And it’s praise indeed when the reviewer is of the calibre of Andy Martin, illustrator, designer, film-maker and self-confessed “Bubbloholic”.

Andy also defines what he sees as the secret to Barney’s work: his “ability to look backwards and forwards at the same time, whilst always managing to arrive at The Very Point Of Now-ness”.

And Andy knows; a former NME art editor, when he started at the music weekly in 1978 he helped out with layouts as Barney and Diana Fawcett created The NME Book Of Modern Music which accompanied Barney’s redesign.

“I was overawed to be working with him in the smallest way,” Andy told me recently. In his review Andy says: “The graphic bombs Barney Bubbles dropped are still reverberating. In the words of the late, great Ian Dury: there ain’t half been some clever bastards.”

Download Andy’s review here.