Work by Snub23 the grounded boat, The Duke of Lancaster, which has been dug into the Dee estuary in Flintshire since 1979. His giant piece, named “Your Time is Up, The Future is Here”, is 12m x 12m and part of a legal program by several artists to turn the ship into a work of art.
Starting next week at Dome Club, the UK’s first weekly place to see full dome content, is the first of four performances of ‘The Search Engine’. This is a 360 degree film for the full dome (or planetarium) environment.
It’s been seen before in London, Leicester and Montreal but this is a newer, revised version that lasts 50 minutes and presents an alternative version of the album with film, animation, photography and graphics.
The first show is April 4th, starting at 7pm at the Think Tank planetarium at Millennium Point, Birmingham. It will then be shown on the 25th, then May 16th and June 6th. Admission is £4 or £3 depending where you sit – the middle back half is usually the sweet spot for dome showings.
The club has weekly showings of all sorts of interesting, art-based full dome films and it’s really the sort of experience it’s hard to convey without actually going yourself. Here’s the little short about the Montreal version of this show that I did last summer.
Ticket available both online or at the door, go to: domeclub.co.uk > TICKETS > Dome Club -> 4th April (or whichever date you’re after).
Two more posters for Pacific Rim, looks like they’re rolling them out one a day this week.
Getting a copy of this little release has been a mission, by the time I found out about it it was sold out on pre-order. I put it on my Piccadilly Records wishlist and hoped, badgered the label to repress it but they couldn’t afford to. Eyed up copies on eBay but didn’t want to give the flippers the satisfaction but finally succumbed when the label – Sonic Catherdral – put up one of their final copies to raise money for Red Nose Day a couple of weeks back. I think it was the most I’d ever paid for a 7″ (two actually) but it’s going to a good cause so fuck it.
‘A Psyche For Sore Eyes’ is a beautifully realised package, designed by Heretic, to house two coloured 45s, a pair of 3D glasses and a whole heap of psychedelic imagery. The paper engineering is particularly clever in the way it accommodates each component and the glasses aren’t just a gimmick. Rather than have ‘look I can touch it’ 3D the red/green balance works more in an op-art sense, similar to the 3D underground comix designs I posted two years back.
Musically I wouldn’t call it ‘psyche’ as such, – it’s a compilation that swings from indie rock to shoegazing drones to electron-noise. Lead track, ‘The Correspondent’ by Hookworms, is so reminiscent of ‘A Storm In Heaven’-era Verve that it’s hard not to imagine ‘mad’ Richard Ashcroft on vocals. The Vacant Lots have been worshipping at the alter of Suicide but in a good way and the fuzz bass and reverb of Lorelle meets the Obsolete reminds me of both the 60’s and the 90’s simultaneously (see ’60, see ’90, go! anyone?*). Even though it’s hard to find in stores you can listen and buy digitally.
*(bad Bow Wow Wow joke – sorry)
Every guy my age has a soft spot somewhere for Iron Maiden‘s covers (some of the music wasn’t bad either but I dipped out around ‘Somewhere in Time’). Their mascot, Eddie, has been with them through thick and thin, morphing and warping into new identities with each album and I just came across these two designs that ape classic sci-fi comics of the 60’s. I’m not sure if these were designs that didn’t make it as there seem to be more traditional versions of the same titles with Derek Riggs‘-style airbrush images too. But if you’re going to do the ‘comic’ look then this is how to do it. UPDATE: turns out that these were by Anthony Dry, see his comments about them down below.
I also found this cover in 3D and couldn’t resist posting it
The poster, designed by Luke Insect, for Salon des Refusés V – a pop up shop/gallery initiated by Scraffer, coming this April in West London. I’ll have prints for sale and work on display – more info soon…
Another zoetrope picture disc – this time for Kate Bush‘s Record Store Day release of ‘Running Up That Hill’ (2012 remix). This will be on a 10″ but it’s not known yet how many copies will be pressed or how you’ll actually see this animate on the turntable. The design was put together by Peacock who also did the same for her last year – and check out the lovely homepage for Kate’s site here.
I’ve been meaning to post this for ages, it’s quite an old record now, being released in 2009 on Fonal Records. Shogun Kunitoki make epic organ-led instrumental space rock and their second album came as a picture disc which also doubles as a zoetrope. They even went so far as to issue a ‘Mystical Shogun Kunitoki Strobe Light’ with which to view the animated designs. The first edition is sold out but they have a few here, unfortunately the record is sold out though. Watch a clip of how it works and steps to build your own here. The Amorphous Androgynous included a track on one of their Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble mixes way back and you can check them out on iTunes.
Astrophonica end their trilogy of VIP 10″s with Machine Drum‘s take on ‘Jungle Juke’. It works a treat and sits alongside the other two rather nicely. Each sleeve is screen-printed in two colours, hand stamped and the whole run is limited to 300 of each disc. Fracture and Om Unit head up the first two releases and they can be bought from here.
In other news, Machine Drum just signed to Ninja Tune! 
I hadn’t seen this before: Japanese Manga artist Makoto Kobayashi‘s ‘Dragon’s Heaven’ was an animated short made in 1988 featuring a lot of his weirder mech designs and drawn in a style more reminiscent of Moebius than the more polished styles you’d see in the Gundam cartoons.
Kobayashi’s mecha are unique, spindly, organic, curvacious and look like they could fall over any minute. It’s sometimes hard to tell where the eyes are or even which way round the body should face as his angular designs defy all regular robotic logic. This is the only time I’ve seen an animated short with this kind of look. The film starts with a face off between two actual models before moving into animation but the credits turn into a mini making-of feature involving the models from the intro.
You can see the whole thing on YouTube but it’s split into several parts.
GOAT tour T-shirt by Luke Insect, available in 3 colours on the band’s US tour.
When the cover image for David Bowie‘s ‘The Next Day’ appeared earlier this year I was firmly in the ‘dislike’ camp. Designer friends raved about it but I just couldn’t agree, although it was nice to have a debate raging over a piece of graphic design – brilliant PR move there. Jonathan Barnbrook‘s defacing of Bowie’s classic, ‘Heroes’, did nothing for me visually despite being a bold move from Bowie for allowing such an act to become the cover of his new album. Supposedly signalling a need to move on and obscure the past from which any artist is always judged, Barnbrook said, “The obscuring of an image from the past is also about the wider human condition; we move on relentlessly in our lives to the next day, leaving the past because we have no choice but to.”
Fair enough, I can get with that but the result is dull and ugly to me, the casual scoring out of the original title and insertion of a white square seemingly designed to provoke. The use of a classic image reminds me of lesser designers who take other’s established icons as part of their own to bolster their visual cred, the equivalent of someone wearing a faux-distressed Led Zeppelin T-shirt they bought in Top Shop last week. The dull typeface across the middle… there’s just nothing to say about it. I would have liked it if they’d have physically stuck a white square with the title onto actual Bowie albums from the past, not just ‘Heroes’ but any of them, that would have had some impact.
The moment passed, as all internet ‘storms’ do, and the first single emerged to rabid fanfare, which I was also unmoved by. I like Bowie but I can’t say I could remember a song he’s done since the ‘Let’s Dance’ era if I’m honest and I stopped checking him out a long time ago. Then, last week, I was at dinner with some friends and one recommended I listen to it as it was, ‘the best thing he’s done since ‘Scary Monsters’. Really? But the single was a maudlin ballad, sung by a man who sounded like he was reminiscing about his glory days – although excessive plays on 6 Music over the past month have softened me to it somewhat. ‘No, that’s the only thing like it on the record, the rest is just a great rock album, said the friend. So I went home and checked the stream on iTunes. My god, he wasn’t wrong.
After hearing the single, the album is a revelation, not only is it full of killer hooks and inventive arrangements, it’s Bowie in full flow. Opener, ‘The Next Day’, kicks straight in and within 70 seconds roars into the chorus with Bowie hollering for all his worth, “HERE I AM, not quite dying, my body left to rot in a hollow tree!” As opening tracks on a comeback album go, that takes some beating and immediately silences all the pundits who were sure the album would be a melancholic glance back at the past by an aging icon. You’d never know it was the same record to feature, ‘Where Are We Now?’, which is a huge curveball of a lead single if ever there was one. ‘Dirty Boys’ skanks along sounding like he’s being backed by Fishbone at a New Orleans wake, ‘If You Can See Me’ is just intense, his voice pitched into alien dimensions whilst navigating a time signature that would tax any competent player. ‘Dancing Out In Space’ recalls the best parts of the 80’s pop like ‘Modern Love’, a joyous, bouncy song with doo-wop backing vocals whilst ‘Boss Of Me’ alternates hard and soft that even the saxophone can’t spoil. There are shades of both 70’s and 80’s Bowie, the ghost of Robert Fripp‘s guitar (although he doesn’t actually play on it), the mood is generally uptempo and his band is tight as… It’s chock full of singles and you wonder whose idea it was to lead off with what is essentially the breather you get after the first five tracks. The closing track, ‘Heat’ sounds like ‘Low’-era Bowie meets Scott Walker doing ‘The Electrician’, a chilling piece to end the album. If you get the deluxe download edition there are three bonus tracks too, none of which are filler in any way.
All that to say, I love it, I’ve played virtually nothing else all week and, inspired by the music, I decided to do my own take on defacing ‘Heroes’ which I’ve posted above.
DJ Scientist, label head of Equinox Records, pulls out all the stops for his 25 years of Solid Steel mix this week with a Solid Soviet Steel special.. Never someone to do things by halves he’s been working on this for months and there’s a lot of background info to go with it:
Solid Soviet Steel Radio (SSSR) is a special guest mix for Solid Steel by DJ Scientist that solely features music from the former Soviet Union. The dedicated record collector, disc jockey and label owner from Berlin managed to unearth and put together an extensive and fascinating selection of tracks from countries like the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldavia, Russia and more.
More than that, to make it even more special, this first lesson in a series of other Soviet mixes by DJ Scientist is dedicated to tracks by so-called VIA bands. VIA is an abreviation for Vocal Instrumentalis Ansamblis or Vocal Instrumental Ensemble which was basically the synonym for pop groups in the Soviet communist states throughout the 70s. Many of these groups managed to create their own kind of sound, mixing western styles like Jazz, Funk and Rock with traditional music from their own countries. For example, very unique vocal harmonies can be heard in VIAs such as Iverya (Georgia) or Gaya (Azerbaijan).
All tracks have been recorded from original vinyl from the Soviet state label “Melodia” (Melody) and have been mixed and edited with Serato Scratch Live and Cubase. Some of the bands appearing in the mix cannot clearly be labeled as VIAs. Rero for example usually was an instrumental group and has been called “Variety Orchestra”. However, on the track “Come Outside” they play together with a vocal group. Technically speaking, the famous “Rude-Paparude” by Maria Kodrianu is not a straight VIA track too, as Kodrianu was a well known solo singer from Moldavia. However, here she is backed by one of the funkiest grooves, played by a VIA that was lead by A. Mordkowicha.
The artwork is taken from the cover of the Soviet youth magazine Krugozor issue 11/72.
No, that’s not a Roy Lichtenstein, it’s Dave ‘Watchmen’ Gibbons after Irv Novick and this is his entry for the Image Duplicator show that starts in May at the Orbital comics gallery in London. The aim of the show is to highlight the original artists that Lichtenstein copied and produce a new take on their images, much the same as he did. The difference in this case will be that the show will mainly consist of comic book artists and commercial illustrators and be held in a gallery in a comic shop rather than an art gallery. The exhibition is the brainchild of designer Rian Hughes who has long written about the contradictions between what is deemed high and lo art and is a champion of showcasing lost or forgotten artists’ work.
For those unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of Lichtenstein’s aping of others’ work as his own, take a look at this amazing site by David Barsalou called DECONSTRUCTING ROY LICHTENSTEIN. He has painstakingly tracked as many of the sources that Lichtenstein copied and presents the two side by side, the results are quite shocking both in how exactly he copied and how bad or bland the results are.
There was a great documentary on about him on the BBC just two weeks ago called, ‘Whaam!’ It covered his career from both sides of the story as well as featuring a section with Dave Gibbons making his case for the originals over Lichtenstein’s copies. The Image Duplicator show runs for two weeks between May 16th-31st, centered around the same time that The Tate Modern end their Lichtenstein retrospective. There is still time to enter if you fancy it and any proceeds from sales of prints will be given to the Hero Initiative charity that looks after the welfare of senior comic creators.
In another nice piece of synchronicity, this week the story broke about the aging British artist Brian Sanders who was sought out by the producers of Mad Men to illustrate posters for the new series in his old style. They found his originals in a book called, ‘Lifestyle Illustration of the 60’s’ and asked their art department to draft something in the same fashion. Rather than copy the style they went and found Sanders and the results speak for themselves. Just by coincidence, the person who put the book together that they saw the work in was none other than Rian Hughes.
A digital recreation and remix of an early Designers Republic sleeve for The Orb who are doing some sort of gig performing their first two albums at Brixton’s Electric venue on April 5th. Tickets and event page are here.
Below is a post from my ‘other’ blog – ArtOfZTT.com – where I post artwork relating to the ZTT label and interview the people who made it. 
I arrive early, at a pub just outside Hither Green station in deepest South East London, to meet Tony ‘AJ’ Barratt, renown music magazine photographer and key ingredient in the early days of ZTT image-making. His photos of spanners, statues, masks and landscapes gave an identity to (the) Art of Noise as well as gracing the first release from the label, ‘Into Battle’. He also did many live shots, promo and video stills for Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Andrew Poppy.
It’s Friday evening and the place is filling up, the only photo of Tony I’ve got for reference is 30 years old and he’s told me to look out for ‘a hairless Glenn Gregory, ex of Heaven 17 lookalike’. After about 10 minutes a guy comes in who might fit the bill and I catch his eye, ‘Tony?’, ‘Yes’, he says, shaking my hand but with a very puzzled expression on his face. ‘Tony Barratt?’ I enquire, ‘ah, no, you’ve got the wrong person, he says, ‘but my name IS Tony though’. With perfect timing, the right Tony walks through the door holding a copy of the Ambassadors Theatre program for ‘The Value of Entertainment’.
He does indeed look like Glen Gregory, albeit without hair, and is instantly warm, engaging and candid about his early experiences in the music business. We’re joined by his partner, Jan, and after a couple of pints we repair to his house nearby where I notice the 12″ picture discs for both ‘Relax’ and ‘Two Tribes’ amongst the many pictures hanging on their walls.
How did you get it touch with ZTT? Presumably you knew Paul from working at the NME or was that later?
No, it’s much more personal than that, I moved down to London with Paul’s sister, Jayne (they were an item). I knew Paul in Stockport, vaguely…
Is that where you’re from?
Yeah, and he bought out a fanzine – ‘Out There’ – sent it down to the NME and they said, ‘you’ve gotta come down and speak to us as soon as you can’. He went down and started off his career, this must have been early eighties so that kind of fits in. I moved down to London with Jayne in ’83 and I was a photography student at Harrow. In my second year there, obviously Paul Morley was (at) the NME and he was doing all this great stuff, (so) I took my stuff to the NME. This was before the Art of Noise or whatever. I was shown the door.
I went to the Melody Maker and started doing work there, concert stuff and photos and things, and then as time went by, Paul suddenly started to get involved with… I’ve no idea how that whole thing came to be – that he met with Trevor Horn, you might know a bit more about it or it might be mythologised by Paul or whatever.
The accepted story is that he interviewed Trevor when he was in the Buggles…
Yeah I remember that.
…he slated them, but when Trevor got the opportunity from Chris Blackwell (head of Island records) to start a label, he remembered Paul and got in touch. That would have been at some point in ’82 or ’83 presumably so you would have done those Art of Noise photos in the summer?
(Laughs) It’s awful to say but I have no memory of when or how, you have to remember that I was coming to the end of my photography course, I don’t think I’d actually left and there was this vague idea of some vague photos that might be needed for this vague idea of a group. And it was never something that was kind of like, ‘here’s a brief, we would like you to go out and do this’. The record label started and there’re all very exciting PAs at the Camden Palace with the Frankies, all sorts of bands were signing and people were interested and it was going to be the artist event of the… which it turned out, in some ways, to actually be.
AJ (with cable release), Paul Morley (with phone) and friends circa ’83 – AJ: “I took this from across the room with the cable release, if I remember, Paul was on the phone to Trevor sorting out the ZTT thing.”
But I can’t actually remember. I remember it being a great time, I’d moved down to London, I was on the guest list of these great parties and it was free drinks and I thought, ‘oh my god I can’t believe this’. And then there was this record label and there was the Frankies and this vague idea of this thing called The Art of Noise and it was never like a… Because the members were so busy all the time, it was never like, ‘the group are going on tour now, etc.’ So there was no real sense of urgency.
They weren’t a group in the classic sense were they? They were producers, studio engineers and arrangers, which is commonplace today, but back then… They were ‘the music’ and Paul was ‘the image and the words’ and he knew how to present them.
Yeah, I’m not sure how you’d describe it, and he would chuck things in, he really did chuck things into the mix there, but there was never any sense there of… a plan. I got the impression that the music they made was at the end of a hard day producing whoever the hell it was.
The initial ideas for the Art of Noise apparently came from producing Yes, they stole a drum track which was going to be wiped, which then became the basis for ‘Beatbox’.
Well, if you listen to ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart’ by Yes, there’s a bit in the middle where it kind of flips up and I remember that being crucial to the Art of Noise. I think that’s when Morley kind of went, ‘that’s what the Art of Noise should be’.
When you took all the images like the hand with the rose and the spanner, that was just you on your own or did Paul come with you, did he give you those props?
My memory of that is that, at that time, I would just go out and take photos. When Paul was talking about the Art of Noise, what kind of came into my head was like Russian Constructivism, Futurism… The Human League did an EP called, ‘The Dignity of Labour’ and I always thought of this idea of labour being a fantastic idea to get into, you know, the ‘strength through joy’ kind of thing.
I know what you mean, like SPK, imagery of spanners and hammers, almost acting out Russian Constructivist posters.
So, I would just go out on a Saturday afternoon, go down to parts of London that I didn’t know and I’d just wander about, climb into things and take photos of things and mess about. Where those photos were taken, where that crane was that I climbed into, the same place as the van (from the ‘Close Up’ sleeve). It has obviously been a scrap metal yard at some point but you can see Tower Bridge in the background and when you think about London 30 years ago, there’s a piece of scrap land that you can see Tower Bridge from, that’s unbelievable.
It’s fascinating for me to see the contacts for the original Art Of Noise spanners etc., just seeing the outtakes or different shots. (AJ had provided me with original contact sheets for some of these shots).
The spanner photo (above) is my favourite of all time because it’s my arms, I set the shot up and I judged how high up I should put the spanner and I did the cable release with my foot. Strange but true, when I saw it, I just thought, ‘wow’. It’s very rare that, you know yourself as a graphic designer, that you do something and…‘bosh’, it works. I was fairly pissed off when Morley didn’t put it on the cover. The one with the van is at a completely different time when I took my mate Phil down.
I’d figured that, I was going to ask, who was that in the mask?
(Laughs) In those shots it’s a friend of mine from college called Phil Priestman, where is he now?
Because you’d assume it was Paul.
Really? Do you think so?
Well, if there’s an image of the group, he was presenting that so you’d assume (that). It doesn’t matter who’s behind it though. Was that the same with the figure on the beach?
No, that was Jayne (laughs)
I’m not sure I want to explode any of these myths (laughs). This is the thing, I’m very aware that by explaining all this stuff it could just sort of pop the bubble. I don’t necessarily want to do that.
Well, I think it’s all well and good actually, the shots on the beach were at a place called Birling Gap, up between Brighton and Newhaven, very nice because of all those rocks and things. Me and Jayne went for a nice day out and…
“Put this cloak and mask on love…’ (laughs)
It was a cape actually, Jayne used to work at the National Theatre as a dresser and she borrowed it (laughs). If memory serves I was given the mask at ZTT and we took it down with us, or Paul dropped it around to where we lived back then. It had never crossed my mind that people would take for granted that that was Morley.
Well, who could it be? No one knew who it was… it was The Art Of Noise in some respects.
(raucous laughter from Tony) Trevor Horn?
You would assume he’s the guy in the cloak, you know? ‘Don’t look behind the screen’, kind of thing. So there’s me thinking it’s Paul and it’s actually his sister!
That’s great.
I didn’t know who it was, there’s one on the back of ‘Close Up’ and there’s someone holding the mask and you can see some slicked back hair…
Yeah, that’s Phil Priestman (laughs). Who happened to have the same kind of haircut but that’s really interesting, I’d never thought of that.
In all the Art of Noise sleeves – their greatest visual asset (to my mind) was the masks and they dropped that completely once they’d moved to China records.
‘Close Up’ is my favourite Art Of Noise 12″ bar none. For everything about it – the music, the cover, the photos, the colours – that epitomizes them for me.
I’d say you’re right actually.
I would stare at that record, like many other ZTT sleeves, and just try and find clues because that was what ZTT was about, it never gave you the answers it just posed the questions and that was half the fun of it.
Well that was part of Morley’s…mystic.
Because he got so much stick over other things, he hasn’t really gotten the credit for the art direction.
Having known him since… when I first met Paul he had hair parted down to here. Tangerine Dream, Nick Drake, reggae, he loved all that. I have the utmost admiration for him, but having said that, I have watched him chance it and throw it out there so much, actually to the detriment of his health. Like all his heroes, he believed that if he kept that up, he could keep throwing out those great ideas, ‘their fourth number one’, let’s put sperm on the cover, this’ll go. And it got to the point where actually, Jill Sinclair and Trevor were saying, ‘well look, we need to make some money here’.
You can kind of see that in the sleeves and such, that playfulness, ridiculously indulgent whilst the coffers are filling up from Frankie’s success. He had a couple of years of ‘the dream’, the honeymoon period, if you like, and then he was reeled back to reality.
The cemetery pictures for ‘Who’s Afraid of the Art Of Noise’, was that Highgate with all the statues?
I don’t know which one because there are a few, I think the cover is Anton‘s (Corbijn), that’s nothing to do with me. I used to get really pissed off at it actually because I’d be ‘Art of Noise photography: AJ Barratt’ and then there’d be this image that wasn’t mine – Anton Corbijn. Because there was no real brief… there’s a photo of a statue holding up a mask, I can’t remember what it’s on? (Moments In Love 12″ sleeve). That’s in a Paris cemetery, I thought, ‘mask, statue, that’ll do for me’ and off you go. There’s another one in Paris from the same time where there’s a wall and a bit of graffiti and a statue behind, that’s at the Eiffel Tower, it was the same time. But the whole thing with the Art Of Noise was, if you see a little image like that, from my point of view, ‘take it’ and take it to Paul who would say, ‘I like that, we’ll see what we can do with it’. And the next week it’d be on a sleeve and you’d go, ‘er, alright Paul, should I chuck an invoice in?’, ‘yeah’, ‘alright, thanks’.
So, what would happen with this? Would you ever meet the designers or would you give the stuff to Paul and he would sort it?
I didn’t have much contact with designers – I was a photography student at the time. I remember going to a design studio in Soho in, maybe, Carnaby St. and I’d take stuff in and talk to them about it. They were really nice actually.
That would have been XL
It was XL, it wasn’t Tom though (Watkins) because he was the manager. I remember taking some stuff in and them saying, ‘what was the brief with this?’, and I said, ‘hey, this is ZTT, Paul Morley’..., you know? See if you like it and work around that.
He was famous for coming in with little things like beer mats with scribbles on and then working from that.
He directed the ‘Moments In Love’ video and I remember doing the stills on that and getting a picture of JJ (Jeczalik) who had the make up on, holding a rose. And then going round to Paul’s house once when he was sick to get permission to use it and him shouting, ‘AJ, what were you thinking?’.
You did the shot of the three of them and they’re made up as, almost clown / marionettes? It looks like it’s in a hairdressing salon.
No, no, that’s backstage at The Tube (80’s TV music show) when they were on it, I did take those, yeah. We flew up to Newcastle, it was a horrible flight, bumpy all the way.
I love that photo, that’s the nearest they came (whilst on ZTT) to ‘being the group’, Anne and Gary have face paint and JJ has a mask. It’s interesting that when the Art O Noise signed to China records they made lots of records with guests – Tom Jones, Max Headroom, Duane Eddy – and they needed a front man because Paul had previously provided that.
I think they suffered from that, there was no guiding voice.
Who has these negatives then? ZTT?
Um, you see, when we moved abroad a lot of stuff got destroyed and lost but I would love to say that everything was filed up beautifully from A to B, but it isn’t. But yes, they did go to ZTT and they might well have disappeared.
At this point we have to disappear too so we’ll end part 1 here having sampled AJ’s memories of the Art Of Noise. Part 2 will be along shortly where we conclude with tales of Frankie tours and frustrating videos shoots.
All photos except the backstage of the Tube scanned from AJ’s negatives, © AJ Barratt. All sleeve and picture disc art scanned from my personal collection, © ZTT. All text © ArtOfZTT 2013.
Postscript: “Trevor Horn once told me, every studio in the land has a cupboard, where they’ve nicked all his samples” (laughs).
‘Metal Made Flesh’ is the start of a new series from Subversive Comics, a new independent publisher who emerged with ‘Bearlands’ last year. Created and illustrated by Simeon Aston and written by Jeremy Biggs, it’s the first of 3 books that will separately showcase a trio of assassins whose stories will later intertwine. The first concerns Phaeon who, in order to get close to his next, heavily guarded target, goes to the extreme measure of having his body swapped into a child’s.
The layout is text with illustrations rather than your regular panels and speech balloons and they’ve chosen to start with part 3 – ‘Flesh’, rather than publish the initial arc in sequence as each is self-contained. Don’t go thinking you’ve missed 1 & 2 – you haven’t, they’re not publishing them in order, I just hope this doesn’t work against them.
The mood is gritty, adult sci-fi with few punches pulled and the art is nicely handled with a heavy palette of blues and greens. A lot of the illustrations are one page affairs that lend themselves more to covers and the weakest moment is a splash page with the nearest thing to the sequential art of a regular comic which seems overworked and messy. But it’s early days yet and I wouldn’t be posting about it here if I didn’t think it was worth looking out for.
The influences are worn on their sleeve; Blade Runner, Total Recall, Ghost In The Shell, District 9, Gibson and P.K. Dick – cyberpunk with great hardware, no complaints here. I look forward to seeing what happens in the next two installments (1 – ‘Metal’ and 2 – ‘Made’, see what they did there?) and then how the three tie together once the stage is set. Check out the art here or see more on Ashton’s Deviant Art page and find the comic direct from Subversive. If supporting your local comic shops is more your thing then it should be available in Dave’s comics, Brighton, Moving Pictures, Devon and Killer Bunny, London (Camden Market). Issue 3 is out now with issue 2 due around May.
Hope all the fantastic Mothers out there have a great day today (and every day).
It’s been a little quiet on here of late due to illness, work and having builders pulling my house apart. Lots going on though, Record Store Day is coming up next month with some special Food treats dropping around the same time. I’ve also been working on a very special item for another Ninja artist that I can’t wait to reveal…