//Colin Fulcher in Hammersmith, west London, 1966//

Barney Bubbles was born Colin Fulcher on July 30, 1942 – this year marks what would have been his 80th birthday.

Spending five years as an award-winning student at Twickenham art school in south west London, where his first poster was for an early concert by the Rolling Stones, he honed his craft in the 1960s by working for a typographic studio in Soho before being recruited as senior graphic designer by the lifestyle mogul Sir Terence Conran.

After producing ‘straight’ product designs for Habitat and such clients as the cider company HP Bulmer (his logo for their Strongbow brand endured for decades) he tuned in, turned on and dropped out, changing his name to Barney Bubbles, operating psychedelic light shows at underground venues in London and San Francisco and art directing such underground magazines as OZ and Friends.

Soon Bubbles was designing eye-popping record sleeves and posters for such counter-cultural acts as Hawkwind and was one of the few designers to make the leap in the 70s to work with punk, new wave and post-punk acts such as Elvis Costello, The Damned, Depeche Mode, Ian Dury, Johnny Moped and Nick Lowe. He also directed music videos, including for The Specials’ era-defining number one single Ghost Town, produced furniture, redesigned the New Musical Express – creating the logo the music paper uses online to this day – and painted privately.

Sadly, the fragile Bubbles died at his own hand on the day US nuclear weapons arrived in the UK in 1983.

His work has subsequently been featured in major exhibitions and is avidly collected all over the world; examples reside in the permanent collections of such institutions as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s V&A.