Graphic Design

ART POP / POP ART: The Art Student Who Became Queen

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Before the stadiums, Freddie Mercury was Farrokh Bulsara, a graphic design student in west London. He enrolled at Ealing Art College in 1966 and left in 1969 with a diploma in graphic art and design. He had studied art at Isleworth Polytechnic first, so by the time he reached Ealing he had a trained hand and a habit of drawing everything.

Ealing was a good place to be at that moment. Pete Townshend and Ronnie Wood had passed through. Gustav Metzger, the pioneer of auto-destructive art, had lectured there, and Townshend later credited that influence on the way he smashed guitars. The college treated pop culture as a serious subject for study. A student could draw a record sleeve in the morning and argue about the avant-garde at lunch without anyone seeing a contradiction.

That is the idea at the centre of this book, and Mercury is one of its clearest examples. He did not leave art for music. He took the training with him and applied it to a rock band. The logos, sleeves, costumes and stage sets were the work of a designer, and the singing was the part everyone noticed.

His Ealing friend Tim Staffell sang in Smile, the band that Brian May and Roger Taylor played in. When Staffell left, Mercury took his place and the group became Queen. Around that time he and Taylor shared a stall in Kensington Market, selling second-hand clothes and Mercury’s drawings. The art and the band started from the same bench.

A Victorian in the Tate

Mercury’s taste in art was not what you would expect from a young man in a 1970s rock group. He did not collect pop art or hang psychedelic posters. He admired Victorian painting, and one picture in particular: Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke.

Dadd was a gifted Royal Academy student, praised young for his fairy subjects. In 1843, during a psychotic episode, he killed his father. He spent the rest of his life in institutions, first Bethlem and later Broadmoor. He painted The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke in Bethlem between 1855 and 1864. George Henry Haydon, the hospital’s steward, commissioned it. Dadd worked on it for nine years and still treated it as unfinished. Siegfried Sassoon gave it to the Tate, where it has hung since 1963.

The canvas is small, about 54 by 39 centimetres, and crammed with figures. A woodcutter fairy stands with his axe raised, about to split a hazelnut that will become a new carriage for Queen Mab. Around him a crowd waits in the grass: a magician, a patriarch in a triple crown, a politician, a dandy, a pedagogue, fairies, elves and creatures that fit no category. Everything is rendered in tiny, patient strokes, close to the way an engraver works. Nobody moves. The moment before the blow is held for ever.

Dadd also wrote a long poem to explain the picture, naming each figure and its role. Mercury read it. His song “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke”, on Queen II (1974), borrows its cast directly from Dadd’s list. He told the BBC he had done a good deal of research, and that is believable. He studied the painting the way a designer studies a brief.

Accounts agree that he returned to it often. He took bandmates to see it, and Taylor and the producer Roy Thomas Baker are named among them. The painting seemed to show him what Queen II could be: dense, theatrical and ornate, with a darkness underneath the decoration.

Why Dadd matters to Pop Art

On the surface, a Bethlem inmate’s fairy picture and a Marshall stack have little in common. Look closer and the links appear.

  • Crowding. Dadd leaves no empty space. Queen’s arrangements, with their stacked vocal harmonies, behave the same way.
  • Theatre. The painting is a stage set with a cast. Mercury treated every Queen performance as a staged tableau.
  • Fantasy as freedom. The Victorians used fairies to say things they could not say directly. Mercury used the same device, and the song plays on the word “stroke” and on a word that sounds a lot like “queer”.
  • Craft. Dadd’s patience is the opposite of the sloppy rock gesture. Mercury had the same respect for finish.

Pop Art borrowed from advertising and comics. Mercury borrowed from the Victorian fairy painting and heraldry, and he made them pop.

The Crest

The clearest evidence of his training is the Queen crest, which he designed himself. It works as a logo, but it is built on the rules of heraldry.

Each band member is placed by birth sign. Two lions stand for Leo, which covers John Deacon and Roger Taylor. A crab stands for Cancer, which is Brian May. Two fairies stand for Virgo, which is Mercury. They surround a large letter Q, and a phoenix crowns the whole thing. The fairies are worth noticing. Mercury put them on the band’s coat of arms, and they are a small echo of Dadd.

The crest was first seen on the back of the debut album in 1973. It became the band’s face on the next two big releases.

A Night at the Opera (1975)

The album came out in November 1975, with art direction credited to David Costa. The cover shows the crest in soft colour, mostly cream with touches of blue, yellow, pink and green, centred on a plain white ground. The early UK sleeve was embossed, so the crest stood up from the card. The script is Filmotype York.

The effect is a bookplate, or the monogram on an old opera programme. It was a bold choice in the year of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Most rock sleeves of the time shouted. This one stood still and let the crest do the work, in the same way Dadd’s figures wait in the grass.

The white background matters. It reads as a stage before the curtain goes up, and the title, borrowed from a Marx Brothers film, supplies the joke that keeps the pomp from turning stiff.

A Day at the Races (1976)

The follow-up, released in December 1976, takes the same crest and turns the background black. Queen borrowed another Marx Brothers title and kept the visual rule of one emblem, one colour field and no photograph.

That consistency is the design lesson. The pair of sleeves works as a system: the same mark under a different light, white for the opera and black for the races. Brian May later said he saw the two albums as parallel, and the sleeves make that point before the music starts. This is what a brand identity looks like when a trained designer runs it.

Conclusion

It is easy to describe Mercury as a showman who happened to draw. The evidence points the other way. He was a designer first, and he built the persona, the stage and the sleeves as parts of one project. Ealing gave him the discipline. Dadd gave him a model for obsessive, ornate fantasy. The crest gave him a symbol that could sit on a sleeve, a banner or a T-shirt without losing its meaning.

For a book about art and pop, the lesson is simple. The boundary between the gallery and the charts was never as firm as critics claimed, and Mercury walked straight across it.

Farrokh Bulsara (Freddie Mercury) – Ealing Art College 1966-1969

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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.

RETROSPECTIVE: Where Have They Been? Joy Division, Closer

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A detailed retrospective on Joy Division’s devastatingly timeless album Closer, exploring the band’s final and most haunting studio album in all its creative, atmospheric, emotional and historical depth. The eternal question, closer or closer?

Joy Division Closer (1980)


Rarely, an album arrives haunted before you even drop the needle. Closer, released in July 1980 just weeks after Ian Curtis’s death, is the ultimate example. It arrived like a final communiqué, a cold transmission from a place beyond exhaustion. If Unknown Pleasures was the sound of a band discovering the architecture of modern despair, Closer was the completed structure: stark, beautiful, desolate and impossibly refined. It remains one of the most unsettling records ever made, not because of the tragedy that surrounds it, but because of how complete it feels. Four young men, barely out of their early twenties, constructing a monument with the calm precision of veteran craftsmen.

Recorded at Britannia Row Studios in early 1980, Closer was shaped by the same constellation of characters that defined its predecessor. Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris formed the nucleus, still working under the shadow of Manchester’s derelict industrial gloom. Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus held Factory together with philosophy, flair and a certain reckless faith. Peter Saville designed the sleeve, this time a funereal photograph of a stone tomb from a Genoan cemetery. And Martin Hannett returned to sculpt the sound, more ghostly, more meticulous, more distant than ever. What they created no longer sounded like post-punk discovering itself. It sounded like something else entirely.

Curtis’s lyrics are the centre of gravity here. Written in short bursts of clarity amid worsening health, collapsing marriage and relentless touring, they possess a startling emotional precision. There is no flailing, no melodrama. Instead, Curtis writes like a man tracing the edges of his own disappearance. “A legacy so far removed” he intones on “Heart and Soul”, a line delivered with such resignation it feels almost weightless. On “Twenty Four Hours” he sounds caught between yearning and surrender, while “Passover” reads like a series of warnings he never expected anyone to hear. Curtis had always been precociously articulate, but on Closer his imagery crystallises. He writes with the concision of a poet and the clarity of someone who knows time is thinning.

Musically, the band had sharpened into an eerie, restrained machine. Hook’s bass leads most of the melodies, mournful but insistent. Sumner’s guitar is sparse, almost pointillist, teasing out glimmers of light through the haze. Morris remains astonishing, turning minimal drum patterns into emotional punctuation. There are moments that hint at what New Order would become, yet nothing here feels transitional. This is a closed circle.

And presiding over it all, Martin Hannett. If his work on Unknown Pleasures turned the band’s rawness into atmosphere, on Closer he goes further, transforming space into an emotional instrument. His production leaves acres of room between the notes. Drums crack like snapped bones in a cathedral. Basslines hover in negative space. Curtis’s voice floats somewhere between the living and the dead. Hannett built these tracks with the attention of a watchmaker, each mechanism ticking in isolation until it formed a whole that feels strangely inevitable.

Side one is almost liturgical. “Atrocity Exhibition” opens with a lurching rhythm and guitars that clatter like loose machinery. It is disorienting, provocative and brilliant. “Isolation” introduces a brittle electronic pulse, as if the band are already stepping into their next form. “Passover” feels like a whispered confession, “Colony” storms with controlled frenzy, and “A Means to an End” ties it all together with one of Hook’s finest basslines.

Side two is something else entirely. It is not a descent so much as a surrender. “Heart and Soul” is spacious, drifting, suspended in its own gravity. “Twenty Four Hours” is devastating, built on one of the band’s most violent dynamic shifts. “The Eternal” might be Joy Division’s most heartbreaking song, Morris’s drum pattern funereal, Sumner’s synths thin and trembling, Curtis sounding utterly alone. And then “Decades”, the closing track, a cold sunrise over ruins. Hook’s bass loops like memory itself while Curtis sings with a calm that chills the spine. It ends not with drama, but with a kind of acceptance.

When Closer arrived, it was instantly framed as a posthumous statement. It is not. It is a fully realised work by a band operating at the peak of their powers. The tragedy does not define it, but it certainly haunts it. Even without hindsight, the emotional gravity is unmistakeable. It is an album made with astonishing clarity by musicians who had no idea it would become a memorial.

Forty-five years on, Closer still stands apart. It is not a companion piece to Unknown Pleasures but a culmination. The purity of its production, the maturity of the writing, the confidence in its restraint. These were four young men building something timeless while their world was falling apart around them.

If Unknown Pleasures is the moment of ignition, Closer is the monument left behind. A cathedral of quiet despair. A masterwork of control, tension and emotional truth.

Enthusiasts return to it not because of its mythology, but because of its craftsmanship. It is immaculate, unsettling, and strangely beautiful. It remains one of the finest records ever to emerge from Britain, and one of the few that still feels like a closed door you can never fully open.

A band at the edge of collapse. A producer at the height of his powers. A label built on belief. And a singer writing with a lucidity that still feels impossible.

Closer endures because it sounds final. And because, in its own stark way, it is. Where have they been?

RETROSPECTIVE – Joy Division Unknown Pleasures

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A stark, immersive deep dive into Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division’s 1979 debut that transformed post-punk into something spectral and eternal. Exploring the collision of Ian Curtis’s lyrical brilliance, Martin Hannett’s ghostly production, and Factory Records’ visionary chaos, this retrospective revisits the album that defined modern alienation and still sounds like the future.

Joy Division Unknown Pleasures, the ultimate retrospective review.


Some records don’t just capture a moment. Unknown Pleasures wasn’t merely a debut but a collision of working-class intelligence, creative genius and industrial desolation that turned late-Seventies Manchester into a kind of spiritual proving ground. Released in June 1979, it remains one of those rare works where every element; band, producer, manager, label, sleeve designer and city fuses into perfection. A flashpoint that changed everything.

Joy Division were four awkward young men who didn’t look the part. If the local council office workers put a band together this was it. No poses, no smiles, no pretence. Ian Curtis stood at the centre: pale, intense, eyes fixed somewhere beyond the crowd. Bernard Sumner, all nervous energy, turned thin air into electricity with brittle, searching guitar lines. Peter Hook, with attitude and melody, played bass like lead, as if he’d grown weary of the instrument’s traditional place and decided to reinvent it. Stephen Morris, unflappable and precise, was the human metronome keeping it all from imploding. Together they made music that sounded less performed than conjured.

And yet, at the heart of it all, stood Curtis, not simply the singer, but the reason Unknown Pleasures still feels like revelation. His lyrics weren’t slogans or statements; they were serious literature. Curtis was a working-class intellectual, a devourer of Kafka, Ballard, and Burroughs, a man who could translate alienation into poetry without losing the grit of everyday life. He wrote with eerie precocity, his words carrying the depth of someone twice his age. “Disorder” opens the record with “I’ve been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand”, a line that already sounds like a plea from the edge. “She’s Lost Control” was drawn from his encounters at the employment exchange, the story of a woman whose seizures mirrored the illness that would later contribute to his demise. In “New Dawn Fades”, he faces despair with devastating clarity: “A change of speed, a change of style, a change of scene, with no regrets.” Curtis never dramatised his pain; he documented it. Every lyric feels lived, every silence deliberate.

Around him, the band moved with precision. Sumner’s guitar shimmered with nervous energy. Hook’s bass carried the emotional and propulsive pulse. Morris locked everything into place with mechanical rigour. They didn’t just accompany Curtis’s words; they inhabited them, building soundscapes of claustrophobia and strange beauty.

Then came Martin Hannett, the producer who turned Joy Division’s live fury into something spectral. A sonic visionary and a mercurial eccentric, Hannett treated the studio like a laboratory. He recorded breaking glass, lift shafts, and literally empty space, turning silence itself into an instrument. The band wanted raw power*; Hannett delivered atmosphere, detachment, immortality. Hook complained it was too clean, too cold. But Hannett understood that this wasn’t a record about noise, it was about isolation. What he built in Strawberry Studios wasn’t just a mix; it was an environment.

(*for a heavier Joy Division listen to the live side of Still and the BBC John Peel Sessions available on the ‘Best Of’ CD)

Overseeing it all, Factory Records, Anthony H Wilson’s impossible dream. Tony Wilson was the showman-philosopher-TV presenter and new music advocate, preaching art over commerce. Alan Erasmus his quiet lieutenant, Peter Saville the young graphic designer and aesthetic genius who gave Factory its visual language. Saville’s historic sleeve design for Unknown Pleasures, the white-on-black pulsar from a Cambridge astronomy textbook, became the perfect visual echo of the sound within. No title, no band name, no marketing. Just a transmission from the void. Inspired.

The record unfolds like a descent. “Disorder” rushes in with nervous urgency. “Day of the Lords” trudges through a wasteland. “Insight” floats in eerie calm, as if overheard from another world. “New Dawn Fades” devastates with Hook’s bass in lament, Sumner’s guitar shimmering like fluorescent light. Then side two opens with “She’s Lost Control”, a mechanised tragedy pulsing with inevitability. “Shadowplay” prowls through dim alleyways, “Wilderness” and “Interzone” flicker with punk afterglow before “I Remember Nothing” ends in collapse, static, glass, and Curtis’s voice dissolving into silence.

When it was released, Unknown Pleasures barely registered commercially. Factory’s distribution (like Rough Trade in London) was chaotic, and Manchester’s cultural importance had yet to be mythologised. But those who found it; the lost, the restless, the disillusioned recognised something transcendent. Punk had been about confrontation; Joy Division turned inward and found a new vocabulary for despair. They had created the post punk meisterwerk.

Within just a year, the story turned tragic. Curtis, battling epilepsy and emotional turmoil, took his own life on the eve of the band’s first American tour. Closer followed posthumously an austere requiem with prescient sleeve to match, but Unknown Pleasures remains the genesis, the moment the ordinary became eternal.

It endures because it was never really of its time. Curtis’s lyrics read like prophecy; Hannett’s production sounds perpetually modern. Sumner, Hook and Morris would carry fragments of its brilliance into New Order, but they never recaptured this particular alchemy, the balance of tension and restraint, intellect and instinct, belief and doom.

Unknown Pleasures isn’t just the greatest post-punk album. It’s the blueprint for everything that followed. The hum of fluorescent light in an empty flat. The heartbeat of a city rediscovering its soul. The poetry of disconnection made sacred by four ordinary lads, one visionary producer, and one man’s terrible genius.

Forty-six years on, it still sounds like the future, it still hurts but as Tony Wilson later mused, a record that launched a band responsible for the renaissance and redevelopment of an entire city.