//Proof copy of unused front cover for single sleeve, Your Generation/Day By Day, Generation X, Chrysalis, 1977.//
Presented here for the first time in nearly 35 years, this is Barney Bubbles’ original artwork for the front cover of Your Generation, the 1977 debut single by Generation X.
The design was rejected because the photograph was considered too routine. What a shame. This is a typically high-impact Bubbles work combining concise photographic presentation with audacious typography.
The quartet’s manager Jonh Ingham, the journalist who had been at the forefront of punk reportage, has dug it out from his archive exclusively for this blog.
“I cut, folded and glued it, so we could see what the sleeve would look like held in the hand,” says Ingham.
This Larry Wallis poster design – one of five of the stars of the 1977 Live Stiffs tour – is among 20 or so examples of Barney Bubbles’ work included in Rude & Reckless, the punk and post-punk graphics exhibition opening tomorrow (July 21) at NYC’s Steven Kasher Gallery.
The show samples the collection of New York resident Andrew Krivine, who started accumulating records, posters, flyers and ephemera during family visits to the UK in the late 70s.
Barney Bubbles produced this striking poster for a performance of Vivian Stanshall’s one-off show An Evening At Rawlinson End at the London’s Collegiate Theatre (these days the Bloomsbury Theatre) in October 1978.
The grid overlaid an image of Stanshall aboard his favourite vehicle – the bicycle – in character as the “still unusual” Hubert Rawlinson.
7" single sleeve. Back + front of Cairo, Amazulu, Towerbell Records, 1983.
The single sleeves section of this site has been updated today with the addition of yet more images, bringing the total number of Barney Bubbles’ designs for the 7″ format there to 85 (and there are more on their way…)
Some of the Chelsea College Of Art graphics communications students who staged their own Barney Bubbles mini-exhibition last year (see here) have posted their contributions online.
I was delighted to receive this boxed Blockhead watch recently.
Of course the typogram on the watch face – which emerges at twelve-fifteen and three o’clock – was designed by Barney Bubbles at the behest of the late Ian Dury, who said in Will Birch’s No Sleep Till Canvey Island:
“I phoned him and said, ‘I want a logo. It’s got to be black and white and square’. Then I heard somebody in his office say, ‘Wow’ and he said, ‘I’ve done it’.”
This is the letterhead Barney Bubbles produced for Hawkwind’s Stacia Blake in 1973.
By that time Stacia – who was always billed by her first name – was an integral and popular part of the Hawkwind experience. Hence the need for headed paper.
Blake’s commanding stage presence and interpretative dancing added a vital female physicality to the aural and sonic battery the group launched on a near-nightly basis and for some fans, this writer included, they were never quite the same after her departure in 1975.
It was an honour to receive this a few months back in the post from Blake, these days an accomplished artist based in Ireland.
She had heard about the staging of Process and wanted to make her contribution, which was much appreciated, not least by fans such as Mick Jones and Jah Wobble, who remembered her role in Hawkwind with affection and admiration.
This 100-second career resume has been created by Lisa Whitaker, who is currently studying graphics at Leeds College of Art.
The DVD – housed in an “inside-out” sleeve and accompanied by a poster – came out of a course brief for a collection of 100 design objects in which she compiled album sleeves, including Bubbles’ design for Imperial Bedroom by Elvis Costello And The Attractions.
“I am fascinated by this talented man and his links to other creative people,” says Whitaker. “My moving image piece Barney Bubbles Inside Out pulls together the research and is aimed at graphic designers, record collectors and music lovers as a way of spreading the word about inspirational figure.”
The absorption and reinterpretation of Barney Bubbles’ oeuvre continues apace, as evinced by this, the design for Punks Jump Up’s Blockhead EP by Michael Willis.
With an overall feel of Bubbles’ compositional techniques – particularly that of realising physiognomy by use of abstract and unusual elements – Willis’ artwork draws on such Bubbles’ creations as the BLOCKHEAD logo, the Tommy The Talking Toolbox ident, the Space Ritual tour material and the typography of the Revelations and Doremi Fasol Latido packages.
Since he was one of the pioneers of the so-called “age of plunder” (as Jon Savage pointed out in his 1983 piece on post-modernism for The Face), it was perhaps inevitable that the reintroduction of Bubbles’ work to a new generation of graphic artists and designers – via Reasons To Be Cheerful and Process – would result in the master himself being plundered.
