Cut it out: The astounding story behind Barney Bubbles’ Hawkwind Galactic Tarot
In November 1971, design legend Barney Bubbles produced a typically audacious promotional item for Hawkwind’s recently released album X In Search Of Space.
Tag: Oz
We’re keeping the dialectic open: Final week of PRINT! Tearing It Up at Somerset House
PRINT! Tearing It Up, the exhibition about the resurgence and history of independent progressive British magazines, has entered its final week at central London’s Somerset House.
Sighting of Barney Bubbles in BBC 1971 doc New Horizons: The Alternative Society
The BBC TV documentary The Alternative Society is an intelligent snapshot of London’s Notting Hill-based early 70s counterculture.
Getting It Straight In Notting Hill Gate: Jo Gannon’s quintessential snapshot of W11 in 1970
Taking its title from a song on hippie outfit Quintessence’s debut album, Jo Gannon’s documentary Getting It Straight In Notting Hill Gate – as featured on the BFI’s website – captures the social churn in the west London neighbourhood at the start of the 70s.
Magick Is Freedom! (After Barney Bubbles) opens in London this week
When I first saw it I was questioning a lot of things, not least my adequacy. Things like inspiration, influences, references . . . where do things come from? Copying things—not as “homage’”or “pastiche”, but dying to get inside a thing. Inhabit it. Nostalgia too. Using machines. Colour. Systems. Perpetual motion. Automatism. Copying things. Graham […]
The London Rock n Roll Show at Wembley Stadium 1972: Memories of Oz, Frendz and the Let It Rock stall
I acquired my first underground press publications in the summer of 1972, at about the point when the sector was taking the nosedive from which it never recovered. Still, better late than Sharon Tate, as they say. Aged 12, my taste had been whetted by sneak peeks at an older brother’s collection of magazines when […]
Mr Freedom designs at the V&A: ‘When what has been considered bad taste is suddenly found to be invigorating’
“There is a moment when ‘good taste’ becomes dead; what has been considered ‘bad’ is suddenly found to be invigorating. Fashion today has little to do with la mode and the tacky is often accepted as an essential part of the necessary ‘total’ look. It can be fun.” Cecil Beaton, introduction to the catalogue for […]
Graham Wood on the series of 24 posters inspired by a 1968 design for Oz magazine
Best known as one of the founders of British design collective Tomato, Graham Wood chose a 1968 poster for underground magazine Oz as the wellspring for a series of 24 poster prints. I corresponded with Wood about the ways in which the original artwork- made by Barney Bubbles and his 60s design partner David Wills […]
Documentaries: Up pops Tommy Roberts in Three Swings On A Pendulum (1967)
Look out for an appearance by Tommy Roberts – subject of my new book – in the 1967 documentary Three Swings On A Pendulum, currently available for viewing (in the UK at least) on BBC iPlayer.
Beatbooks 61: Communal, alternative and psychedelic living; Peyote; Hippies; Music; Psychedelic & Underground Art; Sixties London; Underground Press
The new Beatbooks catalogue lines up the seminal alongside the obscure, from complete sets of Oz, Ink, Gandalf’s Garden and Suck magazines and Time’s “Swinging London” cover story to Robert E. Brown’s The Psychedelic Guide To Preparation Of The Eucharist, LIFE’s July 1969 study of US communes and a rare poster for the Psycho Circus […]