Sorcha Dallas

” If you’re a painter or a musician,” said the Clash’s bassist Paul Simonon, “you get your research from the past and you mix it with what’s affecting you today.” Nothing, then, seems more perfect than the marriage of collage and record covers; if the cover is the visualization of the sound, then assembling found elements serves perfectly to highlight music’s intimate relationship with the past. With that in mind, we asked five world-class graphic designers (those with one foot deeply entrenched in music) t o school us on the different levels of visual language and iconography that grace their favourite collaged record covers, and to salute the artists and designers who defined visually the music that shapes our world. Peter Saville, Trevor Jackson , Julie Verhoeven, Stuart Bailey and Stefan Sagmeisterin: in their own words.

Peter Saville The Buzzcocks: Orgasm Addict (1977 United Artists) Design:Malcolm Garrett Art:Linder Sterling

I have a particular affinity with this cover because it was done by friends of mine while we were all at Manchester School of Art studying Communication Design. Malcolm Garrett did the layout and typography and Linder [Sterling] did the collage. We were in college when the whole punk revolution happened and Malcolm and Linder were almost immediately involved with the Buzzcocks, and I was very envious of this. (It’s quite a special moment when you’re in art school working on theoretical projects and you get involved in something that is really happening.) At that point I could only look on and wait for my opportunity, which came about twelve months later with Factory Records. The late ‘70s was the Postmodern period, which for some was a period of retrospection, but for others, such as myself and Malcolm, it was a period of discovery of what had come before in art and design. We were looking and finding parallels to our times in early Twentieth century – the formative years of Modernism from the Russian Revolution to Bauhaus. As young people discovering Modernism for the first time fifty years later, we felt it hadn’t been manifest. So we took it upon ourselves to disseminate those ideas in the context of our “now” through the medium of this new alternative, independent pop music. To this end, Malcolm created this sort of pop Constructivist hybrid – a Day-Glo Constructivism – and we see evidence of that in his typography on this Buzzcocks single. Linder was working in the DIY spirit of punk but with an intelligence informing it that was not prevalent in punk, referencing the photomontages of Dada artist John Heartfield. Together they created an aesthetic template for a more intelligent, culturally-conceptualized pop. I continued in Linder and Malcolm’s direction of finding a convergence point – a crossing point between the immediacy and reality of the pop music scene of the time and the formal canon of cultural reference.