Barney Bubbles' fold-out poster for UK tour by Ian Dury & The Blockheads. 59cm x 64cm. 1978. To be featured in the exhibition British Design 1948-2012.
Today the rehabilitation of Barney Bubbles’ legacy moved a step further with the BBC Radio 4 broadcast of a half-hour documentary about the personal life of this graphic design master.
I was refused a preview copy, having been told last summer by the presenter/writer Mark Hodgkinson that I would not be needed as a contributor. No mention was made of my book, exhibition or this blog.
The exclusion of the latter three projects feels clunky even from an objective P.O.V. (as confirmed by a number of supportive messages).
While I am perfectly content not to have been involved – not my cup of tea, ’nuff said – I am also extremely chuffed that Bubbles and his legacy have reached another staging post in the journey to widespread appreciation.
Barney Bubbles' Ian Dury poster for Stiffs Live Stiffs tour. 60" x 40". 1977. To be featured in the forthcoming exhibition British Design 1948-2012
Next stop: the inclusion of some amazing Barney Bubbles/Ian Dury collaborations in this spring’s big British Design show at the V&A show. Watch out here for exclusives.
Posters, each 60" x 40" designed by Barney Bubbles for the October 1977 Stiff Records UK tour Live Stiffs. Photography: Chris Gabrin.
Exhibits in Chris Gabrin's exhibition at Dimbola Lodge, Isle Of Wight.
Chris Gabrin’s exhibition From Hear To Photography includes a doozy for Barney Bubbles fans – for the first time since their creation more than three decades ago, Bubbles’ huge Live Stiffs poster designs are displayed together.
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.
Among the lesser-known Barney Bubbles designs to emerge during last year’s research for the second edition of Reasons To Be Cheerful was the black-on-black label for Sheet Music for a single release by post-punk act The Vampire Bats From Lewisham.
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’.”
On a page in the Chelsea Space visitors’ book, New York designer Aleksandar Maćašev sums up the reaction to the show we’ve received this week from a flood of visitors, including waves of graphics students, a major British artist, Ian Dury’s biographer, the owner of the country’s biggest spoof news site, one of rock music’s leading record sleeve designers (who has incorporated a section on Barney Bubbles in a new book), and, of course, Billy Bragg.
Maćašev wrote that a visit to the exhibition was the top of his to-do list while in London, and, judging by his response, we did not disappoint. Artist Daniel Sturgis, who has openly acknowledged his debt to Bubbles, was similarly complimentary, as were Will Birch and Paul Stokes, one of the men behind The Daily Mash.
Studying the ramp wall exhibits with Will Birch.
Will Birch asks about the book and magazine display.
With Paul Stokes (far right) and Chelsea students.
And designer Richard Evans, who has been art director for The Who for more than 35 years, came along for a viewing, bringing with him his exciting new book Art Of The Album Cover, which has a section dedicated to Barney Bubbles’ achievements in this sphere.
Richard Evans discusses process with Chelsea Space assistant curator Barbara Elting and assistant Martina Gonano.
Richard Evans with his new book open at the section on Barney Bubbles’ album sleeve designs.
“I found it fascinating and informative (more than most of the LDF and ADF!),” writes Jonathan from Sussex Coast College Hastings. “Because of the layout, you get the sense of ‘this is his work’ and then you walk round the corner and…’this is how it was done’. It’s not just a show of his finished pieces – it goes deeper than that.”
Physiognomy was a preoccupation of Barney Bubbles and a recurring theme; he worried at the representation of the human face and tackled it from many angles. There are hundreds littered across his work, rendered in unusual arrangements and assembled from unlikely elements.
Here, in the first of a series of blogs by guests, the US designer Vic Fieger selects his Top Ten Barney Bubbles Faces:
Armed Forces: there he is, Barney himself, in the best place to hide: where everybody can see you. He seemed never to back away from portraying his big nose (see also Fast Women & Slow Horses), which makes up 70% of this self-portrait. The presentation of the eye utilises one of Barney’s favourite tricks: the repositioning of an oval shape. Most of his ovals have the same dimension ratio, and were likely cut or drawn with the use of a drafter’s stencil for isometric circles.
Inner panel, 12in sq. Armed Forces, Elvis Costello And The Attractions, Radar, 1979.
The Blockheadlogo for Ian Dury and crew is of course one of his best-known. Everything is as clear as can be: eye/nose/eye/mouth. The letters are unaltered and of uniform size, save for the elongated L, and the arrangement of them is all it took to makes this word into a bona fide blockhead. Is it just serendipity that the letter-forms seem to present a mouth of misaligned and rotten teeth, framed by the round C and D?
There is similarity to the back of the 1981 re-issue of Dury’s What A Waste. In the square, white this time, the (still perfectly horizontal) mouth is the negative space of a double-edged razor which has wandered from the front cover. And is that another Eye Of Horus, gazing at the title of the B-side, perhaps just waking up to it?
Label, What A Waste/Wake Up! , Ian Dury & The Blockheads, Stiff, 1978.
Back, 7in sleeve, What A Waste/Wake Up & Make Love To Me, Ian Dury, Stiff, 1981.
The fellow who adorns the sleeve of Nick Lowe’s I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass is made of metal; his mouth is a utility knife, his nose a pair of tweezers, and he sheds a pop pull-tab tear. A circular saw frames the face, the negative space this time providing the outline of head and neck.
The opposite end of the spectrum is represented by the sleeve for The Inmates’ seven-inch Me And The Boys. Here Barney subtracts rather than adds, removing different lengths of teeth of a plastic comb for the chiseled profiles of the titular mates. Stray hairs left in the combs provide – what else? – their hairstyles. This theme is extended to the rear of the sleeve, where Betty Lou (the B-side) is a long-haired beauty. There’s no paper wrapping (like for each of the Boys), so we have a female comb posing nude.
Ingrid Mansfield-Allman’s Stop Wasting Your Time has a thick stripe taking up half of the front cover, which consists of a grid with a black dot at each eighth intersect. The portion above is black, below is white. A precise calligraphic swash eases down the left side. Together, these elements present the veiled visage of woman as funeral attendee, her lips formed from the dense, compact letter forms of Haettenschweiler. They spell the record’s title, as if this character is saying: “He’s gone now, so what are you waiting for?”
Front, 7in sleeve. I love The Sound Of Breaking Glass/They Called It Rock, Nick Lowe, Radar, 1978.
Front, 7in sleeve. Me And The Boys/Betty Lou, The Inmates, WEA, 1981.
Front, 7in sleeve. Stop Wasting Your Time/Sister Slow, Ingrid Mansfield-Allman, Polydor, 1981.
Haettenschweiler is also used in Barney’s letterhead for Elvis Costello. While the O’s are big, bold and circular, the rest of Costello is pushed together in this typeface – type face? – to complete his trademark horn-rims. The capital “E” is stretched down for the outline of his head and the coif is made up of the “LVIS”.
Letterhead, Elvis Costello Ltd, 1980.
Another letterhead, for F-Beat, presents the face of a clown from the most primitive of shapes. The lowercase “B” is represented as a mostly filled-in circle for one eye and the other eye is the clown’s painted cross from a lowercase “t”. The “A” is a red triangular nose, the “E ” a square formed by identical and equally-spaced parallel rectangles (another of Barney’s recurring devices) and the longer portion below the horizontal line of the T suggests face-paint running down a harlequin’s face: the tears of a clown, maybe?
Howard Werth’s 4D Man sleeve is particularly smart: an eight-pointed star and a bold pink numeral 4 which rotates at intervals of 90deg to form the part of the star, but also, in its upright form, is an angular profile. The rest of the star forms a spiked mohawk hairstyle, and the placement of “MAN” can be seen as a shorn scalp. Whether the D is an eye or an ear isn’t clear.
Another drawn up from geometric sources is the test-pattern man of Roger Chapman’s Mango Crazy album. It’s quite hard to tell exactly what’s going on here; for instance, which direction is he facing? His mouth and chin seem to be in opposite directions; his eyebrows can be discerned, but which are his eyes: the red dots or the white? Does each eye have two dots, one of each color? Is he shown in the action of casting his gaze aside? Just pondering all of the possibilities here is enough to make a man, er, go crazy.
Letterhead, F-Beat Records, 1980.
Front, 7in sleeve. 4D Man/What's Hoppin', Howard Werth, Metabop, 1982.
Come to think of it, are any of these faces at all? They’re grids, bits of metal, letters of the alphabet, combs, and so forth. It’s part of human nature to see faces where they don’t actually exist, but Barney Bubbles envisioned them like nobody else I have ever come across.
The man born Humphrey Anthony Erdeswick Butler-Bowdon had opted out of playing bass for the Kilburns a few years earlier to concentrate on his art, occasionally contributing to record covers for the likes of Wings and 10cc.
7in sleeve. Front cover, Whoops A Daisy/Davey Crockett, Stiff, 1978.
The winsome Whoops A Daisy was backed by a cracking version of the 50s film theme The Ballad of Davy Crockett and wrapped in a wonderful Barney Bubbles sleeve using Chris Gabrin’s photographs of Ocean performing the elaborate dance moves he had recently enacted on the Stiffs Live Stiffs tour.
7in sleeve. Back cover, Whoops A Daisy/Davey Crockett, Stiff, 1978.
These were exaggerated by the huge white suit Ocean had bought in Brixton Market during his time in the Kilburns.
Sleeve lettering, front cover.
Barney decorated the sleeve with detailed lettering (the H on the back from interlinked horseshoes to match the rhyming-slang name of Ocean’s backing musicians, Iron Hoof) and on release there was also a version of the black and white sleeve featuring blue spot-colour.
Sleeve lettering, back cover.
The accompanying poster was a delight. With Ocean’s name picked out in dance-step style, 35 frames from the Chris Gabrin shoot were presented in sequence with the instruction: “Cut poster out and make Humphrey Ocean’s Daisy Disco Do It My Way flickbook.”
Poster 30in x 20in, Stiff, 1978.
We’ve put them together here to accompany the tune:
And here Ocean is called to the stage to join the Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll finale of the Stiff tour and shows us how it’s done:
As highlighted in Will Birch’s tremendous Ian Dury biography, the creative relationship between the late singer and Barney Bubbles was one of the most fruitful in the history of pop.
Of similar ages with deep art school roots, Barney and Dury commenced their partnership in the spring of 1977 just as both were heading for the top of their game, with Barney installed at Stiff after a hiatus of more than a year and Dury preparing to unleash the career-defining records and performances which brought him enduring national treasure status.
Back cover photograph by Chris Gabrin.
Unlike his treatment of others, Dury was never-less-than respectful of Barney. “Barney was easily the most incredible designer I’d ever come across,” Dury told Birch.
Poster for Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, Stiff Records, 1977. Tom Sheehan Collection.
Dury said Barney “scared the shit out of me. He was righteous. He didn’t have the faults or the ego and he made me feel second class. I wanted his approval in a strange kind of way”.
And, as Birch details, when Jake Riviera departed Stiff with Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello at the end of 1977, remaining partner Dave Robinson was left with Dury’s recently released New Boots & Panties!! as his main chance for commercial survival.
The decision was made to throw all resources behind the polio-stricken performer and his band The Blockheads. Barney art-directed a sustained marketing and promotional campaign made up of several elements: his Blockhead logo, numerous press ads, several posters, a songbook and a tour programme. Together these helped maintain the album’s presence in the charts for more than a year and set up hits What A Waste and number one smash Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick.
NME, February 4, 1978: Ian Dury and Davey Payne.
The cover of Birch’s book is a delightful rendition by Dury’s friend and mentor Sir Peter Blake, while on the back is a photo by Chris Gabrin from sessions for a series of music press ads.
Melody Maker, February 4, 1978: Fred Rowe and Ian Dury.
These are littered with Dury’s skewiff humour and guttersnipe poetry and feature some of the possible titles he had drawn up for his debut solo album.
NME January 28, 1978: Ian Dury and Charley Charles.
Gabrin’s monochromatic clarity and his strong working relationship with both parties was an important element in the Dury/Bubbles dialogue. “We were working full-pelt at the time,” said Gabrin the other night. “There was so much to do to keep up with press ads and tours.”
Right: Melody Maker, January 28, 1978: Norman Watt-Roy and Ian Dury. Left: Sounds, February 4, 1978: Ian Dury and John Turnbull.
Gabrin’s band portraits of Dury and The Blockheads (and minder Fred “Spider” Rowe) hit the UK’s music weeklies in February 1978.
Poster, Stiff Records, 1978.
A Gabrin photograph from an earlier session (which Barney had overlaid with a lurid orange screen for one of five giant posters for the Stiff tour) was used for a standard sized poster to hammer home the album’s availabiity. The year ended with more band shots in the incredible fold-out programme for the December 1978 Hanky Pantie tour.
8" x 6" tour programme cover, December 1978.
The matchstick portrait cover was even used for the manufacture of hankies (to be knotted and worn on the head). A couple of Stiff employees – maybe Paul Conroy or Andy Murray can identify them? – sport these in the Top Of The Pops audience for Dury and The Blockheads’ triumphant performance of Hit Me.
Ian Dury & The Blockheads perform Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, Top Of The Pops, December 1978.
By 1983, when Dury was filmed by director Franco Rosso for a Channel 4 documentary, the wordsmith was in a very different place.
On one of his regular separations from The Blockheads and main writing partner Chaz Jankel, Dury’s career was about to hit the skids as he recorded the half-baked 4000 Weeks Holiday. During the making of the film, management company Blackhill collapsed, but there are some sequences where it’s office can be seen decorated with Barney’s designs.
As well as Blockhead logo stickers there are posters for Do It Yourself and also the spoken-word album Blackhill’s Peter Jenner released on Charisma by cricket commentating legend John Arlott.
This was cooked up with Charisma publicist and Barney’s friend Glen Colson, who recalls how he came up with such faux cricket positions as “Wayward Short Leg”.
Poster, Charisma Records, 1982.
By the time the documentary was screened in 1984, Barney had died at his own hand.
“Barney Bubbles told me a few straighteners towards the end of his life,” said Dury, towards the end of his own. “Barney told me: ‘You were a horrible piece of work in those days Ian.’ I said: ‘Barney, I didn’t want to be’.”
Left: 12" cover, Jukebox Dury, Stiff, 1981. Right: 7' cover, What A Waste, Stiff, 1981.
A couple of years earlier, Barney had delivered his views on Dury’s behaviour via the designs for 1981 greatest hits Jukebox Dury and it’s single, the reissued What A Waste.
Gone is the affection of the New Boots & Panties!! era. In it’s place, with stark contrasts, the bleached-out image renders Dury as Frankenstein’s monster, while the jaunty razor-blade earring is now used for chopping out coke, lobotomising the artist.
Will Birch’s book is a fully rounded portrait of this extraordinary man, and is heartily recommended.
Here’s a chance for you to get your hands on a FREE copy SIGNED by the author.
Send your answer to the question below to thelook@rockpopfashion.com – we’ll be announcing the winner’s name on February 14 .
Q: What is the title of the B-side of Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick?
As well as Blockhead logo stickers there are posters for Do It Yourself and also the spoken-word album Blackhill’s Peter Jenner released on Charisma by cricket commentating legend John Arlott.
This was cooked up with Charisma publicist and Barney’s friend Glen Colson, who recalls how he came up with such faux cricket positions as “Wayward Short Leg”.
