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I’ve been acting as a consultant to artist Lucy Harrison on her latest site specific project Carnaby Echoes, which focuses on the culturally fertile area of central London adjacent to Soho. With the starting point of the opening of Murray’s Club in Beak Street in 1913, Harrison is mounting her artistic response to 100 years […]
Malcolm McLaren’s adaptation of the infamous Tits t-shirt is one of punk’s most familiar designs, as applied by he and Vivienne Westwood to shirts sold in SEX and Seditionaries, worn by members of the Sex Pistols and replicated hundreds of thousands of times since. Such is its distorting androgynous power that a version was chosen […]
The Random House/Penguin takeover prompted a visit from photographer Sarah Lee to shoot my collection of Penguin books for illustrative material for The Guardian. One of her shots has already been used – a set of early 70s Raymond Chandlers with James Tormey jackets.
Time to put away the books, mags, newspapers, pamphlets, catalogues and other materials used as reference for the map The Look Of London, which is published later this week by Herb Lester Associates.
The four albums released by Alice Cooper between 1971 and 1973 propelled the band’s international ascendance and the frontman into enduring superstardom. Cooper and his bandmates never again attained the quality level of the dumb-but-delicious Detroit garage-glam they punched out with such aplomb on these records, enhanced as they were by the crystal-hard production of […]
The joy of writing about a subject as rich as Tommy Roberts is that research turns up an apparently limitless supply of fabulous material. Even the tangential stuff – such as this from my archive, a spread from a 1971 Sunday Times Magazine – gets me going.
My essay on artist Derek Boshier’s engagement with popular music is in the new catalogue from Pallant House Gallery, home to the forthcoming show Derek Boshier: David Bowie And The Clash.
French newspaper Libération’s coverage of the White Noise show in Chaumont included a section on my Barney Bubbles exhibit The Past The Present & The Possible. Marie Lechner’s report – see here – points to Bubbles’ “spirit of protest and fun” shared by other White Noise exhibitors such as French design/music magician Shoboshobo (aka Mehdi […]
“People do love huge pieces of paper”. So runs the quote heading up a section in V&A curator Catherine Flood’s excellent overview British Posters: Advertising Art & Activism, published by the museum to coincide with its multifarious design celebrations this Olympic year. And it’s true. We do. Or we all did, when this vital form […]
Album sleeves, photography, magazines and a variety of press cuttings and ephemera underline the widespread recognition for Lloyd Johnson’s designs over the decades. Lloyd paid particular attention to them in the assemblage of the contents of the table-top vitrines and a wall collage on the fifth day of the exhibition installation just before the weekend.