rip it up and start again by rita araujo

RIP IT UP AND

START AGAIN

EDITORIAL Com Rip It Up and Start Again - título roubado a uma obra de Simon Reynolds que faz uma história do pós-punk entre 1978 e 1984- pretende-se criar uma publicação que reflicta as origens do póspunk enquadrando-o não só enquanto corrente musical mas também enquanto potenciador de criações gráficas que marcaram um tempo e um estilo, que "roubando" inovaram de forma significativa associando-se ao boom do digital. No final, pretende-se também demonstrar a importância do fenómeno pós-punk, principalmente o que vigorava em Inglaterra, na estruturação dos campos do rock e música alternativa em Portugal. Portugal vivia desde 1974 um período de transformações brutais e tal teve um impacto evidente também no campo da música. Se o fado era a música oficial do antigo regime, cantautores como Zeca Afonso e José Mário Branco, por outro lado, davam voz à voz silenciada e eram marcos fundamentais naquela que era apelidada de música de intervenção. Assim, para as gerações que viviam intensamente o fervilhar revolucionário, não tanto pelo lado da política mas mais pelo lado da cultura, a afirmação de um gosto musical era fruto de uma vontade de inovar face ao que existia assinalando uma ruptura evidente. Com a "abertura das portas" e as influências estrangeiras que, embora fossem chegando antes de 1974 de forma reduzida, agora abundavam, foi também possível a uns quantos indivíduos viajar e beber informação que depois, ao voltar a Portugal, puseram em prática. Assim, a Fundação Atlântica tem um

peso importante na afirmação de um estilo diferente no nosso país mantendo entre amigos e conexões um largo espectro de pessoas e bandas que marcaram uma altura. Marcando uma vanguarda, renovaram símbolos e ícones, não sem a devida polémica, assumindo um posto importante naquela que foi a emersão de uma nova contemporaneidade. Em termos gráficos, esta publicação apresenta aspectos que tocam de uma forma transversal todos os artigos. Mantendo uma simplicidade que remete para as publicações da editora especializada em música alternativa Black Dog, absorve também os ideais de proporção de página defendidos ao longo dos tempos, nomeadamente pelo tipógrafo Jan Tschichold. Tal é visível através do uso ocasional de linhas vermelhas ao longo da publicação. O uso destas noções de proporção é deliberado, não só porque faz sentido, mas também porque assim se remete de uma outra forma para o facto dos designers gráficos que, conotados com o punk e pós-punk, eram influenciados em muito pela Bauhaus e pelo Estilo Internacional Tipográfico, entre outros (como o Construtivismo, o Futurismo e o Dadaísmo), sendo isto visível através da apropriação que estes fazem de uma imagética fundada pelos movimentos citados. Algumas das fotografias, nomeadamente as que estão presentes nos separadores, estão tratadas digitalmente e gravadas em formato bitmap, uma forma de celebrar o digital que tanto povoou as criações gráficas dos movimentos que este documento aborda. •

ÍNDICE Céline Wouters

Newspaper Jon Savage

The Age of Plunder Mário Lopes

Duas Faces do Mesmo Punk Charlie Gere

Punk and the Digital Aesthetic Rick Poynor

But Darling of course it’s normal: the post-punk record sleeve Jon Wozencroft

Out of the blue Rodrigo Nogueira

A fábrica portuguesa

NEWSPAPER Céline Wouters he word punk has been smoldering in EngT lish for hundreds of years, undergoing drastic changes of meaning from century to century. It began as a kind of overcooked corn, explained in a 1618 account of certain Indians in Virginia. Around that time, also, punk was a word for ‘ashes’ in the Delaware Indian language. A couple of centuries later, punk had become a word for the slow-burning sticks used in kindling fireworks. By 1889 it was a slang term for a cigarette, and by the end of the century punk had a sense ‘worthless’ as in a story by George Ade. Today’s first meaning of punk, a small-time hoodlum, developed in the period between the World Wars. And in the late 1970s punk was assiociated with music. •

Overcooked corn

THE AGE OF PLUNDER

While it contains many details that are socially specific to Britain - particularly in its opening paragraphs - Jon Savage’s article, written for the Face at the height of its cultural impact, is one of the most incisive commentaries on the graphic of the early 1980s. The few years since punk had seen a groundswell of design activity in the music business, and graphic imagery created in the subcultural context of the musical “new wave” soon began to exert a powerful influence on the international mainstream of design, which by the end of 1970s lacked energy and innovative thinking. Savage (b. 1953) wrote as a music critic with a broad awareness of style’s coded role in popular culture and a tenacious grasp of the political meanings of visual form. Even by the standards of more recent design writing, his article in unflinchingly direct in its criticisms of designers who engage in the post-modern plunder of historical styles, casually stripping them of their meanings, and reducing the past to a playground of consumable commodities. - rick poynor

THE AGE OF PLUNDER Jon Savage

John Lennon.

A Beatles 12-inch flops on to my desk, sporting a rather fetching color pic of those well-known faces in their velvet collar Burtons and their famous pink tab collars. The record contains their first - not very good - single “Love Me Do” with an alternative take. Train-spotting sleeve notes and a facsimile of the original label add up to a product that is perfectly anachronistic (they didn’t have Beatles”collectors or 12-inchers in 1962, but that’s other story). It’s perfectly aimed: backed up by a clever campaign on the London buses - youthful pics of the Four with the captions “It was 20 Years Ago” and “Did You Know that John Lennon was in the Beatles?” the record charted and peaked at number five. I thought it was shit in 1964, but now?! This alerts me, and I start noticing things. A few days later, I’m on a quick shoot: Manchester’s Christmas lights are being switched on the city center. There’s a bit of razzmatazz: a brass band, an electric organ, appearances by the stars of Coronation Street. What gets me is the large crowd, and how it’s behaving: this is after all, only a low-key event but there are

thousands more out that have been expected and they’re ravening. The crowed in pinched, cold and in sections obviously very poor. As they surge and yell, I catch a note of real desperation and chilling frenzy beneath the surface jollity that could turn any which way. Things are nearly out of control. And, supreme irony, this crowd, which has been ground down by Tory policies reinforcing the divide between the two nations, started singing and bawling between the carols; Beatles songs, those songs of hope from another age: “She Loves You” and “A Hard’s Night.” “Help might have been more appropriate. You wouldn’t catch them singing ABC songs. Back to the wonderful world of pop. I turn to the Daily Mail of 16 November. A full-page feature trumpets Mari Wilson as “The Girl Behind the Return of the Beehive.” The piece adds, revealingly, that “Mari, 25… is dogged by the fact that her hairstyle has always been bigger that her recording success.” Quite. A few days before, she has appeared on The Old Grey Whistle Test: a quick interview reveals that she’s done all the

the age of plunder

homework necessary on the beehive and the late 1950s/ early 1960s, that she really wants to emulate Peggy and Judy and that she is going to perform one of her face songs, “Cry me a river.” She perches on a stool, surrounded by her violinists, the “Prawn Cocktails”- so Ealing who actually looked like punks. It’s not bad, but nothing like Julie London. But then Mari is one camp joke that has transcended as things tend to at present. She records for a very studied little label called Compact, which has also done all the necessary homework: silly cod sleeve notes by “Rex Luxore”, silly inner sleeves with 1950s curtain patterns and a name taken from a cruddy early 1960s television serial that is hop enough to drop. The thing that really floors me is that in the same Daily Mail of 16 November there is a tiny news item: Compact, the twice-weekly TV serial set in a women’s magazines office, is to be brought back by the BBC in the spring of 1984. The original series was killed off seventeen years ago. Clearly, we are dealing with something quite complex, that is beyond the bounds of parody. We are inundated by images from the past, swamped by the nostalgia that is splattered all over Thatcherite Britain. Everywhere you turn, you trip over it: films, television series of varying quality, clothes, wars, ideologies, design, desires, pop records. A few more examples, to make your hair really curl: the Falklands War - so Empire, so 1940s war movie; Brideshead Revisited and A King of Loving, two Granada serials that looked at the 1920s and the 1950s respectively through rose-colored glasses with the design departments having a field day with all this “period” nonsense. The British film of 1982 that has the Yanks drooling is Chariots of Fire, a 1920s morality play. There’s a rush of public-school and working-class boys into the army, an event unthinkable ten years ago and a new confidence in the middle classes, just like

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the 1950s, with the rise of formerly moribund magazines like the Tatler, and the runaway success of the Sloane Ranger Handbook. It’s all underpinned by a reinforcement of the old class and geographical divisions by the most right-wing government since the war. And I haven’t even mentioned the 1960s. Craving for novelty may well end in barbarism but this nostalgia transcends any healthy respect for the past; it is a disease all the more sinister because unrecognized and, finally, an explicit device for the reinforcement and success of the New Right. Part of this is a response to increased leisure. Because we don’t produce solid stuff any more - with the decline of the engineering industries - we are now all enrolled in the Culture Club. In the gap left by the failure of the old industries comes Culture as a Commodity, the biggest growth business of the lot: the proliferation of television, video (especially in the lower income groups), computers, and information. But this flow of information is not unrestricted: it is characteristic of our time that much essential information is not getting out, but is instead

The Sloane Ranger Handbook.

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ABC “All of My Heart”

glossed by a national obsession with the past that has reached epidemic proportions. Pop music, of course, reflects power politics, and it is fascinating to see how it has toed the line. As elsewhere, 1982 has been the year of the unbridled nostalgia fetish: consumers are now trained - by endless interviews, fashion spreads, “taste” guides like the NME’s “Artist as Consumer” or our own arch “Disinformation” - to spot the references and make this spotting part of their enjoyment. It is not enough to flop around to “Just What I’ve always Wanted,” no, you have to know that Mari has done her homework and you should be able to put a date to the beehive. Thus pop’s increasing self-consciousness becomes part of the product and fils out nicely all the space made available by sleeves, magazines, and videos. These days, it is not enough to sling out a record: it has to be part of a discrete world, the noise backed up by an infrastructure of promotion, videos, and record sleeves that has become all-important and now is in danger of making the product top-heavy with reference. Basically, it’s mutton dressed as lamb: do ABC really have to dress up (badly) as country requires

to promote “All of My Heart?” Of course not: but it sells the product like the wrapping on a chocolate box. But this is ABC’s third or fourth image: when do they stop, and when does the audience have enough? Record sleeves have been an integral part of this tendency towards mystification and an overloading of meaning: in this Tower of Babel the designer, too, has become all important. Designers even have two books to celebrate their role - the Album Cover Albums - and they win design awards and stuff like that. If - like me - you remember when records came in plain white sleeves, it’s nice to see people trying, but it is getting a bit silly when the sleeve is more important that the record. Or maybe not: here is perhaps the ultimate recognition of the disposability of today’s pop music, an acknowledgment of the victory of style over substance. Here we refer, as always, to punk rock: because in those turbulent nine months the ground rules were laid. Punk always had a retro consciousness - deliberately ignored in the cultural Stalinism that was going on at the time - which was pervasive yet controlled. You got the Sex Pistols covering Who and Small Faces numbers

the age of plunder

and wearing the clothes from any youth style since the war cut-up with safety-pins; the clash wearing winklepickers and sounding like the Kinks and Mott the Hoople on better speed; Vivienne and Malcolm buying up old 1960s Wemblex pin-collars to mutate into Anarchy shirts. Partly this was a use of deliberate reference points - an age before country-rock, session musicians, and dry ice. It was also a reflection of the revivalist groundwork already put in by labels like Stiff and Chiswick, who were the first to reintroduce picture sleeves and customized labels, just like those French or Portuguese Rolling Stones EPs you’d find in Rock On. Thus you will find items like the All Aboard with the Roogalator sleeve, at the time much more interesting than record itself: a direct crib of Robert Freeman’s famous picture for With the Beatles. Or, rather more wittily, the sleeve notes written by Paul Morley for The Good Time Music of the Sex Pistols, a 1977 bootleg, which are a word-for-word steal from The Pretty Things album of 1965: “Exacty one year ago, as we write, the Sex Pistols were raw, unexposed,

The energy that had created punk and, as an unintentional byproduct, revitalized the music business couldn’t sustain: by the time the channels were fully opened, there wasn’t really very much left to say. and latent. They were like the atom, ready to ecstatically disclose to the world punk rock, a religion of fast moving people…” By this time, picture sleeves were, like “Limited Edition” 12-inch singles or coloured vinyl, an established part of the record company come-

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on to the consumer and, thanks to designers like Jamie Reid for the Sex Pistols and Malcolm Garrett for Buzzcocks, an integral part of the way the product was put over. Sleeves like Jamie’s “Holidays in the Sun” and “Satellite”, and the Buzzcocks “Orgasm Addict” (designed by Garrett around a montage by Linder) complemented perfectly what was inside, as nostalgic and found elements were ripped up and played around with to produce something genuinely new. The energy that had created punk and, as an unintentional byproduct, revitalized the music business couldn’t sustain: by the time the channels were fully opened, there wasn’t really very much left to say. Punk’s quite careful, instinctive constructions were unraveled stitch by stitch in a series of revivals, renewals, and plain fads as every youth style since the war was paraded for emulation and consumption. The references that had been a means to an end became an end in themselves. Instead of trashing the past, pop music started to celebrate it - an act formerly unthinkable in such a tawdry, transient medium. The Age of Pillage had begun: so many sleeves to fill, so many images to construct - where better to go that pop’s own rich past. This was and is simple enough. Images from pop’s unselfconscious past are invoked as some kind of ritual, or key to a time when pop was still fresh and all a goo: money, sex, and fame beyond measure. Key figures recur: thus you will get the Ray Lowry sleeve for the Clash’s London Calling directly imitating that of Elvis Presley’s first HMV LP, or the sleeve for “Armaggideon Time” reproducing the blithe young dancers that are to be found on any pre-1958 HMV single sleeve. These references are further compounded by genuine reissues, live HMV’s own It’s Only Rock’n’Roll: 1957-62, which reproduces the dancers again, but in a different context: Collector’s Corner. The Beatles are also ripe for plunder. The With the Beatles sleeve, perhaps the most famous

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and monolithic piece of cover art - a symbol from the exact moment when pop went mass for the first time - reappears everywhere. Little stylistic devices like the white band on top of the front sleeve, with the name of the group and a mono/stereo designation or silly sleeve notes surrounded by ads for “Emitex” and notices that this is “Microgroove” or “33⅓ Extended Play” have become so familiar as to be hardly worth remarking upon. What the Beatles signify also becomes a matter for comment: thus the Residents felt it necessary to graffiti-ize the With the Beatles sleeve for their own insect ends to make the Third Reich’n’Roll point: that pop music as epitomized by the Beatles has become a dread, totalitarian hand upon the minds of the youth. Perhaps they protest too much, but then a group like Haircut 100 will invoke the rear sleeve of Rubber Soul to reinforce their “pure-pop” Monkee pretensions. It is worth pointing out the difference in meaning between the original and the copy or homage. When Rubber Soul or With the Beatles came out, the design was innovative: not shocking perhaps, but thought-provoking. Its invocation by Haircut 100 or even the Residents shows how the Beatles have taken on, with time, a meaning very different from their original one and how falsely current pop views the past, redefining that past in its own contemporary

image. Similarly, when the Elvis HMV sleeve appeared, it was simultaneously surprising and instinctive - not a matter for comment. Lowry’s sleeve captures the feeling well - mainly because he is a genuine obsessive - but there’s no getting away from the fact the the Clash are putting themselves in the “Great Rock’n’Roll Tradition” with all that that implies. It’s ironic for a group that had said “No Elvis, Beatles, or Rolling Stones in 1977,” but even that was giving the past a little too much credence. Another example of the way this plunder works can be seen in the sleeve for the recent Bauhaus hit, “Ziggy Stardust.” The group’s pretensions in naming themselves after the architectural school - particularly when their work has no conceivable reference to it - can be dismissed as another example of pop’s demented pillage of all twentieth-century art, but the mechanics of this particular “revival” are quite interesting. The record was an unabashed tribute by the group, as they admitted, to glam rock in general and Bowie in particular and an astute choice as the Great Single that Bowie himself never released. The packing reflected this: the Bauhaus “corporate” logo - another recent trend, this - was overlaid by the Aladdin Sane flash, typically inaccurate and out-of-sync, as “Ziggy Stardust” came from the previous album. The package was then topped by lettering taken

Elvis Presley “Elvis Presley”

The Clash “London Calling”

the age of plunder

directly from Edward Bell’s Scary Monsters sleeve, thus matching three different periods of Bowie into one “authentic” package. The group made a very good job of it on Top of the Pops - all of David’s mimetic gestures, and “Ronno” lurches - but by then it was all beside the point. This was glam rock for 1982. Pop’s own past has not been sufficient: perhaps the most irritating manifestation of the Culture Club is the way that the whole of twentieth-century art and - more recently - any amount of ethnic material have been used with increasing desperation to tart up product that has increasingly less meaning. In this, Bauhaus are only small offenders. Take the spearheads of last year’s obsession with style, for instance: Spandau Ballet, before they got wise and changed direction, connived in sleeves by Graham Smith that peddled the worst lind of neo-neo-Classical pomposity in their frank debt to John Flaxman’s lithographs or consider Chris Sullivan’s poor Picasso - cubist period, please - pastiches on any blue Rondo à la Turk sleeve. These were obvious enough and made the mistake of being much too “fine art:” anybody with an Athena poster on the wall could see where they came from; just like all the progressive groups used to do bod Dali in the early 1970s. Much more clever and systematic is the work of Peter Saville, perhaps the best-

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David Bowie “Ziggy Stardust” Detail of the album cover

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known sleeve designer in England today, and one whose work in the new Ultravox album gained, hardly surprisingly, more comment than the record itself. Saville began work on designing Factory posters and sleeves, where his frank debt to Futurist posters and typographer Jan Tschichold fitted in perfectly with Factory’s “industrial,” “machine” image. Tschichold published the book that is regarded as the foundation of modern typography in 1928: Die neue Typographie proposed a new, almost classical simplicity and a rejection of Victorian ornament - like the Futurist movement in Italy, it was a celebration of the age of the machine. Thus it comes as no surprise that Saville’s brilliant sleeves for Factory Recors - The Factory Sample, New Order’s Movement and “Everything’s Gone Green’ - reproduce Futurist and Tschichold designs fairly closely. They gave Factory one of the highest, if not the highest, graphic profile and made Saville’s name. If on occasions the sleeve became not an ornament but a prison, then it was because the product didn’t come up to the Factory “specification:” a very good example of this occurs on Section 25’s tentative, delicate Always Now album, which is all but swamped by a Saville sleeve that is an object exercise in overdosing, and a clear indication that the designer has become more important than the group. With time, this process has become clear as Saville becomes more important and more

influential: his recent designs for Ultravox’s “Quartet” and “Hymn” are perfect examples of cover art that matches the interior product in a way that is far from flattering. Like Ultravox, these sleeves are grandiose, cod neoclassical exercises perfectly executed for the erection of false pillars of worship. Like the ABC sleeve for “All of My Heart,” which has them parodying the classical grandeur of a Deutsche Grammophon sleeve, they represent some kind of nadir of style over content. Boys, my congratulations! The past, then, is being plundered in pop as elsewhere in order to construct a totality that is seamless, that cannot be broken. It is a characteristic of our age that there is little sense of community, of any real sense of history, as the present is all that matters. Who needs yesterday’s papers? In refashioning the past in our image, in tailoring the past to our own preconceptions, the past is recuperated: instead of being a door out of our time, it merely leads to another airless room. The past then turned into the most disposable of consumer commodities, and is thus dismissible: the lessons that it can teach us are thought trivial, are ignored among a pile of garbage. A proper study of the past reveal, however, desires and spirits not all in accordance with Mrs. Thatcher’s mealy-mouthed ideology as it spreads like scum to fill every available surface, and it is up to us to address ourselves to them. •

Ultravox “Quartet”

Factory Poster/Agenda by Peter Saville

DUAS FACES DO MESMO PUNK Mário Lopes No início dos anos 70, Marc Bolan e David Bowie “inventavam” o glam e, mestres da encenação e no artifício, lá estavam eles no topo das tabelas de vendas, nas capas das revistas e na abertura dos telejornais britânicos. Enquanto isso, do outro lado do Atlântico, havia uma banda a passearse por Nova Iorque com a mesma discrição andrógina: botas com socas de 20 centímetros, cabelo encharcado em laca, fatos de cores berrantes e maquilhagem abundante. Deles, porém, nenhuma notícia nos jornais, nenhum concerto esgotado. Podíamos encontrá-los em centros artísticos dominados pela inteligentsia da Factory de Andy Warhol - a extravagância parecia feita à medida dela -, pudemos vê-los, na primeira vez que pisaram um palco, a animar um público constituído por sem-abrigo, junkies, chulos e prostitutas. Os New York Dolls tocavam um rock”n”roll agreste, desajeitado e ruidoso. Glorificavam a perversão e a decadência e ambicionavam levar o “trash” nova-iorquino ao estrelato pop. Claro que eram demasiado chocantes demasiado cedo e tiveram o mesmo fado dos Velvet Underground. Ou seja, não houve

muitos a prestaram-lhes atenção na altura devida, mas esses poucos foram suficientes para iniciar uma revolução - encontrávamos nos seus concertos todos aqueles que, pouco depois, fariam do CBGBs o centro do punk nova-iorquino. Pegaram nos Stones e nos Stooges, puseramlhe melodias de girl-group em cima e, depois, pouca perícia e muita atitude fizeram o resto. A roupa era nova, a revolução nem por isso. Os New York Dolls foram acima de tudo um símbolo, a imagem da diferença e da irreverência face à modorra do politicamente correcto, temeroso de todos os desvios. Foram a chama que acendeu o rastilho e, quando a bomba explodiu, os estilhaços voaram em mil direcções. No CBGBs, víamos os Talking Heads, os Blondie, os Dead Boys ou Patti Smith e aquilo que os ligava era mais uma ética que uma estética. O CBGBs foi estreado pelos Television e é provável que não o tivessem feito sem a existência dos New York Dolls. A verdade, porém, é que existia todo um universo a separá-los. Onde os Dolls eram pose e atitude, os Television eram pesquisa sónica e poesia musical. Preferiam a sombra à luz,

David Bowie and Marc Bolan

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a discrição à ostentação. Se perigo havia neles, era nascido do desconhecido em que pareciam habitar. Liderados por Tom Verlaine, obcecado por Eric Dolphy e Ornette Coleman, boémio literato que resgatou o sobrenome ao poeta simbolista francês Paul Verlaine, tinham jazz, os Velvet Underground, ficção científica, “film noir” e psicadelismo transviado na sua música. Tom Verlaine, cantor e guitarrista, de sobretudo preto e olhar distante, circunspecto, era a face de uma banda independente, numa cena independente. Em 1977, gravaram um álbum perfeito, “Marquee Moon”, e depois de darem de caras com o sublime, não mais se recompuseram - acabaram pouco depois de gravarem o segundo disco, “Adventure”. Em 2006, Tom Verlaine, que iniciou logo após o fim dos Television uma carreira a solo, sempre à sombra da obra-prima “Marquee Moon”, põe fim a um silêncio discográfico de mais de década e meia com dois álbuns, “Songs And Other Things” e o instrumental “Around”. Em 2006, os New York Dolls preparam-se para editar o terceiro álbum da sua carreira - 32 anos

depois do segundo, “Too Much Too Soon” - e, aparentemente, nada mudou. A ética punk pode ser a mesma, mas Verlaine é o pesquisador que gosta de compor no apartamento entre a meia-noite e as seis da manhã, e a sua música mantém o mistério e a ressonância poética que primeiro nos cativou. Os New York Dolls são rock”n”roll fiel às suas mitologias e ao seu espírito excessivo e adolescente - mesmo que a idade o desminta. O misterioso e os exibicionistas. Em “One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This”, os New York Dolls surgem intocados pelo tempo. Os corpos estão envelhecidos e esta música já não choca nem é revelação para ninguém, mas isso, neste contexto, é secundário. O novo disco é tanto um tributo a eles próprios como ao rock”n”roll cuja fama transgressora quiseram perpetuar, nos anos 70, nas zonas proibidas de Nova Iorque. “Despida a maquilhagem, no fundo de tudo estava o blues. Os New York Dolls eram uma banda de blues”, vem afirmando o guitarrista Sylvain Sylvain - como quem diz, “e ainda o são”.

Tom Verlaine

New York Dolls

duas faces do mesmo punk

Tom Verlaine edita o instrumental “Around” e percebemos que é fruto do trabalho que vem desenvolvendo sobre cinema mudo (musicou, por exemplo, “L”Étoile de Mer”, de Man Ray, e “They Caught The Ferry”, de Carl Dreyer). Lança também “Songs And Other Things” e revela-se como sempre foi: um discípulo de Lou Reed que, desde cedo, se desembaraçou do mestre e descobriu uma voz própria. O jazz na liberdade com que as músicas se desenvolvem, o funk transformado em matéria branca, tensa e angular, o psicadelismo em busca das dissonâncias dos Sonic Youth, o contador de histórias, pouco dado a narrativas lineares, a revelar-se pai espiritual de

mário lopes

Stephen Malkmus. Nos anos 70, ao responder a um jornalista que o inquiria sobre a singularidade da música dos Television, respondeu isto: “O estilo é acidental e incidental. Nem sei o que é. E se alguém mo tentasse explicar, abandonaria logo a sala”. Aquela é a banda, recorde-se, que o lendário director da Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun, disse não poder assinar. Justificação entre pedido de desculpas: “Isto não é música terrena”. Não o era realmente a de “Marquee Moon”, o monumental álbum de estreia dos Television, continua a não o ser a de “Songs And Other Things” e “Around”.

Patti Smith fotografada por Annie Leibovitz

Morrissey

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Tom Verlaine e os New York Dolls, dois nomes essenciais do punk americano. O primeiro ganhou lugar na História ao abraçá-la para a escrita de um capítulo radicalmente diferente, os segundos por quererem preservá-la de forma tão drástica e exuberante que acabaram por ser impulso de mudança. Verlaine, que andou nos anos 90 em digressão com a velha conhecida Patti Smith - foi guitarrista nos seus dois primeiros álbuns a solo -, que foi inicialmente escolhido por Jeff Buckley para a produção do seu nunca editado segundo disco, demorou 14 anos a editar um álbum. Porque não antes? “Preguiça, talvez”, diz agora. “Porque não tenho nada de relevante para gravar”, disse há uns anos. Tom Verlaine, artista recluso, discreto e enigmático. A face artística, adulta, do punk. Os New York Dolls, 32 anos depois de “Too Much Too Soon”, 33 depois da estreia homónima pela qual serão recordados, regressam por “culpa” de Morrissey, fã assolapado que em 2004 os convidou a reunirem-se para tocar no Festival Meltdown, do qual era nesse ano curador. Do sucesso dos concertos realizados desde então a “One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even

This”, o novo álbum, foi um passo. David Johansen, que passou os anos desde o fim dos New York Dolls, em 1977, a renegar a banda, encerrou as sucessivas metamorfoses da carreira a solo, deixou crescer novamente o cabelo e voltou à juventude - nos anos 80, reinventou-se como o cantor ligeiro e historiador musical Buster Poindexter; ultimamente tocava folk e blues como David Johansen And The Harry Smiths. Sylvain Sylvain, o guitarrista, carreira errática desde o fim dos Dolls - incluindo uma temporada como taxista -, esperava a reunião há tanto tempo que saltou imediatamente para bordo. O mesmo, aliás, acontecia com o baixista Arthur Kane, mas teve pouco tempo para celebrar (três semanas depois do concerto de regresso, em 2004, morreria de leucemia). Johnny Thunders e Jerry Nolan, os outros membros da formação clássica, também desapareceram há muito, mas David Johansen e Sylvain Sylvain parecem suficientes quando o objectivo é representar no presente uma imagem iconográfica. New York Dolls, festivos e exibicionistas, nada discretos. A face excessiva, chocante e eternamente adolescente do punk. •

duas faces do mesmo punk

mรกrio lopes

David Johansen and the Harry Smiths

Jeff Buckley

PUNK AND THE DIGITAL AESTHETIC

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The period between the late mid seventies and the late eighties saw the advent of the muchheralded information society. The inadequacies of Fordist-Keynesian ideas in relation to global competition and financial deregulation necessitated restructuring on the part of capitalism to more responsive, fluid models of organisation. This was bound up with concurrent developments in information communications technology, which presented the technical means to realise such a fluid, flexible capitalism. At the same time those developments in information communications technologies also led to a new range of commodities based on microelectronics, personal computers, and video games. Thus the

vision of a society dominated by information and information technologies propounded by academics such as Daniel Bell or Futurologists such as Alvin Toffler would seem to have been realised. But, unlike Bellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vision of the move towards such a society as an evolutionary process, its realisation was an antagonistic and sometimes violent process, in which traditional industries and industrial models were either radically overhauled or, effectively, dispensed with, often at great social cost. The Seventies in particular saw industrial antagonism on an unprecedented scale throughout the industrialised world. In the eighties these antagonisms were â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;resolvedâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, in some countries at least, by the

previous page Edward Heath

Daniel Bell

Alvin Toffler

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charlie gere

coming to power of right-wing governments, whose invocations of traditional values masked radical neo-liberal economic agendas. These circumstances produced, among many other things, a distinctive techno-aesthetic that found expression across a number of fields. In music the possibilities of digital technology combined with the legacies of art school performance-oriented rock, disco and punk, produced ‘techno’ and its assorted variations. Punk was also one of the inspirations, along with ‘postmodern’ fiction for the science fiction genre known as ‘cyberpunk’. The technological potential unleashed by desktop publishing and graphics software allied with the methodological potential offered by variously by punk and French deconstructionist philosophy produced a style of graphic design and typography known sometimes as deconstructionist graphic design, and sometimes as ‘The New Typography’. Though obviously coming out of different contexts and circumstances, these developments shared a fascination with contemporary technology and in both its utopian and dystopian possibilities, as well as its glamour. They also evince similar tropes and strategies, of appropriation, juxtaposition, detournement, montage, collage, repetition, facilitated by or reflecting upon the

extraordinary capabilities of that technology. Punk was at the same time a genre of popular music, a visual style and a set of attitudes. Though much fetishised and mythologised since its brief heyday in the late nineteen seventies it has had and to some extent continues to have a great deal of influence on many areas of cultural practice. To a certain extent punk, especially in its British manifestation, can be read as a response to the painful and difficult metamorphosis begun by capitalism in the late sixties and early seventies, from the comparative stabilities of post-war Fordist-Keynesianism to a more flexible, responsive and less socially forgiving mode. Britain in the seventies was riven by industrial antagonism, most famously the miner’s strike of 1973-4, which coincided with the Arab oil embargo imposed as a result of the Arab-Israeli War. Such circumstances necessitated the introduction of a three-day working week in the factories and saw a country periodically reduced to candlelight. The then Prime Minister, the Conservative Edward Heath, called an election in 1974, to force the issue of the unions’ power, which he lost to socialist Harold Wilson. Wilson’s government, and that of James Callaghan who took over the premiership two years later, though more conciliatory to the

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unions, fared little better than that of Heath. The middle period of the seventies saw increasing industrial unrest, soaring unemployment and inflation, and the seeming collapse of much of the country’s social fabric. The discontent generated by this unhappy set of circumstances would lead eventually to a vote of no confidence in Callaghan’s government, and the subsequent election of a Conservative government under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. It was in these circumstances that punk emerged in Britain in the mid seventies. This must be understood as more than simply the emergence of a musical genre or an aesthetic style. In Britain popular culture and pop music was, at the time, one of the principle means of political expression for young people. This was in the absence of any real equivalent to the student movements found, for example, in France, Italy or even the United States, which in turn reflected the particular relationship between class and higher education in Britain. Pop music had also been of great importance in enabling the projection of identity, particularly among those who felt themselves otherwise

disenfranchised or without the means for political expression. The problem was that the pop and rock scene was still very much dominated by the countercultural aspirations and optimism of the late sixties and early seventies, as well as being anodyne and even middle class. As such it was increasingly irrelevant to those confronting the far less easy prospects of the middle seventies. On the other side of the Atlantic an alternative had already started to emerge. In New York in particular a rock scene had prospered throughout the seventies that eschewed the hippy consensus. The Velvet Underground’s nihilism and use of dark, largely urban, heroin-centred imagery put them at odds with the then-current psychedelic pop culture. Nevertheless they were influential on a number of other groups who were also interested in more confrontational strategies for their music. Among these were some bands and performers who would later be major influences on punk rock such as the MC5, Iggy and the Stooges and the New York Dolls. The Velvet Underground also influenced a generation of English ‘Art Rock’ bands and

Margaret Tatcher

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charlie gere

Malcolm McLaren

performers, such as Roxy Music and David Bowie, who had come out of the English art school system, as well as the art-oriented rock scene of seventies New York, out of which emerged The Talking Heads, Television, Patti Smith and other performers later known as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;new waveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. The theatricality, irony and comparative lack of pomposity evinced by these performers were some of the facets that led them to become influential on the punk movement of the late seventies. In the mid-seventies a young clothes designer and provocateur came from England to manage The New York Dolls, a band notable

both for the frank expression of nihilism and boredom in their lyrics, and for having their drummer die of an overdose soon after the release of their debut album. Malcolm McClaren had seen the Dolls play in London and Paris and decided that they were the ideal vehicle for exploring his ideas about the subversive possibilities of rock and pop. McClaren had been influenced by the Situationists, the French theorists of art and revolution, about whom he had written his student thesis. Following their lead he attempted to reinvent the Dolls as a Situationist intervention,

The Velvet Underground “The Velvet Underground and Nico” Album cover by Andy Warhol

The Buzzcocks “Orgasm Addict” Album cover by Malcolm Garrett

Sex Pistols “Never mind the bollocks, here’s the Sex Pistols” Album cover by Jamie Reid

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by draping them in hammer and sickle motifs, and hanging banners with provocative slogans, ‘Better Red than Dead’, and ‘What are the Politics of Boredom’. Unfortunately the band was by then disintegrating, and McClaren’s tenure as manager was brief. Before returning to England he offered to manage Richard Hell, singer for the band Television, who had supported The New York Dolls at their relaunch gig at the New York Hippodrome. McClaren was much taken by Hell’s idiosyncratic style, which included ripped clothes, safety pins and spiky hair. Hell declined his offer and went to form a new band, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, while Television continued under the leadership of its guitarist, the highly talented Tom Verlaine. McClaren returned to London and to the clothing shop he ran with his partner Vivienne Westwood. Originally called ‘Let it Rock’, and dedicated to selling Rock ‘n’ Roll clothes, it had been retitled ‘Sex’, and now sold fetish gear. There in 1975 McClaren encountered John Lydon, who came into the shop wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt with the words ‘I hate’ written in biro above the band’s name. This witty antagonism towards the most pompous of the rock bands then dominating the music scene impressed McClaren enough to audition Lydon for a band he had been nurturing with his friend Bernie Rhodes, called The Sex Pistols. With the mercurial Lydon, now known as Johnny Rotten as singer, the Pistols were the perfect vehicle for McClaren’s situationist-inspired ambitions. For two years through a combination of luck, manipulation and talent, the Pistols achieved national and even international fame and notoriety, before their disintegration culminating in bassist Sid Vicious’s murder in New York of his American girl friend, and subsequent fatal overdose. In the wake of their success numerous punk bands were formed, including The Clash, Souixsie and the Banshees, The Damned, The Buzzcocks and many others far less well known.

punk and the difital aesthetic

charlie gere

punk was far more than simply a musical genre, though it produced some of the best pop music ever made (as well as a lot of the worst). It was a fully articulated subculture, with a distinctive visual style involving a bricolage of elements such as fetish clothing, teddy boy gear, ripped and torn items and, unfortunately, nazi uniforms As mentioned above, punk was far more than simply a musical genre, though it produced some of the best pop music ever made (as well as a lot of the worst). It was a fully articulated subculture, with a distinctive visual style involving a bricolage of elements such as fetish clothing, teddy boy gear, ripped and torn items and, unfortunately, nazi uniforms (though these were eschewed fairly early on). It also developed, partly through necessity, a distinctive graphic design style, which found expression in record sleeves, publicity and in ‘zines’, the xeroxed and collaged publications which were one of the most distinctive developments coming out of punk. The most famous ‘zine’, ‘Sniffin Glue’, edited by Mark Perry, was exemplary in its use of roughly put together found material and hand written/ drawn graphics. Jamie Reid’s graphics for the Sex Pistols’ record covers and publicity material also employed similar techniques to great effect. His famous collage of the Queen with a safety pin through her nose for the cover of the Pistols’ controversial single ‘God Save the Queen’ is now recognised as a classic piece of design. His motif for a later release, ‘No Future’, is an American school bus, with the word ‘Boredom’ where the destination should be displayed. This clearly refers, ironically, to the iconic hippy

vehicle Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ Magic Bus, which had the word ‘Furthur’ [sic] as its destination. Clearly Reid intended this appropriation and detournement of the mythical bus as a critique of the countercultural fantasies of self-realisation and progress towards a better society. His bus has only boredom for its destination and there is no better future to which it might travel. The negativity and even nihilism that punk expressed was in direct contrast to the optimism of the counterculture, and was far more believable for those for whom the present consisted of limited possibilities and the future possibly worse. Punk was an aesthetic response to the political and social disasters of the nineteen seventies. It reflected a world of industrial and social antagonism, urban decay and hopelessness, not just through the employment of specific imagery, but through the very methods of cutup, montage and appropriation it employed, which visually articulated the dislocations in the coming of post-industrial society. In practical terms punk was resolutely lowtech, eschewing the complex music technologies beloved by seventies musician. But punk also evinced a fascination with technology and machines, not so much as musical tools, but

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as symbols both of the passing industrial era and of the coming information age. Part of the bricolage of punk style involved industrial and utilitarian imagery and clothes, such as boiler suits and workers’ boots, as well as the use of stencilled graphics and industrial-style icons. This element was drawn out in one of the first ‘postpunk’ developments, known later as ‘Industrial Rock’, whose early exponents included Throbbing Gristle, the band that emerged out of the art collective Coum Transmissions, which had gained notoriety with their 1976 show at the ICA, ‘Prostitution’, as well as Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division and The Human League, who all also employed electronic means for making music. This genre of industrial electronic music was also strongly influenced by developments in Germany. Since the late sixties there had been a deliberate attempt by some German musicians to create a distinctly German pop music, as a

counter to pop and rock’s traditional AngloAmerican hegemony. This involved performing songs in German and looking for sources of influence outside the blues and folk traditions. Among such sources were American avant-garde composers John Cage and LaMonte Young as well as their home grown equivalent Karlheinz Stockhausen, who had been experimenting with different techniques to create music since the nineteen fifties, including the use of tape and other electronic methods. Out of this emerged a distinctive genre known as Kosmische Musik in Germany (and rechristened Krautrock in the U.K. 1), among which were found bands such as Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Can and Aamon Duul. Perhaps the most famous, commercially successful and ‘new wave’ of these groups was Kraftwerk, which means both ‘men at work’ and ‘powerstation’, started in 1971 by Ralph Hutter and Florian Schneider. Throughout the seventies

Kraftwerk

punk and the difital aesthetic

charlie gere

Kraftwerk

Kraftwerk produced a number of extraordinary productions, particularly after taking control of every aspect of their music making and image after 1973, when they built their own Dusseldorf studio, Kling Klang. It was at this time they started to employ a Moog synthesizer and exploit the potential of drum machines. Out of this came ‘Autobahn’, a 22 minute single, which evoked a motorway journey, with machine-like precision. This was followed by a number of other singles and albums, in which electronic means were used to evoke a world dominated by technology. Though formed before the punk explosion Kraftwerk’s bleak urban imagery, robotic sound and distinctive style made them a paradigmatic new wave band, and ideal for the music culture of the late seventies. Kraftwerk’s other pervasive and long-lasting influence was, surprisingly, in the area of black dance music. They influenced Giorgio Moroder’s

productions for Donna Summer, as well as the late 1970s productions of Sylvester. Through this and other routes Kraftwerk’s machinic sound was exploited by black DJs in industrial cities such as New York, Detroit and Chicago. Its evocation of alienation through technology was ideal to express the industrial decay of such cities, Detroit in particular. The kind of music produced in these conditions became known as Detroit Techno, Chicago House and New York Garage. What distinguished these different genres from previous dance music styles, apart from their mode of production, was their deep engagement with technology. In this Techno was far more than simply a musical genre. Like punk it was a symptom of social and cultural change. If punk reflected the disjunctures and ruptures endured by a society making the painful transition from a manufacturing to a post-industrial, post-fordist economy, then Techno reflected

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the achievement of that transition, though not uncritically. The name ‘Techno’ itself was taken from Alvin Toffler’s techno-libertarian screed The Third Wave (1980), in which he talked about the importance of the ‘Techno Rebels’ to the coming eponymous wave of technologically determined change. Toffler, along with Kraftwerk and the black futurism evinced by groups such as Parliament, all influenced Juan Atkins and Richard Davies (AKA 3070), the original Techno progenitors, to produce a music that celebrated the romance of new technology while at the same time reflecting the damage that the shift away from traditional industrial manufacturing had wrought on cities such as Detroit. Techno and other similar genres of dance music were the start of a series of extraordinary developments which extended beyond dance music, and embraced many other aspects of culture. Coinciding with the availability of the drug MDMA otherwise known as ecstasy or E, which promoted both well-being and copious energy, a vibrant and creative dance culture

emerged in the States, the United Kingdom and the Continent. Unlike most previous pop and rock music culture, in which the performer was separated from the audience and presented as an icon, this culture was far less concerned with subjectivities and more with a close relation between producer and consumer. Music was produced by DJs, often through sampling, or visually anonymous but technically competent enthusiasts, and consumed through dance rather than passive attention to somebody else’s performance, with the DJ and the audience operating almost in a kind of cybernetic feedback relation. In his or her capacity to manipulate technology, and in the paradoxically solitary nature of his or her work and eschewal of the traditional theatricality of rock and pop performance, the DJ resembles another cultural figure, the hacker, who also came to prominence in the middle eighties. On the other hand the rave culture of which Techno is a part offers a promise of community and connection outside of the constraints of capitalism and state repres-

punk and the difital aesthetic

charlie gere

sion. Thus it is unsurprising that Techno and allied cultural phenomena are often invoked in relation to the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and Hakim Bey, as well as those of writers such as Alvin Toffler, ostensibly on the other side of the political divide between right and left. Techno thus becomes a kind of metonym of techno-capitalism, not just in the machine aesthetic of the music itself, but in the social and cultural arrangements and possibilities it proposes. Meanwhile the new possibilities presented by digital technology coalesced with the cultural energies released by punk rock in the late seventies, leading not only to Techno, but also inspiring some young science fiction writers to develop new and contemporary directions within the genre. In 1977, the year in which punk entered the public consciousness, the Canadian writer William Gibson published his first short story ‘Fragments of a Hologram Rose’, while Bruce Sterling published his first novel Involution Ocean. Four years later in 1981

the older writer Vernor Vinge published his novella True Names, in which the characters inhabit the computer’s virtual spaces. These different works began to define a way of representing the complex spaces and experiences of a new post-industrial, postmodern world. As such they were the first examples of the as yet unnamed genre of cyberpunk. At the same time French comic strip artist Möbius was producing extraordinary strips portraying dystopian visions of future urban decay. Many of these elements came together in 1982 when Ridley Scott filmed Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Scott turned Dick’s story into a future film noir set in a rain-drenched, orientalised Los Angeles. The book’s main character, Deckard, a blade runner, is dedicated to searching out and liquidating androids. Manufactured by the Tyrrel Corporation, androids are apparently indistinguishable from ‘natural’ humans. Deckard has been turned from one of Dick’s typical everyman naives into a world-weary figure closer to one

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of Chandler’s private detective characters. It was less the plot or the typical Dickian concerns about identity and subjectivity that made Blade Runner and more the look of the film. Influenced by Möbius, Scott’s vision of a nearfuture cityscape presented the most perfectly realised backdrop for articulating contemporary concerns and fears about a society dominated by global corporations and information technology. From the pyramidal building housing the Tyrrel Corporation, which dominates the landscape (its sides incised with patterns so as to resemble the surface of a microchip) to the street-level prosthetics laboratories, the film presents a visual allegory of a society dominated by techno-science and information technology. The pervasive dark and continuous rain obliquely suggests that such a domination comes with a price in relation at least to the environment. The presence throughout the film of floating advertisements extolling the virtues of offworld colonisation suggests a world that is no longer a desirable place to live. Blade Runner came out at a time when new

technology was becoming far more visible in mainstream culture. The early eighties saw the development of the Apple Macintosh, the machine that made computing ‘friendly’ and accessible, the emergence of Techno music, the paradigmatic dance noise of the post-industrial urban landscape, the beginnings of deconstructionist graphic design, more about which later. William Gibson’s 1984 science fiction novel Neuromancer resonated perfectly with these other elements of the Zeitgeist. Though not responsible for the term, or for originating the ideas it came to embody, Gibson’s book is the paradigmatic work of ‘cyberpunk’. In it he ‘coalesced an eclectic range of generic protocols, contemporary idiolects, and a pervasive technological eroticism combined with a future-shocking ambivalence’. 2 Stylistic sources include Chandler, Burroughs and Michael Herr, author of Vietnam reportage classic, Dispatches. This eclectic set of influences are combined to produce a dystopian vision of the near future, in which the nation state is of negligible importance and the world is dominated by high-tech

Computer Apple Macintosh

punk and the difital aesthetic

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corporations, or as Gibson calls them as part of an insistent orientalism, zaibatsu. Everywhere vast conurbations have spread, such as Chiba City in Japan or the Sprawl on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, though perhaps the most important space in Neuromancer is the nonspace of the computer networks, in Gibson’s by now famous term, ‘cyberspace’, Gibson’s vision of a three-dimensional realisation of networked computer data. At about the time Techno was emerging out of the clubs of Detroit, and cyberpunk was developing as a literary genre, a distinctive style of graphic design, which also reflected, criticised and celebrated the possibilities of contemporary technology and technoculture, was being developed. It also owed much to the influence of punk. As we have seen punk was influential on areas beyond music because it was much more than a musical style. It was an entire aesthetic, that, consciously or not, harked back to much of the twentieth-century

avant-garde. Malcolm McLaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, based many of his ideas for provoking interest and outrage on the methods of the Situations, while designer Jamie Reid developed a style for record sleeves and posters that evoked Situationist graphics, and the cut-up techniques of William Burroughs and others. Other punk graphics referred or were reminiscent of Dada, Constructivism, Bauhaus or Futurism. Punk style in clothing was also reminiscent of other movements and ideas, at least before it became a high-street cliché. Johnny Rotten, lead singer of the Sex Pistols, in an early gesture, ripped up a suit and put it back together with safety pins. As well as granting the safety pin iconic and fetishistic status within punk, this also anticipated the short-lived deconstructionist fashion movement, which attempted to co-opt the ideas of Derrida and others for clothes design. In the late seventies Derrida’s De La Grammatologie was published in the Anglophone

William Burroughs

Jamie Reid “God Save the Queen” Illustration for the Sex Pistols

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world in the landmark translation by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 3 Its philosophical denseness and complexity made it inaccessible to all but a few. Nevertheless its questioning of the totalising nature of dominant forms of knowledge, and its assertion of the material basis of discourse formation resonated with other attempts to come to terms with an increasingly disorganised and complex world. This was evinced even by punk rock fanzines, such as Sniffin’ Glue, with their deliberately crude appearance, usually put together on a Xerox machine with hand written and collaged graphics. At more or less the same time those involved with more mainstream graphic design were beginning to come to terms with deconstruction’s message. In 1978

the influential typography journal Visible Language published an edition devoted to ‘French Currents of the Letter’. 4 This issue looked at how French philosophy and literature were enabling new approaches to writing. Among those who were discussed were many connected with poststructuralism, including Derrida, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and Michel Serres. This issue of Visible Language was designed by students from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, which, under the aegis of co-chair Katherine McCoy, was encouraging interest in the intersection between graphic design and poststructuralism. The students involved were given a seminar in literary theory by the head of Cranbrook’s architecture program, Daniel Libeskind. What

Jacques Derrida

punk and the difital aesthetic

charlie gere

Roland Barthes

resulted was an examination and critique of the conventional relations between typographical elements and the concomitant belief in legibility and transparency. (This approach had already been anticipated by Derrida in his 1974 book ‘Glas’ 5 , which mixed fonts and used complex and non-linear arrangements of text.) Derrida’s use of typography for deconstructive purposes was aimde at profound philosophical investigation and expression. As Ellen Lupton points out the interest in poststructuralism shown by graphic designers such as McCoy was more celebratory than critical, invoking the poetic rather than critical aspects of the important thinkers 6. What began to develop at Cranbrook and continued elsewhere was less a profound examination of the conditions of design, and more an anarchic form of self-expression on the behalf of designers liberated from the ideology of transparent communication, legitimised by allusions to contemporary French philosophy. In some senses it was more closely related to the release of energies enabled by punk, than to the profound and difficult project of deconstruction.

This said, poststructuralism and deconstruction offered powerful and liberating paradigms for graphic designers. In the early eighties interest in poststructuralist approaches to design was revived at Cranbrook, through the enthusiasm of students such as Jeffery Keedy, later head of graphics at CalArts. This coincided with the development of the Apple Macintosh, which offered designers unprecedented power and potential. The Macintosh had been designed with visual computing in mind, and enabled the development of much visual and graphic design software. Though the Macintosh did not determine the rise of deconstructionist graphic design, which, as we have seen, preceded it by some year, it did greatly enable it, and assured its rapid success as a style. In 1984 publisher/editor/art director Rudy VanderLans and typographer Zuzana Licko started a graphic-design magazine called Emigré, taking advantage of the ease of production offered by the Macintosh. Emigré rapidly gained a reputation for innovative and radical design. In particular it investigated the possibilities of

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type design, using font design software. The experimentation exemplified by Emigré was paralleled by developments elsewhere. In the Netherlands Studio Dumbar, founded in 1977, undertook similar experimentation, which its founder, Gert Dumbar, continued as head of graphic design at the Royal College of Art in London in the nineteen eighties. Also in the United Kingdom The Face magazine and its designer Neville Brody gained reputations for innovation and playfulness in design, as did groups such as Why Not Associates, 8VO, and designers such as the Royal College of Art graduate Johnathan Barnbrook. Perhaps the most spectacular and difficult example of such design was that produced by David Carson, first for the short-lived surfing magazine Beach Culture, and then for the more mainstream (or at least more widely distributed) Raygun magazine in the early nineties. The latter took illegibility and challenging graphic design to

new heights, or extremes (depending on one’s point of view) and may have represented the apogee and possible end of a particular approach. Since then this style of complex, computeraided graphic design has become part of the mainstream visual culture, used in mass market magazines, such as Wired, on CD covers and publicity for mainstream music acts, as well as influencing the non-linear multilayered graphics widely employed on music television. Cyberpunk, techno and deconstructionist graphic design represented consonant reactions across different genres to the emergent technoculture. Cyberpunk’s juxtaposed ideolects, techno’s use of repetition and sampling and eschewal of the artist’s presence, deconstructionist graphic design’s use of layers and experimentation with typography all reflected a world of diffused and distributed communication mediated through networks of powerful information technologies. In this, as I hope

Emigre no. 1

Raygun no. 3

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charlie gere

Walter Benjamin

this paper has shown, they are all beneficiaries of the legacy of punk, whose fragmented and iconoclastic style presented the most cogent aesthetic reaction to the coming dislocations of late capitalism. Of course the characteristic punk means of expression using montage and collage have a far older history. From Dada through to the Situationists, Pop Art and William Burroughs they have been frequently employed as artistic strategies. For some such as the rock critic Greil Marcus punk is part of a particular modernist trajectory that also encompasses Dada and the Situationists. It may be that such claims for punk are a little extravagant. But the comparison with Dada does suggest the similarities between the disclocations of the early twentieth century. Dada was a response not just, for example, to the barbarities of the First World War, but also to developments in the technologies of representation. This is the point made by Walter Benjamin in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Apropos of Dada he remarks that: “One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every

art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies.” 7 Benjamin goes on to suggest that Dadaism was attempting to create, with their ‘word salad’ poems full of obscenities and their collaged and montaged paintings, ‘the effects which the public today seeks in the film’ 8, with its destruction of aura, its tactility and constant shocking of the spectator through sudden change and shifts of emphasis. Similarly punk can be seen not just as a response to the dislocations of its period, but also an anticipation of the possibilities of technology then just emerging. Though graphical computing, multimedia, hypertext and so on were not widely available they existed and their future ubiquity was already being predicted. Furthermore the shift towards a post-industrial society was predicated on the application of ‘real-time’ computer systems and networks, which employed such

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technologies and ideas. The punk style, with its disruptions and disjunctures, its emphasis on texts and its use of iconic graphics anticipates the coming world of ubiquitous graphic computing. As shown above, the punk strategy of do-it-yourself graphics and music was later echoed in the use of desktop publishing and graphics software by graphic designers in the nineteen eighties. This is not to suggest that punk had any influence on the development of these technologies. But it did create a framework in which they could be understood and used. Punk, despite its apparent nihilism, also invokes another of Benjamin’s other key concerns, the possibility of utopian redemption in the ruins of capitalism. When Johnny Rotten sang ‘No Future’, he might have been singing of Benjamin’s own idiosyncratic conception of utopianism. Benjamin eschewed the false promises of technological and social progress that animated both capitalism and its state socialist alternatives, and continues to have such force today in relation to new technology. Instead he developed a curious amalgam of Jewish mysticism and Marxism in which history is nothing but a catastrophe. He cleaved instead to a concept of redemption derived from the cabbala. Benjamin contrasted secular history, the sequence of catastrophic events that mark human time without fulfilling it, with revolutionary Jetztzeit or ‘now-time’, every moment of which is full of the real anticipation of such redemption, much as ‘for the Jews [...] every second of time was the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter’.9 For Benjamin revolution was not the end point of historical progress, as it was for more conventional Marxists, but a Messianic break from its course.

Benjamin’s unique conflation of Marxism and Jewish mysticism perturbed many of his friends and colleagues and continues to bemuse to this day. Whether it bears any useful relation to the construction of viable alternatives to capitalism is a moot point. But it does offer a way of thinking about the apparently dystopian legacy of punk as actually utopian, albeit in a complex and roundabout manner. Punk celebrated urban decay and ruin and the hopelessness it engendered. The punk landscape was catastrophic in that it apparently bore no redeeming or progressive features, only the marks of empty historical time. But out of this the energy to imagine something different, revolutionary even, emerges. The Sex Pistols may not have had a coherent political philosophy (putting aside McLaren’s exploitation of Situationist ideas), but they did offer some kind of utopian redemption in the very noise they made, and in the very fact of making it. In attenuated form this redemptive messianic utopianism pervades the descendents of punk described above. Perhaps most exemplary of this is the cyberpunk film The Matrix, which expresses this utopianism with particular force. It is, literally, a film about messianism, with Neo, the Keanu Reeves character being proclaimed as ‘The One’, for whom others have been searching. What is more to the point is the world in which this messiah is sought. It repudiates even the possibility of redemption through technology. This is a fallen world in which the machines have taken over. The appearance of normal life conceals an utterly different truth, that of humankind’s enslavement to those same machines. In a most Benjaminian moment Neo awakens, literally, to the truth of his situation. Upon taking a pill

punk and the difital aesthetic

charlie gere

proffered by a character called Morpheus he finds himself not, as he thought, in late twentieth century San Francisco, but two centuries later, in a pod, one of a seemingly infinite series, each of which contain the atrophied body of a human in the process of being farmed for its electrical energy. Putting aside the absurdity of this development its invocation of awaking recalls the immense importance of that act for Benjamin as a metaphor for awakening from the dream world of capitalism. Having awoken to the truth Neo is put on the path to the realisation of his messianic destiny. Once this is achieved he can break out of history, and even to stop time, which is demonstrated by his capacity to stop the bullets from the guns of the agents who have been pursuing him. (This reminds me of Benjamin’s description of the clock towers being shot at during the first days of the French Revolution, and which indicate for him the awareness of the revolutionary classes that they are about to make the continuum of history explode.)10 The Matrix is, obviously, a piece of popular entertainment, rather than a political tract. Nevertheless it contains, I suggest, something of the utopianism that punk first rehearsed, and which militates against the relentless march of progress towards a bright future of globalised, wired neoliberal capitalism. The traces of the punk aesthetic within popular and mass culture, such as described above, are also perhaps like the ‘chips of Messianic time’ 11 that Benjamin saw as embedded in each moment of time, and which propose the possibility of redemption from the catastrophe of progress. •

Notes 1 Cope, J. (1994), “History of Krautrock Part 1”, Wire, 130, December, 1994, p. 40. 2 Bukatman, S. (1993), Terminal Identity, p. 146. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 3 Derrida, J. (1976), On Grammatology, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 4 “French Currents of the Letter” (1979), Visible Language, 12.3 (Summer). 5 Derrida, J. (1986), Glas, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 6 Lupton, E. & Abbott Miller, J. (1996), Design, Writing, Research, p. 9. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 7 Benjamin, W. (1999), “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Illuminations, p. 230. London: Pimlico. (1st Ger. ed. 1936, Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, V.1). 8 Benjamin, W. (1999), “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Illuminations, p. 230. London: Pimlico. (1st Ger. ed. 1936, Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, V.1). 9 Benjamin, W. (1999), “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Thesis XVIII.B, Illuminations, p. 255. London: Pimlico. (1st posthumous Germ ed. 1950, Neue Rundschau, 61.3). 10 Benjamin, W. (1999), “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Thesis XV, Illuminations, p. 253. London: Pimlico. (1st posthumous Germ ed. 1950, Neue Rundschau, 61.3). 11 Benjamin, W. (1999), “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Thesis XVIII.A, Illuminations, p. 255. London: Pimlico. (1st posthumous Germ ed. 1950, Neue Rundschau, 61.3).

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BUT DARLING OF COURSE IT’S NORMAL: THE POST-PUNK RECORD SLEEVE Rick Poynor In the last few years, there has been a revival of interest in the music that came after mid-1970s punk. Bands from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Franz Ferdinand acknowledge their debt to post-punk originals such as Gang of Four. The latest issue of The Wire magazine has an ad for a compilation of underground Brazilian groups citing the British post-punk bands Joy Division, The Slits and The Pop Group as influences. There have been collections of post-punk music and now, finally, there is British music critic Simon Reynolds’ 500-page history of the genre from 1978 to 1984, with the invigorating title Rip it Up and Start Again. It’s a brilliant book. Reynolds, who lives in Manhattan, started researching it in 2001 and it has arrived at exactly the right moment to benefit from, and propel, the growing wave of interest. He argues that post-punk music’s explosion of creativity equals the golden age of popular music in the mid-1960s, but that it has never received its full due. I think he’s right. Design has always been a key part of the record-savouring experience for many music fans and it remains so today, as Momus noted in

Gang of Four

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a recent post. There is a continuing fascination with record covers of the post-punk period. Dot Dot Dot has published pieces about the sleeve designs of XTC, John Foxx, Scritti Politti and Wire — its editors were kids when they came out. Most notable of all was the rapturous reception accorded to Peter Saville’s exhibition at the Design Museum in 2003. British journalists seemed almost as besotted as Saville himself with what he had achieved at Factory Records in the early 1980s and even the London Review of Books sent along their man (novelist Andrew O’Hagan) to check it out.

The latest compendium of post-punk music graphics is This Ain’t No Disco: New Wave Album Covers by New York designer and author Jennifer McKnight-Trontz. I wish I could recommend it, but it’s a lamentable piece of work as cloth-eared when it comes to the music as it is blind to the visual qualities and impervious to the cultural significance (or lack of it) of the artefacts it both includes and arbitrarily leaves out. First published by Chronicle and taken up in the UK by Thames & Hudson, it shows little sign of having passed through the hands of anyone who knows or cares much about the subject. Its interpretation of “new wave” is so loose that it lacks any credibility and many of the covers display no design originality while the bands they represent have rightly been forgotten — Katrina and the Waves, anyone? Kajagoogoo? Meanwhile, memorable covers that clothed some of the most original post-punk releases, music that still exerts an influence, fail to make the grade. Here are just a few: Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154 by Wire; Cut by The Slits; Public Image and Metal Box by Public Image Ltd; Y by The Pop Group: 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Throbbing Gristle; Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division; The Correct Use of Soap by Magazine; Hex Enduction Hour by The Fall. There is nothing by Neville

Dot Dot Dot magazine

Wire “Pink Flag”

but darling, of course it’s normal: the post-punk record sleeve

rick poynor

Cabaret Voltaire poster by Neville Brody

Brody for Cabaret Voltaire or Fetish Records and, with just one cover shown, Vaughan Oliver’s ravishing body of work for 4AD, so prominent in the 1980s, barely gets a look-in. If Roxy Music and Kraftwerk qualify as new wavers, then why not former Roxy band member Brian Eno and the German avant-gardists Can? They were both a big influence on post-punk bands and they had good covers. (Eno produced the Talking Heads album, Fear of Music, which indirectly gives the book its title.) McKnight-Trontz includes Iggy Pop’s Party (1981), presumably because it looks like “fun” with its cleaned-up, presentable Iggy and colourful blobs and splatters, but excludes The Idiot (1977) with its bleak, unsettling, black and white portrait of the singer: what did he mean by those peculiar hand gestures? Someone who understood the music’s impact would be unlikely to make a misjudgement like that. This may seem inconsequential — they are only record sleeves, after all — but what makes post-punk so interesting and inspiring, even now, as Reynolds shows so well, is the exceptional range of cultural influences that shaped the music, its refusal to stand still, its disinclination to cede any ground, especially to commercial priorities, and its intellectual energy and artistic ambition. All of this was reflected in the most

inventive, audacious cover art of the time. “Those seven post-punk years from the beginning of 1978 to the end of 1984 saw the systematic ransacking of twentieth-century modernist art and literature,” he writes. “The entire period looks like an attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme and technique via the medium of pop music.” The bands’ sources included Futurism, Dada, Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Jarry, John Heartfield, Constructivism, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, Die Neue Typographie, Bertolt Brecht, the Situationists, Jean-Luc Godard, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, and the extreme science fiction of William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick. Many of the musicians had studied art or design. Talking Heads’ David Byrne put in time at RISD, members of Wire attended Hornsey Art College, Gang of Four were in Leeds University’s fine art department, where the head, art historian T. J. Clark, had belonged to the Situationist International. (It’s a long list. For the best account of art school influences on British rock, see Simon Frith and Howard Horne’s Art into Pop — Reynolds acknowledges his debt to the book.) The sleeve designers — Bob Last at Fast Product, Saville at Factory, Malcolm Garrett in his collaboration with the

The Normal “T.V.O.D.”

The Human League “Being Boiled”

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Buzzcocks, Brody at Fetish — shared many of these influences. Any visual survey of post-punk graphics that concentrates solely on album covers overlooks a crucial part of the story. The discovery that it was possible to record, manufacture and distribute records relatively cheaply spurred the development of a thriving independent scene. The 7-inch and then 12-inch single with picture sleeve went through a great flowering. 1978 saw the arrival of an advance guard of lo-fi synthesiser singles that heralded a new direction for electronic pop in the 1980s: “T.V.O.D. / Warm Leatherette” by The Normal; “Being Boiled” by The Human League; “United” by Throbbing Gristle; Cabaret Voltaire’s four-track Extended Play; “Paralysis” by Robert Rental; “Private Plane” by Thomas Leer. It’s hard to convey the excitement that records like these generated among music fans at the time. A large part of it was the feeling that the usual channels had been bypassed. Only com-

mitted readers of the music press were in on it. No one else had a clue. The audience had taken control of the means of production and anything seemed possible. It was a new kind of do-it-yourself electronic folk culture and the kitchen-table designs that gave this sensibility an image were raw but thrilling. The photo of crash test dummies, borrowed from the Motor Industry Research Association, and use of the Din typeface to represent Daniel Miller’s “Warm Leatherette” underscores the cold, sociopathic lyrics about the eroticism of a car crash (“Hear the crushing steel, feel the steering wheel”). Listeners instantly registered the song as a homage to Ballard’s cult novel Crash. This Ain’t No Disco breaks its own remit by featuring a few singles, none of them shown here, but it largely misses this side of post-punk music. One of the pleasures of Reynolds’ book is its excellent picture research with the assistance of British music writer Jon Savage. •

but darling, of course it’s normal: the post-punk record sleeve

rick poynor

Magazine “The Correct use of Soap”

Throbbing Gristle “20 Jazz Funk Greats”

The Fall “Hex Enduction Hour”

OUT OF THE BLUE Jon Wozencroft

“I first set my eyes on it one Saturday morning in Rough Trade in late June 1979. The record had just come into the shop… I bought it immediately.”Jon Wozencroft on Peter Saville’s work on Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover, as he developed from the ‘Use Hearing Protection’ posters of Factory Records into a graphic design icon. The artwork for Joy Division’s first LP, Unknown Pleasures (1979), was handled by a young and relatively inexperienced designer, Peter Saville. He had made a mark on the local scene in Manchester with his posters for the Factory club in 1978 featuring an industrial symbol warning “Use Hearing Protection”, made quiet by his delicate use of typography, which had been inspired by the work of Jan Tschichold. Little was said about the vision thing. Nobody could have anticipated that the prescience and simplicity of the cover would continue to resonate 28 years down the line.

Peter Saville

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A contemporary perspective on Unknown Pleasures, therefore, might not appreciate that it came out of the blue. In 1979 the audience was, of course, aware of distinctive sleeve design, previous marriages between sound and image having been frequently lauded: the Blue Note label, Quicksilver Messenger Service’s Happy Trails, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Choose your own example. Few thought about graphic design as an expansive medium, especially when the lack of information on the cover might become the distinguishing feature. There were no coffee table design books and no committed publishers. The success of LP covers in disguising a multitude of musical sins was, nevertheless, well known, there being nothing unusual about buying a Yes album because Roger Dean had done the artwork. When it came to punk rock, designers set out to demystify the process and unhinge the obvious connections with advertising and consumerism. It wasn’t the same then. Privatisation

had yet to kill off the idea of public service, and pop video was still a nascent form. Great punk sleeves such as the Sex Pistols’ Holidays in the Sun were totemic, because here was a critical and independent voice, Jamie Reid, talking about mindless consumerism in the best journalistic tradition of art and mass-media culture while still achieving good packaging. Even if you were apart from this more aggressive aesthetic, it was impossible to boast immunity.The blackand-white, politicised Daily Mirror and New Musical Express were the popular, influential outlets, and magazines would have to wait for The Face for a style upgrade. The elliptical grandeur of Roxy Music was overtaken at this point. Now bald instead of feather boa’d and alongside David Bowie (instead of Bryan Ferry), Brian Eno became a shadow player of glamour and helped to relocate the idea of Berlin to Warsaw, as if the film Cabaret and its celebration of Weimar decadence were on a double bill with Wajda’s Kanal. Next week,

Pink Floyd “Dark Side of the Moon”

out of the blue

jon wozencroft

Joy Division

The Beatles “The White Album”

Performance might be coupled with The Man Who Fell to Earth. This interplay between the popular and an avant-garde spirit of resistance ushered in a brief golden period in which the status quo struggled to stay in touch. When the group Warsaw became Joy Division, Ian Curtis, Bernard Dicken, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris went for an interior direction, developing their sound out of circumstance rather than knowing how to tailor it for contemporary consumption. This “sound of music” came out of the socio-cultural landscape whose post-industrial premonitions are easy to spot now (being “corrupted from memory”- a line from Candidate, one of the tracks on Unknown Pleasures). The songs questioned the public/private landscape, how the Second World War became the IRA bombing campaign, which would later fuel the idea of “the enemy within” and prefigure “the war on terror”, but in 1979 the situation was something else. The songs are not necessarily heavy, but are weighted towards a deeper inquiry than boy meets girl, or boy doesn’t meet girl. The dystopias of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, which had such an influence, taking William Burroughs and Brion Gysin into consideration, sat side by side in 1979 with the music business context of power pop, new wave and the popularity of The Police and even Dire Straits. (Joy Division initially made fumbling attempts

to cover soul standards for RCA Records and its Manchester branch, because it would have been great to be on the same label as Iggy Pop and David Bowie - on a trans- Europe express out of Manchester.) There is a perversity in the decision by Joy Division, or rather their manager Rob Gretton, to stay with Factory Records in Manchester - “the devil you know”- and the arrival of the group’s first LP, Unknown Pleasures, in the marketplace. Their marriage with Factory’s partner/producer Martin Hannett was tense and unequal, and at the same time some magical element seems to have been applied between No Love Lost on the early Warsaw recording of 1978 and Digital, as produced by Hannett, a few months later. Hannett had studied chemistry before he got into music production and he quickly realised that the band were “heaven sent”. Factory Records’ Tony Wilson agreed. It is fortunate that Joy Division did stay with Factory, as it is likely that its cover design would not have been sanctioned by an established record company, in whose hierarchies a designer would have little chance to explore this curious, instinctive relationship with the sound’s production. Consider the tactile paper stock, no band name nor title on the cover - not even The Beatles got away with that on The White Album. Instead, an enigmatic blank slate, quietly

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centred with a sensual but also perfectly serene white radio waveform, pulsar CP 1919. The cover was black, the luxurious black of deep space. Stephen Morris presented designer and now Factory partner Peter Saville with the image that he had earmarked from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy. I tried to contact Stephen and ask “Why that?”, but it is in essence a stupid question and he hasn’t got back to me. The legend goes that the band gave Saville an A4 folder which included the pulsar image, intending it to be printed black on a white background, and at the last minute he decided to do the opposite. Saville was also presented with a newspaper clipping of some strange photograph of a hand reaching for a door handle, which was used on

the inside cover (“This is the way, step inside.”). He was less than happy, some years later, when he was made aware that this was actually a wellknown shot by Ralph Gibson. I remember being quite baffled myself when I saw it in the postcard racks at the ICA bookshop. So the genesis of the imagery on Unknown Pleasures is also one that opens up all the Postmodern design and art world preoccupations with appropriation, spotlighted then by Jon Savage in his The Face article “The Age of Plunder”. Plunder was not a problem in the punk rock context, though it did cost Virgin a headache when Jamie Reid’s Holidays in the Sun cover had to be withdrawn from the shops for exactly that. This was all part of the on/off process of building up a precious relationship with the general public, for whom

Peter Saville

Joy Division “Unknown Pleasures”

Sex Pistols “Holidays in the Sun” album cover by Jamie Reid

out of the blue

jon wozencroft

Joy Division “Unknown Pleasures”

the picture sleeve gave added value to the music. Where Unknown Pleasures deviates from conventional wisdom is to be found in a sudden convergence of independent idealism with something that looks expensive - an enigmatic inversion of luxury packaging enters the iconography of popular culture. There is a distinct presence to the printed piece, and it is this aspect that exhibits Saville’s particular aesthetic. It would have been easy to use CP 1919 as it appeared on the Warsaw bootleg two years later, full to the edge of the frame, its energy dissipated. Saville’s command of print media shows the power of “the reductive process”; it can also be seen as an early indicator of the current obsession with curation. Saville has suffered and benefited ever since from being on the edge of the transitions between pop, art and fashion and their hybridisation into communications culture. Malcolm Garrett, Peter Saville and Neville Brody would quickly be pinpointed as the key figures in graphic design’s elevation, but at this stage they were all either at college or just out of it. All three took on a distinct ambition to use graphic design as a means of “improving modern life”, and all three made their mark in the wider cultural context through non-commercial record cover design. Suddenly, “the new wave equivalent of the Roll-

ing Stones’ mouth” emerges, as Saville describes it now. The Unknown Pleasures design quickly became a T-shirt, developing into a brand you should really only be able to purchase at Comme des Garçons, but instead, you will find at any market stall from Brasilia to Bangkok. Just as John Pasche’s design for the Rolling Stones encapsulates the mouth/the voice/the attitude, so does pulsar CP 1919 express the outer-worldly dimension of Joy Division’s sound and space and, by proxy, every other emotional/ psychic conundrum that has followed in its wake. If the listeners of Unknown Pleasures were able to project their own meanings on to the cover’s design, to fill in the spaces loaded within the mysterious waveform of the music, then Saville’s intuitive brilliance rests within the telescoping of the six elements - the four sides of the outer and inner cover and the two labels, “inside” and “outside” - into the same tight rectangular space, at the centre, harmonised like invisible plates placed one upon the other. Gibson’s Hand Through Doorway (1969) is of such a print resolution that it becomes graphic, and yet the overall impact of the six sides is as if it were one photograph, the frozen moment of the music. CP 1919, this freezing of time over an unimaginable distance, has the most extraordinary

Ridley Scott

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afterlife once it enters the mainstream. Recently, it has infiltrated the fashion and art worlds as a signifier of the beyond, the source of something beyond the material world, but where exactly? This is supported by Joy Division’s title - what are these unknown pleasures they speak of ? Certainly, CP 1919 and Saville’s design, as Paul Morley wrote recently, “helped to create the reality whereby the group could be perceived as truly great”. The control room sequence in Ridley Scott’s Alien has the contours of the image flash up on the on-board simulation as the suggested terrain of an unknown planet. The qualities of Joy Division’s music do everything to support this “remote viewing”. It is a true achievement to present something concrete and untouchable in the same domain, before and beyond its time while rooted in a contemporary moment. CP 1919’s continued appropriation is a conversation with this distance/ratio/geometry. There is an inherent simplicity and naïvety in its ambition, but hardly one of modesty. “I like this, this is what I want to show” has been the credo of every work that Saville performed for Joy Division and New Order. Unknown Pleasures might be the only Factory release that the band ever had a real hand in, the major hand in terms of imagery, to the extent that it is credited in

Peter’s book as having been designed by Joy Division and Peter Saville. The only one, yet the alpha and omega of a client relationship that has become a threshold for graphic designers (as “co-authors”). Unknown Pleasures became and is an icon because all the various elements fused in a moment of mysterious harmony. (Look at the skin of a stingray.) What it manages to perform is a blending of the function that the sleeve “should articulate the music”, and possess an ability to stand apart as “something other” - while remaining a question to the viewer. Saville fully intended it to be “a thing, more like a 1970s Dieter Rams product” than the wrapper that enveloped this cellular music of Joy Division, their influences having been stripped down and then reassembled into a new DNA. It was a clarion call to all those who loved the potential of record covers to be obscure objects of desire as well as a commercial success story. A romantic and also idealistic, and yet classic vision, it has been an inspiration since the moment I first set eyes on it, one Saturday morning in Rough Trade in late June 1979. The record had just come into the shop. A box of some new delivery was opened on the counter, and out of it emerged this black enigmatic textured item. I bought it immediately.•

out of the blue

jon wozencroft

Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy

Joy Division

A Fﾃ。RICA PORTUGUESA

página anterior Heróis do Mar

Pedro Ayres Magalhães

Miguel Esteves Cardoso

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Todos conhecem a história da mítica editora inglesa Factory, contada várias vezes e até registada no altamente ficcionado filme de Michael Winterbottom, “24 Hour Party People”. O que muitos ignoram é que Portugal também teve a sua Factory – a Fundação Atlântica, fundada em 1983 por Miguel Esteves Cardoso, Pedro Ayres Magalhães e Ricardo Camacho. A Fundação durou até 1985 e produzia e prensava discos que eram distribuídos pela Valentim de Carvalho. Miguel Esteves Cardoso era jornalista e tinha estudado em Oxford. Foi correspondente de publicações portuguesas em Manchester, onde acompanhou a evolução da Factory e criou uma extensa rede de contactos. Pedro Ayres Magalhães era membro dos Heróis do Mar e estudante de Psicologia. Ambos eram amigos de infância. Ricardo Camacho era médico, músico e produtor. Trabalhou com Miguel Esteves Cardoso pela primeira vez num single de Manuela Moura Guedes. Foi após este lançamento que as três figuras centrais da Fundação começaram a pensar em fazer algo pela música do seu país, e foi assim que a editora nasceu. Segundo Ricardo Camacho, a Fundação funcionava anarquicamente: “na altura éramos

pessoas com muitas ideias e sem sentido prático. Poderíamos ter tornado a história da música portuguesa diferente se tivéssemos conseguido sobreviver mais dois ou três anos. A Fundação desapareceu numa altura em que os seus grupos atingiram vendas que lhe teriam permitido subsistir mais tempo e também avançar com outros projectos que nunca chegaram a realizar-se.” Dentro da editora, Camacho dirigia a produção, Magalhães o reportório e Cardoso era o Director-

geral da companhia, enquanto outros tratavam da gestão comercial, da questão jurídica, da imagem, das actividades de promoção e informação e das actividades externas de divulgação: “o Miguel tratava dos contactos com Inglaterra. Eu e o Pedro trabalhávamos em estúdio. E discutíamos muito, tínhamos muitas ideias, nem todas eram convergentes. Mas era giro.” “Na Fundação da Fundação: Os Nossos Primeiros Propósitos”, primeiro comunicado público da editora, foi escrito por Miguel Esteves Cardoso em 1983. O documento expunha as ideias da Fundação. Esta pretendia fazer com que a exportação excedesse a importação e contribuir para aumentar a quantidade de produção nacional no estrangeiro. Usando pouco dinheiro, pretendia cortar com todas as despesas extra e canalizar todos os meios para a produção. Utilizou uma “estética da pobreza”, ou seja, procurava qualidade sem gastar dinheiro. Nunca houve dinheiro próprio da editora, pelo que as despesas eram suportadas pela Valentim de Carvalho. Ricardo Camacho explica: “Agora gravo coisas em casa, antigamente tínhamos que ir para estúdio gastar dinheiro. Por isso, ao fazermos um único disco, estávamos endividados durante muito

tempo. Foi isso que rebentou com a Fundação Hoje teria sido diferente.” Tanto Ricardo Camacho como Miguel Esteves Cardoso falam das pessoas da Fundação como jovens inexperientes. Camacho diz que um dos factores que levou ao fracasso da editora foi a existência de gente com personalidades muito fortes dentro da mesma. “Não existia uma liderança. Por exemplo, na Factory havia uma personalidade muito forte, o Tony Wilson, como nas outras editoras independentes. Toda a gente queria fazer o que lhe apetecesse. Isto não é viável numa editora sem meios.” Os discos nacionais da Fundação, na sua maioria singles, eram de artistas como Sétima Legião, Delfins ou Xutos & Pontapés. A Fundação lançou também discos estrangeiros, quase todos licenciamentos de editoras inglesas. Entre os artistas estrangeiros da editora, encontravam-se nomes como The Raincoats ou Young Marble Giants. Os objectivos que a Fundação propunha cumprir eram difíceis. A editora acabou por fracassar economicamente. Ricardo Camacho explica: “Tivemos a ideia de transpor para Portugal a experiência inglesa das editoras independentes. Era um fenómeno desconhecido em Portugal,

Heróis do Mar

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(post) punk maganize

que o Miguel tinha trazido de Inglaterra. Não o fizemos da melhor maneira, e como pioneiros cometemos todos os erros que os que vieram depois puderam evitar. Erros de relacionamento e avaliação do mercado e de distribuição.” A Fundação não chegou a ter sucesso, existindo com dívidas e fracassos. Para Camacho, a Fundação “podia ter dado uma verdadeira editora, verdadeiramente independente, e com capacidade económica para prosseguir um projecto próprio. Dispersámo-nos por coisas sem lógica que não encaixavam naquilo que devíamos estar a fazer. Gastámos imenso dinheiro num projecto que nunca viu a luz do dia, que inclusivamente o Pedro Ayres Magalhães foi gravar a Manchester. Pessoalmente, gostaria de ter concentrado as atenções da Fundação na Sétima Legião, nos Xutos, e naquilo que viriam a ser os Madredeus.” Curiosamente, a história da Fundação, que tudo teve a ver com a da Factory, acabou até por se cruzar com a história da editora britânica. Miguel Esteves Cardoso convidou uma das bandas do catálogo da Factory para gravar em Portugal: os Durutti Column, projecto do guitarrista Vini Reilly, que vieram gravar um single. Acabaram por gravar um disco inteiro, “Amigos em Portugal”. Ricardo Camacho conta que “Reilly estava habituado a gravar com poucos meios, chegou cá e viu equipamento como nunca tinha visto. O Tony nunca lhe tinha pago um estúdio. Foi assim que conseguiu experimentar coisas novas e criar aquele som.” A história não acaba aqui. Havia um acordo entre a Factory e Vini Reilly que fazia com que a editora desse ao artista 50% das vendas totais, descontando os gastos com tempo de estúdio. Não se sabia se este acordo era válido para todo

o mundo. A lei portuguesa especificava que apenas se podia dar menos de 20% das vendas. Os ingleses acabaram por ficar extremamente desiludidos por causa do dinheiro. Esta é a versão portuguesa da história. Tanto Wilson como Reilly contam outra versão. Wilson, na reedição de “Another Setting”, um dos discos dos Durutti Column, escreve, a seguir a uma contextualização histórica dos defeitos dos portugueses: “Amigos em Portugal. Amigos em Portugal? Uma vez queixei-me à minha primeira mulher que o álbum tinha posto a empresa do Miguel e dos amigos a andar, e mesmo assim quando o Vini tocou em Lisboa seis meses depois nem um deles apareceu no concerto. Porque é que haviam de ter aparecido? Honra, gratidão, dívida. Que estupidez, eles são portugueses, não têm tais conceitos mundanos.” Tanto Miguel Esteves Cardoso como Ricardo Camacho se apressam a refutar isto. Cardoso explica que foi a todos os concertos que Vini Reilly deu em Portugal, enquanto Camacho explica que os Durutti Column chegaram mesmo a tocar com equipamento da Sétima Legião. Tanto Tony Wilson como Vini Reilly julgam que “Amigos em Portugal” deu muito dinheiro à Fundação e fez da editora um sucesso, quando, na verdade, nada disto parece ter acontecido. Hoje em dia é muito difícil encontrar os discos que a Fundação lançou entre 1983 e 1985. A última edição da editora saiu com o selo da editora mas pela EMI-Valentim de Carvalho. Era um single de Pedro Ayres Magalhães, “O Ocidente Infernal/Adeus Torre de Belém”. Foi este o adeus de uma editora que ambicionou fazer algo pela música do seu país como nunca havia sido feito, e como nunca se chegou a fazer. •

a fรกbrica portuguesa

rodrigo nogueira