The second volume of Ed Piskor‘s ‘Hip Hop Family Tree‘ – a history of rap music in comic book form – is out this summer. It features another round of guest artist pin ups and a few of these have leaked on the web in the past week or so. There will also be a free issue, drawing from both volumes and sporting a new cover, out for Free Comic Book Day this May.
I’ve featured Ian McQue‘s work before on here, his glorious colour work mostly, and now he’s produced an A4-sized book of B&W sketchbook drawings subtitled ‘Robot, Space Dudes, Flying Ships etc’.
His work is populated by flying barge-type ships, usually moored to buildings or futuristic dockyards, small insect-like craft and boxy rough-terrain vehicles. His human characters come in all shapes and sizes and his robots are of the thin, lanky variety or sometimes like spider mechs.
There are even a few deviations in the book to more fantasy countryside scenes, a page of Hellboy studies and a certain Judge costume that features here a fair bit.
The book – and several colour prints – are available from his bigcartel shop and some come with a personal sketch in the front.
A page from a new book, ‘Brian Eno – Visual Music’, by Christopher Scoates.
The minister of super heavy weight funk is back, no not James Brown, Jim Mahfood. Not only did he release his ‘Visual Funk’ book this year but now there’s a v. limited 100 copy ‘Pop-up Funk‘ book too with, you guessed it, pop up versions of his illustrations. Above is a poster he’s adding in to a 10 copy AP edition – get it here.
I once took on a jigsaw of a Jackson Pollock painting, I forget which one exactly but it took me something like three months to finish, slowly chipping away every day, finding where the next blob of paint belonged. The same day I placed the final piece it seemed like a burden was lifted and I started and finished a vintage 500 piece Vaughn Bodé jigsaw in a few hours. This book was the Bodé puzzle equivalent after finishing Julian Cope‘s monster-sized book from the previous post.
Up until this point, Cope had been the clear front-runner for book of the year, his exhaustive, multi-genre compilation easily fending off all others by size and heaviness alone (of the Rock kind as well as weight). But John Higgs‘ far-reaching yet concise, ‘The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned A Million Pounds’, is going to pip him to the post by sheer force of ideas and vision.
My love of the KLF and all things related is well documented in the hoax soundtrack and visuals I created with Mr Trick some years back so it’s no surprise that this was on the reading list. The e-book version emerged a year ago to great acclaim and a printed edition followed shortly after with many trumpeting it as a unique view on their well-worn tale.
Rather than trot out a regular history of the duo, detailing all their adventures, hits and misses, Higgs chooses to expand outwards from the band, both back and forward in time. If there’s one event that the book centers on it’s the burning of a million pounds and from there he draws clear lines to Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea, Alan Moore, Ken Campbell, the number 23, Dr Who, magical thinking, The Dadaists, the Devil, Discordianism, the assassination of Kennedy, Wicker Men and the banking crisis of the late 20th Century.
Not your average KLF biography then? Higgs places the band in amongst all of these and more, highlighting the synchronicities and coincidences surrounding them and showing you a bigger picture which may or may not have influenced their actions. He’s also not a fawning fan boy ready to mythologise their back catalogue with rose-tinted spectacles either. He describes their first album, ‘1987’, as ‘shit’, ‘Doctorin The Tardis’ as ‘a novelty record’ and wonders if Drummond and Cauty aren’t just ‘attention-seeking arseholes’. On the first two counts he’s mostly right.
No more to say, I don’t want to spoil it, go and find the book and I guarantee you’ll see the band in a different light, even if you’re the most hardened fan. Also check Higgs’ website as it’s full of great articles related and unrelated including an automated, self-referencing tumblr dedicated to quotes from the book that generates random gifs regularly.
This book has taken me the best part of the year to finish, it’s been sighted in most rooms in the house since Xmas and probably has more soup and cereal encrusting its pages than any other book I own. It’s a huge 700 page collection of Julian Cope‘s album reviews from a decade of writing for his Head Heritage site and it’s easily one of the books of the year.
If you’ve never read Cope before he’s in a different league from any other music critic you’ve ever read. Frequently laugh out loud funny, researched up to the hilt and with a Hunter S. Thompson-esque sense of urgency that swings between over-excited teenager making their first discoveries to seen-it-all-before-couldnt-give-a-fuck posturing. His prose is peppered with references to Norse mythology so he invokes Loki and Odin constantly whilst lovingly referring to the reader(s) as ‘children’, ‘babies’ and ‘motherfuckers’. He casually drops anecdotes about all and sundry from the Liverpool scene and knows his shit inside out. The great thing about this is that you can drop in and out of it with ease and each page, let alone each chapter, will have you scurrying to Google to look up records he describes that cannot possibly live up to his out of this world comparisons.
He starts at the end of the 50s with some Lord Buckley and proceeds, decade by decade, to rifle through the forgotten, the neglected and the just plain unknown music that he deems at least worthy of the same accolades afforded the Mojo-endorsed rock gods we all see peering out of Classic Rock-type magazines every month. Most of his sentences are really long too. After the 00’s (sorry, I can’t say ‘noughties’) we get condensed versions of his Krautrocksampler / Japrocksampler format for Detroit Rock, Post Rock, Hard Rock, Glam Rock and Dansk Rock (Danish in case you were wondering).
For serious music fanatics wishing to read an alternative take on the history of rock in the 20th Century rather than those wanting a light read, this will come to be seen of equal importance as ‘Krautrocksampler’ in time. If you still need convincing then read what the Quietus had to say about it and then Treat yourself.
Found in one of my kids’ books, love the poem and illustration.
This is going to be one of the compilations of the year, if you don’t know or have this stuff already then you need it if you like unhinged, leftfield comics of any kind. (Not sure who laid out that poster though, shocking!)
A seller (inddes)has put some seriously rare Syd Mead books up on eBay – a lot of them signed, with very low starting prices. Most of these books rarely come up for sale and when they do will start at around the £100 mark. Marvel at his beautiful design work, if I had the money I’d bid on the lot.
Now a design cliché whilst highlighting just how adaptable those old designs were, the object as Penguin book gets another outing here. We’ve had record sleeves, film posters and more but now it’s the turn of comics to get their chance in the spotlight. When they’re done as well as these then I don’t mind at all, more examples by Fonografiks over here.
A package dropped through the door last week and I instantly knew it was from Nigel Peake. He always addresses packages to ‘Master K. Foakes’ in the old tradition my grandmother used to. Inside was a new book, something of a departure for him as it’s a story this time rather than observational illustrations based on a theme.
Drawn during the winter month in Austria and Switzerland between 2012-3, ‘In The Dark’ tells of a boy’s fear of the dark and can be enjoyed by adult or child alike. With all the current talk of ‘Supermoons’ it seemed apt that the moon featured large (literally) in the story too. It’s self published and available from his website for £14, as are several other of his books and his Ninja Tune family tree poster. Check out Nigel’s equivalent of a ‘Fragile’ sticker too, ‘careful please’.
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I did a little interview with Robert Lamb over at Stuff To Blow Your Mind and chose three books I’d recommend for some summer reading. This list is here and you can listen to the podcast here.
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This is the first collection of Augustine Kofie‘s work, self-published and available at his Keep Drafting site for $40 inc. Int. postage. You can see his art progress over a ten year period in just 62 full colour pages. What a body of work to behold so far too, his colour palette and sense of compositional balance is incredible as is his taste in texture and collage.
For me there is no other artist producing work of this calibre right now, I just wish I was richer and could afford some of his originals. This book is a steal at this price when you see some of the work contained within so it’ll have to do for now.
I was lucky enough to receive this fantastic book for Xmas this year after the first printing in 2008 disappeared and started going for silly money. Luckily this 2nd edition has extra info and images so waiting paid off and I can’t recommend this book highly enough for fans of music design in general. Until the middle of the last decade the name Barney Bubbles wasn’t widely known or recognised aside from music business associates from back in the day or the odd rabid fan.
The reason for this is not because his work was hidden away on obscure releases – he designed covers for several classic albums as well as a fair few hit singles in the 70’s and early 80’s. It wasn’t because the work wasn’t good, most of it is stunning, all the more so when you read into the detail he put in each and every one. It was more to do with the fact that Barney often didn’t sign much of his work, and when he did it was under some super-coded pseudonym only a few close to him would recognise. He also didn’t go out of his way to publicise himself and suffered from bouts of depression which, sadly, caused him to take his own life in 1983, thus halting what could have been a groundbreaking career in design.
I say this because Bubbles was that rare thing in that he spanned two very distinct generations and worked seamlessly within both of them, a rarity these days and hard to pull off as most designers get associated with a particular style or genre and become known for that only. He started in the midst of the 60’s and became a full blown hippy, journeying to San Francisco in the summer of ’68 . He returned to produce graphics for the scene in London – the name Barney Bubbles was given to him after he started his own psychedelic light show mixing inks on overhead projectors. A long association with Hawkwind followed and he designed some of their most innovative sleeves such as ‘Space Ritual’ and ‘X In Search Of Space’ – both fold out wonders the likes of which were abundant in the 70’s.
But come the year of punk, when all this was to be washed away and the reset button pushed, Barney fell in with the newly hatched Stiff label with Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe among others and seamlessly altered his style(s) to fit with the times, coasting through into the 80’s unscathed. He was the first person to mimic the Penguin book covers now so ubiquitous, parodied Blue Note sleeve design nearly a decade before it came back into fashion with Acid Jazz and took De Stijl and Cubist designs as inspiration before many others. He even dipped his toe into furniture design and early video promo making before he passed (did you know he directed The Specials‘ ‘Ghost Town’ video? no, me neither).
Until the publication of the first edition of this book, tirelessly put together by journalist Paul Gorman, who has since helped curate displays at the V&A of famous pop memorabilia, the design world had largely ignored Bubbles even though many pieces have featured in Record Cover collection books over the years. The drawing together of his output and the joining the dots between the various phases, pseudonyms and uncredited work has finally shone a spotlight on him, something it’s doubtful he would have gone out of his way to do had he still been alive.
I certainly wasn’t aware of how far he reached with his work but plenty of his sleeves and designs were familiar to me even though a lot of the music wasn’t something I listened to. The logo for the NME paper from 1978 through to 2010 – that was Barney, the Stiff Records logo, Billy Bragg‘s ‘Life’s A Riot With Spy vs Spy’ sleeve, Elvis Costello‘s ‘Armed Forces’ LP package, The Blockheads‘ logo, the first Depeche Mode LP cover, the first Damned singles and albums…
An incredible body of work and an amazing book, lavishly illustrated that chronologically treads the paths that Bubbles did with plenty of input from the artists and friends that he worked with. My only nitpick with it is that the images are almost always out of synch with the text, the illustrations always seemingly several pages behind which is frustrating when you’re trying to get a sense of a sleeve being described only to find it 6 pages later.
His death is also almost a minor entry in the narrative and, having heard Mark Hodkinson‘s harrowing ‘In Search of Barney Bubbles’ documentary on BBC Radio4 it’s all the more tragic when you see everything he’d achieved up until that point. Treat yourself to this book and revel in his work as he finally takes his place among the greats of music design in the 20th Century.
I can’t resist a comic or book with a record on the inside cover and the 7″ size of McBess‘ ‘Malevolent Melody’ made me grab it off the shelf in the NoBrow shop in Great Eastern St. earlier in the year.
The name McBess was unfamiliar but his images floored me and I immediately bought this as well as another oversize book by him called ‘Big Mother’. Seldom do I come across someone who has such a strong, fully developed visual style that stands out so immediately.
Shades of Kid Acne and Pete Fowler‘s style permeate throughout but not a hint of colour and some of the smoothest draughtsmanship I’ve seen in a while.
I was in love with his style from the minute I saw it, my favourite artistic discovery of 2012. 
Check out his site here.
When Pepe Deluxé do anything they don’t do it by halves, in fact they go the whole nine yards and then add a load more into the mix for good measure. What emerges is music and imagery so multi-layered it requires repeat listens to pierce the surface and process the motherlode of information contained within.
One of the reasons I love Pepe is because there is genuinely no one like them, they are a one-off and a band seemingly working in and across separate time zones whose records sound so out of place you wonder if they’ll ever even find reappraisal 20 years down the line. This isn’t a criticism, it’s to be admired that a band can strike out so single-mindedly whilst ignoring any current forms of music that are deemed ‘hip’ and ‘cool’. In fact it’s testament to Pepe and Catskills for leaving off the many remixes they’ve had over the last releases as, with the exception of Husky Rescue‘s cover of ‘Supersonic’, none of them came close to Pepe’s vision and sounded like they were trying to force the band into a modern day setting (sorry guys, just my opinion).
The new Deluxe version of their ‘Queen of the Wave’ album is no different, in fact it ups the ante considerably and throws everything AND the kitchen sink at you over 2 CDs, a DVD and a 64 page booklet inside a hard backed book. The original album is present but the ‘Esoteric Pop Opera In Three Parts’ has suddenly expanded to three discs, the second with versions, new and unused tracks and an easy-listening style EP of selected songs. The DVD includes videos for singles both new and old as well as stems for budding remixers. Everything about it says EPIC, the original album is one in itself but bolstered by the 2nd disc, DVD and a book that has crammed enough material for 100 pages into 64 then the deal is sealed.
No space is left un-filled and we learn everything from recording history to how they shot the video for ‘Night & Day’ with real magic tricks and all. The book shouldn’t work, it breaks so many rules of what good design is with up to 10 different fonts competing for space on any one page and a layout that’s more scrapbook than grid. Yet it does work and adds to the music is so many ways, placing the album visually between steampunk and psychedelia with nods to Tiki and Analogue electronics from the golden age. One minute you think you’re looking at an issue of Practical Electronics then it’s a poster in the style of a traveling circus or a Richard Hamilton-esque collage.
Anyway, enough of me blathering on, check the video below as it’s another brilliant Pepe production with the classic ‘Virtual Chicken Little Funk Operator’ set to become legendary. You can BUY the deluxe package from Catskills HERE.
Jonathan Edwards has a few new books out as well as featuring in the upcoming ‘Creature Couture’ book by Felt Mistress. This one is called ‘Imagined Landscapes’ and features all sorts of weird and wonderful locations in his unique style.
If you follow his twitter you’ll have seen these popping up over the last year or so and he’s collected them together in a 32 page sketchbook. I love the colours on the cover and wished there was more colour inside but then again it is a sketchbook.
He has copies in his online shop as well as more sketchbooks, prints, original art, comics and he’ll even do a bespoke portrait of you.
Felt Mistress aka Louise Evans has a book coming out of her creature designs from the last 18 years. 400-pages feature over 1,650 photographs, previously unseen drawings of her partner Jonathan Edwards’ original design ideas, details of every Felt Mistress collaboration with other artists and more. With in-depth interviews with Loiuse, Jonathan, Jon Burgerman, Pete Fowler, Ben Newman, John Knox, Nobrow and more, it looks like the definitive article.
If you pre-order the book from the publishers Blank Slate you’re in with a chance to win an actual Creature made by Louise which is featured in the book. One book will come with a felt ‘You Win’ ticket as seen below and details of how to claim your prize.
There are also versions of the book with Mr Tippy characters in regular and gold editions and, if you still can’t get enough creature love, you can hear Louise and Jonathan talk about the book at Foyles on Charing Cross Rd. on Dec 11th at 8.30pm. The talk is free but you have to book a place online and Jonathan will be doing creature portraits on a first come first served basis.
The excellent Pepe Deluxé are coming to the UK for their first live performance on November 12th at the Scala in London. Tickets are available here from Soundcrash.
The full live experience will be supported by Husky Rescue and guests and coincide with the release of the Deluxe edition of Pepe’s ‘Queen Of The Wave’ album which I rhapsodised over earlier this year.
Apparently the new edition (a deluxe Deluxé edition?) contains 2 CDs and a DVD and comes in a 64 page hardback book with loads of extra artwork to add to the album companions already generated for the original version. Check the front and back covers below and get more info from their Facebook page.
Two new Kraftwerk books are about to hit the shelves. The Vinyl Factory issue a collection of 45 sleeves from around the world in a limited edition book with a 7″ of an interview on Sept 12″ with a free exhibition of the sleeves at The Vinyl Factory Chelsea gallery, 91 Walton Street, London SW1 between Sept 13th and Oct 5th. You can pre-order the book for an eye-watering £80 here.
A new biography is also released this week called ‘Publikation’, written by David Buckley and published by Omnibus Press. It got a good review in the recent issue of Mojo as he seems to have interviewed as many of their close associates and ex-band members as possible. You can buy it now and it’s nice to see that it’s been designed by Malcolm Garrett.