A retrospective review of Dire Straits’ 1980 album Making Movies. Knopfler’s technical brilliance meets romantic melancholy in an era that supposedly had no use for either. In my heavily late Seventies NME hack influenced style.
DIRE STRAITS: Making Movies (Vertigo) 1980
There was something deeply suspicious about a band this technically accomplished in 1980. While half of London was still thrashing about in bin liners and safety pins, Mark Knopfler’s lot turned up with an album so pristine, 38 minutes so meticulously crafted, that you half expected to find the corners mitred.
Making Movies arrived eighteen months after their self-titled debut made them improbable millionaires in America, and it was clear they’d been spending the intervening period in expensive studios rather than the back rooms of grotty pubs. Recorded at New York’s Power Station with Jimmy Iovine producing – the man who’d just finished polishing Springsteen’s The River – this was Dire Straits going for broke, or rather, going for more money than they’d already got.
The opening salvo, “Tunnel of Love,” sprawled across eight minutes like some Dylanesque fever dream filtered through a Tyneside accent. It was all fairgrounds and Spanish guitars, with Knopfler’s finger-picked lines circling each other like moths round a sodium lamp. The man played like he was being paid by the note, which he probably was.
“Romeo and Juliet” – which got played to death on Radio 1 – was the sort of thing that had sixth-formers scribbling lyrics in the back of their French textbooks for years. It was wretchedly romantic, all unrequited longing and cinema queues, with Knopfler doing his best to sound like he’d actually had his heart broken rather than just read about it in a Leonard Cohen novel.
But here was the rub: it worked. Despite themselves, despite the almost offensive levels of musicianship on display, despite the fact that punk never happened in their world, Dire Straits crafted something genuinely affecting. “Hand in Hand” swung like prime-era Dylan, while “Les Boys” – a tawdry tale of Parisian transvestites – had the sort of seediness that Bowie used to do before he discovered Switzerland and synthos.
The centrepiece, though, was “Skateaway,” a peculiar bit of New Wave-ish funk about a rollerskating girl cruising through urban decay. It had synthesizers, for God’s sake. Synthesizers! On a Dire Straits record! Pick Withers’ drumming was tighter than a gnat’s chuff, and the whole thing sounded like what might happen if Steely Dan decided to have a go at writing a hit single.
Mark Knopfler remained an enigma wrapped in a headband. His vocals sounded like he was perpetually on the verge of nodding off, yet there was a sly intelligence to his wordplay that elevated this above standard-issue soft rock tedium. He’d clearly listened to a lot of JJ Cale, a lot of Dylan, a lot of those American FM radio staples, and he wasn’t afraid to nick the best bits.
The production was, predictably, immaculate. Every hi-hat shimmer, every bass throb from John Illsley, every keyboard wash from Roy Bittan (on loan from the E Street Band, no less) sat exactly where it should. It was the sonic equivalent of a freshly Hoovered front room with the cushions all plumped up.
Which brought us back to that initial suspicion. In an era when the most exciting music was being made by people who could barely play their instruments, Dire Straits were almost confrontationally competent. They weren’t interested in year zero, in tearing it all down and starting again. They wanted to take you to the pictures, buy you chips on the way home, and maybe have a bit of a cuddle if you were lucky.
And you know what? Sometimes that was enough. Making Movies didn’t change your life or inspire you to form a band in your mate’s garage. But on a rainy Tuesday evening when you were skint and miserable and the world seemed determined to grind you down, it might just have made things seem temporarily bearable.
In the pantheon of rock’s great reinventions, few albums have aged as gracefully, or as mysteriously as David Bowie’s Low. Released in January 1977 to widespread bewilderment and commercial indifference, this curious hybrid of fractured pop songs and ambient soundscapes now appears, from our 2025 vantage point, to be one of the most prophetic statements in popular music’s history.
The conventional narrative surrounding ‘Low’ has always centred on geography and biography: Bowie fleeing Los Angeles and its pharmaceutical temptations for the disciplined clarity of divided Berlin, collaborating with the electronic music pioneer Brian Eno to create something entirely new. Yet recent archival research has complicated this neat story considerably. Much of the album’s foundational work actually took place at the Château d’Hérouville studios in France, months before Bowie’s Berlin sojourn began in earnest. The geographical mythology, it transpires, was partly retrospective construction, though no less meaningful for that.
What emerges most clearly, nearly half a century on, is how ‘Low’ functions as both ending and beginning. It represents the final flowering of the rhythmic obsessions that had driven Bowie through his American soul period, yet subjects those same impulses to a process of systematic deconstruction that would influence popular music for decades to come. The rhythm section of Dennis Davis and George Murray, veterans of ‘Young Americans’ and ‘Station to Station’, found themselves playing against type – their customary precision dissolved into something more impressionistic, more concerned with atmosphere than with groove.
The Brian Eno collaboration proved transformative in ways that have become clearer with time. Eno’s methodology, the famous “Oblique Strategies” cards, his insistence on removing conventional guitar solos, his suggestion that Carlos Alomar play rhythm parts without chord progressions, represented a systematic assault on rock orthodoxy. The results were songs that barely qualified as songs at all: “Breaking Glass” distils two minutes of nervous energy into treated percussion and fractured vocals, whilst “What in the World” transforms romantic yearning into something that might have been transmitted from outer space.
The album’s bipartite structure – seven relatively orthodox pop songs followed by four extended instrumental pieces – baffled RCA’s marketing department and contributed to its commercial failure in America. From today’s perspective, however, this division appears remarkably prescient. The instrumental suite that occupies ‘Low’ s second side anticipates much of what we now recognise as ambient music, electronic composition, and even certain aspects of contemporary hip-hop production. These are not songs to be sung along with but environments to be inhabited.
Recent scholarship has illuminated the extent to which these instrumentals drew from Bowie’s direct observation of Berlin’s divided landscape. “Warszawa”, despite its Polish title, was inspired by a fragment of Eastern European folk music encountered during train travel, yet the wordless vocal improvisations that crown the piece were shaped by Bowie’s response to the city’s displaced populations. The recent revelation that much of the composition employed a Chamberlin keyboard loaded with authentic folk samples adds another layer to its haunting effectiveness.
“Art Decade”, the album’s most austere moment, benefits enormously from contextualisation within Berlin’s cultural and physical landscape. The title references both artistic periods and the literal decay Bowie witnessed in the city’s bombed-out quarters. The track’s processed saxophone, actually Bowie himself, electronically treated beyond recognition – creates a soundtrack for urban desolation that prefigures everything from post-punk’s architectural obsessions to contemporary electronic music’s fascination with industrial decay.
Perhaps most remarkably, ‘Low’ anticipated many of the anxieties that characterise our current cultural moment. The paranoia that suffuses tracks such as “Always Crashing in the Same Car” was attributed at the time to pharmaceutical excess, yet it reads today as remarkably prescient about our surveillance-saturated digital existence. The isolation and disconnection that runs through the album’s emotional landscape prefigures our contemporary struggles with technology-mediated relationships and algorithmic social control.
The album’s commercial disappointment, number three in Britain, invisible in America – now appears less like failure than validation. Records of this ambition and difficulty are not intended for mass consumption; they are designed to influence everything that follows. And the influence has been extraordinary: the template ‘Low’ established can be traced through post-punk, new wave, ambient house, and contemporary art-pop. Its innovations have become so thoroughly absorbed into popular music’s vocabulary that they no longer sound revolutionary – the ultimate mark of success.
What continues to astonish is how genuinely futuristic much of Low remains. The drum sound that producer Tony Visconti achieved by positioning microphones in a stairwell – compressed, gated, artificially enhanced – established the template for 1980s pop production. Yet it originated here, in service of compositions that had no commercial ambitions whatsoever. Similarly, the harmonic treatments applied to Bowie’s vocals created textures that sound alien even today.
Recent discoveries in the Bowie estate’s archives have only confirmed ‘Low’s status as a masterpiece of studio technique. Alternate mixes recently made available reveal the extraordinary care that went into every sonic decision. The stripped-back version of “Sound and Vision” demonstrates how much archaeological work underpinned the finished product – every element feels essential, irreducible, the result of countless hours of experimentation distilled into perfect miniatures.
‘Low’ endures because it solved a problem most popular artists never recognise: how to maintain visibility whilst achieving genuine artistic invisibility. Bowie created his most personal statement by becoming deliberately less human. The electronic processing, the ambient diversions, the systematic removal of conventional rock signifiers – these represent methods of artistic evacuation, ways of escaping the personality cult that threatened to consume him.
From our current perspective, with knowledge of everything that followed – the completion of the Berlin trilogy, the commercial rehabilitation, the decades of recycling past innovations – ‘Low’ appears as Bowie’s most courageous artistic statement. It represents the sound of a major popular artist refusing the safety of established success, choosing instead to venture into genuinely uncharted musical territory.
The album concludes with “Subterraneans”, originally conceived as music for The Man Who Fell to Earth, and the piece provides an apt metaphor for the entire enterprise. It is the sound of something recognisably human being processed through alien technology, emerging transformed but not destroyed. Nearly fifty years after its creation, this remains the most accurate description of what ‘Low’ achieved – and why it continues to matter.
From surf music to sonic revolution: why Pet Sounds remains pop’s most extraordinary achievement and Brian Wilson’s last coherent masterpiece.
At the passing of the musically creative genius Brian Wilson, I’ve written this sixth decade reappraisal of The Beach Boys album Pet Sounds as a meditation on one of music’s most extraordinary creative achievements. A work that represents both the culmination of years of obsessive craft development and the sound of consciousness chemically expanded beyond conventional limits.
From a technical, production and arrangement perspective Pet Sounds – compared to literally everything produced beforehand anywhere is like comparing a Chevy Bel Air with a Saturn 5 rocket plus Apollo orbiter and lander. But this quantum leap didn’t emerge from nowhere. Wilson had been methodically building towards this moment since 1962, spending obsessive hours in Gold Star Studios, studying Phil Spector’s wall of sound techniques firsthand. By the time of “I Get Around,” he’d already developed an uncanny ability to hear individual instruments within dense arrangements and was experimenting with unconventional microphone placement that suggested an intuitive understanding of acoustic space.
Between 1963-1965, Wilson systematically expanded his musical vocabulary in ways that would prove crucial to Pet Sounds’ revolutionary impact. His harmonic progression from basic surf progressions to the complex jazz-influenced arrangements of “California Girls” and “Help Me Rhonda” shows us his systematic musical development. Wilson was absorbing Bach, studying Four Freshmen arrangements, and incorporating diminished chords and unexpected modulations. Simultaneously, he was cataloguing an increasingly exotic instrumental palette – harpsichord on “When I Grow Up,” orchestral arrangements on “The Warmth of the Sun,” and unusual percussion combinations that would later bloom into Pet Sounds’ bicycle bells, dog whistles, and Coca-Cola bottles.
Perhaps most significantly, Wilson’s vocal arrangements grew increasingly complex through albums like “Today!” and “Summer Days.” He was developing techniques for recording his own voice multiple times to create impossible harmonies, essentially turning himself into a one-man choir. This technical mastery meant that when his consciousness expanded, he had the tools to translate internal complexity into actual sound.
The emotional development running parallel to this technical growth was equally crucial. Wilson’s evolution from teenage surf fantasies to the adult anxieties about love, isolation, and belonging that permeate Pet Sounds wasn’t simply chemical revelation – it was the natural progression of a sensitive artist confronting the complexities of the human condition.
Substitute liquid hydrogen mixed with oxygen and a lit match with LSD and a musical genius and you’ll get Wouldn’t It Be Nice and God Only Knows here, and later Good Vibrations – his unique sounding music incredibly recorded on limiting four track equipment. It famously shook Paul McCartney to up his game and Bob Dylan has since remarked “Brian recorded Pet Sounds with four tracks, nobody else could record it with one hundred”.
Listen to Pet Sounds now, knowing what we know about Wilson’s lysergic acid adventures, and those otherworldly arrangements make perfect sense. Of course “God Only Knows” sounds like it was transmitted from heaven to Wilson’s rewired consciousness while operating on a papal frequency the rest of us can’t even tune into. But the genius wasn’t that Wilson was taking drugs – the entire suburb of Laurel Canyon was tripping in ‘66. The genius was that he was disciplined enough, focused enough, and talented enough to document his pharmaceutical journey with obsessive precision, using a toolkit of techniques he’d spent four years perfecting.
“I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” we thought it was teenage alienation set to music. That maybe a prophetic autobiography from someone who’d already glimpsed his own future. The Theremin isn’t just an exotic instrument; it’s the faraway sound of Wilson’s cognition misfiring – in real time, beautiful but disturbing. But Wilson had been experimenting with unconventional instrumentation for years – this wasn’t random psychedelic inspiration but the culmination of systematic sound exploration.
The production techniques he described as derivative of Phil Spector and revolutionary in ‘66 now reveal themselves as the work of someone literally on another level. Wilson wasn’t just multi-tracking vocals he was seemingly attempting to capture the sound of multiple personalities having a conversation inside his head. Yet this vocal architecture built upon years of development – turning himself into a one-man choir through techniques he’d been perfecting since the early Beach Boys recordings.
Those impossibly complex arrangements on tracks like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” aren’t showing off; they’re the musical equivalent of someone trying to make real something only he could hear in his imagination in ways difficult or impossible for lesser mortals to comprehend. But they’re also the work of someone who’d spent years absorbing Bach, studying the ‘Four Freshmen’ arrangements, and incorporating jazz harmonies that as mentioned most pop musicians couldn’t even hear, let alone execute.
What’s terrifying and brilliant is how Wilson managed to harness his disintegrating mental state and turn it into art. The drugs that were slowly destroying his grip on reality were simultaneously opening doorways to musical territories that simply don’t exist for the chemically unenhanced, a musical Doors Of Perception and where, see Aldous Huxley, heaven eventually becomes hell. Every overdub, every bizarre instrumental choice, every impossible vocal arrangement was Wilson obsessively following his rewired neural pathways to their logical conclusion – but using a musical vocabulary he’d been building methodically for years.
“Pet Sounds” the instrumental also makes more sense when viewed through this lens – it’s the sound of Wilson’s mind trying to process information through a consciousness that’s been chemically recalibrated. Those conversations between saxophone and percussion aren’t random; they’re Wilson translating internal dialogues that were becoming increasingly complex as his brain chemistry shifted, but executed with the instrumental sophistication he’d been developing since his earliest studio experiments.
Most people who’ve ingested that much LSD, in greater quantities than Syd Barrett, a similarly progressive British musical casualty and founding member of Pink Floyd, can barely tie their shoelaces, let alone orchestrate 40-piece arrangements that still sound futuristic. Wilson could do this because he’d already built the technical foundation – the chemicals didn’t create his abilities, they liberated them from conventional constraints.
But here’s the truly heartbreaking bit – we can now hear Pet Sounds as Wilson’s last completely coherent statement before the drugs and the pressure and the sheer weight of his own vision crushed him. Every perfect detail, every impossibly beautiful moment, every note that shouldn’t work but does – it’s all evidence of a mind operating at peak capacity whilst simultaneously consuming itself.
The comparative commercial failure in the America of 1966 was simply because the market wasn’t ready for avant-garde popular music made by someone now playing piano 24/7 seated in a sandbox. They wanted surf music from those nice clean-cut boys; what they got was the sound of now unkempt, long haired and bearded genius having a nervous breakdown in slow motion set to beautiful melodies. Remember that alongside the pressure generated creatively there’s financial pressure from Capitol who are ploughing dollars into the project. Yet another stress that’s under appreciated and rarely mentioned. Yes the total cost of a project might be oft quoted but not the absorption often by one sensitive creative person.
Wilson’s story since Pet Sounds – the breakdown, the bedroom years, the pills, the decline – only makes this album more precious. It’s the sound of someone touching something spiritual whilst burning up in the atmosphere of their own obsession. He gave us a glimpse of what’s possible when infinite talent meets unlimited chemical enhancement, and then paid the price for that glimpse with his sanity. Like many in era he flew close to the sun paid for it.
Pet Sounds isn’t just one of the greatest pop albums ever made – it’s a document of human consciousness pushed to its absolute limits and somehow managing to create beauty instead of chaos. Wilson took drugs that would have turned most people insane and used them to access musical dimensions that don’t exist for the rest of us. But he could only do this because he’d spent years building the technical and emotional vocabulary necessary to translate the untranslatable.
Now years later, Pet Sounds stands as both monument and warning – proof that sometimes genius requires madness, but also that madness without the foundation of obsessive craft development produces only chaos. Wilson’s achievement was combining systematic musical development with chemical consciousness expansion, creating something that transcended both.
Essential, heartbreaking, still beyond the comprehension of the majority. In era? Conpletely out there.
Picture this, it’s ’79 – punk’s getting philosophical and Seventies disco is wheezing waiting for it’s Eighties inhaler. Then five exuberant nutters from Athens, Georgia rock up to dance this mess around a bit.
I realised while thinking about the ‘next one’ that being a punk, new wave, indie and nowadays classic rock fan there’s not exactly much joy in my album racks. A few disco era, the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever soundtrack is mostly upbeat even if the film is grittier than you’d expect.
So running my finger along the spines and out slides this bright yellow pop art cut and paste thing by Sue Ab Surd (get it?) that sounds exactly like it looks. Joyful but odd in equal measure and totally new wave – because what other genre would have them? Art Brut now included music.
Nearly half a century on, and the B-52’s debut still sounds like it was made by visitors from Planet Claire where everything’s inclusive and brilliant all the time. What we’ve learned in the intervening decades is that this wasn’t just a great teenage party record – it was the moment American rock music remembered it was allowed to smile.
Back in ‘79, punk was getting all serious and art-school, chart disco was dying on its arse, and new wave was formed sixth formers in skinny ties looking miserable. Then along came five lunatics from Athens (Georgia) – with beehive hairdos, ‘a ‘thrift store’ look before Molly Ringwald and the audacity to suggest that rock music could be simultaneously completely mental and absolutely brilliant.
The genius of it is clearer now than ever. While their contemporaries were desperately trying to be cool, the B-52’s had stumbled onto something much more powerful – they were trying to be joyful. And joy, as it turns out, is infectious.
Fred Schneider’s vocal approach was nothing short of revolutionary, though nobody realised it at the time. That Schrechgesang ‘speak-sing’ delivery that seemed bonkers in ‘79 basically invented alternative rock vocals. Indie frontman like Michael Stipe channelled a bit of Fred’s fearless weirdness. The man gave permission for rock singers to stop being frontmen and be themselves.
“Rock Lobster” once destined for the bizarre list alongside Telephone Man and Oh Superman! has revealed itself to be pure genius – a seven-minute masterclass in how to build tension, create atmosphere, “Rock lobster, down, down” and anyone that way inclined lose their mind on a dance floor. please listen to it now. It’s f***ing crazed. As the closer for side one it’s perfect, you cannot wait to hear side two. Chapeau Chris Blackwell and B-52’s.
Fun fact; Cindy Wilson’s screaming vocals, reminiscent of Yoko Ono (with the mic left on) and the album’s playful nature directly inspired John Lennon to come out of retirement to write and record Double Fantasy. That tells you everything about its power. If it was good enough to get a Beatle excited about music again, it’s worth attention. It’s hot lava!
But here’s what’s become most apparent with time, this wasn’t just novelty nonsense. The B-52’s were proper musicians creating genuinely innovative sounds. Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson’s vocal interplay was decades ahead of its time, creating templates that alt-rock new wave bands like the Go-Go’s would follow. Ricky Wilson’s guitar, jangly alien-surf-rock, created a sound that would dominate US college rock for the next two decades.
The Athens connection looks even more significant now. That vibrant and bustling college town also produced R.E.M. and literally dozens of lesser known US indie bands. But the B-52’s got there first, proving that stateside you didn’t need to be in New York or LA to create something world-changing. All you needed was great imagination, a sense of humour, and no shame.
What’s remarkable is how modern this record still sounds. You could play “Planet Claire” today and it sounds fresh, unaffected by fashion and super upbeat. It exists outside of time, belonging to no particular era because this album created its own entire universe.
The album’s influence on fashion, art, and general cultural weirdness is immeasurable. The B-52’s made it acceptable to be fun and outrageous. Note fun. They proved that style and substance weren’t exclusive, that you could be completely over the top and still create lasting art. This is Drag Race T-40 years, no B-52’s no Scissor Sisters, maybe for a few coming out became easier and every person who’s ever teased their hair into an impossible shape owes them a drink.
Looking back, the production by Chris Blackwell is inspired. A clean, spacious mix that lets every mad element breathe – it was the perfect sonic setting for controlled chaos. While punk records were deliberately aggressive and new wave was often formulaic and sometimes saved by power pop, the B-52’s found the sweet spot where everything was clear, punchy, and completely alive. Over the next decade other US alternative bands like R.E.M applied the jangly guitar courtesy of Peter Buck and clean uncluttered mixes, Sonic Youth particularly on Daydream Nation that clarity and chaos evident here and The Go-Gos who applied similar vocal interplay, there are also similarities with Talking Heads although these are simultaneous with Brian Eno at the controls until 1981.
A then revolutionary feminist angle has only become more apparent with age. In an era when women in rock were still fighting for basic recognition, Kate and Cindy weren’t just singers – they were equal creative partners, their voices driving the songs as much as any instrument. They presented a model where gender was irrelevant; all that mattered was bringing their energy.
What’s most impressive about revisiting this album now is how it’s aged like fine wine whilst somehow getting more relevant. In our current era of manufactured authenticity and focus-grouped strategy, there’s something deeply inspiring about the B-52’s’ complete commitment to their own beautiful madness. They had a vision, admittedly involving lobsters, aliens, and enough Harmony [insert any US hair spray for local readers] to punch a hole in the ozone and they pursued it with utter conviction.
The ripple effects are still being felt. Is too much to say that without the band and this album, there’s no US college rock explosion or indie revolution, no acceptance that American rock could be colourful and strange. Kurt Cobain in those big white sunglasses. The B-52’s didn’t just make a great debut – they rewrote the rules.
Forty-six years on, “The B-52’s” debut album remains the sound of pure possibility, proof again from these retrospective reviews and research (also for my book Art Pop / Pop Art) that the best art comes from the margins, from people who care more about creating something wonderful than following the rules. It’s a record that gets better with age, revealing new layers of genius with each listen. I’ve loved playing it again.
In a world that often feels like it’s forgotten how to have fun, the B-52’s debut stands as a reminder that sometimes the most revolutionary thing you can do is refuse to take yourself too seriously. They created music that was so purely themselves that it transcended trends, genres, and decades.
Still essential. Still mental. Still absolutely bloody brilliant. 6060-842!
Time takes a Bowie album… and spawns the definitive retrospective.
It’s time for a Bowie Retrospective. After Young Americans, this is his trans-Atlantic mid-Seventies masterpiece signposting the genius redux on the horizon.
Nearly fifty years hence, Station To Station remains David Bowie’s most perplexing achievement, neither his most revolutionary nor his most accessible, but certainly his most necessary. Released in January 1976, it occupies that peculiar position in an artist’s canon where personal crisis, manic depression and artistic clarity converge with inspired precision. That Bowie himself claims to remember virtually nothing of its creation only deepens the mystery: how does one’s most cohesive statement emerge from complete psychological fragmentation? Or does it? It’s common knowledge people often have little or no recollection of bipolar episodes, and Seventies’ Bowie (Class A aside) is textbook manic episode creativity. But I digress.
The album functions as a fulcrum upon which Bowie’s entire career pivots, the moment when the glitter-encrusted showman shed his sequined skin and at this time alien contacts, to reveal something altogether more unsettling beneath. Six tracks, just six, yet each one a movement in what amounts to a symphony of identity crisis. This is Bowie as musical Dr. Jekyll, conducting experiments upon his own psyche with the detached fascination of a laboratory technician.
Musically, Station To Station represents Bowie’s most successful synthesis of seemingly incompatible elements. The Philadelphia soul he’d absorbed during his Young Americans period, that white British art-school graduate slumming it in the City of Brotherly Love (Brother Lee Love I only just got it during research) collides head-on with the mechanical metronomic precision of European electronic music. It shouldn’t work, this marriage of American warmth and Teutonic coldness, yet somehow it births something entirely new.
Earl Slick’s guitar work deserves particular attention. Gone are the bluesy histrionics and Sixties influences that had characterised Bowie’s previous guitar heroes; instead, Slick delivers lines that cut like scalpels, each note placed with obsessive precision. Listen to his work on “Stay”, those slashing chords that punctuate the verses aren’t mere rock posturing but architectural elements, supporting the song’s claustrophobic emotional weight. It’s guitar playing as urban planning, all sharp angles and deliberate omissions. The track itself embodies the album’s central tension: a seemingly straightforward rocker that reveals layers of unease beneath its propulsive surface. Bowie’s vocal alternates between desperate pleading and detached observation, while the band locks into a groove that feels simultaneously urgent and mechanical, the sound of someone running in place, trapped by their own momentum.
The rhythm section of Dennis Davis and George Murray provides the album’s mechanical heartbeat, a pulse that feels simultaneously human and robotic. Their work on the title track’s opening section transforms a simple 4/4 into something approaching industrial music, three years before Throbbing Gristle made such sounds esoterically fashionable. This is the rhythm of assembly lines and commuter trains, the metronomic beat of modern alienation. But “Station To Station” functions as more than mere sonic experimentation it’s a ten-minute manifesto of identity dissolution. The track’s structure mirrors its lyrical journey from European mysticism to American soul, with Bowie literally traveling from one musical station to another. The opening’s stark, almost ritualistic atmosphere gives way to the gospel-influenced finale, yet something essential remains lost in translation. The Duke emerges not as synthesis but as absence, the negative space between stations where no trains stop. Thankfully the Trilogy confirms he bought a return ticket.
Lyrically, Bowie constructs a peculiar theology that borrows from Nietzsche, Cambridge educated bisexual Aleister Crowley, the Kabbalah’s occultism, Judeo-Christianity and his infamous cocaine, milk and peppers fuelled paranoia. It’s a sort of spiritual algebra where traditional religious symbols are multiplied by pharmaceutical insight and divided by sexual desperation. If a Rock Star could be thus – gender confusion? The results don’t always make sense indeed, they’re not supposed to. This is the sound of a mind in free fall, grasping at mystical straws.
“TVC 15” transforms what might have been a simple paranoid episode into a peculiar love song addressed to a television set, the kind of domestic surrealism that would later mark Talking Heads’ best work. Yet where David Byrne would approach such material with Asperger’s detachment, Bowie invests it with genuine longing. The Duke may be emotionally vacant, but he’s not entirely dead inside.
It’s “Word On A Wing,” however, that provides the album’s most naked moment. Disguised as a love song but functioning as a prayer, it finds Bowie reaching towards something approaching grace. His vocal performance here, multi-tracked harmonies that create a choir of Bowies, each one seeking salvation in a slightly different key, represents perhaps his most vulnerable moment on record. The Duke’s marble facade cracks just enough to reveal the frightened human beneath.
The album’s visual identity proves equally calculated. That stark red-black-and-white cover avec an iconic still from Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth captures something essential about both album and era. Here is Bowie mid-stride, embodying alien detachment that defined the star mid-Seventies. The bold, minimalist typography strips away baroque excess, replacing it with corporate authority. This is alienation made manifest through graphic design, the Duke as extraterrestrial advertising executive smack bang in the peak Fifth Avenue heyday. And a lovely futuristic font style it is and stylistically redeployed here.
The synchronicity between album and film feels almost too neat, yet it works. Thomas Jerome Newton, Bowie’s gin-soaked alien entrepreneur, shares the Duke’s emotional remove and otherworldly perspective. Both exist as commentaries on American excess, observers rather than participants in the society they critique. That both emerged from the same period of pharmaceutical dissolution creates a multimedia meditation on identity and exile that feels genuinely prophetic.
Yet Station To Station is not without its limitations. The album’s brevity at barely 38 minutes is cruel to fans. Similarly, the album’s obsessive perfectionism occasionally works against it. Every element serves the whole, certainly, but sometimes one craves the messy humanity of Diamond Dogs’ unguarded moments. The Duke’s emotional detachment, while conceptually fascinating, can feel genuinely cold, a frigid barrier between artist and audience that even Bowie’s considerable charisma cannot entirely overcome. There’s a warmth in “Golden Years” that’s residual from the previous Young Americans album but different enough to spawn it’s own Bowie-generation, a stunning inclusion and single release that almost makes up for any deficiencies. We’re not going near the infamous salute and flirtation with the far right or any misunderstandings, but they exist so merit this mention.
The cover of “Wild Is The Wind” succeeds brilliantly as vocal performance but fails to entirely justify its inclusion. While Bowie’s voice stretches towards notes that seem almost beyond reach, a man grasping for salvation it remains unclear what this particular song adds to the album’s overarching narrative. It’s beautiful certainly, and would we be without it (a non-album single?) but beautiful in a way that feels slightly disconnected from the Duke’s particular path right then .
What makes Station To Station essential is not its perfection but its necessity. This is Bowie’s ‘Exile on Main St.’ an album born from extremity that transcends its circumstances. Where other artists might have been consumed by such personal turmoil, Bowie channelled it into his most disciplined statement. The cocaine psychosis that nearly destroyed him instead crystallised into diamond-hard brilliance.
The album’s influence can be traced through decades of post-punk anxiety, from Joy Division’s mechanical depression to The Prodigy’s electro-dance-punk hybrid. The Thin White Duke’s aesthetic all sharp suits and sharper cheekbone became a shorthand for alienated glamour, reimagined via the New Romantic Blitz Club Bowie Nights while the music’s marriage of warmth and coldness prefigured everything from New Order to Bloc Party.
Yet its true achievement lies in its function as an artistic Ground Zero. This is Bowie burning down his house to see what survives the flames, and discovering that what emerges from the ashes (to ashes) is something genuinely new. The Duke may be dead, but his ghost haunts everything Bowie would subsequently create, a reminder that sometimes the most profound art emerges not from comfort but from the desperate need to survive one’s own worst impulses or embedded periodic psychopathy.
Station To Station endures as proof that artistic necessity and personal crisis can produce results that transcend both. It’s neither Bowie’s most adventurous work nor his most commercially successful, but it may be his most honest and human, a document of a mind at war with itself, achieving temporary ceasefire through the discipline of writing and playing. In its now frozen perfection, it captures something essential about the terror of an artist in free fall, creating masterpieces from a wreckage of his own making.
Eighteen Months of Madness in the Heart of Hollywood. The ex-Beatle’s wildest period yet – sex, booze, and Rock’n’Roll excess that nearly destroyed a legend.
Right, so you think you know John Lennon? The peaceful Beatle, the ‘Bed-In’ revolutionary, the bloke who gave us “Imagine”? Well, think again, because between October 1973 and early 1975, our John went completely barmy in Los Angeles – and we do mean completely. They’re calling it his “Lost Weekend,” though at eighteen months, it’s more like a lost year and a half.
It all started when Yoko threw him out of their Dakota apartment. Yes, you heard right – she actually booted him out, told him to go find himself or some such psychological bollocks. “Go away and have your midlife crisis somewhere else,” was apparently the gist of it. So off trots Lennon to La-La Land with May Pang, Yoko’s 23-year-old assistant, who’d been hand-picked by Mrs Lennon herself to keep an eye on her wayward husband.
What followed was a period of such spectacular debauchery that even Keith Moon would’ve raised an eyebrow. Lennon, aged 33 and supposedly a reformed character, promptly went completely off the rails in the most American way possible.
First stop was a beach house in Santa Monica that quickly became legendary for all the wrong reasons. Lennon surrounded himself with a motley crew of musicians, hangers-on, and fellow piss heads who turned the place into something resembling a Rock’n’Roll commune crossed with a rehabilitation centre – except nobody was trying to get clean.
The core gang included Harry Nilsson (already well on his way to drinking himself to death), Ringo Starr (taking a break from his own marriage difficulties), Keith Moon (just because), and a rotating cast of session musicians, groupies, and general wastrels. They called themselves “The Hollywood Vampires” – which tells you everything you need to know about their priorities.
Days would start around noon with cocaine and brandy, move on to more serious drinking by mid-afternoon, and end with everyone unconscious in various compromising positions around dawn. Lennon, who’d supposedly given up the hard stuff years earlier, was necking everything he could get his hands on – whisky, vodka, tequila, you name it. The man who once sang about peace and love was now starting fights in nightclubs and getting thrown out of venues across Los Angeles.
The nadir came in March 1974 at the Troubadour club, where Lennon and Nilsson had gone to catch an Ann Peebles show. Both absolutely legless, they proceeded to heckle the poor woman throughout her set. When staff tried to quiet them down, Lennon apparently shouted something unrepeatable about the management’s parentage and stormed off to the toilets.
But here’s where it gets properly weird – instead of using the gents, our revolutionary hero decided to relieve himself in a cupboard, emerging with a sanitary towel stuck to his forehead like some demented tribal marking. The press had a field day, of course. “BEATLE JOHN’S TOILET SCANDAL” screamed the headlines, and suddenly the man who’d once been the most respected musician in the world was reduced to a laughing stock.
The incident became symbolic of everything wrong with Lennon’s LA period. Here was a bloke who’d written some of the most important songs of the decade, reduced to pissing in cupboards and wearing feminine hygiene products as headgear. It was pathetic, really.
Amazingly, amidst all this chaos, Lennon was still trying to make music. The problem was, he was too pissed most of the time to do it properly. Recording sessions for what would become “Walls and Bridges” were exercises in frustration, with Lennon turning up hours late, completely bladdered, and unable to remember lyrics he’d written the day before.
Producer Jack Douglas later described the sessions as “like trying to record with a very talented ghost who kept disappearing.” Lennon would start a take, wander off mid-song, and return hours later having forgotten what they were working on. It’s a miracle the album turned out as well as it did.
The saving grace was May Pang, who somehow managed to keep some semblance of order in the chaos. Twenty years younger than Lennon and completely out of her depth, she nevertheless became his anchor during this period. She’d drag him out of bars, clean him up for recording sessions, and generally prevent him from killing himself through sheer stupidity.
If you want to know how mental things got, consider this: Lennon thought it would be a brilliant idea to record an album of Rock’n’Roll covers with Phil Spector producing. Yes, that Phil Spector – the gun-toting maniac who was already showing signs of the complete breakdown that would later land him in prison for murder.
The sessions, held at various LA studios throughout 1974, were legendary for their dysfunction. Spector would turn up armed (literally), paranoid, and completely controlling. Lennon, meanwhile, was usually drunk and belligerent. The two would spend hours arguing about arrangements while session musicians sat around collecting overtime pay.
One session ended with Spector firing a gun in the studio and then disappearing with the master tapes, leaving Lennon with nothing to show for weeks of work. It was like something out of a Martin Scorsese film, except it was real life and nobody was laughing.
The thing is, beneath all the chaos and self-destruction, you could sense Lennon was actually quite miserable. This wasn’t the joyful excess of a rock star living it up – this was the desperate flailing of a man who’d lost his way completely.
Friends from the period describe him as paranoid, lonely, and increasingly aware that he was making a complete tit of himself. The press coverage was universally awful, his music was suffering, and worst of all, he was alienating himself from the son he claimed to love more than anything.
Julian was still back in England with Cynthia, and Lennon’s contact with the boy was sporadic at best. When he did ring, he was often too drunk to hold a proper conversation. It’s heartbreaking, really – here was a man who’d sung about love and peace, completely unable to maintain relationships with the people who mattered most to him.
The long and winding road back… By late 1974, even Lennon’s legendary constitution was showing signs of wear. He’d put on weight, looked terrible in photos, and was developing a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most unreliable talents. Studio executives were starting to avoid him, club owners were banning him, and his behaviour was becoming genuinely concerning to those around him.
The wake-up call came when he collapsed during a recording session, apparently from exhaustion and alcohol poisoning. Rushed to hospital, he spent several days recovering while doctors told him in no uncertain terms that his lifestyle was unsustainable.
It was then that May Pang apparently sat him down for a serious conversation about his future. According to those close to the situation, she basically told him he could continue on his current path and probably die, or he could sort himself out and try to salvage something from the wreckage of his life.
The irony is that throughout this entire period, Lennon was in regular contact with Yoko back in New York. She’d ring him every few days, ostensibly to check on his wellbeing but apparently also to monitor his behaviour. Some cynics suggest the whole “Lost Weekend” was orchestrated by Yoko from the beginning – a way of letting Lennon get all his middle-aged rebellion out of his system while keeping him on a very long leash.
Whether that’s true or not, by early 1975 it was clear that Lennon was ready to return to New York and his wife. The LA experiment had run its course, leaving behind a trail of damaged relationships, wasted opportunities, and some genuinely questionable musical decisions.
But here’s the thing – as much as the Lost Weekend period was a disaster in human terms, it also produced some of Lennon’s most honest and vulnerable music. “Walls and Bridges” contains some genuinely affecting songs about loneliness and regret, while the eventually completed “Rock’n’Roll” album, despite its troubled genesis, showed Lennon reconnecting with his musical roots in ways that would influence his later work.
So what do we make of John Lennon’s Lost Weekend? Was it a necessary period of self-exploration, or just eighteen months of expensive self-indulgence? The truth, as usual, probably lies somewhere in between.
On one hand, it’s hard to have much sympathy for a millionaire rock star whose idea of finding himself involves drinking himself senseless in beach houses while his assistant-turned-girlfriend cleans up after him. The whole thing reeks of middle-class privilege and self-pity taken to absurd extremes.
On the other hand, there’s something genuinely tragic about watching one of the most important artists of his generation lose himself so completely. Lennon’s music had always been about honesty and emotional truth, and in some perverse way, his LA breakdown was probably the most honest thing he’d done in years.
The period also demonstrated something important about the nature of creativity and self-destruction in rock music. While the myth of the tortured artist is largely bollocks, there’s no denying that some of our greatest musicians have produced their most powerful work while falling apart personally. Lennon’s Lost Weekend wasn’t pleasant to witness, but it was undeniably real in a way that his more controlled periods sometimes weren’t.
Perhaps most importantly, it showed that even John Lennon – the man who’d helped change popular music forever – was still fundamentally human, still capable of making spectacular mistakes and learning from them. The fact that he eventually sorted himself out, returned to New York, and spent his final years as a devoted father and husband suggests that the Lost Weekend, for all its chaos, might have been a necessary part of his journey.
Whether it was worth eighteen months of madness is another question entirely. But then again, that’s Rock’n’Roll for you – never simple, never clean, and never quite what you expect from the outside.
Whatever gets you thru the night eh?
*The author wishes to acknowledge that this piece is based on publicly available information and interviews from the period, and that some details remain disputed by those involved.
#nowplaying John Lennon – Walls and Bridges (1974)
Thirty-two years on, and Together Alone still sounds like nothing else in the Crowded House catalogue. What seemed like a bewildering left turn in 1993 now reveals itself as the band’s most prescient work, a record that anticipated the alt-rock soul-searching of the late nineties whilst remaining utterly, defiantly itself. Neil Finn’s mob wandered off into the spiritual wilderness armed with nothing but a fistful of melodies and Martin Glover’s sonic wizardry, and what they dragged back from the void was this peculiar, haunting beast that sounds like it was recorded in some ancient Maori temple with the ghosts of a thousand ancestors whispering sweet harmonies into the mixing desk.
History has been kind to Together Alone. What critics initially dismissed as commercial suicide now reads as artistic bravery of the highest order. The title, which once seemed like undergraduate philosophising, now carries genuine weight, this is music for our atomised age, for contemplating connection and disconnection whilst doom scrolling at 3am, wondering where it all went wrong and why the notifications never stop.
The genius of Youth’s production has aged magnificently. The man who gave us Killing Joke’s industrial nightmares somehow coaxed sounds out of Finn and company that still shimmer and breathe like living things decades later. Gone were the pristine pop perfections of their earlier work, replaced by something altogether more organic and mysterious. Listen now and you can hear the DNA of everything from Radiohead’s OK Computer to Bon Iver’s falsetto folk, Youth was crafting the sound of millennial melancholy years before anyone knew what to call it. The drums sound like they’re echoing through cathedral spaces, the guitars drift in and out of focus like half-remembered dreams, and Finn’s voice floats above it all with an otherworldly detachment that’s genuinely unsettling.
The opening salvo sets the tone perfectly a rolling, hypnotic rhythm that builds into something approaching transcendence before dissolving into the ether. It’s pop music, Jim, but not as we know it. This is Crowded House wrestling with their demons in public, and Youth has given them the sonic palette to paint their neuroses in glorious Technicolor.
Finn’s songwriting has taken a decidedly introspective turn. Where once he dealt in universal truths wrapped in sugar-sweet melodies, here he’s digging deeper into the psyche, exploring themes of isolation, connection, and the peculiar melancholy that comes with success. The man sounds genuinely troubled, and it suits him.
The production shines brightest on the album’s more experimental moments. Youth has layered in all manner of mysterious sounds, backwards vocals, found sounds, studio trickery that would make Kevin Shields weep with envy. Yet it never feels gimmicky or overwrought. Every sonic flourish serves the songs, adding depth and texture without overwhelming Finn’s essentially human songwriting.
That said, Together Alone isn’t without its problems. At times, the band seem so determined to avoid their pop past that they forget what made them special in the first place. A few tracks meander when they should soar, and the overall mood is so consistently downbeat that you occasionally long for the simple joy of their earlier work. ‘Why are you listening to that depressing music?’ it is not, but it can be downbeat.
But these are minor quibbles with what history has revealed to be an essential record. Crowded House risked everything to make something genuinely personal and challenging, and Youth gave them the sonic framework to create what now stands as their most influential work. It wasn’t their biggest seller, but it was their boldest statement the record that proved they were artists first, hit-makers second.
In our current age of manufactured vulnerability and algorithmic angst, Together Alone stands as proof that real emotional complexity can’t be coded or commodified. It’s a grower, this one and the kind of record that reveals new secrets with each listen, the kind that soundtracks both Instagram stories and genuine moments of crisis in equal measure.
Three decades later, Martin Glover’s achievement becomes even clearer. He took New Zealand’s finest export and helped them create their masterpiece, a record that sounds more relevant now than it did then. The kids discovering it on Spotify don’t know they’re listening to the future of indie rock, circa 1993. Seems like Youth may not be wasted on the young after all.
There was always something different about David Bowie, wasn’t there? While his contemporaries were busy being rock stars, he was busy being something else entirely: an art project with a guitar. As the rest of rock’s aristocracy draped themselves in velvet and attitude, young David Jones was meticulously crafting personas with the same care a painter applies to canvas or a sculptor to stone. And why wouldn’t he? The lad was steeped in art school sensibilities before he ever picked up a microphone.
When Bowie space-walked into our consciousness in the late Sixties, he brought with him the baggage of Bromley Technical High School, where his art teacher Owen Frampton (incredibly the father of “Frampton Comes Alive” Pete, as cosmic coincidence would have it) had stuffed the boy’s head with possibilities. It was here that our man first encountered the heady brew of visual thinking that would define his career. While most pop stars were channeling Elvis and Chuck Berry, Bowie was communing with the ghosts of Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters.
“I’ve always been a visual thinker, the music was always just one part of the whole package. I needed the visual element to complete the circuit.” David Bowie.
And complete it he did, in a series of personas that functioned less as costumes and more as living exhibitions of performance art: Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke. Each one a walking gallery installation, meticulously curated down to the last detail.
But it was his relationship with the British Pop Art movement that truly illuminated Bowie’s approach. Enter Derek Boshier, the pioneering artist whose conceptual thinking provided the spark for one of Bowie’s most iconic album sleeves.
Boshier, a graduate of the Royal College of Art and contemporary of David Hockney, had been pushing the boundaries of Pop Art since the early Sixties. By the time he encountered Bowie in the mid-Seventies, both men were operating in that fertile territory where high art and pop culture collide with the force of subatomic particles in CERN’s hadron collider.
The concept for “Heroes” that stark, Eno-drenched masterpiece of 1977, came directly from Boshier’s fascination with gesture and posture. The now iconic image of Bowie, arm raised in a peculiar mime salute that’s neither fascist nor friendly, was Boshier’s suggestion: a visual quotation of Erich Heckel’s painting “Roquairol.” It’s the kind of art-historical reference that would fly over the heads of most rock stars, but for Bowie, it was the nectar of Zeus.
“David understood exactly what I was trying to do, most musicians want to look cool or dangerous. David wanted to look interesting. That’s the art school influence right there choosing the intellectually provocative over the merely attractive.” Derek Boshier.
This wasn’t just about album covers, either. When Bowie moved to the Brutalist rebuilt concrete city of Berlin in the late Seventies, he wasn’t just running from cocaine and Los Angeles; he was deliberately placing himself in the epicentre of European expressionism. While holed up in that apartment above the auto parts shop, he wasn’t just sharing with Iggy Pop or recording with Eno; he was making pilgrimages to the Brücke Museum, communing with the ghosts of German expressionism.
The Berlin trilogy of “Low,” “Heroes,” and “Lodger” wasn’t just a musical departure; it was Bowie’s most explicit attempt to translate the fractured perspectives of expressionist art into sound. Listen to the instrumental second side of “Low” and you will ‘hear’ the angular distortions of Kirchner or the colour explosions of Nolde translated into synthesiser washes and oblique rhythms.
Even his collaborators were chosen with an art school sensibility. Brian Eno wasn’t just a sonic innovator; he was a graduate of the Winchester School of Art and a student of cybernetic theory and systems thinking. Their collaborations were less traditional songwriting sessions and more like conceptual art happenings, with Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards, themselves pure art school, directing the creative flow.
“The thing about David is that he approached recording studios the way other artists approach galleries. Each album was an installation, a complete environment with its own rules and internal logic.” Tony Visconti Record Producer.
This approach reached its zenith with Boshier’s involvement in the “Lodger” sleeve, an elaborate piece of conceptual art disguised as an album cover. The distorted image of Bowie falling, the deliberate reference to Polaroid manipulation techniques this wasn’t just packaging; it was a manifesto.
Throughout the Eighties, as Bowie’s commercial star rose and his artistic credibility occasionally wobbled, the art school influence remained his secret weapon. Even at his most commercial, during the “Let’s Dance” period, there was always something slightly off-kilter about his presentation a knowing wink to the cognoscenti that this, too, was performance art.
By the time he re-emerged with the industrial crunch of “Outside” in 1995, Bowie had circled back to his art school roots with a vengeance. Collaborating with Brian Eno again, he created not just an album but a complete fictional world populated by characters like Nathan Adler and Baby Grace Blue a concept album that owed more to installation art than it did to “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust.”
For his part, Boshier remained a touchstone throughout Bowie’s career, the connection to an art school sensibility that never left him. Their collaborations from “Heroes” through to Bowie’s later years represented one of pop music’s most enduring dialogues between rock and visual art.
In an era when most rock stars were content to be rock stars, Bowie remained defiantly, stubbornly, gloriously an art student at heart the smartest kid in the classroom who never stopped asking “what if?” While others were content to give the audience what they wanted, Bowie insisted on giving them what they didn’t know they needed.
His final album, “Blackstar,” released just days before his death in 2016, was perhaps his most complete art statement; a multimedia farewell that incorporated music, video, graphic design, and performance into a single, devastating whole. The falling astronaut, the blind prophet, the button-eyed specter weren’t just music video conceits; they were the culmination of a lifetime spent at the intersection of rock and conceptual art.
David Bowie wasn’t just influenced by art school thinking; he was its greatest ambassador in the realm of popular music. He took the experimental, boundary-pushing ethos of the art school and smuggled it into the mainstream inside trojan horses made of glitter, lightning bolts, and a space travelling Pierrot.
As we approach the tenth anniversary of his departure from this particular dimension, it’s worth remembering that Bowie’s greatest creation wasn’t Ziggy or the Thin White Duke or even his fabulous canon. It was the concept of David Bowie himself, the ultimate mixed-media art project, a half-century in the making, that changed not just music but the very idea of what a pop star could be.
For that, we have the art schools to thank. Not bad for an education that most parents would have considered a waste of time, eh?
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Art Pop / Pop Art: a study of the influences of art school, famous artists and movements on pop and rock music. Those institutions where failure is motivation, where the eccentric and pretentious emerge into the fascinating space where art and music meet.
The Artistic Bond Between Ian Dury and Peter Blake.
In the vibrant landscape of post-war British art and music, few creative partnerships have been as meaningful yet understated as the one between punk & new wave pioneer Ian Dury and pop art master Sir Peter Blake. Their collaboration bridged the worlds of fine art and popular music, creating a visual and sonic language that celebrated British culture in absolute eccentric glory.
The foundation of their relationship was built at the Royal College of Art in London, where Blake taught in the painting school during the early 1960s. Among his students was a young Ian Dury, who enrolled to study painting before his musical career took flight. This teacher-student relationship evolved into a friendship and creative partnership that would span decades.
Blake, already known for his pop art style and collage techniques, recognised in Dury a kindred spirit who appreciated the beauty in everyday British imagery and vernacular. Both artists shared an affection for music hall traditions, seaside entertainment, and the rich tapestry of working-class British life.
Their most famous collaboration came in 1977 when Blake designed the iconic cover for Dury’s album “New Boots and Panties!!” with his band The Blockheads. The cover featured Dury and his son Baxter standing outside a clothing shop in London’s East End, capturing the authenticity and unpretentious quality that characterized both artists’ work.
This wasn’t Blake’s first venture into album artwork, he had already created the legendary collage for The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” a decade earlier. However, his work with Dury reflected a different sensibility: less psychedelic fantasia and more urban realism, though both shared a deep appreciation for cultural references and visual richness.
The visual aesthetic Blake helped create for Dury became part of the artist’s signature style, combining elements of music hall, fairground art, and British seaside postcards with the energy of punk. This visual language perfectly complemented Dury’s lyrics, which celebrated similar themes with linguistic dexterity and wit.
What bound Blake and Dury together was more than just a professional relationship, it was a shared artistic philosophy, a Pop Art manifesto:
Democratic Art – Both believed in art that spoke to ordinary people without condescension. Blake’s pop art embraced everyday imagery and commercial design, while Dury’s music combined highbrow wordplay with the rhythms and language of the street.
British Cultural Heritage – They shared a deep appreciation for distinctly British forms of entertainment and expression from music hall traditions to seaside amusements, fairgrounds, and the rich lexicon of Cockney rhyming slang.
Visual Storytelling – Both artists were masterful visual storytellers. Blake through his intricate collages and paintings, Dury through his character-driven narratives and vivid lyrical portraits.
Authenticity – Neither artist was interested in pretension. Blake’s work celebrated real people and places, while Dury’s songs gave voice to characters often overlooked in popular music.
The visual language they developed together helped define Dury’s public persona as an artist deeply rooted in British tradition yet thoroughly modern in his sensibilities. Blake, for his part, continued to be inspired by music throughout his career. Having worked with Dury, he went on to create artwork for other British musicians, including Paul Weller, Oasis, and The Who. His experience collaborating with Dury undoubtedly informed these later musical partnerships. Ian Dury’s painting style very similar to Blake’s, in fact they could be confused.
The Blake-Dury collaboration represents an important moment in British cultural history, a time when the boundaries between “high” and “low” art were being deliberately blurred, and when artists were reclaiming and celebrating aspects of British culture that had been previously dismissed as vulgar or trivial. Evidenced in the 1962 BBC TV episode of ‘Monitor’ a previously establishment series reserved for fine art and classical music sensibilities showing a laid back, montage style documentary by Ken Russell dedicated to pioneering Pop Artists; Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty & Peter Philips. These occasional media break outs preparing the ground for later.
Their partnership demonstrated how visual art and music could reinforce and elevate each other. Blake’s artwork didn’t simply influence Dury’s music it contextualised it, providing literary-visual pop art inspired cues that enhanced the listener’s understanding of the musical content. For me, the Blake-Dury relationship is the epitome of Pop Art and Art Pop, Blake’s influence was so essential to Dury I don’t believe he would have existed or been anywhere near as popular without. In perspective, the surprising statistic that Dury was the U.K.’s biggest selling pop artist in 1978.
Today, their collaboration stands as a testament to the power of cross-disciplinary artistic partnerships. The visual language they developed together continues to influence album artwork and the presentation of musical personas, while their shared appreciation for the vernacular aspects of British culture has helped shape subsequent generations of British artists and musicians.
In a cultural landscape increasingly dominated by global influences, the Blake-Dury partnership reminds us of the rich creative potential that can emerge from deeply local inspirations proving that the most universal art often comes from the most specific cultural contexts.
Their legacy lives on in their shared vision of an art that speaks to and celebrates the lives, language, and experiences of ordinary people an artistic philosophy as relevant today as it was when a young Ian Dury first sat in Peter Blake’s classroom at the Royal College of Art.
Ian Dury Royal College of Art, 1964-1967.
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Art Pop / Pop Art: a study of the influences of art school, famous artists and movements on pop and rock music. Those institutions where failure is motivation, where the eccentric and pretentious emerge into the fascinating space where art and music meet.
The Visual Voltage Behind Buzzcocks – Malcolm Garrett and Linder Sterling’s Punk Palette
Manchester’s Buzzcocks stand as pioneers who somehow managed to marry the razor-slash aesthetic of the punk rock movement with actual tunes you could whistle. But behind every great band lurks an equally significant visual identity, and in the case of Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto’s brainchild, two art school provocateurs provided the images that would become as iconic as the music itself.
Malcolm Garrett and Linder Sterling are two names that should be etched into the consciousness of anyone who gives a toss about the intersection of music and visual art. While the Buzzcocks were busy crafting their uniquely melodic brand of sonic assault, these two were creating the visual language that would become inseparable from the band’s identity.
Malcolm Garrett, the man responsible for the band’s sleeves from 1977 onwards, didn’t just design record covers, he created a visual manifesto. His approach was clinical, almost surgical in its precision. Taking the sterile aesthetic of Swiss typography and dragging it kicking and screaming into Manchester’s nascent punk scene, Garrett’s work for Buzzcocks represents a pivotal moment in graphic design history.
The sleeves for the “Singles Going Steady” series remain a masterclass in stripped-back modernism. Garrett employed a rigorous grid system, clean sans-serif typography, and a restricted colour palette that made most of his contemporaries look like they were still stuck in some psychedelic hangover. His work screamed “modern” in an era where that word actually meant something.
“I was interested in communication rather than decoration, the Swiss Style had this clinical precision that seemed perfectly suited to the music, technical, sharp, but with an underlying emotion.” Malcolm Garrett.
Garrett’s use of bold colours against stark backgrounds, his meticulous placement of text, and his incorporation of technical drawing elements reflected Buzzcocks’ own musical approach that is technically precise but emotionally raw. His sleeves for “Orgasm Addict,” “What Do I Get?” and “Ever Fallen in Love” remain some of the most instantly recognisable artifacts of the punk era, utilising negative space and bold color blocking that would influence generations of designers to come.
If Garrett provided the architectural framework for Buzzcocks’ visual identity, Linder Sterling (then working under the single name, Linder) supplied the provocative, confrontational imagery that adorned it. Her most famous work for the band and the cover of “Orgasm Addict” remains one of punk’s most startling visual statements.
A naked female torso with an iron for a head and grinning mouths for nipples , it’s a cutting commentary on the objectification of women that’s lost none of its power to shock and provoke. Created with the simple tools of scissors and glue, Linder’s photomontage technique drew from Dada and Surrealism but was unmistakably of its time.
“I was interested in creating a kind of visual violence, taking the language of advertising and pornography and turning it back on itself. These were images that were supposed to be consumed passively, but I wanted to make them impossible to consume without thought.” Linder Sterling.
Linder’s work employed the cut-up technique that William Burroughs had brought to literature and that Buzzcocks themselves were experimenting with musically. Her collages juxtaposed images from men’s magazines, women’s magazines, and domestic appliance catalogues to create jarring, unsettling combinations that exposed the underlying mechanics of consumer culture.
What united Garrett and Linder was their shared background in the Manchester art school scene and their commitment to modernism in its most aggressive form. Both rejected the prevailing hippie aesthetic that had dominated music visuals for the previous decade, instead embracing a stark, forward-looking approach that was perfectly in tune with Buzzcocks’ own musical leanings.
While the Sex Pistols’ visual identity (courtesy of Jamie Reid) embraced anarchic chaos and The Clash leaned into a revolutionary pastiche, Buzzcocks’ artwork was clinical, precise, and oddly timeless. Garrett and Linder were creating a new visual language that would go on to influence everything from Factory Records’ output to the entire field of digital design.
Garrett’s work for the band employed techniques borrowed from industrial signage and technical drawing an approach that complemented the band’s music, which similarly combined mechanical precision with raw emotion. His bold use of colour and his embrace of negative space made Buzzcocks’ releases instantly recognizable in the racks.
Linder’s feminist-informed montage work, meanwhile, provided the perfect visual counterpoint to Pete Shelley’s sexually ambiguous lyrics. Her images challenged the viewer in much the same way that Shelley’s songs did thus forcing a reconsideration of established norms around gender and sexuality.
The influence of Garrett and Linder’s work for Buzzcocks cannot be overstated. Garrett would go on to design for Duran Duran, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (OMD), Magazine, and Simple Minds, bringing his clinical approach to the emerging new wave scene. His pioneering use of computer design in the early 1980s would cement his place as one of the most forward-thinking designers of his generation.
Linder, meanwhile, continued her confrontational art practice while also fronting her own post-punk outfit, Ludus. Her feminist photomontage work presaged the appropriation art movement of the 1980s and continues to be exhibited in major galleries worldwide. I’ve since appropriated her Orgasm Addict design as a large scale acrylic. Meta.
But it’s their work with Buzzcocks that remains their most potent legacy, a perfect marriage of sound and vision that defined an era. While the band delivered their urgent, lovelorn punk anthems, Garrett and Linder provided the visual context that amplified their message and helped cement their place in music history.
In an era when album artwork has been reduced to a tiny square on a streaming platform, it’s worth remembering a time when the visual component of music was just as important as the sounds themselves. Garrett and Linder didn’t just create images to accompany Buzzcocks’ music, they created a complete audiovisual experience that defined the band’s identity as much as Shelley’s buzzsaw guitar and lovelorn lyrics.
As we continue to pick through the remains of punk and its associated guerrilla marketing for inspiration and meaning, the work of these two visual artists serves as a reminder that the movement was about more than just three chords and the truth, it was a complete aesthetic revolution that transformed how we see as well as how we hear. And in that visual revolution, Malcolm Garrett and Linder Sterling were right at the extreme edge, scissors and Letraset in hand, ready to cut up the past and paste together the future.
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Art Pop / Pop Art: a study of the influences of art school, famous artists and movements on pop and rock music. Those institutions where failure is motivation, where the eccentric and pretentious emerge into the fascinating space where art and music meet.
