As previously detailed here, in 1981 Barney Bubbles was drafted in to design the sleeve of Depeche Mode’s debut album Speak & Spell at the suggestion of his friend, the photographer Brian Griffin.
12in sleeve. Front cover, Speak & Spell, Depeche Mode, Mute, 1981.
Barney’s work was frequently interlaced with symbols of power, and one of his most subtle was the arrangement of the credits on the album’s back cover in the form of a royal chess piece to accompany the crown logo he created for the band’s name.
Left: Label copy. Right: Back cover, Speak & Spell, 1981.
Appearances by Depeche members are limited to on-stage footage, and the narrative is driven by the hopes, dreams, experiences and fantasies of the millions of Depeche followers all over the world, from California to Iran via Canada, Mexico, Germany, Romania and Russia.
If there is a common thread running through this and Oil City Confidential (two very different films about groups from opposite ends of the musical spectrum), it is the transformative power of music, whether sweaty four-to-the-floor R&B or anthemic stadium synth.
We urge you to catch both documentaries when you can; keep up with the latest news and info on their general release here and here.
12in sleeve. Choose Your Own Adventure, heartsrevolution, iheartcomix, 2008.
If proof were needed that Barney Bubbles continues to inspire contemporary designers more than a quarter of a century after his death, look no further than London’s own Kate Moross, the 23-year-old making waves around the world with a remarkable body of work which first started to attract attention while she was still at Camberwell College of Arts.
10in card gatefold. Back and front, Populuxxe, Cutting Pink With Knives, Isomorph, 2008.
Inner gatefold, Populuxe, Cutting Pink With Knives.
Moross shares Barney’s deft use of colour, concerns for isometry, geometry and architectural form and his appetite for music (operating vinyl-only label Isomorph). She is similarly fascinated by symbols - not least the repeated representation of her trademark three triangles - and applies a serious work ethic across a range of media and disciplines.
Moross determinedly creates at the cross-hatches of fine art and graphic design but, in a similar fashion to Barney, refuses to be pinned down stylistically.
Her flyers, posters, stickers, record sleeves, t-shirts, art direction, lighting design, stage sets and videos for the likes of La Roux, Simian Mobile Disco, heartsrevolution and Telepathe exemplify a dedication to detail and a ready wit.
Music video, directed by Jo Apps and Kate Moross. Audacity Of Huge, Simian Mobile Disco, 2009.
Moross - who has designed for record labels including Allido and Merok Records, created campaigns for such companies as Cadbury’s and a clothing range for Top Shop - was introduced to Barney’s work via his 1977 sleeve for The Damned’s album Music For Pleasure.
12in sleeve, card. Music For Pleasure, The Damned, Stiff Records, 1977.
From left: Back sleeve, both sides of inner, Music For Pleasure.
“It was old and new and confusing,” Moross told us while on the road this summer: last month she took part in Semi Permanent, the international design event in New Zealand, lining up with fellow Brits Harry Pearce (of Pentagram), Sanky (AllofUs) and Tim Beard (Bibliotheque), as well as such design legends as David Carson.
Moross during her Semi Permanent presentation, Auckland, August 15 2009. Photo: Otis Hu.
“I love confusing,” declares Moross. “I love codes and symbols, so Music For Pleasure has everything; graphic and illustrative, pattern and block colours, everything mixed together perfectly.”
La Roux t-shirt, 2009.
Moross says that the coherence within Barney’s disparate methods and styles lies in his ability to “fit the brief, and that’s what every artist or designer’s goal should be. Not everything needs to be the same, but it should always be brilliant, and Barney was brilliant”.
Moross’s rise coincided with the reawakening of interest in illustration, packaging and graphics in music circles in the Noughties.
Left: Clubnight poster 2007. Right: Test Card clubnight ident, 2008.
Advertising campaign, Cadbury's Dairy Milk, 2009.
“I think that the Sixties and Seventies did wonders, but then the Eighties and Nineties kind of stopped caring; it was the artists that sold the music, not the art,” she believes.
7in card with foil imprint. Into The Galaxy, Midnight Juggernauts, Isomorph, 2009.
“But it came back round. Packaging and design were back, labels and bands started employing illustrators and designers to make something special again.”
Packaging 12in vinyl and jewel case CD. Temporary Pleasure, Simian Mobile Disco, Wichita, 2009.
7in sleeve, paper. Back and front cover, Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, Ian Dury & The Blockheads, Stiff Records, 1978.
“I love the way the fractured isometric shapes are broken apart in a bold three-colour composition and then beautifully reconstructed on the reverse,” she said.
10in debossed laser-foiled matt sleeve. Back and front, Switchblade EP, heartsrevolution, ISO 2008.
Sleeve detail, Switchblade EP.
Foil sticker, Switchblade EP.
“To be honest, I didn’t know Barney’s work until recently,” Moross added. “But when I found it, I wished I could have been around at a time of such awesome creativity within musical ephemera. I feel like, with my enthusiasm, I would have fitted in well.”
That may be true. But their loss in the Seventies and Eighties is definitely our gain today.
Signed promotional poster for Danger, 1982. (c) H. Thompson/Reasons 2009.
Credits, Mirror Moves, The Psychedelic Furs, CBS, 1984.
Barney Bubbles’ association with the great British post-punk band The Psychedelic Furs may not have lasted all that long yet it proved to be fertile, particularly when it came to his friendship and working relationship with the group’s driving force and frontman Richard Butler.
Front cover, Forever Now, The Psychedelic Furs, CBS UK, 1982.
These days an exhibiting painter, Butler attended Epsom School of Art & Design and handled the group’s visuals, receiving a credit for the artwork for the group’s second album Talk Talk Talk along with the phrase ”After Andy Warhol”. As noted in the comment below, the design was created by Julian Balme, who had started his career at Stiff Records in 1979.
The collusion with Barney on the band’s 1982 release Forever Now and it’s attendant singles paid dividends in the form of excellent and typographically challenging artwork which may have bamboozled the US record company but impressed and endeared Barney to the group: at that time Richard and his bass-playing brother Tim, guitarist John Ashton and ex-Birthday Party drummer Phil Calvert.
On 1984 album Mirror Moves, their first release after Barney’s death, the Furs - and young designer Al McDowell - tipped their hat to his memory in the credits with the words “After Barney Bubbles”.
Back and front, Forever Now, CBS Netherlands, 1982. Note hand-written band name and title added to front cover.
We’re indebted to A&R legend Howard Thompson - rightly lauded these days for his digital radio station North Fork Sound - for the back-story and some of these images, including the rare and never previously published promotional poster for the single Danger.
Barney Bubbles painting his portrait of Richard Butler 1983. (c) Reasons 2009.
“I met Barney four or five times; he seemed like a lovely, if some times troubled fellow,” says Howard. “When I was at Island Records in the mid 70s, I instigated the distribution deal for Stiff so I think that must be where we first came across each other.”
Back and front cover, Love My Way 7", The Psychedelic Furs, CBS UK, 1982.
Moving to CBS, Howard worked with the Furs on their first two albums, and then transferred to the US in early 1982. At this time, as we know, Barney had started to take his portfolio around various larger record labels, encouraged by friends such as photographer Brian Griffin.
Inner gatefold, Love My Way 7", The Psychedelic Furs, CBS UK, 1982.
Commissioned by Butler, Barney’s design for the front of Forever Now applied a greater sense of form to the Warhol-esque screens used on earlier Furs’ releases with an organised mosaic of tiles in flourescent green and pink.
Griffin’s dramatic monochrome band portrait is filtered through this prism and framed by Barney’s circular logo created from yellow stars.
On the back the song titles run into each other in imposing capitals decorated with tessellated pink rectangles.
Back and front cover, Love My Way 12", The Psychedelic Furs, CBS UK, 1982.
CBS’ enhanced budget, and the industry trend towards multi-format releases, enabled Barney to go to town on the singles.
Love My Way appeared with two 7″ sleeves - one a gatefold - and a 12″. The latter compiled Griffin’s head and shoulder shots on the front.
The B-side song is Aeroplane.”On the back is a ‘xerox’ of the parts to a model aeroplane kit; so Barney, isn’t it?” says Howard.
The Love My Way sleeves were subjected to a gelatin-silver process (which embeds metallic silver in the coating). These scans aren’t the best, but silver dots can be indentified as an element of the five tangent circle motifs which appear enlarged on the gatefold inner.
Motifs, Love My Way 7" gatefold, The Psychedelic Furs, CBS UK, 1982.
The decorations - see also the three interlocked circles which Barney added to certain FBeat releases - are also arranged in repeat as quasi-chemical structures which convey the more user-friendly name “The Furs” as well as accommodating lettering which spells out the band’s full name and the song titles.
The front cover of second single Danger is one of Barney’s paintings. Typical of his private work of this period, apparently random squiggles and abstract shapes deliver the physiognomy of the four musicians. Earlier covers are evoked - 1977’s Music For Pleasure by The Damned, 1981’s Me & The Boys by The Inmates - and references are made; for example the “paint-pot” ring also appeared on artwork and badges for Do it Yourself by Ian Dury & The Blockheads.
Back and front cover, Danger 12", The Psychedelic Furs, CBS UK, 1982.
The Danger cover was printed as a poster for circulation to the media in an edition of just 90. ’I have number 18,” says Howard. “The signatures read: ’Love Love Love Richard Butler(with a drawing of a heart)T. Butler Phillip Calvert xx John A$hton‘.”
Left: Front cover, US release of Forever Now, Columbia, 1982. Left: Inner, Mirror Moves, CBS, 1984.
Barney’s intricate artwork appears to have been too much for the US record label Columbia. “In their infinite wisdom, ‘marketing’ chose to use a different, non-BB cover for the album and, of course, they released the singles in generic bags,” says Howard. “Twats.”
Back and front, 4Star EP, Columbia, 1982.
Chasing the youth market (which picked up on the group when they re-recorded early track Pretty In Pink for the John Hughes movie of the same name) CBS appropriated and bowdlerised Barney’s artwork for the grab-bag 4 Star EP.
Butler was responsible for the design for 1984’s Mirror Moves in conjunction with Al McDowell, who has long proclaimed a debt to Barney’s work - his design company Rocking Russian was in part named after Barney’s demonstrations that contemporary design could be invigorated by engaging with the work of the Constructivists.
Back and front, Mirror Moves, Columbia, 1984.
McDowell formed offshoot record sleeve design company Da Gama with Tomato’s John Warwicker and, with Butler, produced a sleeve which drew on the elements created by Barney: the circular album title logo and arrangements of stars which are overlaid with tiled portraits, again by Griffin.
The layout of the song titles and credits follows Barney’s back cover of Forever Now and, right at the end, there is the special tribute to their departed friend and design hero.
Study 2009, Richard Butler. Oil on canvas, 16in x 12in.
Richard Butler went on to greater success with the Furs before forming Love Spit Love in the 90s. The Psychedelic Furs reunited for a tour in 2000. Butler now concentrates on painting and recently held an exhibition of new work at Miami’s Kevin Bruk Gallery.
Today we unveil the first public exhibition of the collected single sleeves created by Barney Bubbles; a stunning virtual presentation featuring a host of rarely seen images.
England's Glory/Dream Tobacco, Max Wall, Stiff BUY 12. Released April 1, 1977.
The single sleeves are important since they - more than any other area of Barney’s work - embody the characteristics of pop art as defined by Richard Hamilton in 1957:
Pop Art is:
Popular (designed for a mass audience)
Transient (short-term solution)
Expendable (easily forgotten)
Low cost
Mass produced
Young (aimed at youth)
Witty
Sexy
Gimmicky
Glamorous
Big business
Barney’s single sleeves comply, though, of course, he added the particular characteristic of anonymity. Only one sleeve carries a credit - for the lettering above Humphrey Ocean’s portrait on England’s Glory/Dream Tobacco by Max Wall (apparently at the insistence of the late comic genius).
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll/Razzle In My Pocket, Ian Dury, Stiff BUY17. Released August 26, 1977.
More will be added over the coming months; just last night at the Nick Lowe/Ry Cooder aftershow, Soft Boys’ leader Robyn Hitchcock confirmed what had long been posited: Barney was responsible for his band’s 1978 Radar single (I Want To Be An) Anglepoise Lamp/Fat Man’s Son.
(I Wanna Be An) Anglepoise Lamp/Fat Man's Son, The Soft Boys, Radar ADA8. Released: April 1978.
Collectively this represents an inspired body of commercial work, much of it concentrated in the post-punk period after Barney returned to the music business in March 1977.
From Head To Toe/The World Of Broken Hearts, Elvis Costello & The Attractions, FBeat XX30. Released September 1982.
In the days when hit singles sold in their hundreds of thousands, Barney (who majored in cardboard design for retail purposes at college) almost single-handedly ignited the explosion of 45rpm packaging as it came back into vogue.
Darling Let's Have Another Baby/It Really Digs/Something Else (Chiswick NS27). Released January 1978.
Eager to address the problem-solving possibilities offered by multiple releases and coloured vinyl, Barney produced at an impressive rate, with few, if any, falling below the high quality threshold.
Accidents Will Happen/Talking In The Dark, Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Radar ADA38. Released May 1979.
The mask of anonymity eased adoption of a dizzying array of styles and approaches. Yet themes, symbols, fonts and techniques recur and develop: hearts, arrows, stars, tears, physiognomy, dynamic use of colour, art history references, industry in-jokes, photographic treatments and so on.
Some contain elements contributed by others; obviously the images of the photographers with whom he worked, and also releases such as Accidents Will Happen, where Barney applied the concept of inverting the sleeve. The stills which ended up on the inside came from the promo for the song made by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel. Designs for earlier releases, such as The Pie and Silver Machine, were completed by record companies out of artwork he had already created for albums or posters.
Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick /There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards, Ian Dury And The Blockheads, Stiff BUY38. Released: November 23 1978.
We start with the folded paper sleeve for the Christmas message of 1966 Barney recorded in a railway station auto recording booth for family and a few friends and move on to big sellers such as Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, which reached number one and spent 15 weeks in the UK chart.
Visit the exhibition here; download tracks by clicking on individual sleeves. These days music arrives naked, so come celebrate a time when it paraded all gussied up and garbed in finery.
The application of geometric symbols was an important element of Barney Bubbles’ visual language.
Detail from label, I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down, FBeat XX1, February 1980.
As pointed out in Reasons To Be Cheerful, Barney’s use of symbolism throughout his career underlines his consistency of approach and undercuts notions of a clear division between his 60s/70s “hippie” work and that produced after joining Stiff Records in March 1977.
The presence of symbols also effected a “signature” for this artist who opted for anonymity and avoided credits in his later years.
A fine example are the three triangulated circles which surfaced in February 1980 as a tiny detail on the label for I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down, the hit single by Elvis Costello & The Attractions which inaugurated Jake Riviera’s FBeat Records. Next they appeared on the double A-side promo for the label’s second single, Splash (A Tear Comes Rolling Down) by Clive Langer & The Boxes, though were gone by the official release.
B-side of From Head To Toe, Elvis Costello & The Attractions, FBeat, 1983.
Thereafter, the circles crop up on releases by Costello and Nick Lowe up until Barney’s death in 1983. However, the symbol was not used in the label copy for releases by other acts on FBeat, including Lowe’s collaborative projects with Dave Edmunds in Rockpile such as Seconds of Pleasure or The Attractions’ “solo” effort Mad About The Wrong Boy.
So what to make of this repeated, if selective, use? The pyramid and triangle were sources of fascination in line with Barney’s interest in Egyptology and Norse mythology, as evinced by such projects as The Glastonbury Fayre and in various forms for Hawkwind and band-member Nik Turner’s solo projects.
"Pyramid power": Cut and fold inserts, The Glastonbury Fayre, Revelation, 1972.
The three overlapping circles convey many meanings, drawing on the potency of Sacred Geometry as well as the work of “The Great Geometer” himself, Appollonius of Perga.
From advert for Xitintoday by Nik Turner's Sphynx, NME, April 22, 1978.
In Christian terms, they represent the Holy Trinity, and in combination with triangles signify alchemy. Intersecting and tangental circles occur in Masonic mathematical calculations - Barney’s father Fred Fulcher was a mason and the compass, used to draw circles, is a key symbol in Freemasonry.
Left: Symbol for the Holy Trinity. Right: The Borromean Rings.
The three interlaced circles are also known as the Borromean Rings (since they decorate a particular Baroque palazzo on one of the three northern Italian islands owned in the 17th Century by the Borromeo family). A form of the link was used by the Vikings and is known as Odin’s Triangle.
Contemporary versions used in sociology and management models.
The explicit use of this symbol during the FBeat period comes into focus when one considers Barney’s ongoing preoccupation with power - hence also the variants on crowns and other regal insignia. The strength in the three interlocked circles lies in their unity; if one is broken the potency is lost.
My interpretation is that the three circles - fuelled by the energy of the pyramid and imbued with multiple layers of meaning - represent the powerful interplay between Jake Riviera, Barney himself and the priority artists Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe: this was a time when management, design and music were all reliant on each other and firing on all cylinders.
