In this episode of Art on your sleeve, I speak with graphic designer and art director, Bill Smith. Since the 1970s, Bill has been one of the busiest designers servicing the music industry and he’s worked on so many record sleeves that a book has been published celebrating his amazing portfolio. In the introduction to the show I read from …
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31 years ago today, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. In 1990 the world was a very different place; I was not long into my first job and aggrieved about local and global injustices. I’d just ‘come out’, discovered animal rights and gone vegetarian, there was an unequal age of consent, the AIDS pandemic was raging and Liverpool was just …
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February is LGBT History Month, and at the end of last year Museum of Liverpool sent out an online call for local LGBT personal histories with plans to display a curated range of seldom-told tales of the city in commemoration of the month. The brief was to use visual and written media to tell a personal story about one’s life, to …
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At the start of 2020, Soft Octopus Design Studio was commissioned by Liverpool Hope University to work on a collaboration with Tate Liverpool. Titled Hope and Resistance, the exhibition’s aim was to present the artefacts, stories and artwork of young people living on the Palestinian West Bank who had responded to the question – What do you want to tell the …
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This episode is an audio supplement to a six-page Pop Art feature I wrote for Classic Pop magazine, issue 27, published February/March 2017. This issue of the magazine is now out of print but it is available to purchase in digital format from: https://pocketmags.com/classic-pop-magazine/febmar-17 From the horse’s mouth, or the designers website: Simon Halfon has been designing artwork since the …
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Being Boring, a single by Pet Shop Boys is 30 years old today. This is one of my favourite songs by one of my favourite pop groups and as such, I felt I needed to mark the occasion. What better way than with an episode of Art on your sleeve.
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This episode is an audio supplement to a six-page Pop Art feature I wrote for Classic Pop magazine, issue 13, published October/November 2014. This issue of the magazine is now out of print but it is available to purchase in digital format from: https://pocketmags.com/classic-pop-magazine/octnov-2014 In the podcast I interview artist and designer, Bob Linney about his record sleeve artwork for …
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With little else to do during a quarantine, almost all of us are moving our social interactions online. Facebook, WhatsApp, Zoom, Skype and FaceTime are the new replacements for catching up over a cup of coffee or glass of wine. The times they are a changing, as Bob Dylan would groan. Somewhere online, I saw someone crudely flip the familiar …
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2020 hasn’t been quite the happy new year that we all wished each other just three months ago, has it? With floods verging on biblical, the realisation that Brexit is a sad reality and now a public health crisis to contend with, can things get any worse? Sadly I fear they can. Back in the eighties when I was designing …
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This episode is an audio supplement to Classic Pop magazine, issue 4, published May/June 2013. In this podcast I interview artist, Fraser Taylor, who was part of a design collective called The Cloth (1983-1987).
Fraser was one quarter of The Cloth along with David Band, Helen Manning and Brian Bolger. The art of Fraser Taylor and David Band featured on many record sleeves in the early eighties, most notably for Spandau Ballet, Altered Images, Aztec Camera and The Bluebells. Music from these artists and others is included in the episode along with archive interview content from Gary Kemp and David Band.
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