RIP Storm Thorgerson

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.


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Circular London Underground map

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.

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Salon des Refusés V opens today, 1 week only!

Salon des Refusés V opens today at 201 Portobello Rd, London, W11, a pop up gallery and shop of 30 artists curated by Scraffer. Including work from names like Remi/Rough, Luke Insect, Pure Evil, Kid Acne, Inkie and James Jessop it should be a pretty diverse selection.

The overriding theme of the show is artists that are pushing boundaries, with the work of established artists hanging next to that of ‘up and comers’; there is something for everyone, both stylistically and fiscally.

I have an original collage piece on show called ‘Think of a Space’, one of the first of a new series I’m doing at the moment. The Scraffer site will also have two new colour versions of my ‘Skullstronaut’ print on sale shortly after the show.

The show will be on between 22nd to 28th April only and doors open between 10am and 7pm each day.

Posted in Art, Event, Openmind designs, Poster / flyer. | No Comments |

Old School Hip Hop mix on Solid Steel

This week on Solid Steel I put together the best of a set I made for the De:Tuned party in Antwerp the weekend before last with the I Love Acid crew. They asked for an old school Hip Hop and Hip House set (I think I probably own about one Hip House record so it’s more heavy on the electro to be honest). Anyway, it’s a trip back to the 80’s but with an added bonus for Solid Steel that the Antwerp crowd didn’t get. The first seven and a half minutes consists of selections from the first mixtape I ever made in 1987, extracted from an old TDK AD90 cassette and unheard by virtually anyone for 25 years.

Let me explain a little about the mix, it was made over many months in various sections once I traded in my first mixer (a Tandy model with no crossfader) and bought a Soundlab model – hence the name, ‘The Soundlab Mix’. At the time I had very few records, maybe less than 100, I had no parental collection to raid as they never had a record player and my younger brother had none either. So, I was forced to use what I could find alongside the few import 12″s I could afford and the limited UK releases of US Hip Hop that were available. People forget that a lot of early rap never got released in the UK in the first half of the 80’s, we were mostly forced to survive on Streetsounds Electro compilations and the few ‘hits’ that the Sugarhill, Tommy Boy and Def Jam labels produced until the rest of the industry caught up.

This meant that my early mixes have tracks from 7″ singles given away free with music papers, carboot soul and funk compilations and even a flexi disc I had found attached to a magazine in a paper recycling shed at school. As you will hear, the mix is massively influenced by Double Dee & Steinski‘s ‘Lessons’ series and Grandmaster Flash‘s ‘Adventures On The Wheels of Steel’. Kicking off with the Thunderbirds theme, the idea to mix well known soundtracks over beats seemed like a no-brainer but I’ve spared you the 007 and 2001 themes elsewhere on the tape. In the spirit of the aforementioned ‘Lessons’ I decided I needed an ‘old’ song to mix over some beats, similar to the ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ section in Double Dee & Steinski’s masterpiece. For this, I used the flexi disc which happened to contain, ‘The Inquisition’ from Mel Brooks‘ ‘History of the World Part 1’ film, not very politically correct by any means, sorry, I had to use what I get my hands on.

Anyway, I wanted lots happening rather than having to mix live and change records so I would record a short section of two records, wait until one had finished and pause the tape on the beat. Rewinding to the best point, I’d cue up another record and jump back in at the appropriate point, sometimes for as little one line of dialogue. Neither of the decks were Technics 1200‘s and only one had a pitch control so each record had to be pitched to beat mix before the next section. Actually the ‘pitch’ control wasn’t anything of the sort, it was a tiny screw next to the tone arm that I found, if you inserted a small screw driver into it, you could fine tune the deck speed faster or slower. At times I would have to release the pause button and start scratching immediately so a lot of it is a little shoddy, also, occasionally the initial edit was sloppy so I had to rewind and do it all again until I got a clean join between the two separate recordings. It was a learning experience and I would record small sections with what I had and slowly build on it as and when I got new records so that the side filled up over the course of about a year, eventually ending with some chart acid and dance music in amongst the beats, rhymes and film snippets.

Posted in DJ Food, Mixes/Solid Steel, Solid Steel. | No Comments |

Record Store Day 2013 ‘The Search Engine’ 4×12″ repress

It’s Record Store Day again and Ninja Tune release a four disc vinyl repress of the EPs that made up my album, ‘The Search Engine’. These are straight represses of the original three EPs (One Man’s Weird…, The Shape of Things… and Magpies, Maps & Moons) plus the Amorphous Androgynous remix 12″ from last years’ RSD (on black vinyl this time though).

The first three 12″s have been out of print for some time now and contain extra tracks plus some different mixes to the CD album, with some tracks also being full length versions. If your bought these the first time round there’s nothing new musically here I’m afraid. The poster covers are replaced by an eight panel foldout sleeve though, with remixed artwork of which you can see more images here.

In the spirit of the title, and to add a little something for RSD, I’ve had ten unique pieces of artwork inserted randomly into the first 600 copies of the album. Six high quality prints of zoetropes that I made for the exhibitions last year and four unique collages as seen in this post. All are 12″x12″ in size, signed, stamped and protected by a transparent sleeve.
If any readers of this blog find one, please let me know, I will post a photo of you here with your find and it will be nice to see how far they go out into the world. Everyone going to a store has a chance to find one of the inserts, they’re completely random and could go out to whoever orders them at stores participating in RSD. Even if you manage to get a regular copy I’d appreciate photos and locations and will post the best ones like last year.

The Ninja Tune online shop will have another 400 or so copies for sale the Monday after RSD so don’t worry if you can’t get to a store.

Posted in DJ Food, Ninja Tune, Openmind designs, Packaging, Records. | 1 Comment |

Vintage Lego ads from 1981

I absolutely love these ads from 1981, they’ve been doing the rounds on the web for some time now, I think they originate from a Lego Flickr group but I can’t find the source. Anyway, before Lego Friends designated a pink and purple world for girls only, it was resolutely unisex, and hang the cheap brown background, it was all about the bricks.

Posted in Toys. | 3 Comments |

Secret 7″s project for Record Store Day

It’s that time of year again, Record Store Day looms this Saturday and the Secret 7″ project is back for another year. Initiated by Universal Records, it presents artists and designers with the chance to create a one-off cover for one of seven different releases, both old and new.

This year’s artists are Public Enemy, Elton John, Laura Marling, Nas, Haim, Jessie Ware and Nick Drake. Over 700 sleeves have been created and each will be available on April 20th at Mother, 10 Redchurch St, London, E2 7DD at the price of £40 each with the money raised going to the charity Art Against Knives.

You won’t know who has designed which sleeve or what song you’re buying (although you can take an educated guess) until you buy it, when all will be revealed. I bought three last year and it was one of the most exciting purchases I made in recent memory.

The sleeves were on view to the public last weekend and I managed to catch the last few minutes and snap some favourites before they closed the doors, which reopen at 10am on Saturday. I spotted work by Pete Fowler, Jonathan Edwards and Felt Mistress among them but Gilbert & George have contributed this year somewhere too.

Posted in Art, Event, Packaging, Records. | No Comments |

The Image Duplicator exhibition at Orbital Comics

Here’s my entry for the Image Duplicator exhibition that opens next month in the Orbital Comics gallery in London. I posted about this last month, it’s been set up by Rian Hughes to highlight the original artists that Lichtenstein copied, uncredited, for his most famous Pop Art works. For mine I’ve chosen Tony Abruzzo‘s work that was used for two other ‘Kiss’ pieces. I wanted to give a nod to Dave Gibbons – the original artist on Watchmen – for his speaking out on the subject of appropriating imagery whilst also referencing the similar outcry when Watchmen was remodeled as Before Watchmen last year. Not quite the same thing I know but it makes for a tenuous link.

Creating a fake cover for a comic called Before Lichtenstein was the first part, I then made this into a ‘real’ distressed comic that looked like it might have been the sort of thing Lichtenstein copied from. I chose to do one of the Kiss images because of the visual link to Watchmen – the iconic silhouetted kissing imagery that crops up throughout. If I have time I’d love to do a ‘variant’ version with the same image in X-ray, aping the ‘nuclear kiss’ image.

The list of participants in the show so far is shaping up with Dave Gibbons, Shaky Kane, Rian Hughes, Steve Cook, Mark Blamire, Jason Atomic, Graham Ross, David Leach and, possibly even… Howard Chaykin (!) David Barsalou has pitched several pieces as well, his site being the Deconstructing Lichtenstein reference everyone has been using to compare and contrast images from. The show opens May 16th-31st at the Orbital Gallery (inside Orbital Comics, 8 Great Newport Street
London, WC2H 7JA).

Posted in Comics, Openmind designs. | 1 Comment |

R.I.P. Carmine Infantino

Very sad to hear the news that Carmine Infantino passed away the other day. I remember him from the time he used to draw Star Wars Weekly in the late 70’s as his distinct style stood out despite who was inking his work that week. As a result, he’s probably one of the first American comic book artists I noticed along with Micheal Golden‘s work on Micronauts. I didn’t have access to US comics at that time aside from the random samplings you could find in the spinner racks of some newsagents.


Posted in Art, Comics, Star Wars. | No Comments |

Sigue Sigue Sputnik – ‘Flaunt it’ ad from i-D

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.

Posted in Design, Magazines. | 3 Comments |