Paul Gorman is…

Talking Barney Bubbles x Hipgnosis at Stroud’s Pop Up festival on March 26

Feb 28th, 2023

I’m looking forward to appearing at Pop Up, the subcultures festival being held in the Gloucestershire town of Stroud next month.

I’ll be comparing and contrasting the work of Barney Bubbles with that of his rivals Hipgnosis in the 70s and 80s with Mark Blake, author of the new book about the British music design studio and Pop Up organiser and writer Ben Wardle.

//Front Cover, Peter Gabriel, Charisma Records, 1977. Design: Hipgnosis//

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

“Downloading music is the future; you won’t buy music from shops’: Malcolm McLaren in 1996

Oct 9th, 2015

mm - interview2mm3
mm5mm4

//Stills from unedited interview with Malcolm McLaren by Ariel Van Straten, London 1996//

The establishment still aren’t quite able to understand interactive; it’s the street which understands it and is able to use it in a simplistic but very real way. They will be the people who break through; they will make it the most sexy. It won’t be as cerebral as the likes of Peter Gabriel or Eno and that lot.

[Handed underground dance CD]: See look, they’re already emailing, connected to the web, and that’s where it’s all happening.

Web TV, downloading music, graphics and so on is definitely the future, definitely where it is going to go. These guys are on the verge of suggesting in the years to come you won’t purchase your music from shops. Your cultural information is going to come through the Net.

Now it’s about buying the technology so that you can broadcast from your goddamn bedroom across the planet. I think the reason why the industry is holding back is because they know that it is only a question of the technology being affordable and that’s when it will happen.

Malcolm McLaren, London 1996

mm - interview2

In the mid-90s photographer Ariel Van Straten interviewed Malcolm McLaren for a film about graffiti art. Entitled Getting Your Name Up, the short was made for a video-only issue of Don’t Tell It magazine, to raise awareness of the plight of Simon Sunderland, who had been jailed for five years for committing criminal damage on the rail network in South Yorkshire using the tag ‘Fista’.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , ,