orleans wake, ‘If You Can See Me’ is just intense, his voice pitched into alien dimensions whilst navigating a time signature that would tax any competent player. ‘Dancing Out In Space’ recalls the best parts of the 80’s pop like ‘Modern Love’, a joyous, bouncy song with doo-wop backing vocals whilst ‘Boss Of Me’ alternates hard and soft that even the saxophone can’t spoil. There are shades of both 70’s and 80’s Bowie, the ghost of Robert Fripp‘s guitar (although he doesn’t actually play on it), the mood is generally uptempo and his band is tight as… It’s chock full of singles and you wonder whose idea it was to lead off with what is essentially the breather you get after the first five tracks. The closing track, ‘Heat’ sounds like ‘Low’-era Bowie meets Scott Walker doing ‘The Electrician’, a chilling piece to end the album. If you get the deluxe download edition there are three bonus tracks too, none of which are filler in any way.
All that to say, I love it, I’ve played virtually nothing else all week and, inspired by the music, I decided to do my own take on defacing ‘Heroes’ which I’ve posted above.
A digital recreation and remix of an early Designers Republic sleeve for The Orb who are doing some sort of gig performing their first two albums at Brixton’s Electric venue on April 5th. Tickets and event page are here.
Below is a post from my ‘other’ blog – ArtOfZTT.com – where I post artwork relating to the ZTT label and interview the people who made it. 
I arrive early, at a pub just outside Hither Green station in deepest South East London, to meet Tony ‘AJ’ Barratt, renown music magazine photographer and key ingredient in the early days of ZTT image-making. His photos of spanners, statues, masks and landscapes gave an identity to (the) Art of Noise as well as gracing the first release from the label, ‘Into Battle’. He also did many live shots, promo and video stills for Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Andrew Poppy.
It’s Friday evening and the place is filling up, the only photo of Tony I’ve got for reference is 30 years old and he’s told me to look out for ‘a hairless Glenn Gregory, ex of Heaven 17 lookalike’. After about 10 minutes a guy comes in who might fit the bill and I catch his eye, ‘Tony?’, ‘Yes’, he says, shaking my hand but with a very puzzled expression on his face. ‘Tony Barratt?’ I enquire, ‘ah, no, you’ve got the wrong person, he says, ‘but my name IS Tony though’. With perfect timing, the right Tony walks through the door holding a copy of the Ambassadors Theatre program for ‘The Value of Entertainment’.
He does indeed look like Glen Gregory, albeit without hair, and is instantly warm, engaging and candid about his early experiences in the music business. We’re joined by his partner, Jan, and after a couple of pints we repair to his house nearby where I notice the 12″ picture discs for both ‘Relax’ and ‘Two Tribes’ amongst the many pictures hanging on their walls.
How did you get it touch with ZTT? Presumably you knew Paul from working at the NME or was that later?
No, it’s much more personal than that, I moved down to London with Paul’s sister, Jayne (they were an item). I knew Paul in Stockport, vaguely…
Is that where you’re from?
Yeah, and he bought out a fanzine – ‘Out There’ – sent it down to the NME and they said, ‘you’ve gotta come down and speak to us as soon as you can’. He went down and started off his career, this must have been early eighties so that kind of fits in. I moved down to London with Jayne in ’83 and I was a photography student at Harrow. In my second year there, obviously Paul Morley was (at) the NME and he was doing all this great stuff, (so) I took my stuff to the NME. This was before the Art of Noise or whatever. I was shown the door.
I went to the Melody Maker and started doing work there, concert stuff and photos and things, and then as time went by, Paul suddenly started to get involved with… I’ve no idea how that whole thing came to be – that he met with Trevor Horn, you might know a bit more about it or it might be mythologised by Paul or whatever.
The accepted story is that he interviewed Trevor when he was in the Buggles…
Yeah I remember that.
…he slated them, but when Trevor got the opportunity from Chris Blackwell (head of Island records) to start a label, he remembered Paul and got in touch. That would have been at some point in ’82 or ’83 presumably so you would have done those Art of Noise photos in the summer?
(Laughs) It’s awful to say but I have no memory of when or how, you have to remember that I was coming to the end of my photography course, I don’t think I’d actually left and there was this vague idea of some vague photos that might be needed for this vague idea of a group. And it was never something that was kind of like, ‘here’s a brief, we would like you to go out and do this’. The record label started and there’re all very exciting PAs at the Camden Palace with the Frankies, all sorts of bands were signing and people were interested and it was going to be the artist event of the… which it turned out, in some ways, to actually be.
AJ (with cable release), Paul Morley (with phone) and friends circa ’83 – AJ: “I took this from across the room with the cable release, if I remember, Paul was on the phone to Trevor sorting out the ZTT thing.”
But I can’t actually remember. I remember it being a great time, I’d moved down to London, I was on the guest list of these great parties and it was free drinks and I thought, ‘oh my god I can’t believe this’. And then there was this record label and there was the Frankies and this vague idea of this thing called The Art of Noise and it was never like a… Because the members were so busy all the time, it was never like, ‘the group are going on tour now, etc.’ So there was no real sense of urgency.
They weren’t a group in the classic sense were they? They were producers, studio engineers and arrangers, which is commonplace today, but back then… They were ‘the music’ and Paul was ‘the image and the words’ and he knew how to present them.
Yeah, I’m not sure how you’d describe it, and he would chuck things in, he really did chuck things into the mix there, but there was never any sense there of… a plan. I got the impression that the music they made was at the end of a hard day producing whoever the hell it was.
The initial ideas for the Art of Noise apparently came from producing Yes, they stole a drum track which was going to be wiped, which then became the basis for ‘Beatbox’.
Well, if you listen to ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart’ by Yes, there’s a bit in the middle where it kind of flips up and I remember that being crucial to the Art of Noise. I think that’s when Morley kind of went, ‘that’s what the Art of Noise should be’.
When you took all the images like the hand with the rose and the spanner, that was just you on your own or did Paul come with you, did he give you those props?
My memory of that is that, at that time, I would just go out and take photos. When Paul was talking about the Art of Noise, what kind of came into my head was like Russian Constructivism, Futurism… The Human League did an EP called, ‘The Dignity of Labour’ and I always thought of this idea of labour being a fantastic idea to get into, you know, the ‘strength through joy’ kind of thing.
I know what you mean, like SPK, imagery of spanners and hammers, almost acting out Russian Constructivist posters.
So, I would just go out on a Saturday afternoon, go down to parts of London that I didn’t know and I’d just wander about, climb into things and take photos of things and mess about. Where those photos were taken, where that crane was that I climbed into, the same place as the van (from the ‘Close Up’ sleeve). It has obviously been a scrap metal yard at some point but you can see Tower Bridge in the background and when you think about London 30 years ago, there’s a piece of scrap land that you can see Tower Bridge from, that’s unbelievable.
It’s fascinating for me to see the contacts for the original Art Of Noise spanners etc., just seeing the outtakes or different shots. (AJ had provided me with original contact sheets for some of these shots).
The spanner photo (above) is my favourite of all time because it’s my arms, I set the shot up and I judged how high up I should put the spanner and I did the cable release with my foot. Strange but true, when I saw it, I just thought, ‘wow’. It’s very rare that, you know yourself as a graphic designer, that you do something and…‘bosh’, it works. I was fairly pissed off when Morley didn’t put it on the cover. The one with the van is at a completely different time when I took my mate Phil down.
I’d figured that, I was going to ask, who was that in the mask?
(Laughs) In those shots it’s a friend of mine from college called Phil Priestman, where is he now?
Because you’d assume it was Paul.
Really? Do you think so?
Well, if there’s an image of the group, he was presenting that so you’d assume (that). It doesn’t matter who’s behind it though. Was that the same with the figure on the beach?
No, that was Jayne (laughs)
I’m not sure I want to explode any of these myths (laughs). This is the thing, I’m very aware that by explaining all this stuff it could just sort of pop the bubble. I don’t necessarily want to do that.
Well, I think it’s all well and good actually, the shots on the beach were at a place called Birling Gap, up between Brighton and Newhaven, very nice because of all those rocks and things. Me and Jayne went for a nice day out and…
“Put this cloak and mask on love…’ (laughs)
It was a cape actually, Jayne used to work at the National Theatre as a dresser and she borrowed it (laughs). If memory serves I was given the mask at ZTT and we took it down with us, or Paul dropped it around to where we lived back then. It had never crossed my mind that people would take for granted that that was Morley.
Well, who could it be? No one knew who it was… it was The Art Of Noise in some respects.
(raucous laughter from Tony) Trevor Horn?
You would assume he’s the guy in the cloak, you know? ‘Don’t look behind the screen’, kind of thing. So there’s me thinking it’s Paul and it’s actually his sister!
That’s great.
I didn’t know who it was, there’s one on the back of ‘Close Up’ and there’s someone holding the mask and you can see some slicked back hair…
Yeah, that’s Phil Priestman (laughs). Who happened to have the same kind of haircut but that’s really interesting, I’d never thought of that.
In all the Art of Noise sleeves – their greatest visual asset (to my mind) was the masks and they dropped that completely once they’d moved to China records.
‘Close Up’ is my favourite Art Of Noise 12″ bar none. For everything about it – the music, the cover, the photos, the colours – that epitomizes them for me.
I’d say you’re right actually.
I would stare at that record, like many other ZTT sleeves, and just try and find clues because that was what ZTT was about, it never gave you the answers it just posed the questions and that was half the fun of it.
Well that was part of Morley’s…mystic.
Because he got so much stick over other things, he hasn’t really gotten the credit for the art direction.
Having known him since… when I first met Paul he had hair parted down to here. Tangerine Dream, Nick Drake, reggae, he loved all that. I have the utmost admiration for him, but having said that, I have watched him chance it and throw it out there so much, actually to the detriment of his health. Like all his heroes, he believed that if he kept that up, he could keep throwing out those great ideas, ‘their fourth number one’, let’s put sperm on the cover, this’ll go. And it got to the point where actually, Jill Sinclair and Trevor were saying, ‘well look, we need to make some money here’.
You can kind of see that in the sleeves and such, that playfulness, ridiculously indulgent whilst the coffers are filling up from Frankie’s success. He had a couple of years of ‘the dream’, the honeymoon period, if you like, and then he was reeled back to reality.
The cemetery pictures for ‘Who’s Afraid of the Art Of Noise’, was that Highgate with all the statues?
I don’t know which one because there are a few, I think the cover is Anton‘s (Corbijn), that’s nothing to do with me. I used to get really pissed off at it actually because I’d be ‘Art of Noise photography: AJ Barratt’ and then there’d be this image that wasn’t mine – Anton Corbijn. Because there was no real brief… there’s a photo of a statue holding up a mask, I can’t remember what it’s on? (Moments In Love 12″ sleeve). That’s in a Paris cemetery, I thought, ‘mask, statue, that’ll do for me’ and off you go. There’s another one in Paris from the same time where there’s a wall and a bit of graffiti and a statue behind, that’s at the Eiffel Tower, it was the same time. But the whole thing with the Art Of Noise was, if you see a little image like that, from my point of view, ‘take it’ and take it to Paul who would say, ‘I like that, we’ll see what we can do with it’. And the next week it’d be on a sleeve and you’d go, ‘er, alright Paul, should I chuck an invoice in?’, ‘yeah’, ‘alright, thanks’.
So, what would happen with this? Would you ever meet the designers or would you give the stuff to Paul and he would sort it?
I didn’t have much contact with designers – I was a photography student at the time. I remember going to a design studio in Soho in, maybe, Carnaby St. and I’d take stuff in and talk to them about it. They were really nice actually.
That would have been XL
It was XL, it wasn’t Tom though (Watkins) because he was the manager. I remember taking some stuff in and them saying, ‘what was the brief with this?’, and I said, ‘hey, this is ZTT, Paul Morley’..., you know? See if you like it and work around that.
He was famous for coming in with little things like beer mats with scribbles on and then working from that.
He directed the ‘Moments In Love’ video and I remember doing the stills on that and getting a picture of JJ (Jeczalik) who had the make up on, holding a rose. And then going round to Paul’s house once when he was sick to get permission to use it and him shouting, ‘AJ, what were you thinking?’.
You did the shot of the three of them and they’re made up as, almost clown / marionettes? It looks like it’s in a hairdressing salon.
No, no, that’s backstage at The Tube (80’s TV music show) when they were on it, I did take those, yeah. We flew up to Newcastle, it was a horrible flight, bumpy all the way.
I love that photo, that’s the nearest they came (whilst on ZTT) to ‘being the group’, Anne and Gary have face paint and JJ has a mask. It’s interesting that when the Art O Noise signed to China records they made lots of records with guests – Tom Jones, Max Headroom, Duane Eddy – and they needed a front man because Paul had previously provided that.
I think they suffered from that, there was no guiding voice.
Who has these negatives then? ZTT?
Um, you see, when we moved abroad a lot of stuff got destroyed and lost but I would love to say that everything was filed up beautifully from A to B, but it isn’t. But yes, they did go to ZTT and they might well have disappeared.
At this point we have to disappear too so we’ll end part 1 here having sampled AJ’s memories of the Art Of Noise. Part 2 will be along shortly where we conclude with tales of Frankie tours and frustrating videos shoots.
All photos except the backstage of the Tube scanned from AJ’s negatives, © AJ Barratt. All sleeve and picture disc art scanned from my personal collection, © ZTT. All text © ArtOfZTT 2013.
Postscript: “Trevor Horn once told me, every studio in the land has a cupboard, where they’ve nicked all his samples” (laughs).
The Trunk reissue 10″ of Tom Dissvelt and Kid Baltan‘s ‘Electronic Movements’ single with my original Philips 7″ version of the same. The reverse of the Trunk release has Daphne Oram‘s ‘Electronic Sound Patterns’, which I don’t have an original of so you get the reverse of the Philips 45. As usual with Trunk, this is pretty limited and available from the website now. Also there’s an excellent 8 page overview of everything Trunk in this months (Feb 2013) Record Collector magazine.
Posts are slowly but meticulously being added over at artofztt.com
AJ Barratt: “I remember going into the NME offices one day and I saw this poster on their wall, and someone had added a third line to the bottom of it. ‘Noise Is Golden, Silence is a Dead Giveaway… and Bullshit stinks’, that’s what it was! (Laughs) That’s what somebody had written.”
‘Into Battle’ promo poster from the archive of AJ Barratt, digitally restored by artofztt.com. Also included is the original photo for this design, scanned from the negative. The quote above is from a forthcoming interview with AJ which contains more exclusive images from his collection.
artist: Art Of Noise title: Into Battle With Art Of Noise format: A2 promo poster design: XLZTT photography: AJ Barratt cat. no: ZTIS100 date: 09/83 art of notes: The red crosses are identical to the ones on the ‘You Can’t Suck The Same Piece of Sugar…’ poster and continue the trend for ephemeral symbols hovering in the top right corner.
I’d like to bring your attention to a new blog I’ve set up about the Art of ZTT Records (or ‘Who’s Afraid of the Art of Zang Tuum Tumb’ to give it its full title).
For years I’ve been collecting everything I can find from the early 80’s incarnation of this label and tracking down the designers and photographers responsible for some of the artwork. It’s a constant work in progress, starting off as a possible magazine article then progressing to a book idea and now, finally, I’ve decided to make it a website.
Inspired by Paul Gorman‘s rehabilitation of Barney Bubbles‘ work into today’s design community I hope the same can happen for the work of ZTT as it was hugely influential on my own desire to design for the music industry. XL, Accident and The London Design Partnership aren’t exactly household names in the same way as Vaughn Oliver and Peter Saville are but I think that the work they produced for the label in their golden age is at least an equal of the Factory and 4AD portfolios.
The site will eventually feature sleeves, promo posters, print ads, photos, exclusive interviews and associated ephemera connected with the label, its artists and designers. At the very least it should be an exhaustive gallery of an innovative label with a host of rare and forgotten imagery.
