Gavin Watson grew up in a typical working class overspill town that surround London. Stumbling into photography aged 14, becoming a skinhead at 15, he inadvertently documented the real, social, interracial and musical scene behind the media’s right-wing portrayal of this demonised youth culture of the late 1970s and 1980s… Read More >
Kim Gordon has been making music for thirty years. Still, when she blesses hordes of ecstatic young people in a Berlin gay bar with the neck of an electric guitar (almost taking out the chandelier in the process) – it is easy to understand why so many people… Read More >
It was, in retrospect, what people call a “pivotal album.” The Colour of Spring, Talk Talk’s third full-length release, appeared initially to be a straightforward development from the band’s previous recordings – artfully crafted pop delivering global hits – and yet pointed bravely towards something unexpected, something decidedly un-pop. One could see the footprints the band had left along the… Read More >
In March this year Peter Saville’s design for the Blue Monday sleeve celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of its release. Its many anecdotes are widely known; That its inspiration was a computer floppy disc, found in New Order’s recording studio as they embarked on ever more sophisticated computer-generated music. And that it was so expensive to produce each copy sold made a financial loss for Factory Records.The sleeve’s colourful edge design may initially have been presupposed as continuance of the floppy disc’s appropriation – assumed simply as techno-digital decoration necessary to complete a picture. Yet three months later when the band released their critically acclaimed second album, a colour chart on the back cover revealed to those who studied carefully; these eye-catching arrangements conveyed information. The transformation of Joy Division’s legacy into New Order’s electronic new sound could not have had a more appropriately enigmatic start. Read more >
Night and Day comprises one hundred and ten iconic Kodachromes from David Armstrong’s archive of late 70s and early 80s photography. A pictorial manifestation of the period’s art and literary scene in New York: A sundry of bohemians, artists and ultimately flaneurs, captured by Armstrong in their hedonistic and carefree lives, surrounded by sex, drugs and rock n’ roll that so epitomise this era. More—
