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Reasons To Be Cheerful, part 2
Four Hawkwind badges and a Nik Turner badge based on designs by Barney Bubbles. From the Coulthart archives. Readers who’ve been waiting for Reasons To Be Cheerful, Paul Gorman‘s landmark study of the...
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More Barney Bubbles
For those who’ve been eagerly awaiting Paul Gorman’s Barney Bubbles monograph, here’s the latest. Readers in the UK may also like to know there’s a feature about the book in the current issue of The...
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Reasons To Be Cheerful, part 3: A Barney Bubbles exclusive
Or why Barney Bubbles rules… The Rumour were a Seventies band I never had any interest in, being part of the Stiff Records’ pub rock axis along with Nick Lowe and others; not weird or noisy enough for...
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Who is Heeps Willard?
In which Christmas arrives two weeks early… It was nearly two years ago that I wrote “We’re overdue a decent book-length examination of his work and his influence” at the end of the epic Barney...
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Designs on Doctor Dee
Some work news. I finished this CD design last year but, as is often the case with these things, it’s taken a while to make its way into the world. This was the final piece of the Mindscape of Alan...
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Readouts
The HAL Project. January flew by in a blizzard of work so posting here tended to rely more on pictures than words. As usual the things I’ve been designing will be unveiled when they’re closer to being...
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Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?
Autobahn by Kraftwerk; Vertigo #6360 620. Colin Buttimer was in touch last week to let me know he’d copied my Barney Bubbles post (with my permission) to his excellent new site, Hard Format, which is...
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Sleeve craft
Another authorless design: Vertigo #6360 616 (1973). Things we did (or didn’t) learn about album cover design this week. • The jury is still out as to whether Barney Bubbles designed the covers for...
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A Journey Into Vision & Sound
The Million Volt Light & Sound Rave (1967). More psychedelia as Paul Gorman at The Look alerts me to an exhibition of work by Pop artist Dudley Edwards running this month at 3345 Parr St,...
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Barney ascendant
Poster by Barney Bubbles for Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!! (1980). Adelita, the publishers of Reasons To Be Cheerful: the life and work of Barney Bubbles, announced this week that Paul Gorman’s...
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Surrealism, graphic design and Barney Bubbles
Poster for Mademoiselle (1970) by Franciszek Starowieyski. Work has cranked into overdrive this week so posting will no doubt be minimal until some semblance of normality is restored. I can however...
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Design as virus #12: Barney’s faces
Sleeve for I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass (1978), a 7″ single by Nick Lowe. Design by Barney Bubbles. Continuing an occasional series. Designer Vic Fieger had a guest post at Reasons To Be...
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Weekend links
The Expansion of the First Great Ornamental Age: 3 Distances (2009) by Seher Shah. • Great Female Artists? Think Karachi. “One reason for the unusually high ratio of female artists in Pakistan has to...
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Weekend links: Hodgson edition
Masters of Terror, Vol 1, Corgi Books, 1977. No illustrator credited. It was all happening this week so there’s a lot to get through. Are you ready? Deep breath… For ye Hogge doth be of ye outer...
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Lonesome Cowboys
Years before Brokeback Mountain, and a few years before The Place of Dead Roads, another pair of gay cowboys were causing a stir on a T-shirt in the SEX boutique, London, a shop run by Malcolm McLaren...
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Weekend links
Or So It Seems (1983) by Duet Emmo. Design by The Brothers Quay. • “Make things, no rules, but be quick.” Bruce Gilbert, musician in (among others) Wire, Dome and Duet Emmo is interviewed. Related:...
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Martin Rushent, 1948–2011
Pop music is one of the best forms of time travel when it summons a memory that returns you to a specific time and place. All I need to revisit the summers of 1981/82/83 is a blast from one of these...
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Weekend links 241
A drawing by Lucille Clerc. • The usual imbalance of heat versus light this week but Kenan Malik and Teju Cole had some worthwhile things to say. Related: Atlantic illustrators respond to the events...
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Weekend links 311
Sphinx (2015) by Lupe Vasconcelos. • I’ve been reading my way through Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels for the past couple of weeks, and may well progress to some of her other books once I’m...
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Barney Bubbles: artist and designer
Image-heavy post! Please be patient. Four designs for three bands, all by the same designer, the versatile and brilliant Barney Bubbles. A recent reference over at Ace Jet 170 to the sleeve for In...
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Blog this: tits out for the future
left: tits t-shirt by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. right: the Hipp Chronoscope via io9. A new year brings new blogs which is perhaps just as well seeing as the old year drew a line under...
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Reasons To Be Cheerful: the Barney Bubbles revival
My long and rambling post about the work of Barney Bubbles in January 2007 generated a considerable flurry of renewed interest in the great designer and ended by saying “We’re overdue a decent...
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The Look presents Nigel Waymouth
This delightful piece of Art Nouveau-inflected grooviness is one of the new T-shirts designed by Nigel Waymouth for The Look via Topman. Waymouth, as some readers here may know, was part of Hapshash...
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