Stiff Records/ Barney Bubbles memorabilia exhibition, April 16 2008

Pretty self-explanatory
Rita
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Stiff Records/ Barney Bubbles memorabilia exhibition, April 16 2008

Post by Rita »

Hi

Reasons To Be Cheerful: The Life & Work Of Barney Bubbles is published on December 4.

It has 600 images and interviews with those who worked with BB and many rare and important EC-related items, including the full story of all the sleeves from My Aim Is True (including out-takes from the photoshoot), This Year's Model, Armed Forces (with excerpts from the never published book by the artist who painted the cover), Get Happy!! (original artwork for the album poster), Trust (drafts for the album cover when it had another name) to Almost Blue ad artwork and a proof of the original cover for Punch The Clock.

Find out more here: http://adelita.co.uk/reasons/index.php
Attachments
Cover of new book about the graphic designer Barney Bubbles who worked with Elvis Costello from 1977-83
Cover of new book about the graphic designer Barney Bubbles who worked with Elvis Costello from 1977-83
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johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

Thanks Rita; we've been monitoring this book here -

http://www.elviscostellofans.com/phpBB2 ... it=Bubbles
johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 197856.ece



From The Sunday Times
November 23, 2008

The sleeve designs of Barney Bubbles

His sleeve designs made him the Picasso of punk, but behind the art lay a tortured soul

Rob Hughes

Everyone loves great record sleeves. Remember Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick: a spotty puppet dog with origami bits? Or the charging elephants from Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces? Hawkwind’s intergalactic Space Ritual, perhaps? Or even the light- bulb simplicity of Billy Bragg’s Life’s a Riot with Spy Vs Spy? All of them share one common thread: Barney Bubbles, a colossus of British sleeve design in the 1970s and early 1980s. The Factory Records designer Peter Saville cites him as “the missing link between pop and culture”; his former mentor Sir Peter Blake, whose occasional brushes with cover art include Sgt Pepper, concedes “he was so good, I couldn’t have really competed with him”; and Ian Dury called him “a genius. . . the most incredible designer I’ve ever come across”.

As Bubbles was the creator of some of the most brilliantly inventive, anarchic works of post-war pop art, you’d be forgiven for wondering why he isn’t the household name he deserves to be. Maybe it’s down to sniffy attitudes — can record-sleeve design ever qualify as high art? Or perhaps it’s due to Bubbles’s utter lack of interest in fame.

Self-promotion, it seems, was the least of his concerns. “He never credited himself on his work,” explains a close friend, the photographer Brian Griffin. “He’d use other names, like the name of a local builders’ supplier around the corner.”

Whatever the case, a new Bubbles anthology might help to reverse that. Paul Gorman’s fascinating, definitive, lavishly spread Reasons to Be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles collects all the essential pieces of a man whose art was as striking and complex as his personality.

Bubbles, then plain Colin Fulcher of Middlesex, began as an art-schooled product designer for Terence Conran in the 1960s. One of his earliest feats was the Norman archer logo for Strongbow cider. Yet the music scene was his true habitat. By 1968, he was pouring out illustrations for the underground bibles Oz and Friends. One of his closest chums was the photographer Phil Franks. “Even when he wasn’t drawing,” he recalls, “his mind was working, ideas bouncing around and popping out all the time. He lived on the edge. Barney was nervous in the sense that there was an abundance of him. He was ebullient.”

Soon Bubbles was designing record covers for Hawkwind, an explosion of ideas that pushed their freeform space-rock into a new dimension. The 1971 classic X in Search of Space, which unfolded into the shape of a cruciform hawk, was an elaborate triumph of sci-fi nouveau. “It was in the days of LSD, and I think Barney used to take the odd acid tab when he was doing the sleeves," laughs the Hawkwind co-founder Dave Brock. “You can probably see the results of that in his artwork, like Space Ritual.” Indeed, with its sleeve panels of cosmic embryos, nipple planets and sonic waves, Space Ritual combined Bubbles’s ideas on philosophy, theatre and art. Still he refused to sign his work, though his reputation was growing apace.

By the mid-1970s, Bubbles made the transition from hippie to punk, reshaping NME’s logo and landing a job as in-house designer at Stiff Records. His graphics gave the fledgling label a sharp, smart new identity. He created sleeves for Nick Lowe, the Damned, Dury, Costello and more — many of which cleverly subverted art movements such as dada and constructivism. It was a fiercely intelligent streak he carried through to F-Beat, Radar and Go! Discs. “His sleeve work was sensational,” asserts the Stiff photographer Brian Griffin. “And his work rate was phenomenal. I never saw Barney sleep, ever. Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick is one of the great art pieces of the 20th century. It’s mind-blowing. I think it’s up there with a Picasso painting.”

Such was Bubbles’s all-round ability and prodigious workrate, he even directed pop videos, including Costello’s Clubland and the Specials’ timeless ride into inner-city dread, Ghost Town. But there were other elements to his character. Hawkwind’s Nik Turner, his best friend, remembers disarming Bubbles after he’d been waving a knife around: “The more I knew Barney, the more I came to realise he was a manic depressive. He’d have manic times, then freak out and go to hospital, a safe place to rest and get well again.” Griffin recounts an episode in 1983, after he and Bubbles had argued over the phone: “He was upset with me, so I told him I was driving over to his home in Islington to see him. He opened the door and his face was lacerated, delicately, with a razor blade. There were about 100 nicks. He was obviously going through a bad time.”

Bubbles was indeed troubled. Haunted by the death of his parents two years earlier, and stricken with personal and financial worries, he committed suicide on November 14, 1983. He was just 41 years old.

His work, true to the seasoned adage, lives on. Hawkwind’s former manager, Doug Smith, insists: “He’s the most important artist in the music industry since the 1960s.” Franks contends that “of all the people I’ve worked with, Barney is right at the top. Compared to him, there isn’t anybody else. He was totally natural”.

So, next time you’re flipping through the small print of a favourite cover, look out for Heeps Willard, Big Jobs Inc., Sal Forlenza or even Jacuzzi Stallion. Behind these pseudonyms you’ll find Barney Bubbles.

“He had this unerring ability to make unprepossessing blokes look cool: Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Johnny Moped, me,” Billy Bragg writes in Reasons to Be Cheerful. “Misfits in the pantheon of pop, Barney made us look magnificent.”

Reasons to Be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles by Paul Gorman is published by Adelita on December 4.
johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 36579.html

Dylan Jones: At heart, Barney Bubbles was an artist –which led to the creative strain he put himself under

Talk of the Town

Saturday, 29 November 2008

Barney Bubbles drew my youth, carved it out of coloured paper, counterintuitive typography, bald modernist graphics, old bits of cardboard and photographs of Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Generation X and Ian Dury. Unwittingly I had bought into his world via a Hawkwind album that he designed and I bought in 1974, when I was 13 and he was 32, but it was the punk explosion two years later that really brought him into my life, like it did for thousands of others.

Barney Bubbles was one of the most important designers of the punk and post-punk era – working with all the artists above and many more – a rarely celebrated creature who was always far more interested in achievement than acclaim. This month he is being justly celebrated in a surprisingly moving and comprehensive illustrated biography, Reasons to Be Cheerful: The life and work of Barney Bubbles by Paul Gorman (Adelita, £24.99). The iconography of punk would have been a lot more reductive were it not for Bubbles' inclusive mix of modernist graphics and Sixties playfulness. With Bubbles you always felt that whatever he was working on was treated as a genuine artefact rather than simple decoration. At heart, he was an artist, which led to the creative strain he put himself under.

Reasons to Be Cheerful is not only a lovingly researched biography, it is also an alternative history of the post-punk scene, from Stiff to Radar to F-Beat to 2-Tone to Go! Discs to – gulp! – Red Wedge and beyond. It's easy to forget the wealth of talent that managed to seep up from under the floorboards during that time. The book also includes the full story behind his cover for Elvis Costello's 1979 album Armed Forces, one of the few visual masterpieces of the post-punk era.

Gormon pays scant attention to Bubbles' suicide in 1983 at the age of 42, and while this slightly undermines the picture of the designer that he spends 200 pages building, in some ways it keeps the enigma alive. In the book's foreword, graphic guru Peter Saville says: "The publication of Reasons to Be Cheerful is ... missionary work; Barney Bubbles should be canonised." He couldn't have put it better had he used Stencil Bold Letraset and a 0.5 Rotring Rapidograph.

Dylan Jones is the editor of 'GQ'
johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

I've been leafing through a copy of this for the last few days . It's a sumptuous affair , beautifully printed , a real tribute to a artistic genius. Words really cannot do it justice - just get it and wallow in it.

A minor quibble would be that the text isn't concurrent with images. We get all the backround story to the Armed Forces sleeve on P.137 but the illustrations don't appear until Pp. 148 -153. Once , however, you get used to that it's alright. That's six pages of slightly larger than A4 pages of reproductions for just one album - the book really is that detailed.

Besides the many specifically Costello related features I was particularly taken by the bio. detail that Barney - born Colin Fulcher - grew up in Whitton, Middlesex. Since Elvis live there in 1970's I daresay that may have been another bond they had.

New - to me- details about the Armed Forces sleeve is that the main cover image, the elephants etc, are painted by Tom Pogson. Other images in the package are by the 'French design collective Bazooka' , ' led by artists Christain Chapiron and Jean-Louis Dupre ( who worked under the pseudonyms Loulou and Kiki Picasso'. Additionally ' one of the animal prints derives from a pair of Bubbles' assistant Diana Fawcett's knickers'.

And so on. Definitely a book worth getting - short of the original sleeves it's the only way to see these images properly .
johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/arts/ ... album.html

Judging an Elusive Artist by His Distinctive Covers

By ALICE RAWSTHORN
Published: January 6, 2009
New York Times

LONDON — After years of scraping by on a pittance from designing record covers for indie labels, Barney Bubbles had turned 40 and needed to make some money. He did the rounds of the big London record companies, only to be told by several executives that they had met with younger designers who were passing off his work as their own.

Shameful though that was, it was not entirely surprising. Shy, introspective and fragile, Barney Bubbles shunned publicity and seldom signed his designs. On the rare occasions that he did, it was mostly under an alias. He credited himself on one record sleeve by drawing a dog, and cited his tax code on another. When the magazine The Face asked him for a portrait to illustrate the only interview he ever did, in 1981, he gave them fragments of different photographs.

Isolated from the design industry during his lifetime, Bubbles has often been ignored by it since he committed suicide in 1983 at 41. Yet his lusciously witty artwork for bands like Hawkwind, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, the Damned, and Ian Dury and the Blockheads has made him a hero to young designers. His designs are now celebrated in a book, “Reasons to Be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles,” by Paul Gorman (published in Britain by Adelita and available on Amazon.com).

It’s an odd choice of title. For starters, Bubbles didn’t design the cover of its inspiration, the 1979 Ian Dury single “Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3.” That was the work of the Pop artist Peter Blake. Then there’s the question of whether “cheerful” is an appropriate description of someone who battled depression and chose to end his life. Yet Barney Bubbles did have a cheerful side.

In the book his gentle charm is remembered fondly by friends and colleagues. And despite his fragility, he was a prolific designer who produced a body of work that seems as joyous, playful and rich in meaning now as it did when he created it.

Beginning with his childhood in a dreary London suburb, where he was born Colin Fulcher (he later changed his name legally), the book traces Bubbles’s career from the psychedelic light shows he created in the 1960s to an ill-fated attempt to reinvent himself as an artist. But “Reasons to Be Cheerful” is dominated by Bubbles’s record covers from the 1970s and early ’80s — “lasting images for fleeting times,” as a friend, the science fiction writer Michael Moorcock, described them.

It may be hard for anyone weaned on tiny iPod images to appreciate how evocative record covers were in the 1970s. For many fans the sleeve of their favorite album or single came to mean as much as the music, and were often the first images to move them emotionally. For graphic designers like Bubbles, the 12-inch square of an LP was a canvas on which they could express their own ideas as well as the music.

He certainly was not the first. Reid Miles created dazzling combinations of type and photography for the American jazz label Blue Note in the late 1950s. In the ’60s it became fashionable for bands to commission covers from artists. The Beatles worked with Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, the Rolling Stones with Andy Warhol and Robert Frank. By the end of the decade, graphic designers like Wes Wilson, Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse were stalwarts of the San Francisco psychedelic music scene. Bubbles played a similar role in London, alongside Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey Powell and Roger Dean.

His early work for underground bands, and for magazines like Oz and Frendz, was described by the designer John Coulthart as “cosmic Art Nouveau.” Like other counterculture designers, Bubbles combined the vernacular symbolism of Pop Art with the decorative curves of Alphonse Mucha’s paintings.

But his work was unusually ambitious in its scale and intricacy. He designed every visual element of Hawkwind’s gigs, down to the drum kits, and his sleeve for the band’s 1971 album, “In Search of Space,” unfolded into an elaborate cutout of a hawk.

When depression struck, he left London and in 1976 moved to rural Ireland. A friend, Jake Riviera, sent telegrams begging him to come back as the designer of his new record label, Stiff, home to Elvis Costello and Ian Dury, among others. There was no reply, but one day Bubbles appeared at Stiff’s office and commandeered the coal cellar as a studio.

He developed a radically different style there, reflecting the urgency of Stiff’s post-punk acts. He reinterpreted Constructivist and early Modernist images in striking collages, which were less decorative than his earlier designs.

The cover of the Damned’s 1977 album, “Music for Pleasure,” features a pastiche of Kandinsky paintings that spells out the band’s name. The graphic designers Peter Saville and Malcolm Garrett remember their excitement at discovering the El Lissitzky-inspired Barney Bubbles sleeve for “Your Generation,” a 1977 single by Generation X, in a Manchester record store when they were students.

Bubbles also loved kitsch. He commissioned cheesily airbrushed illustrations for Mr. Costello’s 1979 album, “Armed Forces,” and had the cover of Mr. Dury’s 1979 album, “Do It Yourself,” printed on gaudily patterned wallpaper.

“Reasons to Be Cheerful” is filled with stories of Bubbles’s obsessive work ethic. He was in the studio seven days a week, generally starting in the afternoon, working through the night and often sleeping there. By the early 1980s he was broke and disillusioned with graphic design. He experimented with furniture design and filmmaking before turning to painting.

But the clarity and ingenuity that made his graphics so compelling seemed bland in the free-form medium of paint. And within a few years of his death, the record sleeves of his young admirers, like Mr. Saville and Mr. Garrett, were being treated with a critical seriousness that had eluded him, as was the work of graphic designers who shared his intensely personal, self-expressive approach.

“Barney’s work was irreverent, individual, intuitive and incisive, at a time when graphic design with a sociopolitical edge was not the norm,” Mr. Garrett is quoted as saying in “Reasons to Be Cheerful.” “To say his work was inspirational is an understatement
johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.barneybubbles.com/blog/archives/557

All about Antoinette' Tony ' Sales - who worked with Barney and was ' A fashion illustrator and Stiff/Radar/F-Beat label boss and Jake Riviera’s first wife (who).... produced a number of sleeves, among them Elvis Costello & The Attractions’ biggest hits Oliver’s Army, Radio Radio and Accidents Will Happen and Lowe’s American Squirm and Cruel To Be Kind.

This is also her work -
Image
Double page spread ad for The Attractions, NME, August 30, 1980.


Kind of related, here's some more work by Bazooka , the French artists who Barney worked with on the Armed Forces sleeve -

http://picasaweb.google.com/Bazookaproduction


Image
johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

http://davidwills.wordpress.com/2009/03 ... -with-age/

Image

Elvis Costello button yellowed with age
March 10, 2009


Steve Kirkendall


I got this button when I saw EC and the A’s for the 2nd time at the Ipswich Gaumont in November 1983. I fell in love with it immediately (I really loved the funny typography along the top) and was gob-smacked to find out recently that the design was to be the front of the ‘Punch the Clock’ album sleeve.

I was at the Norwich School of Art 1978-82 and I couldn’t help but notice how quietly brilliant Elvis Costello’s sleeves were. When I became a designer for the Norwich Arts Centre, Mr B was a HUGE influence because of those sleeves, even tho’ I didn’t know who the designer was. Unfortunately, I found out when I read Roy Carr’s BB obituary in The Face at the end of 1983.

The reason I love Mr B’s work so much was ’cos unlike other cutting edge designers at the time, his work was delivered with this real lightness of touch, it was cheeky, smart, made clever nods to great art and it had a real rhythm and a harmony about it that the work of Brody, Saville and Garrett seemed to lack.


Image

RandM say: feel free to use this pic too if you want. this was a US tour t-shirt. ‘photo courtesy of rebecca and mike’
johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

This Bubbles site highlights a obsuore aspect to some of Elvis' early 1980's releases -

http://www.barneybubbles.com/blog/archives/1672

June 29th, 2009

Image

(extract)

The standard single label also features the cow ident for small London production house Korova, from whom the track was licensed. Interestingly, the promo also features an arcane symbol Barney was peppering his work with at the time: three interwined circles against a triangle or pyramid.

This mysterious and powerful sign surfaced on the label to I Can’t Stand Up a month or so previously, and was to appear on many more Costello releases over the next few years. The three circles have many meanings, from the Great Geometer Appollonius to the Christian Holy Trinity to freemasonry and medieval alchemy and are used to this day to help define corporate management roles.
johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

http://spacerockreviews.blogspot.com/20 ... -29th.html

Thursday, 27 August 2009

Hawklords Gig - November 29th

BARNEY BUBBLES MEMORIAL ALL-DAY BENEFIT CONCERT
PRESS RELEASE



The 229 Club, 229 Great Portland Street, London, W1W 5PN
Sunday 29th November, 2009 from 2 – 10pm


On 14th November 1983, the art and music worlds lost one of their most important and innovative figures with the death of the legendary graphic designer Barney Bubbles. His work as Hawkwind’s cover artist and stage-set creator established him as key figure in the Ladbroke Grove / Notting Hill counter-culture scene, whilst his subsequent work with Stiff Records (including his designs for Elvis Costello’s album covers and his fractured Kandinsky-esque cover painting for The Damned’s Music For Pleasure LP) established his relevance to the punk/new-wave generation. He directed the seminal video for The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ single, worked as art director at Friends magazine and was an early champion of Pennie Smith, who was to become one of rock’s most lauded photographers.

“...one of the most important graphic artists of his time.” Will Birch, ‘No Sleep ‘Till Canvey Island – The British Pub Rock Scene’.

Barney Bubbles’ long-time friend and admirer, former Hawkwind saxophonist Nik Turner, has been instrumental in organising this memorial concert celebrating the life and achievements of this most singular of multi-media artists, with a view to setting up a foundation/annual award for innovative album cover design, and a memorial plaque for him...

Headliners THE HAWKLORDS, featuring Adrian Shaw, Alan Davey, Harvey Bainbridge, Jerry Richards, Martin Griffin, Nik Turner, Ron Tree, Steve Swindells and Terry Ollis will perform Hawkwind’s 1973 stage extravaganza, Space Ritual, up-dated to 2009, supported by The New Bubblettes dancers and lighting designs inspired by Liquid Len & The Lensmen.

The day’s extensive line-up also features key 70s Notting Hill band QUINTESSENCE, The Damned founder-member Brian James, fronting his own BRIAN JAMES GANG, Nik Turner’s INNER CITY UNIT and the band created by Barney Bubbles, THE IMPERIAL POMPADOURS.
Pentameters Players will perform their acclaimed staging of ROBERT CALVERT’s play, ‘The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam’s Dice’.

Also appearing during this memorial concert: JERRY FITZGERALD/LOL COXHILL’S ‘FRE-EX, TRIKIMIKI’S ‘3-D SPACE-WARP’, and D.J. JEFF DEXTER

“Barney was, as far as media direction of the youth of this country, probably the most important artist of our generation.” Douglas Smith, interviewed by Jonathon Green, ‘Days In the Life: Voices From The English Underground’.

www.hawklords.com
The 229 ticket hotline 0207 323 7229
£20.00 advance, £25.00 door
For Press Enquiries, Interviews etc
Ian Abrahams - 07722519266
Posted by Ian Abrahams at 11:11
johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

The latest addition to this site -

http://www.barneybubbles.com/blog/archives/2719

Image
johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

A detailed account of Barney's work on the Get Happy!!! sleeve-

http://www.rocksbackpagesblogs.com/2009 ... e-massage/
johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton ... ascendant/

Nov 21, 2009

Reasons To Be Cheerful – the acclaimed study of the life and work of the late graphic genius Barney Bubbles – has been declared Book Of The Year by the UK’s leading rock monthly Mojo magazine.


Described as “fascinating and definitive” by the Sunday Times and “moving and lovingly researched,” by GQ editor Dylan Jones in The Independent, Reasons To Be Cheerful was written by Paul Gorman (author of style bible The Look and Straight with Boy George) and published by British independent popular culture imprint Adelita (sales and distribution through Turnaround Publisher Services).

Mojo will name Reasons To Be Cheerful Book Of The Year in its January 2010 issue (published November 27) with an exclusive interview with Factory Records designer Peter Saville praising its publication.

A quarter of a century after he took his own life at the age of 41, Reasons To Be Cheerful has transformed Barney Bubbles’ cult status by elevating him into the pantheon of graphic design greats. Among fans of the book are such prominent musicians as Paul Weller, Jah Wobble, Mick Jones, Nick Lowe and Billy Bragg.

Reasons To Be Cheerful is the first and definitive exploration of this important visual artist’s body of work, with more than 600 images including student sketchbooks, private paintings, product, brand, underground and music press and examples of the hundreds of record sleeves, posters, adverts, promotional items and music videos he created for the likes of the Rolling Stones, Hawkwind, Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Squeeze, Depeche Mode, The Specials and Billy Bragg.

Reasons To Be Cheerful has also spawned a spectacular online presence featuring fresh interviews, information and rare and previously unseen images (see http://barneybubbles.com/blog) and has been well received in the UK and US (where it is distributed by D.A.P). Author Paul Gorman will also curate a Barney Bubbles exhibition to be inaugurated at London’s Chelsea Space gallery during Design Week in September 2010.
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.barneybubbles.com/blog/archives/3740

Image

July 14th, 2010

Campaign for Barney Bubbles Google doodle


US designer Vic Fieger has launched a campaign for Google to feature the “doodle” he has created by amalgamating various Barney Bubbles’ graphic devices.

Vic would like Google to run his doodle on July 30 – what would be Barney Bubbles’ 68th birthday.

This what Vic has sent to Google’s doodle team:

Hello,

My name is Vic Fieger. I am a font designer and graphic artist.

Not many people know about Barney Bubbles, as the great majority of his work was uncredited. He doesn’t have the name recognition of his contemporaries in art and album design, such as Peter Saville or Hipgnosis.

But his influence on modern design is unmatched; his creations for acts like Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, the Psychedelic Furs and countless other recording artists gave rise to many of the graphic motifs of the 1980s. Only recently has he begun to receive the recognition he deserved with the release of the book Reasons To Be Cheerful by Paul Gorman. Ten years before this, two of his covers appeared in Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell’s 100 Best Album Covers compilation.

I was hoping you might be interested in posting a Doodle paying tribute to Barney on his birthday, July 30. I’ve attached one I’ve created the other day, using an amalgam of some of his graphic devices from various pieces. Even if a Doodle is only posted in the UK, where most of the acts he worked with were based, it would still be very much appreciated by lovers of design and modern art.

I understand that Google is a very busy company and that your calendar is probably already full. Still, I do hope you consider my proposal.

Thank you for your time, and for the services you provide.

Vic Fieger


Join Vic’s campaign by writing to proposals@google.com referencing his letter and using the mail header:

Barney Bubbles for Google doodle on July 30, 2010
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

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http://emilyforgot.blogspot.com/2010/07 ... bbles.html

PROCESS: The working practices of Barney Bubbles will run from September 14 to October 23 at leading London gallery Chelsea Space.


http://www.chelseaspace.org/more.html

Barney Bubbles

In September/October 2010 CHELSEA space will host an exhibition about the late Barney Bubbles, the influential designer whose iconic work for Stiff Records and Hawkwind inspired a revolution in graphic design. The show is curated by Bubbles’ biographer Paul Gorman, renowned author of the book and blog The Look: Adventures in Rock and Pop Fashion.

27 years after his tragic death, Barney Bubbles is now recognised as one of the most powerful influences on the development of graphic design. Paul Gorman will examine the extraordinary oeuvre of this mysterious figure who insisted on anonymity yet provided the visual identity for the counter-culture, new-wave and post-punk movements.

"Barney Bubbles is the missing link between pop and culture"
Peter Saville

CHELSEA space

Chelsea College of Art and Design
16 John Islip Street
London SW1P 4JU

phone: +44 (0)7841 783129
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

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More Barney Bubbles -

http://www.rocksbackpagesblogs.com/2010 ... n-at-work/


http://www.londondesignfestival.com/eve ... ey-bubbles

An exhibition investigating the working practices of the cult graphic designer Barney Bubbles is being staged as part of the London Design Festival.

The show - at London's Chelsea Space - will present for the first time original artefacts and artwork, sketchbooks, student notebooks, equipment and photography relating to the inventive and audacious designs he produced over the two decades up to his death in 1983.

Real name Colin Fulcher (b. Whitton, west London, 1941), Barney Bubbles studied at Twickenham art school and was senior graphic designer at Conran Design 1965-68. Subsequently he focused on the music industry, designing record sleeves, posters, advertising, videos and ephemera for such clients as Stiff Records, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello, The Damned, Ian Dury, Hawkwind, Nick Lowe and The Specials.

Among the exhibits are sketches and proofs for a range of unreleased designs; original artwork for Barney Bubbles' last project, the Ian Dury album 4000 Weeks Holiday; and a never-before publicly displayed 7ft tall Chuck Berry mobile sculpture created as a private commission for a music industry client.

Process is curated by Paul Gorman, author of the Barney Bubbles monograph Reasons To Be Cheerful; the show will coincide with the launch of the revised second edition which includes 50-plus new images, many fresh interviews and a welter of additional information.



14 September, 2010 - 11:00 - 23 October, 2010 - 16:00

Opening times: 11am - 5pm, Tues to Fri, 10am - 4pm Sat

Ticket information: Free


CHELSEA space, 16 John Islip Street
Chelsea College of Art and Design
London
SW1P 4JU
United Kingdom
johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

The latest on the Bubbles blog -

http://www.barneybubbles.com/blog/archives/3792

Haettenschweiler is also used in Barney’s letterhead for Elvis Costello. While the O’s are big, bold and circular, the rest of Costello is pushed together in this typeface – type face? – to complete his trademark horn-rims. The capital “E” is stretched down for the outline of his head and the coif is made up of the “LVIS”.

Image
Letterhead, Elvis Costello Ltd, 1980.
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EarlManchester
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by EarlManchester »

johnfoyle wrote:While the O’s are big, bold and circular, the rest of Costello is pushed together in this typeface – type face? – to complete his trademark horn-rims. The capital “E” is stretched down for the outline of his head and the coif is made up of the “LVIS”.
That is fucking brilliant!

How come I've never seen this before?
johnfoyle
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

Come on over to London on Oct. 16 and see it for real!
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.madamesays.com/2010/09/15/ma ... s-process/

This exhibit in the Bubbles show -

Image


is explained by this -

http://www.elviscostello.info/biography.php

(extract)

Elvis, the Attractions and producer Nick Lowe reconvened at Eden Studios to record Elvis' fifth studio album "Trust" (earlier working titles were "Cats and Dogs" and "More Songs About Fucking and Fighting").
johnfoyle
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Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by johnfoyle »

Me 'n the lads on our recent visit make the Bubbles blog !

http://www.barneybubbles.com/blog/archives/4372
littletriggers
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Re: Reasons To Be Cheerful - EC in new Barney Bubbles book

Post by littletriggers »

Just caught your mugs on the Reasons to be Cheerful email, lads, sorry couldn't make it foot playing me up, I did get myself the programme though.
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