Music fan and pop ephemera collector Mike Hobday is realising a long-held ambition this weekend with a show of designs by the late graphic artist Barney Bubbles at The White Room Gallery in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire.
This is the sleeve designed by Barney Bubbles – would have been 71 today – for Screwed Up, the 1977 EP by the rabble-rousing writer and performer Mick Farren, who died at the weekend after collapsing onstage during a performance with his band The Deviants of their poem/song Cocaine & Gunpowder.
In 1989, footballer Laurie Cunningham’s life was cut short by a car crash on the outskirts of Madrid. He was 33 years old.
By that time Cunningham had notched up a series of sporting firsts which resonated through the wider culture: a teenage signing to east London team Leyton Orient, Cunningham was the first black player to represent England (in 1977 as an under-21, scoring a winning goal against Scotland) and the first Englishman to play for Spanish giants Real Madrid (in 1979).
Continue reading In search of Laurie Cunningham, flamboyant footballer + north London soul boy
I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come than this multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.
George V, 1922.
The result of being the youngest offspring of parents of more advanced years than the norm, I am an anomaly of my generation (as is Mrs G of her’s) in that I have close relations who died in the First World War.
My father’s brothers Charles and Desmond Gorman both perished on the Western Front in 1918, the former aged 17 a bit more than a week before the cessation of hostilities. Desmond was 19 when he was killed outside Jussey in March that year.
A fundamentalist Christian ideology which extends religious zealotry to the oppression of women and cowardly homophobia. Not a lot to love about Rastafarianism, particularly for one raised in an atmosphere of hard-line Catholicism.
Manchester’s International Anthony Burgess Foundation is a must-visit; not only does it contain the great man’s archive with many gems available for inspection, but in the cafe/foyer there are Burgess’ own author’s copies of his books for sale. Continue reading A visit to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation
Chance encounters with heroes can be tricky, but bumping into John Cooper Clarke outside the Festival Hall late one evening last week proved pleasurable beyond all expectation.
Clarke looked the bomb, naturally in dark glasses as midnight approached, his frame draped in a coat worn across the shoulders gangster-style with white silk scarf hanging loose. Charm personified, he returned my compliments with words of praise with which I’m still coming to terms.
It hasn’t taken much to versify them into this lame appropriation of Clarke’s rat-a-tat style:
“I know your work,
I’ve got The Look,
I was first on our block with that book.”
Interesting to note that Roland Barthes’ “anarchic foam of tastes and distastes” is contemporaneous with You’re Gonna Wake Up. No surprise then that J’aime, je n’aime pas became the starting point for updates and personal interpretations among list-loving binary-fixated bloggers from the mid-Noughties onwards.
Here is a translation of the Great Signifier’s original, complete with coda:
Continue reading Blessed & Blasted: J’aime, Je n’aime pas. 1975
Thirty four years ago today The Heartbreakers played The Speakeasy.
The rock business haunt north of Oxford Circus had seen better times by this gig. I was taken by a member, a photographer at the agency where I worked. I remember being embarrassed by his long hair.
Continue reading Posters: The Heartbreakers at The Speakeasy (1977)
You can’t beat Iggy for range: balletic posturing, arrhythmic shape-throwing, hand-held-high swaying (with mic lead clamped between teeth), the imploring bit on the knees and all-out floor-grovelling, they’re all here in this clip from 1977.