Seventies Music

ART POP / POP ART: David Bowie, Art Classes & Derek Boshier

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The Art School Dandy. Bowie’s Brush With Bohemia.

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.

ART POP / POP ART: Ian Dury & Peter Blake

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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.

ART POP / POP ART: Buzzcocks, Malcolm Garrett & Linder Sterling

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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.

ART POP / POP ART: Brian Eno & Tom Phillips

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Or ‘Two Brain’ Brian Eno’s Art School Daydreaming

In the pantheon of rock’s cerebral mavericks, Brian Peter George Jean-Baptiste de la Salle Eno AKA Brian Eno or just plain Eno stands as our premier egghead-in-residence, the boffin who turned knob-twiddling into an art form, and made the recording studio a canvas rather than a mere tool. While lesser mortals bang away at their instruments with workmanlike dedication, Eno approaches music as just another colour on his palette.

The roots of Eno’s glorious dilettantism lie not in the cramped smoky clubs of London but in the rarefied air of art school conceptualism. Before he became the feather-boa’d synth wizard of Roxy Music, before he produced landmark albums for everyone from Talking Heads to U2, before he invented ambient music while flat on his back after being walloped by a taxi, young Brian was just another paint-splattered art student at Ipswich’s Suffolk College, soaking up ideas that would later transform rock music.

“Art school didn’t teach me how to paint, it taught me how to think about why I might want to paint in the first place.” – Brian Eno.

This intellectual approach, questioning the very foundations of why we make art became the cornerstone of his musical methodology, a perpetual askance glance at rock’s tedious conventions.

At Ipswich, Eno fell under the spell of teacher and mentor Tom Phillips, a walking encyclopedia of avant-garde approaches whose influence on our hero cannot be overstated. Phillips; painter, composer, translator, and all-round Renaissance gadabout introduced the young Eno to the work of John Cage, to the mind-bending possibilities of chance operations and indeterminacy. Phillips’ own masterwork, “A Humument,” in which he transformed a Victorian novel into a series of visual poems by painting over the text, leaving selected words visible, demonstrated how one might create new meaning by obscuring the old, a strategy Eno would later deploy in his oblique collaborations with David Bowie.

“Tom showed me that art wasn’t about technical skill, it was about context, about framing experiences.” This revelation liberated the technically limited Eno, allowing him to approach music as conceptual art rather than a craft to be mastered. When he later joined Roxy Music, he proudly proclaimed his musical illiteracy as a virtue rather than a handicap.

The conceptual art movement that dominated British art schools in the late ’60s provided Eno with his intellectual toolkit. Here was an approach that valued ideas over execution, process over product, and systems over virtuosity, catnip for a mind as restlessly curious as Eno’s. From conceptualism came his fascination with self-generating systems, with setting up musical experiments and then stepping back to see what might happen. His famous Oblique Strategies cards (created with artist Peter Schmidt) with those cryptic injunctions like “Honour thy error as a hidden intention” or “Emphasise differences” are pure conceptual art, placing process above outcome.

While most rock musicians have historically treated their art school past as a brief bohemian holiday before getting down to the serious business of power chords and stadium tours, Eno has remained defiantly committed to the art school perspective. His collaborative approach, turning musicians into components in his sonic experiments derives directly from the workshop methodologies of art school. When he produced Talking Heads’ “Remain in Light,” he was essentially running the band through a series of conceptual exercises, treating David Byrne and company as materials rather than auteurs.

Even Eno’s celebrated ambient works, gossamer soundscapes made for the comedown room, can be traced back to the “expanded cinema” experiments he witnessed as an art student. These multimedia environments, combining film, light shows, and sound, were attempts to create immersive experiences rather than discrete works of art. When Eno later described ambient music as being “as ignorable as it is interesting,” he was channeling the art school notion that art need not demand attention but might instead modify an environment.

What separates Eno from the legions of other art school graduates who’ve strayed into rock’s territory is his ability to translate rarefied conceptual approaches into works that connect emotionally. His productions for U2 may have been informed by systems thinking and process art, but they also made the Irish bombast merchants sound bloody enormous. His solo works might be exercises in cybernetic theory, but they’re also strangely moving, capturing melancholy and wonder in their abstract washes.

In an age when rock has largely abandoned its art school flirtations in favour of earnest authenticity or technical showboating, Eno remains our most eloquent reminder that popular music can be a laboratory for ideas as well as emotions. The art school influence that formed him, that combination of intellectual rigour and playful experimentation continues to inform his work, whether he’s producing pop stars or creating video installations.

As we face another decade of dreary singer-songwriters emoting over acoustic guitars, we need Eno’s art school sensibility more than ever. With Eno, thinking about music can be as revolutionary as playing it.

Brian Eno attended Ipswich Art School, Winchester College of Art 1964-66 & 1966-69.

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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.

ART POP / POP ART: Ray Davies – The Hogarth Of Hornsey

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Or How Hornsey Art College Shaped The Kinks’ Visual and Lyrical Identity

In the pantheon of British rock’s great observers, Ray Davies stands alone the sharp-eyed chronicler who transformed the mundane into the magnificent. While lesser songwriters gazed at the stars, Davies kept his feet firmly planted on the pavements of London, his artistic eye capturing the minute details that others missed. This exceptional perspective didn’t materialise from thin air it was cultivated in the crucible of Hornsey College of Art, where the reluctant art student would develop the visual literacy that would later define his career.

Before becoming rock’s preeminent social commentator, young Raymond Douglas Davies spent a brief but formative period at Hornsey in 1962-63, studying commercial art and graphic design. The institution, a celebrated hotbed of creativity and radical thinking would prove more influential than the aspiring musician might have imagined when he reluctantly enrolled at his father’s insistence.

“I was never really a committed art student,” Davies once confessed. “I’d already caught the music bug.” But while his attention may have been divided, the education he received seeped into his consciousness nonetheless. The fundamentals of composition, perspective, and the framing of subjects became second nature and skills that would later manifest in his extraordinarily cinematic approach to songwriting.

A Visual Composer.

Hornsey College was renowned for its innovative approach to design education, emphasizing keen observation and the thoughtful arrangement of visual elements. Under the guidance of tutors steeped in modernist principles, Davies absorbed lessons about colour theory, spatial relationships, and the power of juxtaposition, concepts that would later find expression in both The Kinks’ album artwork and his meticulously constructed narratives.

The Kinks’ visual identity evolved dramatically throughout the 1960s, mirroring Davies’ growing confidence as a conceptual thinker. From the straightforward pop group portraits of their early years to the increasingly sophisticated designs that accompanied albums like “The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society” and “Arthur,” one can trace the development of a distinct visual language that complemented the band’s musical evolution.

“Face to Face” (1966) marked a crucial turning point, featuring cover art that reflected the album’s themes of perception and appearance. The band members’ faces, fragmented and reassembled in a modernist collage, visually echoed Davies’ growing preoccupation with identity and social masks, concepts that would have been extensively discussed in any respectable art school of the period.

By the time of “Village Green” in 1968, the integration of visual and musical concepts had become seamless. The pastoral imagery and nostalgic typography perfectly complemented Davies’ elegiac ruminations on a vanishing England. The composition showcased principles of balance and harmony that harked back directly to foundational design theories taught at institutions like Hornsey.

The Artful Detail

But it’s in Davies’ lyrical approach where the influence of his art education truly shines. At Hornsey, students were taught to observe meticulously, to notice what others overlooked. This training fostered in Davies an almost painterly attention to detail that would become his songwriting signature.

His lyrics function as verbal snapshots, vignettes populated by precisely observed characters and settings. When Davies describes a “little tin soldier with his little tin car” or a “misty morning” on the village green, he’s employing the visual precision of an artist selecting exactly which elements to include in a composition. The economy of detail, the careful selection of the telling particular these are hallmarks of both good design and great songwriting.

Davies’ characters are rendered with the careful attention of a portraitist, from the “dedicated follower of fashion” to the “well-respected man about town,” each is brought to life through carefully chosen visual details and environmental context. It’s the songwriter as street photographer, capturing fleeting moments with unerring precision.

His ability to evoke entire social worlds through carefully selected imagery owes much to the art student’s training in visual shorthand, in communicating maximum meaning through minimal elements. When creating album concepts like “Arthur” or “Lola Versus Powerman,” Davies approached them with the structured thinking of a graphic designer, considering how individual songs functioned within the larger conceptual framework.

Hornsey College in the early 1960s was a crucible for ideas about Britain’s rapidly changing social landscape. Students debated modernism, pop art, and the emerging consumer culture, themes that would later dominate Davies’ songwriting. The art school environment encouraged questioning of established values and critical observation of society essentially training Davies in the analytical perspective that would later make him rock’s most astute social commentator.

While fellow art school graduates like Pete Townshend channeled their training into explosive stage theatrics and conceptual grandiosity, Davies took a different approach. His was the art of miniaturism crafting perfect small-scale observations that, when assembled, revealed profound truths about post-war British society.

What Hornsey gave Davies was not just technical training but a way of seeing a framework for processing and interpreting the world around him. The college’s emphasis on both traditional skills and radical thinking produced in Davies a unique combination of nostalgic sensibility and critical perspective that would define his artistic voice.

Though his formal art education was brief, its impact resonated throughout his career. Even decades later, on albums like “Low Budget” and “Give the People What They Want,” Davies’ lyrical eye remained as sharp as ever, his compositions as meticulously balanced as any well-designed graphic.

In the end, perhaps Davies never truly abandoned his art school training at all. He simply transferred his visual literacy to another medium, becoming not just a songwriter but a documentarian, the Hogarth of his age, capturing the shifting landscape of post-war Britain with the precision of an artist and the soul of a poet. The reluctant art student from Hornsey College became rock’s master painter of everyday life, transforming the commonplace into the extraordinary through the power of observation and detail.

As Davies himself once put it: “I’ve never stopped seeing the world as a series of pictures.” And for that, we have his brief but pivotal time at Hornsey College of Art to thank the foundation upon which rock’s greatest observer built his enduring legacy.

Ray Davies attended Hornsey College of Art 1962-63.

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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.

ART POP / POP ART: Jerry Dammers’ Multi-Cultural Vision

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Or Rude Boy Revolution: Jerry Dammers Two Tone Vision.

In the drab concrete wasteland of late-70s Coventry, while the rest of Britain was busy ripping its clothes and safety-pinning them back together again, a bespectacled keyboard player with a vision was plotting a different kind of revolution. One that would eventually come dressed in sharp suits, pork pie hats and checkerboard patterns.

Jerry Dammers the dentally challenged architect of Two Tone Records, founder of The Specials, and perhaps the most criminally underappreciated musical visionary of his generation didn’t stumble upon his aesthetic by accident. The roots of Two Tone’s striking visual identity and multicultural musical fusion can be traced directly to Room 057 of Lanchester Polytechnic’s art department, where young Dammers spent his days absorbing influences that would later explode into a cultural phenomenon.

The Art School Radical

Lanchester Poly (now Coventry University) in the mid-70s was hardly Central Saint Martins, but what it lacked in glamour it made up for in gritty authenticity. While Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid were cooking up the Sex Pistols’ confrontational visuals in London, Dammers was in Coventry, quietly developing his own radical visual language.

“Art school was where I learned about Constructivism and Bauhaus,” Dammers once explained in a rare interview. “That black and white check pattern came directly from studying those movements, simple, bold, impossible to ignore.”

The checkerboard motif that became Two Tone’s signature wasn’t just visually striking, it was loaded with meaning. Black and white squares existing side by side, neither dominating the other. In Thatcher’s Britain, with racial tensions simmering and the National Front on the march, Dammers’ art school education gave him the tools to create a powerful visual metaphor for racial unity.

His tutors recall a serious, somewhat detached student whose sketchbooks were filled with record sleeve concepts years before he had a record label to release them on. While other students were making self-indulgent installations, Dammers was obsessively designing logos, posters, and manifestos for a cultural movement that existed only in his imagination.

The Coventry Sound System

If art school provided the visual framework, Coventry’s streets supplied the soundtrack. The city’s substantial Jamaican community had brought with them a rich musical heritage that fascinated Dammers. He spent countless nights in West Indian blues clubs, absorbing the hypnotic rhythms of ska and rocksteady, watching how the music created community in the dingy basements of a city best known for being bombed to smithereens in WWII.

“The thing about those Jamaican sounds,” recalls Neville Staple, who would later join Dammers in The Specials, “was that they were already fusion music. Ska itself came from Jamaicans late-night listening to American R&B on crackling radio stations and reinterpreting it through their own cultural lens.”

This was the critical insight that Dammers took from those nights, that musical cross-pollination wasn’t appropriation but conversation. The idea that white punks and black skinheads could find common ground on the dance floor became the foundation of the Two Tone philosophy. A near identical philosophy being formed by Joe Strummer, the white man In Hammersmith Palais.

The Poly Basement Tapes

Lanchester Poly’s dingy rehearsal rooms became the laboratory where Dammers conducted his grand experiment. The Automatics (later renamed The Specials) began as a ragtag collective of art students and local musicians, with Dammers as the unsmiling conductor, pushing his bandmates to fuse punk’s energy with ska’s rhythmic sophistication.

It wasn’t always harmonious. Punk purists thought the ska elements were gimmicky; traditionalists found the punk influence sacrilegious. But Dammers, with the single-minded determination of the true art school obsessive, drove the band forward through sheer force of will.

“Jerry would bring these complicated charts to rehearsal,” remembers original Specials guitarist Lynval Golding. “Most of us couldn’t read music that well, but he had this complete vision in his head. Sometimes we’d spend hours on just two bars of a song until it had exactly the tension he was looking for.”

That tension between disciplines, between cultures, between chaos and control became the defining characteristic of The Specials’ sound. It was the musical equivalent of a Bauhaus design: stripped down to its essential elements, each serving a specific purpose, no ornamentation for its own sake.

The Birth Of Two Tone

When Dammers finally launched Two Tone Records in 1979, it emerged fully formed, with an aesthetic coherence that betrayed its art school origins. Everything from the label’s logo to the bands’ uniforms to the stark black and white promotional photos spoke of a unified vision that was simultaneously retro and futuristic.

The label’s first release, “Gangsters” by The Specials, was pressed with an initial run of just 5,000 copies. Dammers personally designed the sleeve, a stark black and white affair featuring Walt Jabsco, the label’s rude boy mascot adapted from a photograph of Peter Tosh. It sold out immediately, and the Two Tone revolution was underway.

What followed was a brief but incandescent moment in British music history. The Selecter, Madness, The Beat, and others joined the Two Tone stable, each putting their own spin on the fusion sound Dammers had pioneered. For a glorious 18 months, these bands dominated the music charts, bringing their message of racial unity to Top of the Pops while the country burned with riot and discontent.

The sad irony is that Dammers’ art school training, which gave him the tools to create Two Tone’s unified aesthetic, also contained the seeds of the movement’s demise. Like so many art school idealists before him, from Brian Eno to Pete Townshend, Dammers couldn’t stop evolving while the movement he’d created crystalized around him.

By the time of The Specials’ masterpiece “Ghost Town” a harrowing sonic portrait of urban decay that hit number one during the 1981 riots Dammers was already restless, pushing toward more experimental sounds that left both bandmates and audience bewildered.

When The Specials inevitably fractured, Dammers formed the jazz-influenced Special AKA, creating the anti-apartheid anthem “Free Nelson Mandela.” It was another masterpiece of political pop, but by then the Two Tone moment had passed. The art student had moved on to new experiments while his classmates were still copying his previous breakthrough.

Legacy

Today, Lanchester Polytechnic is long gone, absorbed into Coventry University. The concrete brutalism of 1970s Coventry has been softened by redevelopment. And Jerry Dammers has become something of a recluse, occasionally emerging for DJ sets of obscure jazz and world music.

But the impact of that collision; between art school theory and street-level reality, between black and white musical traditions, between design and visceral energy continues to reverberate. From the multicultural dance collectives of the 90s to the post-genre experiments of today’s London scene, Dammers’ Two Tone vision has proven remarkably prescient.

Perhaps the most telling testament to Dammers’ achievement is that the checkerboard pattern he adapted from his art school studies has transcended its origins to become a universal signifier of ska music across the globe. From Tokyo to Mexico City, bands still don pork pie hats and two-tone suits to pay homage to the vision of a serious young art student from Coventry who dared to imagine that black and white could create something more powerful together than apart.

In an age of algorithmic playlists and frictionless fusion, it’s worth remembering that Two Tone wasn’t just about mixing musical styles. It was a complete artistic statement; visual, musical, political and crafted with the disciplined vision of a true art school radical. And somewhere in a dusty archive at Coventry University, there may still exist the student sketches where Jerry Dammers first dreamed it all up, years before the first needle dropped on “Gangsters” and changed British music forever.

“The thing about Jerry, is that he was never just a musician. He was always creating this whole world with its own rules and values. That’s what you got from him being an art student he saw the big picture while the rest of us were just trying to get a gig on Saturday night.” Neville Staples.

In that sense, Two Tone was perhaps one of the greatest art school movements in British pop, marginally less famous than the one that gave us the Sex Pistols, but in many ways more enduring. After all, McLaren, Lydon and Pistols told us there was “No Future.” Dammers and his Two Tone multi-cultural vision insisted there could be if only we were brave enough to imagine it together.

Jerry Dammers attended Lanchester Polytechnic, Coventry, 1972-1975

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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.

ART POP / POP ART: Malcolm McLaren, The Sex Pistols & The Situationists

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Or cash from chaos: Malcolm McLaren, The Sex Pistols and the Situationist assault on Seventies rock.

Malcolm McLaren once boasted he could create a sensation with four idiots and a dog. He didn’t need the dog.

The ginger-haired ringmaster’s maniacal grin looms over punk’s creation myth like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, an omnipresent phantom claiming to have orchestrated every shred of the chaos that ripped through the music industry’s complacent heart in 1976. The truth, like McLaren himself, is considerably more complex and perversely fascinating.

While the Pistols’ snarling frontman John Lydon (née Rotten) might dismiss his former manager as “just an old hippie with too many strange ideas,” McLaren’s strange ideas weren’t plucked from the ether. They were carefully pilfered from an obscure movement of French radical intellectuals whose theories McLaren absorbed during his fitful years at various London art colleges in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

“I left art school because it was becoming a prison,” McLaren once admitted in his peculiar drawl. “But I took what I needed from it. We wanted to create situations, not just artwork to hang on walls.”

That “we” refers to the Situationist International, a group founded in 1957 by French revolutionary Guy Debord and a small circle of artists, writers and political agitators. Their mission was nothing less than the complete transformation of everyday life through carefully engineered provocations designed to expose the empty spectacle of consumer capitalism. (Is this needed now?! SC)

For the Situationists, “détournement” was the weapon of choice. The hijacking and subversive repositioning of existing cultural elements. What better place to plant this time bomb than in rock music, that most commodified of cultural forms?

While McLaren was stalking the corridors of Croydon Art School (and later, the more prestigious Goldsmith’s), absorbing these revolutionary theories between failed attempts at sculpture and film-making, he was simultaneously absorbing the nihilistic charge of American proto-punk acts like the MC5, Stooges and New York Dolls the latter he briefly managed – aka proto-Pistols, jet boys and girls.

“Malcolm was never the most talented person in the room,” recalled an early associate Bernie Rhodes, who would later manage The Clash. “But he was always the one most determined to turn his particular obsessions into some kind of theatre.” As they say, Bernie Rhodes knows.

The Situationists’ concept of “recuperation” how radical ideas are neutralised by being absorbed into mainstream consumer culture gave McLaren a framework for understanding how the rebellious energy of early rock’n’roll had been castrated by the music industry. Cliff anyone? His grand project became clear: create a band that would be a living détournement, a mockery of rock itself.

The laboratory for these experiments was SEX, the King’s Road boutique McLaren ran with fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. Here, selling second-hand Teddy Boy brothel creepers and drapes amid rubber fetish wear and bondage trousers and the now infamous Seditionaries gear, McLaren cultivated his small circle of beautiful, damaged misfits including the core of what would become the Sex Pistols. The shop was a Soho destination for a coterie of Seventies musicians, aspiring rock journalists like Nick Kent (who also auditioned as ‘Pistols frontman) to North Kent punk rock groupies aka The Bromley Contingent.

The boutique’s slogan “Rubber Wear for the Office or the Bedroom” perfectly encapsulated McLaren’s Situationist approach. Take conventional items (office wear), corrupt them with forbidden elements (rubber, bondage), and send them back into society as walking provocations.

“What we were selling was a look for the disenfranchised,” Westwood would later explain. But McLaren was selling something more: an attitude that transformed the wearer into a walking scandal, a human détournement.

Steve Jones, the Pistols’ guitarist and an accomplished thief (Lonely Boy:Tales From a Sex Pistol) who nicked most of his equipment from David Bowie’s ‘Spiders’ was the first piece of McLaren’s human puzzle. Drummer Paul Cook and bassist Glen Matlock followed. They were raw, unpolished, and perfect for McLaren’s designs.

“The Pistols were terrible when they started,” recalls early punk scenester and contemporary Clash accomplice Don Letts. “But Malcolm understood that competence wasn’t the point. The point was disruption.”

When McLaren spotted the green-haired, hunch-shouldered John Lydon wearing a modified Pink Floyd t-shirt (“I HATE” scrawled above the band’s name), he recognised the final element of his Situationist masterpiece. Lydon’s seething contempt for everything, including McLaren’s artsy pretensions gave the Pistols the authentic venom that transformed them from art project into genuine cultural threat. Steve Jones would have it that McLaren asked Vivienne Westwood to approach John Richie (latterly Sid Vicious) but she got ‘the wrong John’ which was lucky for us since Ritchie only looked the part, whereas Lydon was well read, a talented lyricist and an intellectual provocateur.

The Sex Pistols became the perfect Situationist intervention: a band that attacked the music industry from within, exposing its contradictions through calculated outrage. Their infamous virtually accidental appearance on Bill Grundy’s television program where Jones called the host a “dirty fucker” live on tea-time TV wasn’t necessarily an accident but a classic example of what the Situationists called “creating situations.” Jones was just likely to react if drunk and/or provoked and McLaren knew it.

McLaren’s manipulation extended to the band’s lyrical content. “God Save the Queen,” with its declaration that “there is no future in England’s dreaming,” was released during the Silver Jubilee celebrations, a perfect détournement of patriotic fervor.

“Malcolm didn’t write the lyrics,” Johnny Rotten would later insist. “But he created the circumstances where those lyrics became inevitable.” Now say that in Lydon’s disinterested tone.

When EMI signed and then rapidly dropped the band, McLaren celebrated. When A&M did the same after just six days, he was ecstatic. Each corporate rejection only proved his Situationist thesis: that the system could not assimilate true opposition without exposing its own hypocrisy.

The delicious irony one that would have delighted the Situationists is that punk itself was rapidly recuperated. What started as McLaren’s art-school prank became a Hot Topic fashion statement, and the manager’s Situationist theories were themselves commodified in the ironically titled film “The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle.”

When the Pistols imploded spectacularly during their American tour, with Rotten walking off stage sneering, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”, even that seemed part of McLaren’s grand design. The perfectly engineered self-destruction completed the Situationist circle.

Today, McLaren’s radical Situationist dream has been thoroughly absorbed into marketing textbooks. Virgin Credit Cards featuring “Never Mind the Bollocks” imagery represent the ultimate recuperation of punk’s revolutionary potential. Every CEO who quotes “cash from chaos” at boardroom meetings proves how completely McLaren’s subversive theory has been emptied of its power.

Yet something essential remains. For one brief, incandescent moment, McLaren’s Situationist experiment ripped open the fabric of popular culture. The rupture in the space 4/4 time continuum has been mended, papered over with commemorative plates and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions, but the scar remains a permanent reminder that the spectacle can be momentarily shattered by the right combination of art-school theory and raw, untutored rage.

McLaren may not have changed the world, but he proved it could be jolted. As the Situationists might have said, that’s not everything, but it’s not for nothing either (in French).

Malcolm McLaren attended; St Martin’s, Chiswick Polytechnic, Croydon College of Art, Harrow Art College and Goldsmiths College, 1963-1971.

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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.

ART POP / POP ART: The Bryan Ferry – Richard Hamilton Pop Art Axis

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Or the glamour and concept alliance that shaped pop culture’s visual aesthetic.

In the pantheon of British art-rock partnerships, none carries quite the heavyweight intellectual punch nor the sly wit of the decades long association between Roxy Music’s dandy-in-chief Bryan Ferry and the godfather of British pop art, Richard Hamilton. While other rock stars dabbled in art school pretensions before scuttling back to three-chord thrashings when the going got conceptually tough, Ferry, ever the immaculate contrarian, took the scenic route, transforming himself from Hamilton’s eager student into a living canvas that reflected his mentor’s most audacious ideas about art, commerce and the slippery space between.

Back in the linoleum corridors of Newcastle University’s fine art department in the mid-1960s, before glam had even begun to glitter, young Bryan was absorbing Hamilton’s radical postmodernism like a shark-eyed sponge in a stylish blazer. Hamilton, already famous for his 1956 collage “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?” that paradigm-shattering mash-up of consumer culture was quietly planting seeds in Ferry’s fertile imagination. What Hamilton offered wasn’t just art theory, but an escape route from the grey industrial North, a passport to a world where high concept and low culture could dance an elegant tango.

“Richard taught me to think about the whole package, the idea that presentation and context were as important as content. That was revolutionary in the ’60s. He made me understand that the frame around the picture was part of the picture.”

What a picture Ferry went on to paint. When Roxy Music erupted into the stagnant pool of early ’70s rock like some bizarrely elegant alien invasion, the Hamilton influence was everywhere. From the name a take on cinema brands of the era, the band’s self-titled 1972 debut album with its airbrushed model cover (simultaneously celebrating and critiquing glamour), to the meticulous attention paid to every visual detail of their stage presentation. Ferry wasn’t just fronting a band; he was curating a multi-sensory installation that Hamilton would have understood implicitly.

Let’s linger on that debut album sleeve for a moment, a veritable manifesto of pop art principles wrapped around twelve inches of vinyl. The cover, with model Kari-Ann Muller striking a classic 1950s pin-up pose in a candy-pink and blue airbrushed dreamscape, is Hamilton’s lessons made flesh. It’s nostalgic yet futuristic, glamorous yet ironic, handcrafted yet mechanical. The hyper-real airbrushing technique (executed by Ferry’s art school colleague Nicholas de Ville) creates that same uncanny advertising sheen that Hamilton had been deconstructing since the ’50s. The key difference? While Hamilton was exposing the artifice of consumer culture, Ferry was gleefully embracing it with a knowing wink that transformed potential kitsch into high concept.

“We were interested in creating a new kind of sleeve. Something that commented on the history of glamour photography while participating in it. Richard had shown me that you could reference the past without being trapped by it.” Bryan Ferry.

Hamilton himself was delighted by the album’s visual approach. “Bryan understood something I’d been trying to articulate for years,” he told me. “That in consumer culture, parody and celebration are not opposites but parts of the same continuum.”

For “For Your Pleasure” in 1973, the Hamilton influence grew even more pronounced. The cover featured model Amanda Lear (rumored to be Salvador Dalí’s muse) in leather, clutching a snarling black panther on a leash against a nocturnal cityscape, a hyper-stylized, almost surreal tableau that pushed the interplay between high and low culture even further. The nighttime setting, the fashion model posing as dominatrix, the tamed wild animal all created a collage effect that was pure Hamilton in its juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated elements to create new meanings.

“The second album cover was like a film still from a movie that didn’t exist, that’s something Richard taught me, the power of the implied narrative, the story that exists in the viewer’s imagination.” Bryan Ferry.

The cover’s most Hamiltonian feature was its self-referential quality, with the Roxy Music logo appearing as a neon sign within the image itself, a meta touch that collapsed the distance between the product and its packaging. This was pop art’s self-referencing loop in action: the band becoming part of their own iconography even as they were creating it.

These weren’t mere record sleeves they were manifestos of intent, visual thesis statements that positioned Roxy Music not just as musicians but as cultural curators. In both covers, Ferry was applying Hamilton’s lessons about the erosion of boundaries between advertising, art, and mass media, creating images that functioned simultaneously as commercial packaging and conceptual art pieces.

The irony, of course and with these two, irony is always lurking like a well-dressed assassin, is that while Hamilton was deconstructing consumer culture, Ferry was busy constructing himself as the ultimate luxury consumer item. “I’ve always been a product, just one with exceptional quality control.”

Hamilton watched his protégé’s rise with wry amusement commenting, “Bryan understood something essential about modern art, that it’s not about authenticity anymore, but about the manipulation of surfaces and signs.” Coming from another artist, this might have sounded like criticism. From Hamilton, it was the highest form of praise.

The two men’s aesthetic overlap found its most explicit expression in the cover art for Roxy Music’s 1979 album “Manifesto,” where the mannequin theme seemed to directly reference Hamilton’s explorations of the artificial and the constructed. But their most profound connection wasn’t in the obvious visual quotations, but in their shared understanding that in late-capitalism, style isn’t superficial it’s the substance itself.

While punk’s angry children were spitting at the system, Ferry and Hamilton were doing something far more subversive: they were reflecting it back at itself, distorted just enough to reveal its beautiful absurdity. Hamilton’s collages and Ferry’s croon both presented a world of perfect surfaces with just enough disruption to make you question everything you were seeing and hearing.

“We were never interested in shocking people, shock is too easy, too temporary. We wanted to seduce people into thinking differently.” Bryan Ferry.

As the decades rolled by, the student arguably overtook the master in terms of cultural impact, with Ferry’s suave persona infiltrating popular consciousness far beyond Hamilton’s art-world fame. Yet Hamilton never seemed to resent his former pupil’s celebrity. “Bryan took my ideas dancing and I rather like the places they’ve been.”

Their relationship endured until Hamilton’s death in 2011, a rare example of an artistic influence that evolved into something like friendship, albeit one conducted with very British reserve. Ferry’s touching statement after Hamilton’s passing, “he taught me to think, not what to think” perhaps best captures what made their connection so fruitful.

In an age where most rock stars’ art school backgrounds amount to little more than convenient biography footnotes, the Ferry-Hamilton axis stands as something far more profound: a genuine intellectual exchange that helped shape the visual grammar of pop culture. Their shared obsession with nostalgia, glamour, irony and artifice created a feedback loop between fine art and pop music that we’re still hearing and seeing today.

Next time you’re watching some elegantly disheveled pop star deconstructing celebrity while simultaneously embodying it, spare a thought for the dandy and the professor from Newcastle who wrote that playbook decades ago and played it with infinitely more style.

Bryan Ferry attended Newcastle College of Art, 1964-1968

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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.

ART POP / POP ART: Madcap Visions: Syd Barrett’s Psychedelic Impressionism

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Or The Artistic Polymath Destroyed By Extreme Curiosity

‘Nobody knows where you are, how near or how far? Shine on you crazy diamond’. In the kaleidoscopic tumult of British psychedelia, no figure looms larger, or more tragically, than Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett. The founding genius of Pink Floyd didn’t just fall through the cracks of reality; he plummeted into an abyss of his own creation, one splashed with the vibrant hues of his artistic obsessions and ultimately poisoned by the very substances that initially seemed to unlock his creative potential.

Barrett was never merely a musician. In the drab landscape of post-war Cambridge, young Syd emerged as a polymath: a guitarist, singer, songwriter and, crucially, a visual artist whose sensibilities were formed in the crucible of fine art rather than the sweaty backrooms of rhythm and blues clubs.

Before Pink Floyd, Barrett studied at the Camberwell School of Arts, where he absorbed the anarchic spirit of Dadaism and the dreamy abstraction of Impressionism like a sponge. His early paintings reveal a fascination with fractured perspectives and sunburnt colours that would later infiltrate his songwriting. While his contemporaries were slavishly copying American blues records, Barrett was deconstructing reality itself, approaching music as another form of visual expression.

What Barrett understood, was that sound could be manipulated like paint. He wasn’t thinking in terms of chord progressions but in terms of colours and textures.

The Dadaist influence on Barrett’s work remains criminally under-appreciated. Dada that nihilistic art movement born in the carnage of World War I rejected reason and logic in favour of nonsense and intuition. Sound familiar? Barrett’s lyrics often read like they’ve been assembled using Tristan Tzara’s and JG Ballard’s cut-up technique: disconnected fragments forming a surreal collage of childhood memories, literary allusions and cosmic observations.

When Barrett sang about “a mouse in a hole” or “cats that were glass,” he wasn’t indulging in whimsy for its own sake. He was applying the Dadaist principle of deliberate irrationality as a means of liberation from conventional thinking. His songs were audio manifestations of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades ordinary objects (or in Barrett’s case, ordinary phrases) elevated to art through context and presentation.

His compositions twisted conventional song structures into new shapes, playing with silence and noise in ways that mirrored the Dadaists’ fascination with chaos and chance. The extended improvisations of early Floyd performances weren’t just drug-induced noodling; they were attempts to translate the spontaneity of Dadaist performance art into music.

If Dada provided the conceptual framework for Barrett’s art, Impressionism supplied its visual vocabulary. Like Monet or Renoir, Barrett was obsessed with capturing the ephemeral nature of perception, those fleeting moments when reality seems to shimmer and dissolve.

His guitar playing, with its liquid phrasing and emphasis on texture over technique, sought to replicate the Impressionists’ fascination with light. The shimmering cascades of notes in “Interstellar Overdrive” evoke the same sense of dissolved reality as Monet’s water lilies. Both ask: what happens when you stop trying to depict the world as it is and start exploring how it feels to perceive it?

Barrett’s use of the Binson Echorec delay unit wasn’t just a trendy effect; it was an attempt to smear sound across time in the same way the Impressionists smeared paint across canvas. His goal wasn’t to reproduce reality but to capture its subjective experience the way perception fragments and reforms in the mind’s eye.

Enter LSD, the accelerant that would both fuel Barrett’s artistic vision and ultimately consume it. When Barrett first dropped acid in 1965, it seemed to crystallize his artistic philosophy. Here was a substance that made manifest the very ideas he’d been exploring: the fragmentation of perception, the dissolution of boundaries, the revelatory power of irrationality.

“After Syd started taking acid,” recalled Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, “his music became more extreme. It was as if he was trying to recreate the experience through sound.”

The early Pink Floyd light shows, with their oil projections and stroboscopic effects, weren’t just psychedelic window dressing. They were Barrett’s attempt to create a total sensory environment that merged music and visuals into a unified art form – a kind of synaesthetic experience that would break down the barriers between sight and sound.

For a brief, incandescent moment, it worked. Barrett’s LSD use seemed to unlock new creative possibilities, allowing him to translate his visual art sensibilities into music with unprecedented clarity. The songs on “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” are remarkable for their visual quality, they don’t just tell stories; they paint pictures, conjuring landscapes of the mind with a vividness that remains unmatched.

But the acid that illuminated Barrett’s vision soon began to obscure it. By late 1967, his behavior had become increasingly erratic. The man who had once meticulously constructed sonic collages now stood immobile on stage, detuning his guitar to produce discordant noises or simply staring into space.

Some saw this as a continuation of his Dadaist provocations, a deliberate subversion of performance conventions. Others recognized the darker truth: Barrett was no longer in control of his art or himself. The boundaries between creator and creation had dissolved entirely.

“Looking back,” said Roger Waters years later, “it’s clear that Syd was trying to disappear into his art. He wasn’t just making music about fragmented perception; his perception was actually fragmenting.”

Barrett’s final recordings with Pink Floyd reveal an artist caught between brilliance and disintegration. “Jugband Blues”, his last contribution to the band’s catalog, is a harrowing document of self-dissolution. When he sings, “I’m most obliged to you for making it clear that I’m not here,” it’s less a lyric than a dispatch from the frontiers of a disintegrating personality.

After his departure from Pink Floyd, Barrett retreated further into his painting, producing abstract works that became increasingly chaotic and dark. His brief solo career yielded moments of fractured beauty, but the coherence that had once held his artistic vision together had unraveled.

Barrett’s tragedy wasn’t just that he lost his mind, it’s that he lost it in pursuit of an artistic ideal. He wasn’t a cautionary tale about rock excess but about the dangers of pushing perception to its limits. Like Icarus, he flew too close to the sun, and the wax that held his wings together, his fragile sense of self, melted away.

In the end, Barrett chose silence over chaos, retreating to his mother’s house in Cambridge where he returned to painting and gardening, refusing to engage with his musical past. The man who had once sought to translate the visual into the auditory now lived in a world of private visions, inaccessible to the rest of us.

What remains is a body of work that stands as one of the most successful attempts to merge the visual and the auditory in popular music. Barrett didn’t just write songs; he created sensory experiences that translated the theories of Dadaism and Impressionism into a new language of sound.

In doing so, he mapped the furthest reaches of perception, both its wonders and its dangers, its Heaven and Hell, and while the journey ultimately cost him his creative voice, the maps he left behind continue to guide generations of artistic explorers who wisely choose to venture a little less far into the unknown.

Syd Barrett studied at Camberwell College of Art 1964-66

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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.

ART POP / POP ART: Peter Saville, Joy Division & New Order

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The Man Who Framed Post-Punk: How Peter Saville’s art history and graphic aesthetic defined the visual language of Manchester’s most enigmatic bands

In the damp, grey streets of late-seventies Manchester, a revolution was brewing. Not the kind involving barricades and manifestos, but something far more enduring: a marriage of sound and vision that would define an era. While Ian Curtis’ baritone and Bernard Sumner’s clinical guitar lines carved out new sonic territories, another figure, working in silence with Letraset and photographic plates – was busy creating the visual alphabet through which their music would speak to the world.

Peter Saville, 1978 Polytechnic graphic design graduate, typography obsessive, and Factory Records’ design director never actually listened to Joy Division’s debut album before creating its now-iconic sleeve.

“I was given the diagram by Bernard, I had no bloody idea it was a visualization of pulsar waves from a dying star. I just thought it looked… correct.” Peter Saville.

“Correct” is perhaps the understatement of the decade. Reversed so it became white on black and reduced in size, that stark, minimalist rendering of radio waves from pulsar CP 1919 (originally published in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy) adorning Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures has become one of music’s most recognisable and relentlessly appropriated images, a visual shorthand for post-punk industrial decay that adorns everything from t-shirts worn by teenagers who weren’t born when Curtis died to coffee mugs cluttering the desks of advertising executives.

The beauty of Saville’s approach was its magnificent detachment. While his contemporaries were slapping together ransom-note typography and day-glo splashes to capture punk’s anarchic spirit, Saville looked elsewhere – to European modernism, to the Bauhaus, to suprematism, futurism and constructivism. His influences weren’t the Sex Pistols but Fortunato Depero, Jan Tschichold and Herbert Bayer. The result was a visual language that felt both timeless and startlingly new: clinical, austere, and brutally elegant. If you’d never been to art school or studied art history this stuff was totally new and refreshing.

“The thing about Factory was that nobody told me what to do. Tony Wilson just handed me a chequebook and said ‘Make something appropriate.’ Can you imagine that happening now?” Peter Saville.

This freedom allowed Saville to create a body of work that functioned as a perfect visual analogue to the music it contained. The frosty minimalism of Joy Division’s “Closer” sleeve featuring a Bernard Pierre Wolff photograph of the Appiani family tomb in Genoa seemed to anticipate the tragedy of Curtis’s suicide rather than react to it. The sleeve was designed before the singer’s death, yet its imagery seemed eerily prophetic.

When Joy Division metamorphosed into New Order following Curtis’s death, Saville’s aesthetic evolved alongside them. The band’s gradual embrace of electronics and dance music found its visual counterpart in Saville’s increasing use of vibrant color and an almost fetishistic approach to production techniques.

“Blue Monday,” New Order’s seminal 1983 12-inch single, came housed in a sleeve that mimicked a 5¼-inch floppy disk, complete with die-cut holes and coded colour blocks. It cost so much to produce that Factory reportedly lost money on each copy sold, despite it becoming the best-selling 12-inch single of all time. When mentioned to Saville nowadays he shrugs with indifference:

“I wasn’t running a business, was I? I was making something beautiful.”

This beautiful impracticality became something of a Saville trademark. For New Order’s “Power, Corruption and Lies” album, he appropriated a classical 19th-century floral painting by Henri Fantin-Latour and juxtaposed it with a colour-coded alphabet of his own devising a system so arcane that even the band couldn’t decipher it without the provided key. The result was a tension between romanticism and modernism that perfectly mirrored New Order’s own fusion of emotional intensity and mechanical precision.

Throughout the ’80s, as New Order’s sound incorporated more elements of New York club culture and Italian disco, Saville’s designs became increasingly sophisticated. The “Technique” sleeve featured saturated Mediterranean blues and architectural elements that nodded to the album’s Ibiza influences, while “Republic” showcased Saville’s growing interest in digital design techniques.

What makes Saville’s work with both bands so influential is not just its striking appearance but its philosophical underpinnings. In an era when most record sleeves were exercises in literal-minded marketing, screaming the band’s name and image at potential buyers, Saville’s designs operated on the radical assumption that the audience was intelligent enough to meet the work halfway.

“I wasn’t interested in selling records,” I was interested in making objects that belonged in the world.” This approach transformed album covers from mere packaging into cultural artifacts in their own right, objects that demanded the same serious engagement as the music they contained.

Four decades on, the partnership between these Manchester bands and their reluctant visual architect remains one of pop culture’s most fruitful collaborations, a case study in how design can amplify rather than merely illustrate musical ideas. In an age of streaming and digital ephemera, when album artwork has been reduced to a postage stamp-sized afterthought, Saville’s monumental sleeves for Joy Division and New Order feel like transmissions from a more visually literate time.

Now adorning tee shirts and mugs, Saville’s designs have assumed a life of their own. “That’s the thing about symbols, once you release them into the world, they don’t belong to you anymore. They have their own lives.”

Much like the music they were created to accompany, Saville’s designs have achieved that rarest of cultural feats, they’ve become both of their time and completely outside it.

Peter Saville studied graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic 1975-78.

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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.