ARTWORK John Macklin/Graham Newman
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Saville is holding court in his Clerkenwell studio,
a large white space filled with hundreds of art books and boxes of photographs
arranged in straight rows. (One of his colleagues says he has Obsessive-Compulsive
Disorder, and you can believe it, everything is at right angles, even his
pens and pencils.) He's 48 this year, though with his boyish hairstyle and
groovy white jeans, you'd never know it. He's immensely likeable and talks
incessantly, puffing away on his cigarettes, alternating between packs of
Gauloise and Gitanes.
His CV makes impressive reading, co-founder of Factory
Records in 1979, then opening his own studio, moving to an LA ad agency
to work for, among others, Yohji Yamamoto in 1993, and consultancies for
Givenchy and Pringle in 2001, but it tells only half the story. He's a notorious
perfectionist, terrible with deadlines, useless with money and defiantly
operating on a different clock to everyone else, sleeping during the day,
dining at the Groucho Club at midnight and working through the night. He's
been fired from almost every company he's worked for.
Can you discuss your creative working processes?
You have to have a vision, you have to believe in something.
If you don't, you're measuring it out by the meter and it's meaningless.
When I started out I was quite idealistic. I looked at the environment around
me and it looked bloody awful, and I thought: 'Surely it can be better than
this.' Unfortunately within this environment were the seeds of the horror
that became 'lifestyle' - a superficial, synthetic culture. I have a piece
of neon planned for the studio wall that will read 'Be careful what you
wish for'.
Creativity is also about having the space for dreaming.
Dreaming about something being more beautiful, or better, or more generous,
or more macabre - whatever your dream happens to be. And then you have to
have time to craft the dream. At Factory Records I had a remarkably free
space in which to express myself. We didn't have clients and quite often
no brief, so the New Order covers were a platform for me to express whatever
particular idea or concept I was preoccupied with that year.
For me, the process starts as an idea in my head. Ideas
come from your emotional and philosophical reaction to the things going
on around you every day - you have to look and listen and think about what
you're seeing and hearing. Ideas zip around and can be quite elusive, and
trying to catch and then deliver them is quite difficult, but most of my
work is done in a notebook. I'll make a quick note or a sketch or take a
photograph of anything interesting I come across. And I try to steal an
hour or so a day to write about things I've found interesting and what they
mean in a broader context.
Ideas never come out how you first imagined them -
something else happens along the way, and if you're lucky it turns out better.
For me the process of thinking about things goes on all the time. I'm very
often quite happy to sit down and watch some football, or pornography, late
at night, in order to avoid thinking about things, to avoid reading another
interesting magazine or journal or a new book.
You have spent a lot of time in Los Angeles
working for Frankfurt Balkind. How do you feel about been involved in what
was going on there?
I think I still need to feel America more deeply. If
you visit it for 3 weeks, as a tourist, you only get a shallow vision of
the United States. I like the superficiality of California: the sun shines,
you go to a meeting next to a swimming pool, have breakfast, drive your
convertible, then you go to another meeting. L.A. is Mulholland Drive, a
dark, heartless place. The US is full of desperate, greedy, dark people.
No one cares about anything; it is difficult to love in a place like that.
Are you still working with Tomato?
No. Tomato was good when I came back from L.A., because
I didn't have a place to work. They were generous and asked me to collaborate,
but no one spoke to me clearly.
What about Pentagram?
I worked for Pentagram for two years and I learned
a lot. I worked there with 17 colleagues who were considered the best in
what they did. They had both talent and experience. I was prepared to learn
about design and business and how both interact.
And now?
I am broke. I spent all my money, so I had to do new
things. I didn't believe in the New Order' s Get Ready cover at all, I didn't
even go to the session. When I arrived, it was already finished.
Are you something like a famous
man who signs the job someone else is really doing? In other words, do you
just monitor the work?
Most jobs are done like that. I sort of manage to get
people to pay me for talking about things, but not for actually doing them.
If someone wants to pay £200,000 a day, I go there and talk and then
someone else will do the work. Sometimes it is the way it goes. Basically,
business and design do not go hand in hand.
How did you come to the idea of
creating www.showstudio.com?
The idea came into my mind 3 years ago. I have this
romantic notion that the Internet will work as an open platform for everyone
to create whatever you want to create for yourself. I said to my friend
Nick Knight: "Nick, we are going to do something quicker and cheaper
than a book: a web page. This way it will get to people, no matter who they
are, the important thing is that it makes its way to them". Magazines
and books are difficult to find for those who do not live where they are
published. In contrast, on the Web everything is widely available.
How succesfull are you?
By my mother's terms I'm not successful at all ? I
don't live anywhere. I don't have any money. What I do have is a reputation.
The sleeve to New Order's "Blue Monday" is exceptional, It's on
its way to the Museum Of Modem Art.
Is it?
Well, it's not yet. But it will be. 'When I started
out working for Factory I was spoilt, Absolutely spoilt. Now the motivation
for work is to achieve something for your client, I'll be sitting in meetings
and somebody will say "hey, let's not forget, we're all just here to
make money". Well, actually that's not why I'm here. I'm here to make
things better.
Copyright: Vasava Artworks/Suite/Guardian.
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