Paul Gorman

Journalism

Talking Barney Bubbles in the Los Angeles Review of Books

I’m featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books in conversation with the journalist and musician Elizabeth Nelson about the life and times of the late graphic designer Barney Bubbles.

Read the LARB piece here.

Nelson has also recorded a tribute to the late graphic artist with her band The Paranoid Style. The track was released yesterday and is available to stream/download via Bandcamp.

Here’s the song lyric video complete with customised Bubbles artworks:

The Wild World of Barney Bubbles, the third edition of my monograph, is published by Thames & Hudson this summer accompanied by specialist imprint Volume’s limited edition A Box of Bubbles. Order your’s here.

Recent journalism: Baggies with attitude for MacGuffin + the colour black in street style for Fred Perry Quarterly

//MacGuffin No 7, spring 2019//
//Fred Perry Quarterly Issue 2, Spring 2019//

Here’s a couple of pieces of recently published journalism, one filed for the Netherlands-based biannual MacGuffin, the other for the second issue of Fred Perry Quarterly.

Continue reading Recent journalism: Baggies with attitude for MacGuffin + the colour black in street style for Fred Perry Quarterly

I’ve picked Shop for i-D’s list of legendary London stores

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Asked by i-D’s Stuart Brumfitt to chose a favourite London fashion outlet I plumped for Shop, which was run  by Pippa Brooks and Max Karie for a decade from the mid-90s in Soho’s Brewer Street (I mistakenly referred to it being at number 5 – as you can see in the photo below it was at number 4).

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//Shop in the early 00s. Photo: Pippa Brooks//

Read my reasons and the rest of London’s Legendary Stores – which includes contributions from Nicola Formichetti, Stephen Jones and Mandi Lennard – here.

À la mod: My piece for The Guardian on the enduring appeal of Mod

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From the SS16 menswear collections to the people flocking to Somerset House’s current celebration of The Jam, the aesthetic of “clean living under difficult circumstances” (as summarised by The Who’s first manager, Pete Meaden) is at one with what’s happening now in fashion…

Read the rest of my piece – with quotes from Dylan Jones of GQ/London Collections: Men, Soho tailor Mark Powell and Man About Town’s Ben Reardon – on the enduring appeal of Mod here.

The Spice Girls: My part in their rise and my non-appearance in the Wannabe video

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Just when boys with guitars threaten to rule pop life – Damon’s all over Smash Hits, Ash are big in Big! and Liam can’t move for tabloid frenzy – an all-girl, in-your-face pop group have arrived with enough sass to burst their rockist bubble.

From Music Week, April 1996

I see that next week marks the 19th anniversary of the release of Wannabe. Coincidentally I came across this cutting while ferreting around my magazine archive: the first published interview with the Spice Girls, when they launched the promotional campaign for the single and I was a contributing editor at industry publication Music Week.

I remember quite a lot about my encounter with the five of them at Virgin Records hq in Ladbroke Grove, not least that they afforded opportunities for digs at the full-of-itself British rock cabal which had grown out of the damp squib which was Britpop.

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//It wasn’t me. From Wannabe//

Continue reading The Spice Girls: My part in their rise and my non-appearance in the Wannabe video