Chances are you saw this beautiful Spotify device that was all over the internet a few months ago. The player makes novel use of RFID tags to create exchangeable playlists linking back to the Spotify service. Although haling from Barcelona, 27-year-old Parra relocated to Sweden in order to get his industrial and interactive design chops up to scratch. I wondered whether training in design had influenced the way Jordi lives his life. He was happy to answer with the following caveat: “Your questions are a bit tricky. I do like minimalism, but it’s not necessarily a philosophy of life to me. It’s definitely good in certain contexts, but there’re things that have to be complex too. But well, there’re a lot of products and services out there that could be way more simple and easier to use, of course”.

Has interaction design taught you anything about living?
What I’ve learned so far is that design is about empathy, about listening to people. Everybody can design stuff if they understand the problems of a certain task. Designers used to make things beautiful and functional, nowadays I think it is more about providing what people really need. Sometimes it’s obvious, others you really need to talk to people to understand what are the real problems. Guessing what do people need on your own can be risky if you don’t have a good understanding of the context.

Some people cannot afford to hire a designer, how do you advise they introduce better design into their projects?
Small companies still don’t see the added value of investing on design. Some people still think design is just about making beautiful objects and don’t want to pay extra money for that, they think they can do it themselves. This can work sometimes, and others won’t. Designers are probably more interested in listening to the people using the product while people with less experience tend to fall in love with their ideas. It’s quite common that small companies have a vision of what they want, and sometimes they’re right, but it can also happen that a company is too much into their business and they loose perspective about what are the final users really expecting from their product. In that way, a design team has a broader perspective. It is really important not to fall in love with ideas, explore other options… Designers can help businesses have a better perspective and find out about problems and opportunities that were not so obvious at first.

Dieter Rams famously has 10 principles for good design, do you have any extra ground rules to add?
I don’t think I have experienced enough to add my own rules on top of Dieter Rams’ principles. He’s a big reference to me and I’m still in a learning stage. My background is engineering and I have only spent 3 years working in the industrial design field. Dieter Rams principles might seem obvious, but that’s the beauty of them. Writing down the obvious in such an understandable way is a big challenge. If I had to add something, it’d be that designers have to talk to people. Test. Get feedback. Sometimes users don’t really know what they want, but talking to them can be the catalyst to come up with great solutions.

You went back to university when you wanted a change, should everyone go back to school to find a new direction?
I went back to school because I didn’t feel I had the skills enough to move from Engineering into Design. I wanted to give it a try and it felt like the right option to me, but not everyone will feel the same way. I have known really talented people that didn’t even study design. It’s something very personal and becoming good at something doesn’t always require a college degree. There are plenty of entrepreneurs that dropped out from college or didn’t ever start.

Is there anybody whose work (in any field) you’ve recently been raving about?
There’s a lot happening nowadays. Even though my work is not into arts and installations, I do enjoy all the work from that field. Karsten Schmidt is doing amazing stuff. He is pushing the use of code as a design tool and the results are amazing. London’s scene is really big in that field. There’s a lot of computational art and installations happening there. Timo Arnall and Berg (the second, a consultancy, also in London) are also doing beautiful work visualising the invisible amongst other projects. Timo is working as a researcher on NFC communications in Oslo and it is really interesting the way he is visualising things that we cannot see, while Berg is a design consultancy with really fresh ideas. Besides that, there’s a lot of people working in the open-hardware and DIY community. It is growing incredibly fast. Thanks to them we have the Arduino and other resources to make electronics and design more accessible to people from all backgrounds. The fact that a lot of people are contributing on stuff like that makes it easier for people like me, with no previous experience with electronics, to explore and play with new stuff is amazing. Now it’s easier than ever to merge design and technology, we’ve to be really thankful to all the people contributing.

Jordi Parra’s official site

Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album – Matthew Robertson

See all books about Factory Records at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com



In the late 70s, the mysterious, topographical radio waves of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures appeared like a burst of energy in an empty void, signifying the arrival not only of one of the best bands this country has produced but also its finest independent record label, Factory. It’s not too strong to say that Peter Saville’s sleeves for Unknown Pleasures and New Order’s Blue Monday are up there with Peter Blake’s Sargeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Kraftwerk’s Autobahn and Vaughan Oliver’s 4AD covers. The design mostly matched up to the quality of the music.

The chaotic, quixotic Factory Records existed from 1978 to 1992, from post-punk to rave, and continues to influence those making music now, not only in nostalgic terms but because they were essentially purely about the music – and the design was all about enhancing the music. Ironically, it was on the very front that Factory couldn’t compete that it ended up competing on – design. This is the label whose die-cut Blue Monday single by New Order, the best-selling 12 inch of all time, cost them money every time someone bought the record.

Of course, Factory is most closely associated with the graphic designer Peter Saville. In the summer of 2003 there was a big Saville retrospective, The Peter Saville Show at the Design Museum and a book, Designed by Peter Saville, which of course featured a lot of his work for Factory. [See Spike's interview with Peter Saville]. Saville’s book presented his art work and other writers put it into context with long, considered essays; what this book does instead is simply catalogue the work and provide minimal expositionary notes. Unlike the Saville book, it highlights the work of other people involved in the Factory story and shows how it evolved beyond the visually literate aesthetic of Saville.

The shadow background of the artwork in FAC461 reinforces the idea that these are objects, artefacts, photographed as if from above on mini-plinths. Ironically, a lot of the artwork published here that we are forever told works best as a 12" vinyl or 33rpm sleeve is shown at pretty much the exact dimensions of a compact disc.

There is a fantastically pretentious but sublime introduction from Factory co-founder and twat-about-town Tony Wilson whose register and sentence construction is unique. How about this, with its brilliantly ambivalent "or": "It all began after a very, very bad Patti Smith gig in late 77 or early 78…"; or this, explaining the Factory design rationale, the pick of the crop: "Does the Catholic Church pour its wine into mouldy earthenware pots? I think not." How can one not love this man (other than by meeting him perhaps)? [See Spike's interview with Tony Wilson for much, much more in that vein].

However, Wilson’s got a gimlet eye for the design success of the Happy Mondays album Bummed, writing about its controversial inside sleeve: "It wasn’t the fact that the woman was middle-aged, it wasn’t the shaved pubes, it was the colour quality which made the viewer feel dirty. Sheer genius, that."

The Durutti Column album The Return of the Durutti Column (1979) designed by Dave Rowbotham is composed entirely of sandpaper and was inspired by the situationist Guy Debord‘s Memoires, "a book bound in raw sandpaper designed to damage all other publications around it" – perfect for punk.

Of course, Factory didn’t just operate in two dimensions – as Tony Wilson might have said – there was Ben Kelly’s Hacienda nightclub, for a while the most famous club in the world, with its chevrons, bollards and cats eyes – a kind of theatrical industrial space, which included the Gay Traitor bar, with its spot lights and furtive air of treachery. (Saville said astutely that "Instead of being a monument to the 80s, the Hacienda is the birthplace of the 90s".) Then there was Factory HQ on Charles Street, a disused textile warehouse (since the 70s they had operated from Alan Erasmus’s one-bed flat) – "a mausoleum to the corporate brand that the label could never be", plus the Dry bar, a continental-style bar, one of the first of its kind in England, all in Manchester.

There’s even info here that’s new to a Factory nut like me (and I made sure my son’s initial allowed me to have a FAC family code, though perhaps that’s a retrospective justification), such as the f-hole logo which I’d always taken to be f for Factory but it’s actually f for Fractured Music, Joy Division’s company (fascinating eh?). Also that there was a cigarette pack design for the Joy Division video Here Are The Young Men, got up like 20 John Player Special’s – I want to trade my VHS copy now! There’s even plenty to drool over in corporate terms such as the stationery and the Factory Christmas cards, especially the one from 1987 designed by Johnson Panas (they were of course commissioned and absurdly lavish), a cardboard model kit of the Hacienda.

While Saville continued his "grand tour for the masses", a visual journey of cultural heritage, with the New Order covers taking in De Chirico for Thieves Like Us, Futurist Fortunato Depero’s Dynamo (1927) for Procession (1981) and appropriating Jan Tschichold typography, there is a sense of a fast-approaching dead end. Luckily, the Happy Mondays covers rescued Saville’s anally retentive control freakery and let rip: they were garish, often unreadable and trippy. Happy Mondays’ Lazyitis single by Central Station Design looks as if they can’t be bothered, which is perfect of course, the bloated lettering slurring its way across the sleeve – you half expect the cover to belch in your face.

“One of the reasons he’s fun to work with – he has a really fine, raw sense of horror. By way of exaggeration and selective grotesquery. His view of reality is not entirely normal. Ralph sees through the glass very darkly.”
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, June 1974

One of the many facets that sets Hunter S. Thompson’s 70s works apart from other forms of classic American literature are the growling, snarling, punch-between-the-eyeballs illustrations of Ralph Steadman. Roaring from the pages, his pictures visualise the horrors of corporate America, ripping the surface to reveal the political greed and other grotesqueries that contort and degrade the human forms within his pictures. With his method of isolating and focusing on a physical idiosyncrasy, he explodes his subjects, capturing a hidden truth that was hitherto unseen; it’s as if Steadman sees with the naked eye of a schizophrenic.

Bloodsucking business men, venal politicians, dollar drugged gamblers, archetypal beholders of negation and power transmogrified into grinning reptilia, squarking sharp-beaked birds, gorgons of sheer inhuman greed. In the ferocious stroke of a few simple lines he trans-atlantically expresses all the negative facets of the human condition to a terrifyingly hilarious degree. If we think of the old metaphor of the artist’s pen being a sword, then Steadman’s scribe is nuclear.

Below is an almost verbatim conversation I conducted with Mr Steadman via a phonebox on Kings Street in Manchester city centre. His rumbling Welsh accent was full of charisma, his personality very accommodating, meditatory, thoughtful and warm. When talking about the death of Hunter S Thompson a real sense of bereavement -the only sort that can be when a real friend passes by- was prevalent in the tone in which he talked about him. Amidst rush hour traffic and passing packets of suit-encased, office imprisoned flesh, the conversation went thus …

You must have been gutted when HST committed suicide.

I always knew he’d do it, but I didn’t know when. It was always the case of I always knew that that one day I would take this journey but I did not know yesterday that it would be today. That’s how it felt and it was way too soon. So upset about it. And I knew he’d do it but I wished he’d just shot his dick off. Something that would give him pain but have him talk about it, because instead of shooting away the one exceptionally wonderful piece of machinery in his body: His brain! The centre of all his being. The centre of his genius really. And he is a genius, no doubt about it as for going down as a great, great journalist writer. He didn’t write novels, he took William Faulkner’s advice about fact being far more stranger than fiction.

I mean I just wonder why he did it? You know if only I could have talked to him. Once! Just to say ‘What the fuck! Don’t be daft, Hunter, for fuck’s sake!’ That’s why I thought if he’d shot himself in the foot or something… But, you see, if you can imagine: in a wheelchair, a man of action, a man who always done exactly what he wanted to do, suddenly realising he has no control anymore and he’s gonna end up in a home with a lot of old people scared him. It’s that thing: ‘In the end it was no use, he died on his knees in a barnyard with all the others watching.’ It’s that indignity he couldn’t stand the idea of.

What was he like as a character?

He could be mean. He didn’t like sloppy drunks, even though he imbibed so much stuff he was just on another sort of level I suppose. I don’t know how he carried on like he did. Like he said: ‘I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.’ That’s the well known phrase. He wasn’t no pusher. But he couldn’t stand sloppy drunks and he wasn’t a sloppy drunk cos he never seemed drunk.

Did he ever frighten you?

Yes, many times in the car. I wrote a song with him once called ‘Weird And Twisted Nights.’ One of the lines is “Drive your stake through a darkened heart / In a red Mercedes Benz / The blackness hides a speeding trap / The savage beast pretends.” We’d driven. . . And this was another one of his tricks, he used to like to drive at night with his lights out because the police wouldn’t see him, a starlit night – “The scar heals black . . .”. There’s a record of it you can get from EMI, it’s called ‘I Like It’ (1999).

What is Gonzo Ralph?

Gonzo is a strange manifestation of ones intentions to go somewhere to cover it (the story) euphemistically as a journalist and yet end up being part of the story, not part of the story but become the story. You make one, you have to generate some sort of tension, some oddness, some unexpected freaky thing that makes it go, ‘Yes that’s it!’

The other thing is there is no accreditation for gonzo journalists, so you go there as an outsider. Like we went to the Miami Convention in the Seventies and we had to get inside without accreditation, that was part of the target. It’s to be a rock and roll journalist. What’s a gonzotic frenzy? Well it’s me in the throes of an ink splattering attempt to capture the feeling I have at that particular time.

I like the gonzo logo that HST used for his Sheriff of Aspen campaign.

That red fist – by the way it’s got 2 thumbs and 4 fingers. Have you noticed? Hunter always said to me ’2 thumbs Ralph, don’t forget 2 thumbs!’ It’s the idea of a freak isn’t it? Anyone with 2 thumbs is obviously a freak or a monkey of some kind, a gorilla. And the flower in the middle of the palm, the green flower is a peyote drug plant.

Have you taken much peyote in your time?

No. Hunter was the one who enjoyed all that shit. I’ve taken coca leaves, I’m very fond of coca leaves but I can’t get them in England. I tried them in Peru, between Cusco and Machu Picchu is a little stop off on the train called Olan Taytambo, and there they sell it to you with wood ash and you roll the leaf around the wood ash like rolling a joint or a cigarette. You put it down the side of your gums and just leave it there and you don’t suffer from mountain sickness, anxiety or anything at such a height which is 13-15 thousand feet above sea level. I’ve got a wonderful book which is probably 100 years old called ‘The Divine Plant of the Inca’ (W. Golden Mortimer – 1901) and it’s all about the coca leaf.

Tell me about when you ended up screwed and shoeless in New York City on one of your first assignments with HST…

‘The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved’ was how it all started, the meeting with Hunter for the first time. . . There’s innocence and experience meeting for the first time! The shoeless episode was the second trip where we went to Rhode Island to cover the Americas Cup and I was shoeless and luckily I’d kept my ticket and passport home.

I had my ticket back to New York from Rhode Island (Boston Airport) and then I got a cab and got to 42nd Street where the bar was thankfully still open, the magazine (Scanlan’s Monthly) had closed and I was in a terrible state and coming down from psilocybin. A drug trip, which was the one and only trip I ever had and that was when I said, ‘Right, drugs are out entirely.’ I enjoy a drink. And I was palpitating, so I borrowed a quarter from the Irish barman, cos I had no money in New York, nothing in a hell of a city! I phoned a lady friend called Vendetoce who I knew from the Bologna Bookfair. I made the call and she said “I’m just going out.’ I said ‘Please, don’t go out, stay there till I get there, please!’ She could tell I was losing my voice and she did stay in.

When I arrived I was purple with palpitations and she got a doctor right away and he gave me a librium injection that put me out for about 24 hours. The irony of all this was that before this happened I put her in hospital with a fracture in Italy when we went into a ditch via my car. Imagine how mad she was to speak to me again! Bless her heart. Anyway that proves there are good people in the world. . .

HST once described you as having a paranoid flash within your character. What did he mean?

A sudden desperate fear that everything something terrible is about to happen. Because I always thought that my heart would stop beating just like that. Bang! Why? My question was: ‘Why should it keep beating?’ It’s an odd question but at the same time that’s a paranoid flash. Why take it all for granted for Christ’s sake? So I never did, and then of course I kept thinking about the fucking thing all the time you know and now I’ve come to terms with it. Touch wood and touch wood now even. He (HST) gave me a lovely head, which I’ve got on a cord around my neck. Sort of a strange primitive face and a long thin piece of what looks like clay or stone. He said: ‘Wear this Ralph, it’ll ward off evil spirits.’

Do you see an essential beauty or aesthetic in the grotesque?

There’s an aesthetic even in watching an operation, there’s an aesthetic in putrefaction. I mean to watch how things breakdown and there’s a kind of aesthetic beauty in that. But it doesn’t mean to say you’re being sick, you do see that but you’d rather not watch it. It’s not ugliness, it’s just a rather unpleasant beauty, because there’s nothing ugly in nature. . . I’d love to be a fly on the wall or to be a fly on their piece of shit! Hahahaha!!!!

How do you get those ideas when you transform people in such frightening animal forms?

I see if I can make human beings look like reptiles. I see if I can make them look like hideous creatures that would not come out of anything but perhaps. . . turn a human inside out. . . take a human being, supposing you can sort of like a rubber glove, turn him inside out and then look at it. That’s how it’s really like. When I’ve done a drawing like that and I’ve done a few, I tried to make the person look as though they’re completely turned inside out and I called him ‘The Perfect Gentleman.’

What’s your idea of a living hell?

Not really being the slightest bit interested in what it is I’ve done all my life. Not wanting to do it and then not knowing what to do next. That would be a living hell. I must have a feeling that: ‘Oooh I’m really excited about this!’ The most depressed times I have is when I just don’t wanna do anything. A living hell is not being creative, being utterly devoid of any creative impulse whatsoever.

Does the new political scene make you shudder more than it ever did?

I can’t be very interested in what are no more than P.R. men. That’s all they are – P.R. men for a policy, or a new sort of: ‘Oh why don’t we try it this way?’ As Hunter said of George Bush: he was a message boy for the big boys, the corporate interests in America. That’s all he is. And that’s what’s happening over here, we’ve got spin doctors, people that manipulate everything and everything is manipulation. It’s not winning through a feeling one has about a person. ‘Wow! I wanna follow that person. I’d vote for him.’ Not because you’ve heard something spun about him, but because he feels something. Like you do about Nelson Mandela, you can’t help feeling the guy’s a good man. It’s passion, yeah! Something wonderful. Maybe Tony Blair started out like that, when we suddenly thought: ‘Wow at last, a fresh air politician!’ The man was clean and then he had his dour man, but nevertheless honest dour Scotsman, Gordon Brown.

What are the elements in society that piss you right off?

I’m afraid of the ethos of reality T.V. which pisses me off. It’s not reality television, it’s completely phoney, things that are made up, phoney! It’s not even fiction, it’s contrived bullshit! And celebs that have done nothing and they have to be celebs and they have to go on television. It’s a terribly sad culture to develop or to pursue and take it further and all in the name of the god Mammon. There’s nothing else in it and I just wish there were. And I wish that kids weren’t being fed it all the time. The kids are not brought up to have minds of their own as individuals. Some do, some break out. Maybe it’s always been like that but in a different form?

We’ll probably get by you know, but I think we might not be able to overcome what which is we’re doing to the planet. You see, nature will do exactly what it must, and if we are a hindrance to its development, to even its destructive powers to reform itself and we are in a way, we will go. No doubt about it. We seem to think we have some control over this planet. I once saw a lump of Greenland breaking off into the sea and moving south, which of course will affect the atmosphere and us generally, and it’ll happen more and more. And as the South Pole starts to melt! We were down in Patagonia in December and it was such a wonderful wilderness, just across the water was the Antarctica and I felt: ‘What an extraordinary thing and what puny pieces of nothing we are!’ I’ve just been doing a series of paintings of that area. Look, all in all I’m trying to be an artist, the fact that I was a gonzo journalist-artist of a type, met Hunter Thompson and went that way. That happened. I can’t do anything about that, I’m glad it happened. It was like hitting a bullseye first time in America. But I wonder what I’d have done if I hadn’t met him?

Was is you that did that famous caricature of Mick Jagger with those over inflated lips or was that Gerald Scarfe?

Mind you don’t get me mixed up with Gerald Scarfe! I’ve done the Rolling Stones eating each other. Don’t worry, because people always say: ‘Ooh I love your Pink Floyd.’ No I didn’t do that! Gerry came up to me and said: ‘ Can you help me? I like your line.’ And so I said: ‘Why don’t I introduce you to my art teacher? Leslie Richardson.’ Whose daughter Lucy by the way, is Lucy from ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. They lived in Weybridge and that’s where John Lennon used to go into their antique shop with Julian. And John used to come in there and Lucy was always playing with lovely old bits of antique jewellery, they were sparkling things and Julian liked them. And that’s when he thought ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, that lovely song. It doesn’t detract that L.S.D. became part of it.

She was only 47 and I went to her funeral about four months ago because she died, and her mother Lesley said a really nice positive thing to say: ‘She had a good life. I couldn’t stop her dying . . .’ You know but . . . She was in film, she worked on all sorts of things, on Lord Of The Rings and was doing very well. A lovely lady. And everyone had to drink pink champagne at her funeral. ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ was played in the church, it was lovely.

What sort of music have you been into?

The Grateful Dead of course. I loved Eric Clapton. And Chet Baker the trumpet player. And I loved Dvorak and loved listening to William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg reading to music. And I’ll even listen to Gyorgy Legeti. I’ll tell you what he wrote was the theme for ’2001′. He was a modern composer who then just went off into all sorts of weird stuff.

I was thinking of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathrustra’ but that was Strauss. You like Nietzsche don’t you?

Yeah I do. There’s another guy called Max Stirner who wrote some very radical things about politics. He wrote a book called ‘The Ego And Its Own’. I don’t know whether I can find it here. . . [Sounds of shuffling through papers]. . . Yes he’s German. ‘The Ego And Its Own’ Max Stirner:

“Question: What does man believe in?
Answer: I believe in myself, the answer of the common soldier.

Question: What is the principal of the self-concious egotist? Answer: Change the question to who instead of what and name the individual. Man is the horizon or zero of my existence as an individual. Over that I rise as I can, at least I am something more than man in general. A somebody rather than a nobody.

Stirner dispels morbid subjection and recognise each one who knows and feels himself as his own property, to be neither humble nor be fobbed but henceforth sure footed and level headed. A mist of this body who has a character and good pleasure of his/her own, just as he has of his/her own.

This is not transcendental generality. This is the transitory ego of flesh and blood. You and I cannot be reasoned into one, we are separate beings, two separate egos. It is important to be a self-concious ego in a self- conscious self-willed person. This is not self-obsession.

Those who pretend selflessness are constantly acting from self-interested motives but clothing them in various guises. Watch those people closely in the light of Stirner’s teaching and they appear to be hypocrites, full of good moral and religious plans of which self-interest is at the end and the bottom, but they are not aware of this. That this is more than coincidence. In Stirner we have the political development of egotism, to the dissolution of the state. The union of free men is clear and pronounced. . . ”

Is that boring the shit out of you? Hahahahaha!!!!! Just that whole thing gets to me because it is about self and yet you’re not being selfish. You care about people. But you want people to be straight forward and honest in reply, if they can help you or you can help them. Surely that’s better! That’s community, that what we’re afraid of doing and we’re killing it. You know, we’re really destroying ourselves because we’re really making the motivating force of anything we do selfish. Really acquisitive in a way that’s really not the point of it.

If there was one book that you could now illustrate, what would it be?

I think it’s gotta be Rabelais’ Gargantua And Pandegruel, about the big baby creature. It’s a tough one. I tell you what I’ve just illustrated: Fahrenheit 451, which is the temperature at which books burn, and Ray Bradbury wrote the book 50 years ago, (he’s still alive), and together that’s what I illustrated for him. When I’d done it, he said: ‘You’ve brought my book into the 21st Century. Thank you’. Which is the nicest thing to say.

The book is as important as 1984 and Animal Farm as real powerful social comment, because it’s about a fire brigade burning books. So that they try and stamp out ideas and a group of people get together and each of them take it upon themselves to learn by heart one book before they get burnt. It’s really worth a read. I’d say get the book but you can’t at the moment because there’s only 451 copies, a limited edition. But I’m sure Simon & Schuster or someone’ll do it. He wrote another wonderful book called The Illustrated Man. To write ‘Fahrenheit 451′, Ray Bradbury hired a typewriter and a room for 38 cents a day and he wrote it in 9 days. Try and read the book cos it’s kinda interesting, a definite must to read because of the implications of burning every book in the world.

You worked on Private Eye didn’t you?

I did in the 1960s. That was when I got involved firstly with Punch, but they weren’t really interested in social comment, they wanted jokes. And I went to Private Eye with a joke called ‘Plastic People’ and Private Eye bought it for 5 pounds and said: ‘More power to your elbow!’ And they published it with a double page spread in issue number 11. That was when Willie Rushden was there, Paul Foot, all those sort of people. Do you know I’m frightened that most of them are dead. Willie’s dead, Paul Foot died. I think it’s something to do with dying, I don’t know what it is? [Goes introspective and semi-silent for a second or two] He was a good journalist Paul Foot, very strong left-wing old Labour guy. But never mind, there’s nothing wrong with that, he believed in something!

That’s what’s wrong with them today, they don’t really believe in anything, they’re paying lip service to something. And that’s not belief but something entirely different. Ad-men is what they are absolutely, advertising a product. ‘We’re selling you this, it’s called New Labour!’ Or bright new Conservatives [chuckles], I don’t know what they are. People I don’t know hahahaha!!!

Didn’t that style over substance politics start in Nixon’s time or even Kennedy’s?

The thing about Nixon was that he really believed . . . He was just venal. He didn’t realise how evil he was. I think he was a genuine politician but with a remit of his own. A huge, deep belief in his own fabulous qualities. His dark scowling face made him a bogeyman. For a caricaturist he’s a . . . a gift! I was able to do all sorts of things with him. The light at the end of the tunnel. Offering cyanide pills to Spiro Agnew his Vice-President, and his was in the stocks being offered pills by Nixon. Who was always dressed in black. He was wonderful to draw. That’s when I had my best times in political cartooning.

It became something when we all suddenly felt: ‘This isn’t about domestic things, this is about life and death! Our lives are being fucked around!” Used to anyone’s ends, particularly corporate power with Enron and the rest. It was the “respectable” companies in Nixon’s time, who became monsters as time went by, and they ran politics and they still do and Bush is merely the bagman, the messenger boy for the dark players. I’m not into conspiracy theories, but I think they went into Baghdad for all sorts of reasons which are not made clear. And the way they use the word: ‘Terrorist. . . Terrorist. . . Terrorist!’ That’s become a mantra or even a trigger for fear. Mention the word ‘Terrorist!’ in George Bush’s voice and it’s something else. We can see through it but we can’t do anything about it!

You see that’s what I think is such a terrible, terrible betrayal, the trust that people have in government. The betrayal of people’s good will, good trust that things are being done for the best and they actually ARE being done for the best. Perhaps. But people betray that and let people down and cheat them. To me that almost fits into the same category as crime and torture. One of those unforgivable crimes that torture is for me. . .”

The sound of exasperation and anger in Ralph’s voice was genuine, a real rage about the dubious world order of our times. Whatever his age, this guy still has the growling edge and essential punch that makes him the greatest caricaturist of the modern era. We tied up our conversation with talks about wine, the fact that the British government wanted to eradicate the use of the Welsh language, polite regrets that we hadn’t conversed over a pint and an imploration that I follow and woo a woman who had mistakenly opened the door to the phone-box; sagacious sounds drowned out by passing road sweeps tidying the days litter from the floor of Manchester’s premier street of designer shops and parasitical employment agencies.

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Content – Rem Koolhaas

See all books by Rem Koolhaas at
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Rem Koolhaas has been thinking about Big Brother and has come up with a new
concept: Big Vermeer. I imagined contestants marooned in very detailed interiors. Actually, the connection is more an art-historical musing: we want to see people doing things indoors, and in 1667 it was ‘A woman writing a letter’ whereas now it’s ‘A contestant in the diary room’. It is “an alchemy of transparency and daylight” which trades in intimacy. This is one of around eighty articles, features and graphic presentations rearranged into a book from their original place in ‘Content’, the magazine of Rem Koolhaas’ OMA-AMO firm.

There’s something ineffably cool about Koolhaas, that wiry and opinionated architect who is utopian and post-modern, who floats in “the amniotic fluid of global fashion” and who has designed many a dazzling project – see his in-construction fortune-cookie shaped, criss-cross silver design for China Central Television in Beijing. In his practice the idealism and breadth of a Mies van der Rohe or a Walter Gropius is fused with a political and social engagement with the world.

OMA’s previous statement book was ‘SMLXL’, a big, heavy, brick-like publication. Content is paperback and flimsy, colourful and kaleidoscopic. “Dense, cheap, disposable” as the editor says on page sixteen. “It is almost out of date already. Content is dominated by a single theme, ‘Go East’. It is an attempt to illustrate the architect’s ambiguous relations with the forces of globalization, an account of seven years spent scouring the earth – not as business traveller or backpacker but as a vagabond – roving, searching for an opportunity to realise the visions that make staying at home torturous. Content is, beyond all, a tribute to OMA-AMA’s [.] commitment to engaging the world by inviting itself to places where it has no authority, places where it doesn’t ‘belong.’” Koolhaas wants this book to be the equivalent of doing the splits in classical ballet: a moment, immobile, stretched between realization and speculation, as, I suspect, he believes architecture to be.

This book is a compendium, a glossy cabinet of idea, observation, wit from Rem and his associates. It has politics but no single viewpoint. It arcs from the U.S. west coast to Japan. It is various but always interesting like a particularly high quality global magazine.

It begins by cataloguing ‘urbicide’ – violence in urban environments – from the “subversion by mass transit” of Los Angeles to “cyclical construction, restriction, and destruction” in Jerusalem; West Bank and Gaza settlements. The articles here are urgent, sometimes playful, always serious. Koolhaas finds “the greatest concentration of Utopias ever known” in Moscow; the idea and practice of a museum is challenged in articles on LACMA (L.A.’s big all-round gallery) and the Hermitage in relation to the market influence; Prada is seen askance in ‘Prada Yada’ and other pieces. There’s a long and excited, er, presentation (full of maps and figures and ideas about the need to build a “Eurasian arc”) on the EU and its political possibilities. Koolhaas has designed a new flag which consists of all the EU national flags squashed into strips and presented from west to east: a kind of United Colors bar-code, a strong ‘ID’ to stand next to the US Stars and Stripes and the blue and white of the UN. Britain’s tabloids got hold of that one and The Sun soon launched an attack: “nutty”, “batty”, they said while reporting how “expert opinion” had deemed the flag to be “a deckchair.”

Elsewhere, we look forward to Expo 2010 in “Shanghai Exponential” and consider what makes a successful World Expo. London’s 1851 Great Exhibition showcased the advances of industrial revolution in all nations, and made a mark on popular imagination as did New York’s World Fair of 1939 and Osaka’s 1970 Expo: tying into Content’s theme of “going East”, the forthcoming Expo 2010 is seen as an opportunity to reorient the world’s idea of itself and its designs for the future. I particularly enjoyed a piece on libraries and the search for civic space – “The library represents, maybe with the prison, the last of the uncontested moral universes. The moral goodness of the library is intimately connected to the conceptual value of the book” – and the Koolhaas solution, in Seattle, is a large honeycombed building of huge spaces and screens showing the arrival and exit of books complete with a new “continuous ribbon” numbering system from 000 to 999 to replace the “much-compromised” Dewey Decimal.

Whether one likes the idea of a central Mixing Chamber and a Book Spiral or not, the energy and scope of his plans and ideas are exhilarating. Every regular user of public libraries can relate to the search for biblio perfection. My personal favourites are the beautifully lit Berlin City library and the pod-interior at Peckham. Turn the page and Content moves on to plywood minimalism, perfume flasks to mix your own male-female smells while on the go, and a short history of post-Berlin wall world politics (“The Second Empire”).

That’s not to mention the 1km high Hyperbuilding or “Red Radio”, the story of how Communists in the Sixties battled for Africa’s radio-waves in their belief that global revolution would start on the heart-shaped continent. And then the man who once wrote ‘Delirious New York’, writes about that city in decline, and instead gets delirious over Hanoi, Shanghai and Seoul.

Rem Koolhaus is ever the iconoclast – against the grain, outspoken, inspired. In the tradition of architects who write idiosyncratic and visionary books – Le Corbusier’s Towards A New Architecture, Robert Venturi’s Complexity And Contradiction In Architecture – the contribution of Koolhaas’ latest is in its wide-ranging attack, its fearless engagement with the world – fearless in that it accepts its own ephemeral place at one particular moment. This, then, is Content.

“Peter Saville drives a skoda”. The appalling idea scared him off of renting one when it was offered in place of the VW Polo that he’d ordered. “I know everyone says they’re really good cars now, but I’m not gonna be in a test group for them. It’s still a Skoda,” he says, terrified that people would think he drove one.

Instead, Saville pulls up at his studios near Old Street, East London in a rented Fiat Stilo, the Doors still playing on the stereo. His own car, a 16-year-old BMW 3 Series, is in the garage and he hasn’t quite got used to the replacement, checking and double-checking that he’s properly locked it. He’s worried about how much the repair bill is going to be when he collects the BMW. In fact, he’s worried about bills full stop.

He has a big tax bill to pay this month, which he says he can’t afford. The bailiffs have been round, who he fended off by lying to them, and the phones have been cut off. Plus his own financial involvement in The Peter Saville Show which opened in May at the Design Museum in London, and a book published by Frieze, has meant that he’s on the verge of personal bankruptcy. Oh, and he’s just about to be kicked out of the house he’s been staying at in West London for the past two years and might have to move in to his studio which hasn’t got a toilet. Or blinds. Or a bed.

You wouldn’t think that this was the same Peter Saville who’s designed some of the most original and iconic album covers ever with Joy Division, New Order, Suede and Pulp; who’s worked for Christian Dior, Givenchy, the Pompidou Centre, EMI and Selfridges, among many, many others; whose seminal work for fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto has influenced a decade of “anti-advertising” advertising, and who’s been recently voted the “most admired individual working within the creative industries” in Creative Review. The Peter Saville who’s been quietly amassing an impressive body of work as a graphic artist over the last 25 years, who at the age of 47 is being officially recognised by the mainstream.

It’s the weekend, which means he’s working, and he’s arranged to do some quick picture editing with one of his colleagues, Sascha Behrendt, just before he meets me. But he’s running late, so they have to look at the prints of a shoot he did a few days earlier for Stella McCartney while I’m there. He’s dressed in his trademark white Helmut Lang jeans, a black T-shirt and some tan leather shoes (no socks). He speaks in a soft Mancunian accent deepened by nicotine, and has a distinctive sustain when pronouncing his Rs. Saville puts on his black-framed glasses and goes over to the table to look at large-format Polaroids of Kate Moss in knee-high leather boots. “The professional situations I have at the moment are really quite abusive,” he says matter of factly. “It’s not a straight, commercial relationship I have with my clients. They come to me for something special, and yet for the most part they know that they can get it cheaply and they do, and that offends me. But I have to take what’s on offer.”

He has his lunch at 5pm; a solitary sausage roll, which he’s eating from a large white plate with a knife and fork. What about all these flash restaurants he’s supposed to go to all the time ­ I thought it’d be a take-out from Claridges or something? “I go to the Ivy about once every two months, despite what’s been written,” he laughs. “I spend about £20 on a meal.” He goes off to the kitchen area of his white-floored and white-walled studio space every so often to make himself an espresso in his Richard Sapper stove-top, making sure that everything is left clean and tidy. He mentions that he is going to watch the Monaco grand prix the following day and has been following the qualifying sessions. With his understated elegance and slightly egotistical charm, he could be a poor man’s James Hunt. “Yes, there is some of that going on,” he admits, a little embarrassed by this particular reputation, but he’s more interested in moving from talk of playboy to Playboy: “I’d like to redo Playboy magazine. I find it lamentable that there isn’t an intelligent, erotic magazine. There isn’t a magazine that was like Playboy was 30 years ago, and I find thatŠ dumb. Why isn’t there any intelligent, abstract eroticism? I can find the artist Lucio Fontana’s colour fields incredibly erotic juxtaposed against a bit of Rocco Siffredi [a porn star].”

From 1978 to 1991 when he was art director at Factory Records in Manchester (which he co-founded with Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus) he had carte blanche creatively. He designed the posters for the legendary Hacienda nightclub in the city, the album covers for the Factory bands (Joy Division, New Order, OMD, etc) all seemingly quixotically free of financial considerations. His artwork for the cover of New Order’s Blue Monday 12 inch in 1983 was die-cut to make it resemble a floppy disc, and, depending on whose version of events you believe, cost the record company anywhere from 2p to 75p everytime a copy was bought. Which perhaps would have been fine had it been a limited edition, but it just happened to become the biggest selling 12 inch record ever. “What I did in my local zone was how I wanted everything to be,” says Saville. “I was spoilt in the beginning by being given a big playground to play in and remarkable freedom.”

The very first poster that he designed for Factory with its “Use hearing protection” strapline, along with the architect Ben Kelly’s design for the Hacienda (which Saville collaborated on), foreshadowed the industrial warehouse chic that would come to dominate interior design in the following couple of decades. (After noticing recently that the originals were fetching £1,500 on eBay, Saville decided to produce 500 re-editions of the FAC1 poster which will cost £100 each. But how much this is motivated by the horror that it’s out of the reach of the masses, and how much by what must be a fairly easy income generator, is hard to say.)

With Blue Monday and the earlier New Order album Power, Corruption & Lies there was an interest in coding the work, so that the titles were spelt out in colour. He pushed this idea further with later albums. With New Order’s Brotherhood (1986) and Technique (1989), it was clear whose work it was from the enigmatic, restrained and visually innovative sleeve design, respectively a sheet of Titaanzink metal and a Warholian cherub. One of the persistent legends that attaches to Saville, is that, like the author Douglas Adams, he loves the sound of deadlines whooshing past. Stephen Morris, the drummer of New Order, confirms this, recalling Saville’s most infamous late delivery. “It was the programme he did for us on an American tour that turned up on the last gig, and we’ve still got 1,000s rotting away in a warehouse somewhere that we can’t get rid of.”

But Brett Anderson, the lead singer of Suede, forgives Saville’s tardiness. Anderson is a friend of Saville’s and worked with him very closely on their albums Coming Up and Head Music. “A lot of it was done sitting and chatting and drinking coffee. It’s a real exchange and a discussion. It’s all part of his charm. What you miss with deadline efficiency is made up for by the incredible level of personal care he takes in the work. He really immersed himself in the music. He’s not driven by money or fame, just a genuine quest for aesthetic beauty.” Saville is currently working with the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans on Suede’s greatest hits cover, due for release in September.

Because of his concerns to get a job done right, Peter Saville and business have long had an uneasy relationship. “There’s no notion in any industry that they will wait for graphic design. They will not wait. They’ll spend longer negotiating your work-for-hire contract than giving you to do the job!” he says with rising incredulity. “It’s just the finishing, but it’s in the finishing that you make it or break it.”

Does he think that his deadlines are unrealistic? “They are if you want something resolved or of any quality,” he says. “My problem comes when it’s my work. I become territorial, and self-indulgent and maybe arrogant. If it takes till next Friday, it’s gonna take till next Friday. You know, I had this mistaken understanding of professional when I was younger that it meant being really good.” He laughs in cynical astonishment. “But it’s actually about doing what has to be done within the circumstances within which you are allowed to do it.”

The way Saville tells it, his designs have actually influenced the music. He claims that the musical direction of what was to be Joy Division’s final album, Closer, was guided by its funereal sleeve photograph by Bernard Pierre Wolff (the lead singer, Ian Curtis, hanged himself shortly before its release). But Morris, who’s currently in the studio writing songs for New Order’s next album where they recorded the ambient music for the Design Museum retrospective, is having none of it. “I think that’s too strong, but not for Peter,” he says, laughing fondly at such hubris. “I remember him and Rob Gretton [New Order's former manager] having a discussion and the upshot was that Peter said people bought the records for his sleeves, not for the music.”

“I come to every new job as if it’s Everest to climb again,” says Saville, lighting up the next of many, many Gauloises. “I foolishly approach everything as if it’s really important and that it has to be done, in some tiny way perhaps, in a way that it hasn’t been done before. I won’t just repeat myself. I don’t know why I do it. Partly it’s about anxiety and fear. Partly it’s about the music business where people would want something completely different.”

He comes across as a perfectionist, utterly disillusioned with big business, confused by his being in a grey area where art meets design and wanting to break free of his financial bonds and take a new direction. One can’t help but feel that with the kind of reckless candour with which he talks about the shortcomings of just about every client he’s ever worked for he’s trying to talk himself away from commercial art through autosuggestion. Icon’s photographer, Jamie, met Saville a few days earlier and was taken aback: “He was unable to resist art directing himself in the local playgrounds and parks. And I was amazed at how open and warm he was.”

Saville clearly has a lot of steam to let off. “Absolutely everything except the creative act is stretched out as long as is needed and there’s this notion that you can resolve the creative issues and problems [clicks his fingers] like that’s the bigger the budget the more people sign-off, the more bland and generic it will be. No one wants to take a chance. I mean, what is happening in car design? It’s either hideously bland or really quite perverse.” The record industry was only ever going to be a professional cul-de-sac for someone fast-approaching 30, and Saville seems more savvy than Machiavellian when he says that he “learnt quickly how to manipulate the record industry to my own ends. I took a selfish, bloody-minded approach to the work and I made life hell for the people who were paying for it. To me the work was going to be my passport out of it.”

With Peter Saville Associates in financial crisis and Factory Records on the verge of collapse, he finally hit commercial reality in 1990 and joined the Pentagram group in LA as a partner. With Saville’s odd working hours ­ he rarely gets up before the afternoon and works until midnight ­ and his antipathy, not to say hostility, towards corporate till-ringing, the relationship was doomed from the start. “I just will not make this analogy between what I’m being paid and how much time we spend on it. It gets as much time as it needs.”

The current interest in Saville has a lot to do with the demographics of the creative industries. There is a whole generation who grew up as fans of, in particular, Roxy Music, Joy Division and New Order, who are now making the decisions. “When I first met the president of Givenchy Parfum,” says Saville, “he said ‘Oh, Monsieur Saville, I am a fan of Joy Division, I am a fan of Peter Saville.’ I was 45 and he was 39.”

And it wasn’t just with couture fashion. “Throughout the Eighties I saw the High Street convert. At Next, I saw so much of what I’d done for Ultravox. It was everywhere.” He explains: “At the design firms, the grown-ups weren’t hands-on anymore and the work was left to the kids.”

At the Design Museum retrospective (designed by the architect Lindi Roy), Saville’s work is arranged chronologically. The middle section is very dark, and shows his catalogue and advertising work for the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. The Game Over series of photo library stock images from 1991 ­ for Yamamoto ­ captures the sense of consumerist exhaustion and overkill amid an impending recession, which has been much copied in terms of its abstraction and typography. A Guide To Never-Never Land adumbrates the future of advertising in the 1990s, where the product is so far off the page that it almost becomes anti-advertising advertising. A car production line, all flashbulbs and gleaming surfaces, stretches off into an infinite hell of consumerism, as much a break with reality as Saville’s image is from Yamamoto’s clothing.

When he’s talking about the retrospective, it seems as if Saville’s incapable of letting go and trusting his work to others. “I’m unhappy towards the people who I do the work for,” he says. “That’s my mood right now, which is kind of ironic after what would appear to be a successful show and book. It’s not what you would imagine. No one has gathered a comprehensive review of the work done by Peter Saville Studios over 25 years and looked at it in order to write about it or curate a proper show for a museum. Nobody. Has. Looked. At. The Work.” He says that the Design Museum exhibition lacks context, that there is nothing explaining why the work is important. And when he says that the show is his “greatest hits”, he means it pejoratively.

Although he sounds exhausted by the demands of running his business, he talks hopefully about the future. There is the Pirelli calendar that he’s working on with the photographer Nick Knight, a long-time collaborator, and which, despite being “a bit cheesy”, has kept his interest. A project he’s working on for the software company Adobe and its Photoshop packaging neatly ties in his attraction to recycling and to reflecting contemporary ways of living. In 1998, he started to experiment with the Wave filter on Photoshop and found that he could produce stunning digital paintings with all kinds of imagery, starting with New Order covers. “What’s interesting when we make the Waste Paintings is that we don’t know what’s going to happen, and that’s fascinating. We did one last week and it was mindboggling. We did it for the Adobe project. If I could work a computer, I’d show it to you! It’s beautiful. Print it out ­ it’s done.”

Saville has spent years agonising over a context or concept in which to place his many boxes of notebooks full of thoughts, sketches and ideas. “I was interested in the industrial estate, the country estate ­ different ways of understanding the word estate. It led me to ‘Estate of’. I though, shit, if I retire or die what will someone do with all of this stuff that I haven’t been able to work out? They’ll put it all together and they’ll catalogue it, and flog it. I thought, well why don’t I?”

It would appear to have opened up possibilities for the graphic designer to move forward with his work and at last untie himself from those abusive client relationships. “A few years ago I was giving myself a hard time about not being an artist because what is it that I do regardless of other things? And then I realised ­ oh, I do this [the notebooks]. I’d done the work. I’d been filling notebooks for 10 years about the things I ought to do ­ preparatory notes. I’d done the work, but I’d never thought about it as writing it.”

This is the big project, after all the hassle with clients and the financial frustrations and worries of his studio work, that he wants to do next, with himself as client: “I’ve learnt not to leave this kind of thing to chance.”

[This article previously appeard in Icon magazine]

Listeners of Radio 4′s Today programme recently voted London’s M25 the worst of the “seven horrors of Britain” in a poll. One imagines that this refers to their experience of it as drivers; but perhaps if they’d done what the novelist, poet and “psychogeographer” Iain Sinclair did and walked around the M25, they’d have thought differently. For this was his unique project – to walk anti-clockwise around the motorway and the areas that it enclosed from Waltham Abbey, exploring the huge tranches of unknown territory that lay bounded by the M25 outside of the city centre. And in doing so, comprehending the scale of the invasion of commerce in these zones and witnessing, as it were, an invisible landscape disappear.

Sinclair describes the journey – taken in the millennial year – in his new book London Orbital. Most people would of course regard the idea of circumnavigating the M25 as a mad one, but was it really that dispiriting? “Not at all. The experience of doing it was incredibly exhilarating,” says Sinclair. “You didn’t know what you were going to find. Getting up really early in this weird landscape. You might as well have been in some totally remote country.”

It is the disconnection between our apprehension of London and its actual topography that Sinclair writes about. (As Will Self puts it: Londoners don’t live in London, they live in the tube map of London). London Orbital is full of developments that airbrush or ignore the history of their sites. Places like Enfield Island Village, described as “an exciting new village community”, of which Sinclair writes: “The village isn’t new, the community isn’t new, the island isn’t new. What’s new is the tariff, the mortgage, the terms of the social contract. What’s new is that industrial debris is suddenly ‘stylish’.”

So what does he think about the housing forecasts for the South East, the recommendations of the Urban Task Force report, and the colossal amount of brownfield renewal that is necessary in and around the capital? “These seem to be projections made from a very privileged metropolitan standpoint about something that’s going to happen ‘out there’, without true knowledge of just what actually is out there,” he says. “The notion of decanting swathes of the populace into these amorphous nowheres, these liminal territories at the edge of the city is, I think, a nightmare prospect.”

This, as London Orbital makes clear, is precisely what the city has always done with its undesirables and madmen. Sinclair – an altogether different kind of asylum seeker, but nonetheless wandering around, not knowing entirely where he is – says that he was amazed to find the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s hypothesis about the optimum distance that asylums should be placed away from the city – 20 miles – so palpably confirmed.

“I was dazzled by the Holloway Sanitarium [now Virginia Park] – the ultimate heritage- asylum conversion,” he tells me. “The thing that disturbed me [about other asylum conversions] was the absence of memory – all traces of what had been there before had been cannily erased, including the name.”

So should architects be learning more about the history of a site? “They should be made to go into the landscape to the site and then move outwards from it for a considerable distance and then to come in on it. Especially the big-name architects who are the worse perpetrators,” he says with a little glee. “They shouldn’t just place something that is simply site-specific to the person commissioning the building.”

As you might expect of Sinclair, he’s unearthed some pretty fascinating nuggets. For example, the story of how the war cabinet was deceived into giving approval for Heathrow airport: “Emergency wartime powers were used to establish, by a network of dubious commercial deals, a major airport that was only 15 miles from the centre of London.” And finding the grave of Hawksmoor in a field just off the motorway was, he says, “quite a shock – this sense of the centre drifting out as it becomes forgotten”.

Were there any new buildings that he particularly admired? “I was very struck by the Siebel building by Runnymede Bridge in Egham. It just appeared out of nowhere between visits. It didn’t bristle with surveillance – most buildings were incredibly paranoid. It seemed transcendantly strange – there was nobody around. It was sinisterly benign.”

Sinclair’s poetic retains that characteristic samizdat quality of goods smuggled past the PR checkpoints, his prose always crackling with connectivity. Here he is on the Xerox building: “Uxbridge is made from Xs. Lines of cancelled typescript. Fields planted with barbed wire.”

One of the many treats of Sinclair’s excellent Lights Out For The Territory (of which London Orbital is a kind of sequel), is his visit to Jeffrey Archer and his penthouse at Alembic House. I wondered if he’d thought of returning to him at his new residence in Belmarsh prison in Thamesmead, south-east London? He laughs at the idea, but admits slightly wearily that “perhaps we’ve had a little too much of him already”.

As for these liminal areas, he’s already looking ahead. “One day, when the research and development has moved elsewhere, the abandoned colony will be turned over to the heritage industry. Wild nature… will be promoted and paraded.” How apt this convergence of Sinclair’s journey with London – to have returned to the beginning.

[This article was originally written for the UK architectural magazine Building Design].

Bristolian born and bred, 40-year-old Julian Murphy studied Design for Print at Brunel College. His acclaimed fetish art, which he describes as “sciperepics”, transforms everyday household appliances into extraordinary objects of desire. Critics have compared Julian’s work to that of Escher and Giger, and it has been featured widely in the fetish press and beyond.

His first book, the lavish The Singular Art of Julian Murphy, has just been published by the Erotic Print Society. A further two volumes are in the pipeline. He also has a range of T-shirts, prints and posters and an excellent web site at www.julianmurphy.co.uk

“Being surprised by art is a genuine rarity these days,” said Design Week, “but judging by the facial expressions of those shown this book it’s a trick Murphy has pulled off.”

You weren’t involved in the fetish scene when you started drawing, so what provided you with initial inspiration?

The initial inspiration came when, as a designer, I used to design greetings cards for companies such as Athena back in the mid ’80s. I always felt the ideas were too strong for such a flippant product, and they had short shelf – or should I say mantlepiece – life. My marriage broke down six years ago and with the lack of clients allowing me to really express my imagination to its full potential, this kind of amalgamated into my art. I also believe good ideas never date, and nor does sex if I come to think of it. Sexual imagery, especially these days, seems to lack any class or style. Why shouldn’t all consenting aspects of sexuality be treated in a classier manner? I just can’t stand cheap crap, or degradation. I guess in a nutshell I’ve always thought this way, about all of life. Sex is just a huge throbbing tool for my creativity.

Are you able to do the housework without becoming aroused?

It’s difficult, and I feel selfish keeping all that pleasure to myself. So to be a more generous individual, I let other people do it. Too much self-indulgent sexual fun on your own is a real wank.

Have you ever been accused of ‘objectifying women’ in your work? If so, how do you respond?

I have been accused of objectifying women, but my answer to that is quite simple: if people think that of me, I feel they are being sexist in their assumption that I’ve actually drawn a woman. How do they know it’s not a woman dressed up as a man, or vice-versa? My work is androgynous – both or neither male or female. It is more to do with fetishism in its purest form, the objects of desire that surround sexuality. But rather than limit that to a pair of high heels or a corset, I’ve expanded the repertoire. I believe no one yet has really explored the total sexuality of inanimate objects. We see it in car design, or packaging. It’s all around us in a subconscious way.

What exactly are ‘sciperepics’?

A word of mine that means: knowledge (sci) from (per) repeating (rep) images (pics) – of which the shoe pattern is a perfect example. The word also reads backwards the same!

Has any household utensil defeated your attempts to eroticise it?

No household objects have yet defeated my observations on an erotic level. Only my relationships seem to do that!!!

Have you ever been banned from hanging out in B&Q?

I have not yet been banned from B&Q, but being single at present, you do find yourself relying quite a lot on “do it yourself”. Given a chance, I’d be more of a “do it all” kind of a guy.

Is it important to you that people should find your work funny as well as erotic?

I hope people find my work amusing. Heaven forbid that sex should become a more serious a matter than the media presents it. I hope my work will create smiles, understandings, challenge the intellect, and maybe change the way people look at objects. A woman sent me a Swiss army knife she saw it at the airport, and it triggered her memory of my illustration. It’s great that I have an ability to pervert a person’s feelings over a completely innocent icon.

What’s the difference between an erotic print and a dirty picture?

I think erotic art celebrates sex, whereas pornography degrades sex and the people within it. But unfortunately it is the degradation that is very often the key to peoples’ excitement.

Has your art made you fabulously wealthy?

Yes, but not in a financial way. If you are talking about soulful wealth, and an inner peace that only comes from being respected for who you really are, talents and failings, then, yes, I’m a rich bastard.

Who likes your stuff, anyway?

On my travels, or at book signings, the one thing that I most love is that about 70% of the people who show an interest in my work are women. Too often I hear that too much sexual imagery is very male orientated. Women seem to be attracted to my art because it does have an intellectual element, and is generally more cerebral. Without sounding sexist or anti my own sex, women are not just physical lovers. Someone once said, “a woman’s most erogenous zone is her mind.” I’m inclined to agree.

Even in death, Timothy Leary is still trying to shatter society’s taboos. Design For Dying appears eighteen months after the former Harvard psychologist turned LSD guru passed away from prostate cancer. Written during his last months, Leary’s book attempts to dispel our fear of death by suggesting that technology increasingly lets us orchestrate the how, where and when of our own grand finale.

Leary designed his own death in loving detail. Scorning hospitalised medical care, he announced at one point that he intended to take his own life, which would be broadcast live on the World Wide Web from Leary’s website, and then be cryogenically frozen. The ensuing media furore provided the perfect vehicle for Leary to give countless interviews about making death the high point of life.

In the end, Leary died peacefully at home, untelevised and unfrozen, but he managed to pull off an audacious parting shot: in April this year, some of his ashes were sent into orbit alongside those of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.

With chapter titles like “Dying? Throw A House Party!” and “Death Is The Ultimate Trip”, Design For Dying isn’t a standard self-help manual. Indeed, Leary’s daily ingestion of both prescribed and proscribed medicines gives plenty of ammunition to those who would want to write this book off as a collection of drug-crazed ramblings.

Yet Design For Dying’s discussion of the various current and future technologies that could outwit death – everything from cryogenics to downloading the mind onto hard disk and regenerating the body through nanotechnology – shows a keen, analytical intelligence at work. Inevitably, he focuses on drugs as a means of achieving insight into what happens beyond death. Underpinning his optimism is the Leary Theory that death is “a merging with the entire life process.” For all his hyberbole, Leary’s sense of humour remains intact: “The idea of keeping someone’s head in cryogenic suspension pushes people’s taboo buttons even more than whole-body suspension, which is one fun reason to do it”.

Perhaps the only measurement of Leary’s success in designing his own death is in the reaction of his friends. Editor R.U. Sirius, former Mondo 2000 head honcho and longtime Leary friend. concludes the book with testimonies from those who spent time with Leary during his final days. What emerges is that despite his relentlessly upbeat public appearances, Leary, like anyone else, succumbed to pain and depression. Moreover, he was fortunate both to have so many friends to call on and to remain mentally alert throughout his illness.

Rather than devaluing Leary’s celebration of death, these testimonies only emphasise how much he succeeded in dying as he wished. Design For Dying is a curiously compelling coda which ensures that Leary’s voice is not yet quite silent.

By the time you read this, Derek Jarman: A Retrospective will have closed at the Barbican Centre. However, the Barbican Centre’s comprehensive catalogue of the exhibition, which has been published by Thames And Hudson, gives a chance to re-evaluate the impact and splendour of Derek Jarman’s work. Though largely famous for his film-work, Jarman was also a prestigious artist and writer, with his artistic skills even pouring over into other diverse art-forms such as scenery design and gardening (yes, gardening).

With a man whose output was so divergent, whose character so like quicksilver, it is hard to pin him down. And this is the beauty of Jarman. He was indefinable and unique, a British maverick comparable in importance to artists such as William Blake, and as such, should not allowed to drift to the side-lines of history, or to be pigeon-holed solely as a queer film-maker.

I discovered Derek Jarman myself through his journals, published as Modern Nature (1991), and At Your Own Risk (1992). Written as direct result of his knowledge that he was HIV+ these books offer the reader a startling honesty. Nothing is hidden from us, and as such we enter into his world, and his everyday life, more as a friend than an observer – no brave face is put on for us, no politeness offered. Instead, Derek gives us truth and compassion, and at times pure, honest, anger. He leaps between the meditative contemplation of his garden and haranguing the British film industry for its complacency, between describing the omnipresence of the nuclear reactor behind his home at Dungeness and the evils of what he called “hetrosoc”. The result is a potent, valuable set of books pulsing with pure emotion.

This truth and honesty is also a quality found in Jarman’s films; he eschewed the expense and contrivance of big-budget films for the simplicity of Super8 stock. Even Jarman’s most expensive films were made at a fraction of the cost of the cheapest Hollywood film. His work was radically different, especially from the usual British attempts at generating some form of quirky pseudo-Hollywood style. However, this outsider position quite suited Jarman, and as he said, “I am the most fortunate film director of my generation: I’ve only ever done what I wanted “. People have said that they find his work hard, or just unintelligible, but that is part of their charm and power. Jarman frequently used the camera like a paintbrush, with the visual quotient of a scene carrying the charge normally left to the narrative: as it were, painting with light. However, such concepts are hard to conceive by a generation who goes to the cinema not to be challenged, but rather, have their eyes stuffed with Hollywood bubble-gum. That is not to say that such films don’t have their place; you just have to learn to look at films by the likes of Jarman with open eyes.

His films were also frequently of a revisionist tone, with Jarman looking back at history and re-viewing it through his own twentieth century eyes, and turning it into something new, something pertinent. For example, in 1977 he released his film Jubilee, coinciding with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, blending a time-travelling Elizabeth I and John Dee with oppressed and violent punks in sharp commentary on contemporary Britain. This concern for the state of the British nation is also reflected in his more complex, and yet more visually rewarding film The Last Of England.

Moreover, Jarman was not afraid of re-evaluating the classics, and produced his own idiosyncratic revisions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the more successful version of Marlowe’s Edward II. This film, like many of his later films, utilised the strength of simplicity with it’s sparse ahistorical sets, and mixture of period and contemporary costume. Again, Jarman looked to the past, especially to the hidden ramifications of a possible gay history, in order to comment on the situation today. That is to say, by re-examining men such as Edward II, Ludwig Wittgenstein or Caravaggio Jarman could shift the emphasis of traditional (read ‘straight’) history, and trace the previously hidden importance of a succession of homosexual men in key roles in Western intellectual culture. However, even though his films were often serious in tone, Jarman always seemed to have his tongue firmly lodged in his cheek, and concepts that could quite easily dissolve into pretentious drivel, frequently sparkle with irreverent wit.

The paintings displayed at the Barbican are, like most retrospectives, a mixed bag. We travel from the cold controlled nature of his early abstract landscapes of his youth to the fiery anger of his compelling last works, and so can easily trace Jarman’s origins and subsequent progression. The curator has also had the chance to assemble some of the artist’s personal artefacts, and the fact that people stand in rapt attention looking at such things as Jarman’s fountain pen or diaries is testament to the lasting power of the man himself.

The last section of the exhibition is the most striking, with the gloomy intensity of the pitch paintings and the dazzling outbursts that constitute the paintings that were first shown in the “Evil Queen” exhibition. These polemical works are Jarman at his most impassioned and his anger and frustration seep through the canvas. Their uncompromising nature was matched by his last film Blue. This film, with the screen saturated with an unchanging blue, was his most lyrical. It would be foolhardy to try capture the power and poignancy of this film in words. With the eyes confounded with nothing but an infinite blue, you are left to the voice-over to lead you through Jarman’s imagination and your own in a way that has never been attempted before.

Jarman’s home and garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, figure frequently in his last works, be it writing or film, and some attempt to address this has been attempted at the Barbican. Outside the gallery local children have made their own gardens a la Jarman to quite good effect. However, nothing can recreate the sense of isolation and strange other-worldliness present at Dungeness. It is as if here everything, including time itself will dissolve at moment into the vast swathes of shingle. His home and the others around it stand stranded in this stark landscape, now dominated and threatened by the vast nuclear reactor behind them.

A posthumous book, Derek Jarman’s Garden (1995), with splendid photographs by Howard Sooley, captures the beauty of the place that meant so much to Jarman. I personally had never considered that gardening could ever be considered an art form, but what Jarman created here is nothing but art, albeit more challenging to construct and maintain as it is an art that continually changes and grows. Innumerable plants provide islands of colour that sit in the sea of shingle which flows through the garden. Driftwood and flotsam punctuate the garden in the form of sculpture and ultimately serve to unify it with the area surrounding it. The result is a bounty of visual delights, made more powerful by the improbability of their setting. It is characteristic that Jarman’s writing, even when discussing the creation of his garden in this book, soon breaks down, and becomes a discussion of so much more. Surely there is no better example than Derek Jarman of an artist whose work is entwined with their life.

How, then, are we to remember this man? Should he be placed in the shrivelled canon of British twentieth century art, filed under “minor artist”, or should he be cast in the limiting role of “queer director”, or just dismissed as loud, over-opinionated, English eccentric? It is symptomatic of artists who work in several media to be dismissed as a jack of all trades but master of none. However, this would clearly not be a worthy epitaph for a man who obviously excelled in nearly every art form he chose to turn his hand to. Jarman was also much more, being not only a very political man, but whose work also had a great feeling for the decline of all the positive elements of British culture that have been stifled and repressed since the start of the Thatcher years.

Whatever his agenda, Jarman always made himself heard and it’s a voice that painful not to hear now. I feel, then, that all us can claim a part of Derek Jarman – he was an important film-maker, and an undervalued and little discussed artist, and wrote books that will surely stand the test of time. And yes, he was a consummate gardener. To lose an artist at the height of their powers is hard to live with, but to neglect what they left us is criminal. What is important now is that no matter how fragmented he may become in our minds, this man of rare vision must be preserved in a unified form in drafty corridors of history. Jarman, with all his divergent skill and charm, was surely more than just the sum of his parts, and that is how he should be remembered. Go and see this retrospective, watch one of the films, or even read the books, but do try and take the time to enter into Jarman’s world. I can assure you, it’s quite an amazing place to be.

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