One of my great heroes was Barney Bubbles . I loved his work and I don’t think I could ever better it. One of the funniest sleeves I ever saw was Accidents Will Happen. People just didn’t get it, that the single was called Accidents Will Happen and Barney turned the sleeve inside out, with all the information on the inside of the sleeve.
His art direction on Armed Forces in the original vinyl format is a great sleeve.
I never met him; I’d love to have met him. I spent two or three days with Brian Griffin (working on the Cactus World News sleeve, Urban Beaches, 1986) , Barney and he were good mates . On the day that Barney committed suicide Brian was on a photo session and had spoken to him in the morning and intended to go and see him – Brian was always very upset about that. Brian said Barney was depressed - he was a person who always thought his work wasn’t as good as other peoples work. In a lot of cases he never put his name on the stuff.
My all time favourite cover is the Glastonbury Fayre (1972) album. You could fold it out, you could make little pyramid of it.
The nicest thing as young designer coming up was, I used to have fanzine called Freep(short for Free Press). I did a special edition dedicated to Hawkwind. It was was a big poster that folded up into a tiny fanzine and the whole inside was on Hawkwind. I was a big fan and went to the Hawkwind office when I was in London . Paul Fenn ( Hawkwnd agent) told me that Barney says he’ really likes what you done with the layout’. As a young fella I said ‘ Jeez, that’s great’ – what more of a compliment could you get? I always felt very good about that. I would love to have just have met him. He just didn’t – the ego, he didn’t want to have his name – ‘designed by’ – he was always an encourager of talent around him. The work he did with Stiff, having to get the four different ads. (for MAIT) in Sounds, NME, Melody Maker etc. Nobody ever does that now, it’s all about ‘Well people wouldn’t understand what it’s all about’, everything is brought (down) to a level... real fans went out and bought the four ‘papers.
A lot of standard design, then and now, seems slightly po-faced. Barney always seemed to have a sense of humour, which is important. He was such a loss, he was one of the great iconic designers. Brian Griffin says that underneath his talents he was a troubled man, concerned about things like the Trident missiles – that arrived (in the U.K.) on the day he died.
I knew Elvis had worked with Barney when he was with Stiff and Radar. In a sense there was little bit of deference to Barney on my part. Elvis knew I loved Barney’s work. another design hero was Vaughan Oliver at 4AD records – he did all the Cocteau Twins etc.
http://rateyourmusic.com/list/jkra3168/ ... han_oliver
I later read pieces by people who said they didn’t like his designs as the designs were so distinctive that they felt that it was more him, less them. And some of those artists, when they moved to other labels, changed that, which meant their artwork wasn’t as outstandingly original but it was more about them. When I was working with Elvis there was that sense that he was very much a person who knew what he wanted.
As a professional designer your role is to work with the artists. The ideal way of working with any artist is to let the artist tell you what they are looking for, the feel, the mood. They will then let you go away and do what you can to realize that by working together. What doesn’t work, what happens with some artists or labels is that they end up telling you ‘Do this, do this, do this’. In the end there’s no real creative input with it. It's design by numbers.
