//Magazines from my archive (clockwise from top left): Creem, August 1974; Grand Royal #3, 1995; Club International, August 1973; Harpers & Queen, October 1976//
//After Dark, September 1974; Ben Is Dead #26, 1996//
I’m one of the contributors to Print, writer Lou Stoppard’s forthcoming celebration of the great fashion and music magazines of the past and present.
Singer-songwriter Carlene Carter has posted a touching memoir of her mother, the country giant June Carter Cash who would have been 86 this week, at online music ‘zine Innocent Words.
A few years ago I attempted a dissection of the intriguing elements of the culture-shock t-shirt You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On!, produced by Bernie Rhodes, Malcolm McLaren and Gerry Goldstein for sale in Sex at 430 King’s Road in the autumn of 1974.
In You’re Gonna Wake Up, the declamatory tone, aggressive punctuation, satirical bite and use of basic typographical emphases such as the repeated forward slash and random capitalised text combined to detonate a densely packed cultural device.
For its 75th anniversary issue, US visual culture publication Print has selected Barney Bubbles as one of six “unsung heroes of design”.
“Bad thing for a young man to lose his father” Charles Cheeryble, Nicholas Nickleby
My father died 35 years ago today.
I was 20 at the time, and witnessed him take his final breath. The narrow world of music and clothes I inhabited was preoccupied with Ian Curtis’s recent suicide; given the fact that my father had been diagnosed with cancer four years previously and spent the last 18 months on earth hospitalised and fighting like a bastard for his life, I couldn’t see what the fuss was about. PiL’s Death Disco was much more my speed.
Continue reading The Old Man: Philip “Staff” Gorman (April 25, 1903 – June 8, 1980)
In the 21st century, when digital downloads displaced compact discs as the format of consumer choice, music went naked into the world, unadorned by design or packaging. Yet this in turn gave rise to vigorous rear-guard action in the growing appreciation of what was fast disappearing. As if from the dead, vinyl made a comeback and the fan in Wilkins places him in a key position to cogitate this phenomenon.
From my text for the Lost In Music catalogue
Great to see heroine Caroline Coon among the subjects/contributors to the second issue of Radical People, Reba Maybury’s celebration of quinquagenarian-plus non-conformists.
One of the most joyous releases of the year so far is the compilation Early Pakistani Dance Music from Germany’s Ovular. I found out about it via Instagram friend and DJ Martin “Soul Stew” Geise.
Continue reading Hipshaking vinyl – Early Pakistani Dance Music: 1967-1975
//Clockwise from top left: A UFO by Ettore Sotsass, Italy 1957. Manufacturer Arredoluce; Passiflora by Superstudio, Italy 1966. Manufacturer: Design Centre; Belt Lamp by Gaetano Pesce, USA 1995. Manufacturer: Fish Design; C2 by Studio Rossi-Molinari, Italy 1969. Manufacturer: Totem//
“These lamps were in no way meant to be utilitarian. They were mass produced as expressions of art by the most innovative designers working at the time and are beautiful objects. Just don’t try to read a book by them!”
The pick of design authority and interiors practitioner Jim Walrod’s extraordinary lighting collection is on display at New York’s Patrick Parrish Gallery until Sunday (April 19).
Over time our assumptions of Pop have become more narrow. That word needs to be shook open a little bit. That history needs to be displaced a little bit. To allow for the diversity you have to go back to a more open idea of what Pop could be.
Darsie Alexander and Ryan Bartholomew, curators, International Pop
Today’s New York Times features Derek Boshier’s 1961 painting Special K as part of the newspaper’s coverage of International Pop, the new exhibition which addresses the fallacy that the movement was the preserve of the US and Britain.