Paul Gorman

BBC Four Goes Pop in August: Derek Boshier commissioned to create new channel ident and also appears in What Do Artists Do All Day? and Pop Goes The Easel

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//Boshier features in these panels from BBC Four’s Pop Art-style run-down of the season elements//

British artist Derek Boshier – subject of Rethink/Re-entry, the monograph I have edited which is published this autumn – is to be featured in next month’s BBC season of programmes about Pop Art.

Boshier has been commissioned by the broadcaster to create a new BBC Four ident which will run throughout August alongside new logos produced by his fellow Royal College graduates Peter Blake and Peter Phillips (who starred with Boshier and the late Pauline Boty in Ken Russell’s groundbreaking 1962 BBC documentary Pop Goes The Easel).

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Blimey! Barney Bubbles among nominees to appear on new £20 banknote

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//News about the nomination has been flagged today by It’s Nice That + Design Week//

Blimey!

Designer Barney Bubbles is among the list of visual artists nominated by the British public to appear on the new £20 banknote.

Bubbles – born Colin Fulcher and the subject of my 2008 monograph Reasons To Be Cheerful – features on the 529-strong list alongside fellow graphic designer Alan Fletcher and a wide variety of popular figures from Francis Bacon and Pauline Boty to Leigh Bowery, Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Hitchcock and Derek Jarman.

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/Barney Bubbles with his poster/programme for Elvis Costello & The Attractions’ 1979 Armed Forces tour, west London, 1979. Photo: Chalkie Davies//

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I Groaned With Pain: Malcolm McLaren’s own t-shirts to feature in exhibition of status quo-disrupters

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//The t-shirts show the deliberate production of variants within the limited edition designed and written by McLaren and printed on the simple square pattern produced by Vivienne Westwood in 1974. © Malcolm McLaren Estate//

Two of Malcolm McLaren’s t-shirts from the very first production run of I Groaned With Pain – the notorious text design produced with Vivienne Westwood in 1974 – will be featured in Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges, the exhibition I am co-curating with David Thorp at Southampton’s John Hansard Gallery this autumn.

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//T-shirt with central tear on light blue jersey with exterior seaming, labelled, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, 1974. 360mm x 375mm. © Malcolm McLaren Estate//

I Groaned With Pain is named after the first four words of the paragraph of text McLaren lifted from beat writer Alexander Trocchi’s erotic novel Helen And Desire (published in 1954 by Olympia Press under the pseudonym Francis Lengel).

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The story of the Sex shop leather hood: From harmless fetish attire (as sported by David Bowie?) to theatre of cruelty design totem

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//Left: Detail of photo of model posing in leather Sex hood, autumn 1974. Photo: © David Parkinson. Right: David Bowie in leather hood, summer 1974, Sherry Netherland Hotel, New York. Photo: Dana Gillespie//

My recent post about David Bowie’s visits in 1974 to 430 King’s Road when it was in its Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die incarnation prompted Facebook friend and DJ Graham “Sugarlump” Evans to alert me to Polaroid photographs of David Bowie trying out make-up, hair and styling options in preparation for his Diamond Dogs tour of the US that year.

David Bowie in Sex Gimp Mask 1974
// Polaroid taken by Dana Gillespie in New York in 1974//

In one, as Evans points out, Bowie posed in a leather hood of similar style to the model sold at 430 as it was transformed over a period of six months from TFTL to fetish emporium Sex.

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Studio Prints: At A Printmaker’s Workshop in Kentish Town 1970

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//Dorothea Wight picking up groceries in Queens Crescent Market…//
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//…before heading into Studio Prints//

The 1970 BBC documentary At A Printmaker’s Workshop focuses on Dorothea Wight’s fabled Studio Prints in Queens Crescent, Kentish Town.

It is also a marvellous snapshot of London on the cusp of change as inner city areas became invigorated by the arrival of interesting new businesses (with none of today’s dread “regeneration” and its companion property-speak of “creative quartiers” and such).

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‘They had the t-shirt off his back’: The 40th anniversary of the creation of the notorious Cowboys t-shirt + the obscenity debate it sparked in the pages of The Guardian

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//Nicholas de Jongh’s front-page report, The Guardian, August 2, 1975//
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//Sex Original-labelled Cowboys t-shirt courtesy Hiroshi Fujiwara Collection//

This month – specifically July 26 – marks the 40th anniversary of the introduction for sale of Malcolm McLaren’s notorious Cowboys t-shirt in Sex, the revolutionary boutique he operated at 430 King’s Road with Vivienne Westwood.

The shirt’s status as the most provocative of all punk designs is enhanced by the fact that it made waves immediately: the same day the shirt went on sale, the first customer to wear it in public was arrested. Within 24 hours, the store itself was raided for indecency.

Continue reading ‘They had the t-shirt off his back’: The 40th anniversary of the creation of the notorious Cowboys t-shirt + the obscenity debate it sparked in the pages of The Guardian

David Bowie’s unwitting role in the transformation of 430 King’s Road from Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die to SEX

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//David Bowie recording the Diamond Dogs LP at Olympic Studios, Barnes, south-west London, January 1974 during his residency in Chelsea’s Oakley Street. Photo © Kate Simon//
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//Malcolm McLaren and Gerry Goldstein in front of the Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die facade, 430 King’s Road, London, summer 1973. © Malcolm McLaren Estate//
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//Malcolm McLaren in Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die designs, Chelsea, London, from New Musical Express, April 6, 1974 . Photo: © Pennie Smith//

It is a little known fact that David Bowie was an occasional visitor to 430 King’s Road when it was operating as Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die.

This manifestation of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s revolutionary boutique  – which paid design tribute to the fetishistic studded leather attire of Britain’s early 60s Ton Up Boys and rockers and sold the cult clothing associated with 40s mobsters and Latino zoot suit rioters – succeeded the 50s outlet Let It Rock in the early spring of 1973, as noted at the time by the fashion writer Catherine Tennant in British Vogue.

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//From British Vogue, April 1, 1973//

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Print @ ShowStudio: Lou Stoppard on the abiding allure of inspirational and off-the-map magazines

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//Magazines from my archive (clockwise from top left): Creem, August 1974; Grand Royal #3, 1995; Club International, August 1973; Harpers & Queen, October 1976//

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//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.

Continue reading Print @ ShowStudio: Lou Stoppard on the abiding allure of inspirational and off-the-map magazines