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Tomorrow night (April 14) I was supposed to be appearing at London’s regular event Word In Your Ear, the live successor of the much-missed The Word magazine founded by publishing titans Mark Ellen and David Hepworth. In the era of social distancing Mark and David have come up with the online Word In Your Attic, […]
You wait years for a Barney Bubbles exhibition and then two come along in the space of a month. On the heels of the mini-show of Barney Bubbles music designs at Fred Perry’s basement space in Covent Garden comes a different take on the work of the late graphics maestro.
I’ve dug into collector and graphic artist Ian Harris’s rich archive again and turned up a brace of t-shirts he designed in the late 70s for Jasper, the eponymous London-based fashion label operated by entrepreneur Jasper Hamilton Holmes from showrooms in central London.
Stiff Records was on fire in 1977. The British independent record label, with owners Jake Riviera and Dave Robinson snapping up acts and art director Barney Bubbles applying his unsurpassable skills to the visualising of their music, came straight out of the traps 40 years ago this month with the release of the first ‘punk’ LP Damned […]
There has been a breakthrough in my challenge to Dame Vivienne Westwood, her co-author Ian Kelly and publisher Picador over their lifting of substantial amounts of material from my book The Look: Adventures In Rock & Pop Fashion for the designer’s 2014 “authorised biography”. The paperback edition of Vivienne Westwood published last week contains a whopping […]
//Left: Poster, 30 x 20″, one of a series of four, for Generation X residency at The Marque, Soho, London, September 1977. Right: Poster, 60 x 40″, one of a series of five for Stiff Records package tour of UK, October/November, 1977. Design (c) Barney Bubbles Estate// New York’s Museum Of Modern Art is featuring […]
Jenni Murray: You’ve said ‘clothes were politics long before fashion’. What did you mean by that? Vivienne Westwood: I have no idea. Jenni Murray: Was it something you said to Ian (Kelly) and now you’ve forgotten? Vivienne Westwood: No…is that what it says in the book? Jenni Murray: Yes Vivienne Westwood: Well then, he might […]
So potent is the creative legacy of the graphic design master Barney Bubbles – who died on this day 30 years ago – that he is continually cited as an inspiration by contemporary visual communicators, while his name and work is attached to all manner of endeavours. Recently, Bubbles artworks were chosen by the French […]
I sourced one of the paintings which is in More Than Fair, the exhibition of Ian Dury’s artworks which opens at his alma mater, London’s Royal College of Art, next month. Dury gave the ultra-Pop Dany Bubbles to his friend and designer Barney Bubbles in the late 70s during their spell of collaboration which resulted […]
As an addendum to my recent post about the staging of the very special late night London concert given by Ian Dury’s art-rock ensemble Kilburn & The High Roads in 1974, here’s the badge commissioned by manager the late Tommy Roberts to flag up the concurrent release of the group’s single Rough Kids. Then a […]