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 >
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 >
Lucille Ball was an American TV star of the 1950s and had acted in the movie Too Many Girls (1940). When due to a 1980s comeback she had received a complete dental prosthetis, Mrs. Ball raised alarm. She complained about constantly hearing Japanese radio stations. Lucille Ball had caused a lot of trouble to the Rolling Stones already… Read More —
This story of Charles Mingus begins with the story of his best friend in Los Angeles. Buddy Collette (1921–2010) was one of jazz’s greatest multi-instrumentalists and spent his whole life in LA. Both men grew up in the suburb of Watts with people from many different ethnic backgrounds—white, black, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, and despite a sharp separation between different ethnic groups they moved between all of these worlds, which stimulated their creativity and had More—
