One Saturday afternoon in 1972 my mum came back from the shops with a comic she’d bought for me: the first issue of The Mighty World of Marvel. This was a weekly that reprinted the early (movie-length!) adventures of The Hulk, The Fantastic Four, and Spiderman in glorious two-colour, bringing real American superheroes to us deprived English kids if not exactly for the first time, at least the first time properly by Marvel themselves. It was so popular that it soon spawned a whole family of other Marvel UK reprint titles like Spiderman Comics Weekly, The Avengers, The Titans, and eventually our very own superhero Captain Britain (who was a bit crap really).

Until then my comics reading had consisted of cheeky English funnies like The Beezer, Cor!!, and Whizzer and Chips (I was a Chip-ite, and my sister a Whizz Kid) but these swinging and clobberin’ superheroes seemed far more exciting to 10-year-old me than Colonel Blink and The Bash Street Kids and I pretty much gave up all those and started getting the Marvel UK titles every week. The character that seriously grabbed me was Spiderman whose alter ego Peter Parker was a bit of a loser despite his super powers: his family was poor, he was shy and hopeless around girls, and he was often picked on at school (mostly by that twat Flash Thompson) — just like me! In British comics, on the other hand, it was the bully or the bad kid who was usually the hero and the weedy, bookish kid was the figure of fun who was laughed at, kicked in the shorts, or shot at with a pea shooter.

I never wanted to be Dennis The Menace (who now seems like a bit of an arsehole, a thug with a nasty dog) but I really wanted to be Spiderman and would daydream about having his super powers so I could beat up whatever knuckle-headed bully was picking on me at school at the time. I got quite emotionally invested in Peter Parker’s personal life too and, I have to admit, I cried when his girlfriend Gwen Stacy was killed. I think I was more upset by that than I was by Ian Curtis dying a few years later.

Back then we had to get our Marvel fix through these reprints because actual American comics were hard to come by at your local newsagent. Every now and then my mum would see one and bring it home for me and I felt like I had come into possession of some precious, rare document from another world. For a start they were in colour (or “color”) and they were full of ads for exotic things like X-Ray Glasses, Sea Monkeys, a newspaper called Grit, and all kinds of other strange curiosities — even your own nuclear submarine! — what an amazing place America was!

Then I discovered the legendary Soho book and comic shop Dark They Were And Golden Eyed and, when that closed, the original Forbidden Planet shop on Denmark Street, so I was able to stop buying the reprints and get the real thing — which I bought lots and lots of every month, especially Daredevil and The X-Men which were going through classic runs in the late 70s and early 80s. Both places had a similar atmosphere to a record shop (where I was also spending a lot of money at the time), being like secret boy’s clubs with their own cliques and mythologies, and needless to say there are a lot of similarities between comic and music fandom: both are overwhelmingly the province of obsessive young males with insufferably smug opinions, a love of arcane trivia, and difficulty with the opposite sex (though there may be rather more virgins in the comics world).

I eventually stopped reading comics sometime in the mid-1980s, the last one I bought regularly was Love & Rockets which wasn’t a superhero comic at all, but even so-called “adult” ones like that weren’t doing it for me anymore and frankly started to seem a bit pointless — if I was going to read something “adult” why not just read a novel? It might be simplistic to say I grew out of them but I think that’s basically it, it’s the same reason I stopped listening to gloomy post-punk. I sold my comic collection in the 1990s which got me a lot more money than the records I also sold at the time (those Daredevils and X-Men had become quite valuable) and haven’t had the urge to pick up once since.

I’ve actually been into a few comic shops recently for the first time in nearly 20 years because my daughter has developed a love for Wonder Woman through watching the old TV series, but I have a hard time finding one suitable for her as they’re all so relentlessly dark and violent now (and expensive — $2.99!) with none of the Pop-Art fun they used to have — even a Supergirl I looked at was as bloody as a Tarantino movie. Personally I think it’s all Alan Moore and Frank Miller’s fault, ever since Watchmen and The Dark Knight they’re all trying way too hard to be grown-up and gritty but to me they seem even more juvenile as a result — only adolescents take themselves that seriously.

Download: Comic Strip – Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot (mp3)

I mentioned recently that I was working on a secret, blog-related project, well this is it (drumroll):

Crying All The Way To The Chip Shop — The Magazine.


Regular readers of this here blog will know that I’m often moaning about digital technology and how it lacks the tactile, touchy-feely warmth of “real” things like books and records, so — using my day-job skills as a designer — I’ve gone and produced a “real” thing, a “Greatest Hits” collection of my favourite blog posts (some rewritten) presented in a 32-page, full-colour magazine, featuring…

…lots to read…


…lovely photos by Ally…


…records…


…more records…


… and pin-ups!

This was made using HP’s terrific on-demand printing service MagCloud and can be yours for a measly $6.75 (plus shipping), BUT if you buy before May 8th it’s an even more measly $5.15. You lucky people. And for those of you that way inclined you can also buy a digital version for viewing on your fancy tablet things and computer whatnots.

So go ahead, treat yourself and buy it here (where you can also see a preview of the whole thing), you won’t regret it. At least I hope you won’t, the damn thing took me bloody ages to do.

Back in the olden days when computers were bigger than a garden shed and had the processing power of a digital watch, typefaces like this were always used to signify THE FUTURE and anything sexily high-tech and space-age. That type style was based on a font called E13B designed in the 1950s by the banking industry to be read by computers as part of the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition system, and you still see those funny-looking numbers on the bottom of your cheques today. The idea that a machine could “read” something must have been quite exciting at the time and a sign of how groovy the future was going to be so no wonder it was used in this fashion.

Forgive me for getting all font-nerd on you but it’s because I am one that I find it rather amusing to see it used on this cover which projects a very Tomorrow’s World-style optimism about the coming decade and seems to be looking forward to an era of robots and jet packs for everyone. Of course what we actually got was an oil crisis, strikes, inflation, riots, and brown flares — and I thought The Economist were supposed to know stuff like that.

Download: This Is Tomorrow – Bryan Ferry (mp3)

Don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of the group Spelt Like This before, they were a male trio who released two singles back in the mid-80s neither of which troubled the charts with their presence and then they broke up never to be seen again. It wasn’t through lack of effort by their record company either, they were given a massive promo push with lots of big ads in all the music weeklies for their 1985 debut single “Contract of The Heart” which I noticed at the time because they were very “designery” with the same sophisticated and enigmatic minimalism used by Pet Shop Boys and New Order in their marketing.

The ads must have worked on me though because when I saw a copy of the 12″ going cheap in a sale at Our Price I bought it without having heard it before. Being a designer (or design student as I was at the time) makes me far more likely to buy a record (or book) if it has a good-looking sleeve and it almost physically pains me to buy one that looks ugly. Call me superficial but I’d walk a million miles for some good typography and nice paper stock and the sleeve of “Contract of The Heart” really lays on the designer effects with a trowel: yards of white space, obscure icons, trendily spaced-out lettering, a tiny duotone photo of the band on the back, and on the inner sleeve some arty photos of pubes, a man on one side and a woman on the other.

They must have spent quite a few bob on this (the 7″ had an even more expensive die-cut), and with such sophisticated packaging you might expect the record to be another “West End Girls” or “Temptation” but “Contract of The Heart” isn’t much more than half-decent Scritti-esque pop that probably should have done better that the lowly #91 it struggled to reach but doesn’t really live up to the promise of its sleeve and marketing. When I first listened to it I felt as if I had been lied to by the graphics, rather than being another Pet Shop Boys, Spelt Like This were in reality basically a boy band managed by pop svengali Tom Watkins (who was actually also managing PSB too at the time) who later gave the world Bros and East 17. So I’ve always seen this record as a 1980s “designer decade” triumph of style over substance and the belief (which was rampant back then) that trendy design could sell anything from a beer to a bank to a pop group no matter what the actual product was like.

The most interesting thing about “Contract of The Heart” now is that it’s an early Stock, Aitken and Waterman production done before they became the producers that ate the pop world and they do quite nice job with this, it’s a whole lot better and more inventive than the tinny Hi-NRG beats of their later work.

So, did it flop because the marketing was all wrong or because the record wasn’t good enough? You decide.

Download: Contract of The Heart (12″) – Spelt Like This

In 24 Hour Party People one of the running jokes was that designer Peter Saville was always late getting jobs finished (eg: delivering the invites for The Hacienda’s opening party on the night itself) so there’s something nicely fitting about it taking him three years to do Tony Wilson’s headstone. And what a beautiful thing it is.


You can see it at Manchester’s Southern Cemetery.

A Certain Ratio were also treated as a bit of a joke in the movie (though not as much as poor Vini Reilly) but I loved them and think this might be my favourite record ever released on Factory.

Download: Flight — A Certain Ratio

(Story and picture via Creative Review)

The 1980s were sometimes known as “The Designer Decade” when the “D” word was often used as a rather snide label for anything that was trendy, superficial, made-over, expensive, exclusive (I was a designer in the late 1980s and got bloody annoyed that my job title was used as an insult.) People drank designer beer and designer water, men sported designer stubble on their faces and we even had designer banks and designer socialism. So it’s no wonder the decade also brought us designer political protest.

One of the iconic fashion items of the era was the baggy white t-shirt with a big slogan on it, though popularized and ripped-off by Wham! and Frankie Goes To Hollywood the original slogan shirts were created with a serious political purpose by British fashion designer Katherine Hamnett in 1983 and had messages like WORLDWIDE NUCLEAR BAN NOW, STOP KILLING WHALES, and EDUCATION NOT MISSILES. A portion of the profits from them went to charity and their simple bold type was designed to be easily copied by others so that the messages on them would become more widespread. While all the FRANKIE SAY RELAX t-shirts may have diluted her original intent somewhat it’s easy to snigger at the idealistic notion of a mere t-shirt having any political effect whatsoever, and that fact that some were made out of expensive silk makes them look like just another silly example of Radical Chic. I went on quite a few demos back then and don’t remember too many people wearing them, the fashion there being mostly Oxfam and Dr. Marten.

Naive fashionista she might have been but I’ll give Hamnett this, she did have the balls to wear this t-shirt when she met Maggie Thatcher at a Downing Street reception in 1984.

(Pershing is the American nuclear missile system that was being deployed in Germany at the time)

I started writing about all this because I actually had a hand in producing Hamnett’s original t-shirts. Between leaving school and going to art college I worked for a couple of years at a silkscreen printers in Fulham who mostly did the sort of rock and pop t-shirts you saw on sale down the King’s Road and in Kensington Market. Then one day in walks this woman Katherine Hamnett with some typeset artwork of slogans in heavy black letters she wanted us to print on some baggy t-shirts she had designed herself, some were cotton and some silk (which were a real bugger to print and dry). I can’t remember how many different slogans there were but she came back several times with new ones. My job was on the pre-press side, photographing the artwork onto film (the original type for those shirts was tiny, only about 2″ high) and making the screens for printing, so I helped produce the very t-shirt she is wearing above. It’s not much I know but it’s the closest I ever got to Maggie Thatcher, pity Hamnett didn’t have a design that said FUCK OFF AND DIE, YOU BITCH.

Download: Two Tribes (Annihilation Mix) – Frankie Goes To Hollywood (mp3)

Reading this feature about the gorgeous but short-lived 1960s magazine London Life I came across this marvelous bit of pop trivia about a promotional idea cooked up by managing editor David Puttnam (yes, that David Puttnam):

One of his more extravagant (though certainly forward-thinking) ideas was to ask Burt Bacharach to write a song for the magazine. “He was very big at the time and it struck me that if he could write a song with London Life as the title it could help us,” says Puttnam. The idea was that the song would garner huge, free publicity for the magazine through radio play. So Puttnam headed up to the Edinburgh Festival, where Bacharach was performing, to suggest the idea. Luckily, he took Jean Shrimpton with him. “Bacharach was much more interested in meeting her than me,” says Puttnam, and he agreed to the plan. Lulu was to have recorded it: she was unavailable, so Anita Harris did it instead.

It’s extra marvelous to me because I work in the magazine business and this is like my dream of what the job should be like. Sadly, my chances of jetting off to meet a pop star with a supermodel on my arm are slim to none. While I’m sure they gave him a large pile of money to do it, I’m still amazed that Bacharach agreed to write a promo song for a magazine, but I guess the presence of Jean Shrimpton will persuade a man to do anything. Hell, I’d write a song for a church newsletter if she asked me to.

I think the story is a bit better than the actual record though. The song is fine but Anita Harris isn’t exactly Dusty, let alone Lulu.

Download: London Life – Anita Harris (mp3)

PS: The illustration on the cover above was by a young man whose name you might know: Ian Dury

On a whim the other day I dug out my copy of David Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs” album to play for the first time in donkey’s years and looking at the sleeve reminded me just how freaky Bowie used to look and how I was a little creeped out by him when I was a kid. With his bony frame, dodgy eyes, wonky teeth, milk-bottle pallor and outlandish costumes he looked like a zombie in a gay horror film. I still remember back in 1973 going round a friend’s house after school and his older sister had just bought a copy of “Aladdin Sane” which he got out to show me and we both stared at the sleeve photos — especially the one on the inside gatefold — as if we were sneaking a peek at his Dad’s porn magazines, something about it looked a bit pervy and illicit. Sounds silly I know but I was only 10, and I loved science fiction too but Bowie seemed to be coming from a far weirder place than Star Trek.

Of all the iconic images on his 1970s sleeves the one on the front of “Diamond Dogs” is probably the freakiest, showing Bowie as some mutant half human-half dog stretching out across the gatefold like a depraved Ray Harryhausen creation. The original version of the painting was even more perverted with the dog half of Bowie proudly displaying his meat and two veg like a centerfold in Dog Fancy magazine, but when record label execs saw early proofs they worried that some shops wouldn’t carry it so the poor old dog was neutered by having his todger airbrushed out.

The cover was painted by Belgian artist Guy Peellaert who had just published a book of paintings called “Rock Dreams” which depicted various rock legends (Dylan, Sam Cooke, Hank Williams, Bowie himself) in fantasy settings. Bowie saw an exhibition of the paintings at Biba and commissioned Peellaert to do the cover which apparently ticked off Mick Jagger as he was after him to do The Stones next album too. In the end Peellaert did both “Diamond Dogs” and “It’s Only Rock and Roll” that year, though Bowie beat them to the shops by several months and his cover is far more striking. Take that, Mick.

“Diamond Dogs” was Bowie’s last Glam Rock album and his last proper rock album of any kind for the rest of the decade and I think it’s fallen through the cracks in his catalogue between his Ziggy pomp and the Thin White Duke/Berlin era and doesn’t get the attention they do which is a shame as I think it’s a better album than “Aladdin Sane” — though I’ll resist the temptation to call it the dog’s bollocks.

Download: Big Brother/Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family – David Bowie (mp3)
Buy: “Diamond Dogs” (album)