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Tomorrow I’ll be talking to interiors, homewares and textile designer Sue Timney about the fashion legacy of the King’s Road, the two-and-a-half mile thoroughfare in west London’s Chelsea where the late Mary Quant kicked off the boutique boom by opening her clothes shop Bazaar at 135a in 1955.
When he launched the small-format 32-page song sheet The Melody Maker in 1926, Tin Pan Alley music publisher Lawrence Wright sparked the media revolution that created the music press. This multi-million pound business eventually straddled the Atlantic and simultaneously proved a fertile breeding ground for generations of writers, photographers, film-makers and performers who made their […]
One of the narrative threads of my book Totally Wired: The Rise & Fall of the Music Press – which is published in paperback next week – traces the ways in which women writers have been forced to fight long and hard against white male dominance of the field. This process was kicked off in […]
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 […]
I’ll be joining contemporary music magazines including Disco Pogo and Ambit Pop at a celebration of the music press then and now at London’s premier magazine outlet Magculture a week on Thursday (October 27). Magculture currently stocks a dozen music magazines, so is the appropriate place to talk about the past, the present and the […]
I’m really jazzed about getting my hands on the first finished copy of Totally Wired, my history of the music press which is published by Thames & Hudson this autumn. Designer Daniel Streat has done wonders with the day-the-world-turned-dayglo jacket concept and my choice of cover star Poly Styrene. There are 60 or so illustrations, […]
Rare and exclusive images will be on display during the forthcoming event about the late Malcolm McLaren’s London life at Fora Soho on June 9.
Beginning in the early 1970s—as under-represented groups were demanding new forms of visibility following the emergence of political movements such as Black Power and the Stonewall Rebellion—a handful of British and American photo-driven alternative magazines came on the scene. The Face, i-D, Rags, Out/Look, and other new publications amplified marginalized voices, especially those of queer […]
Among the many things the world doesn’t need now is another book of record covers, but DB Burkeman’s Art Sleeves, which is published today by Rizzoli, is something else entirely. For once the publisher’s blurb is spot-on; this is “a tightly curated exploration” of record covers which challenge the distinctions between art and design, between […]
Today I’ve launched a page on this site for the Estate of the late radical graphic artist and designer Barney Bubbles. I represent the Estate and its hundreds of original artworks. We have some exciting activity coming up, including the loving recreation of one of Bubbles’ most striking designs for a very special reissue on […]