The Barney Bubbles Estate is thrilled to announce that, for the first time in more than four decades, the sleeve of a new album by a contemporary group will feature an original Barney Bubbles artwork.
The cover of TRACES by London quartet The Great Leslie incorporates this previously unseen design of four dancing figures – do they spell YA YA? – from the Estate’s archive.
Typically quizzical, the hand drawn idents are cast here representing each of TGL’s members and are juxtaposed with a band portrait by Christian Lombardi.
We have also given our blessing for the design to appear on select limited edition band merchandise. Watch this space and check out the TGL website here for more news and detail of this exciting collaboration.
‘Barney Bubbles’ oeuvre reads like a full-circle scale-model of UK pop culture in general: a circular journey, from the sharpness of mod (A1 Good Guyz) to the fuzziness of psych (the lysergic space travels of Hawkwind), and back again to the angularity of punk (Stiff, The Damned).
‘As much as Bubbles was a product of those times, he also was a producer of those times – irreversibly shaping the subcultures that shaped him. He created a graphic language of objects and signs (signs as objects, objects as signs) that truly defined an era – a language that still bewitches us, decades later.’
Experimental Jetset
Experimental Jetset 2018: Erwin Brinkers, Danny van den Dungen, Marieke Stolk. Photo: Kotoko Koya
Mixing post-punk sensibilities with graphic design innovation and avant-garde polemic, Amsterdam collective Experimental Jetset puts the ‘provo’ into provocation.
Founded in the mid-90s, the trio of Erwin Brinkers, Danny van den Dungen and Marieke Stolk consistently challenge the bloodlessness of much contemporary graphic design by incorporating clashing collages, signs, symbols and signifiers with declamatory typography and tonal audacity into their cross-media approaches.
One of the studio’s first designs was the perforated A2 bi-weekly programme poster originally produced for the hallowed Amsterdam venue the Paradiso in 1996. The template is still in use at the Paradiso, latterly featuring the 2010 version which was the result of what EJ describes as a ‘slight redesign‘.
Triptych of posters for group exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2011.
Installation view (detail) of the retrospective Word-Things in Time-Space at Riot, Ghent, May–September 2016.
EJ’s profile was raised way back in 2001 when the John & Paul & Ringo & George shirt was released through Japanese t-shirt label 2K/Gingham. This of course soon became a band t-shirt design staple.
Offset-printed A2 poster for the EJ-curated exhibition about Amsterdam’s radical Provo movement at the city’s W139 art space in 2011.From the graphic language created for New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012-13.Installation view of EJ’s 2023 exhibition at MACRO, Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art.Statement and Counter-Statement is the title of EJ’s 2015 monograph published by Amesterdam’s Roma Publications.Spread from Statement and Counter-Statement.Spread from Statement and Counter-Statement.
In 2022 Experimental Jetset collaborated with Amsterdam-based streetwear label Patta on what they describe as ‘a slightly pop-situationist/mod-revivalist’ capsule collection Patta Psychogeographic Practice.
Patta Psychogeographic Practice Converse All Stars.Patta Psychogeographic Practice manifesto.Record sleeve for Escape-ism’s 2024 album Charge of the Love Brigade, released by Radical Elite Records.
Visit EJ online archive here and read It’s Nice That’s wide-ranging interview with Experimental Jetset where they mention Barney Bubbles here.
Barney Bubbles’ representation of dancer/performance artist Stacia Blake adorned the front panel of his hugely ambitious trifold sleeve for Hawkwind’s live album Space Ritual, released 50 years ago last month.
Those familiar with the sleeve will know that once unfolded the front six panels show that the Stacia figure was emitting shockwaves across the artwork, which incorporated photography of the group in performance by Laurie Lewis and Gabi Nasemann.
++ L’Emeraude, Alphonse Mucha, 1902. Colour lithograph from the Precious Stones series. 67 x 30cm ++
The arresting front panel channels the Art Nouveau work of Czech painter, illustrator and graphic artist Alphonse Mucha, who was very much in vogue in post-hippie circles in the early 1970s. British artist John Coulthart has identified elements in the Space Ritual design directly derived from Mucha’s 1900 lithograph L’Emeraude (The Emerald).
++ The Precious Stones series, 1902 ++
The slavering beast’s head appeared in many of Mucha’s drawings and was based on armrests on one of his chairs, whileL’Emeraude was in Mucha’s series Les pierres précieuses (Precious Stones) along with representations of topaz, ruby and amethyst.
Artists’ agent and passionate music lover Norman Maslov has posted a 10 minute journey through The Wild World of Barney Bubbles on his Youtube channel, augmented by examples of original and reissue record sleeve and poster designs from his collection.
Barney Bubbles’ sleeve for Elvis Costello & The Attractions’ 1979 Radar Records single Accidents Will Happen/Talking In The Dark/Wednesday Week famously took its cue from the title of the lead track by presenting a blank outer with the design on the inside, as if the result of a printer’s error.
