ARTWORK Hacienda 1st Birthday Poster
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In a knowing and gleeful way, Peter Saville, the graphic
designer and art director, is contemplating his own greatest creation: himself.
"When people started looking at the 1980's, Peter Saville became a
classic. The work I did for Factory Records had a predictive quality - it
showed the shape of things to come. I became lionised, which was lucky,
because buisiness and I weren't getting along. I became bigger than the
the thing I would have set my name to. I'm more interesting than most of
my clients. So for the last few years, I've been coming to terms with this,
being the legend. Peter Saville is Peter Saville, it's an end in itself.
I decided I had to present what is most personal and important to me. I've
been less inclined to do commisioned work which doesn't have a space for
me. My biggest client this year is Peter Saville, but the problem with him
is that he doesn't have any bloody money."
A creative legend who straddles the worlds of art,
design, music and fashion, Saville is so famous for his expansive banter
that Nick Knight, his friend and photographic collaborator, was inspired
to make a multimedia piece about it, entitled Lilac Halo - a series of images
with Saville talking over them. Saville's odd combination of giant ego and
disarming honesty, wit and even self-deprication has become his hallmark
over the years. He is a mass of contradictions: grand but never patronising;
direct but with a large pinch of sophistry; almost aristocratic in manner,
but still possessing a suggestion of a south Manchester accent.
We are sitting in his design studio in Old Street,
east London. It's evening, the quite time when he normally works. The loft
is cleared of staff, apart from a lone assistant, click-clicking on a computer,
who has to share the boss's unorthodox hours. Saville himself doesn't use
computers. He is 47, tall, pale and slender. Wearing a costly navy sweater
and constantly flicking a French cigarette, he is the picture of understated
elegance. On his wrist is a watch with pink numerals that could come across,
he says, "a bit Carnaby Street", but which is in fact hideously
expensive.
This month the Design Museum is holding the first major
Peter Saville retrospective. At the same time he will publish his first
book, Designed by Peter Saville. Both demonstrate the huge diversity of
his output over the past 25 years. The show marks a turning point for the
47-year-old-designer - hence this speech about "becoming a classic".
He is drawing a line under the past, and focussing on the future.
Many regard Saville as the most influential designer
of his generation: he was recently voted the "most admired individual
working within the creative industries" by a group of his peers in
the influential magazine Creative Review. But the show and the book will
finally bring his work to a wider public. They will see how he invented
the profile of Manchester's Hacienda club. They will see his record covers
for bands such as Suede and Pulp, and some older ones that are less well-known,
for the likes of Roxy Music and Wham!; and also his high-profile advertising
work with Yohji Yamammoto, Christian Dior and, most recently, Stella McCartney.
In other words, the exhibition and book will showcase
what Saville calls "my greatest hits". The phase is apt, given
that in the late 1970's Saville co-founded Factory Records, the seminal
Mancunian label for which, until its demise in the early 1990's he produced
his most iconoclastic and influential work. Here Saville's personal vision
and style was at its most unfettered and clear, particularly in the graphics
for Joy Division and as the unofficial fifth member of New Order (their
visual collaborations continues to this day).
His calling card, evident in the sleeve art for these
bands, is his uncanny knack of marrying high and low culture, the classical
and the modern, the elite and the democratic, art and life. It is down to
him that the postmodern neo-classical photography of Bernard Pierre Wolffe
(the cover of Joy Division's Closer), Fortunato Depero's Italian Futurist
graphics (New Order's Movement) and Henri Fantin-Latour's 19th-century flower
painting (New Order's Power Corruption and Lies) all adorned the walls of
teenagers' bedrooms.
Saville's favorite piece is that last cover, in which
a printer's colour code is set into the reproduced still-life. Saville describes
it as being "about the Apollian and the Dionysian - the perfect balance".
He says his agenda in appropriating these images persists: he wants to educate
a pop generation in matters of high art and high style. This ambition prompted
the New York Times to describe him as "the default creative director
for a style obsessed generation".
Small wonder then that Saville talks himself up from
time to time. He is, after all, a fundemental part of the mythology of Manchester,
as much a part of the city as Ian Curtis or Hilda Ogden. He was even portayed
in 24-Hour Party People, Micheal Winterbottom's cheerful elegy to Factory
Records, released last year,
Saville grew up in Hale, one of the more aflluent suburbs
of Manchester. "I had, I suppose, romantic notions about the hard city,"
he says. He was at school with Malcolm Garrett, another influential graphic
designer, whose friendship was a spur. "Malcolm and I would sit in
our art class at Saint Ambrose, drawing and planning our future album covers
together," he says. "I wonder how on earth it was that Malcolm
and I went on from Saint Ambrose and Manchester Poly to dominate the London
music industry. Why on earth did our London contempories let Malcolm and
me take over? It was the complacency of being from a cosmopolitan city -
they were like the sons of a wealthy man watching the lads who tend the
garden get the inheritence. If you come from a second city, and move to
a first city, you have to be better."
In some ways the adult personal life is hazier. Stories
abound. There is Saville's famed casual regard for deadlines (a hazard,
he says, of being a perfectionist), which at one point resulted in his Factory
colleagues nearly committing GBH: "There was one time when I was late
with some art work for New Order, very late, beyond late..." There
are the insomniac hours he keeps, his ludicrous nomadic living arrangements,
his ladies' man reputation, his extensive collection of pornography. He
is like a Brett Easton Ellis character crossed with a 19th-century flaneur.
Everybody in the design world seems to have an anecdote about him.
"Peter is essentially a Romantic figure,"
says Emily King, the design critic who is a friend of Saville's and a contributor
to the book. "He's like something from another time, you can't pin
him down," she adds. The photographer Nick Knight, who with Saville
co-founded the fashion website showstudio.com, says: "I've been friends
with Peter for 20-odd years, and in many ways he's still a mystery. But
what I do know is that there have been moments when I've wanted to punch
him and moments when he's wanted to punch me."
One thing that is not in dispute is Saville's talent
and the impact it has had. No other graphic designer, for example, has had
quite the same effect on a city's identity. Alongside Factory Record's Tony
Wilson, Saville created a dream world of images, a "Factory Utopia"
for Manchester. In some strange way he persuaded other people that Manchester
really was this dream place. This included people who lived in the less-than
glamorous Manchester of the late 1970s and 1980s when it was still all decaying
cotton warehouses and canals full of dumped mattresses.
That these canals and warehouses now comprise the city's
stylish Northern Quarter must owe something to Saville's fervent vision.
Manchester is, of course, a far cry from the downbeat city it was three
decades ago. Now it is littered with style bars, high-tech museums and fractured
Daniel Liebeskind architecture. But it could be argued that Saville's visual
mythologising led to the creation of a brand identity for the city, which
in turn demanded a city to go with it. Factory helped start the architectural
renaissance by building the Hacienda, Dry bar and the Factory Headquarters.
With the interior architect Ben Kelly, Saville fashioned an image, part
Bauhaus, part Chicago House, for these stripped-down, post-industrial leisure
complexes.
As Kelly is quoted as saying in the book The Hacienda
Must Be Built, edited by Jon Savage, "Having got involved with Peter
Saville and having some understanding of Factory, I perhaps had the arogance
to think I could interpret what Factory was about from a two-dimensional
point of view, the record sleeves, into a three-dimensional enviroment."
The resulting work is now a style-blueprint that has now been rolled out
nationwide, from hip hotels to high-class soup kitchens. But Saville is
not cashing in by creating corporate identities; he has chosen a different
path for himself.
If anything, he know casts a rueful eye over his design
past. "The recent recognition of the role of the designer had already
been commandeered and abused by the mid-1990's" he states flatly. "We've
shifted from trying to persuade business that design and image can help
it, to having to fend it off. By the mid-1990s, the last affluent boom of
the west, design had become the new advertising. When Malcolm Garret and
I, as a couple of teenagers at Manchester Polytechnic, were thinking about
the high street and making it look better, this is not what we had in mind.
If there is something genuine then I enjoy working with it, but many things
are not genuine - in fact they're desperete, plainly inadequate and requiring
a facelift. I decided I didn't want to be a cosmetic surgeon of inner ugliness
and I didn't want to be part of an increasingly desperate cycle of consumerism.
It really is fucking desperate,"
The man who once said, "My BA was in Roxy Music",
concludes that, "pop culture has made the transition over the past
30 years from being like LSD, slightly dangerous but mind-expanding, to
being like crack, an impediment of an addiction that will bankrupt you.
You will never learn anything from pop culture now." He laughs and
adds, "It seems that, emotinally, I've philosphised myself out of being
commercially viable."
But this does not mean that the designer's work will
end here. Instead of people asking Saville to revamp their corporate identity,
they are now approaching him for a piece of his own. The most obviouse example
is Raf Simons, the Belgian menswear designer whose autumne/winter collection
for 2003 is called "Closer" and is based on Saville's work.
"Peter has had a huge influence on my aesthetic,"
says Simons. "Not just for this collection, but all along. It began
with the impact of the record covers when I was younger. I was always a
fan of the music, but then I began to see how the imagery worked alongside
it in quite an amazing way. It's kind of graphic synaesthetisia. When I
approached him about this collaboration it was an instant reaction - he
wanted to work with me and I know he is very specific about who he works
with. So it's a very important collection for me."
The younger style generation has come of age under
the tutelage of Peter Saville and know finds itself in power. It seems that
a new chapter is about to open up in the mythology of the designer, and
it might be one that outstrips all that has gone before. The overlapping
of fact and fiction may still be there, but it won't be in the banal service
of consumerism. Instead it looks as if it will be about him.
This article originally appeard in The Independent
on Sunday Copyright Jo-Ann Furniss
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