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THE GRAPHIC DESIGN OF PETER SAVILLE
GRAPHIC EUROPE Barcelona 2003 |
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THE GRAPHIC DESIGN OF PETER SAVILLE
GRAPHIC EUROPE Barcelona 2003 |
ARTWORK Automne Hiver 91-92 Yohji Yamamoto
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Launch poster for The Factory, 1978
In 1978 when I was still at art college in Manchester, I got involved with
the music scene and made friends with some people and that became the founding
of Factory Records. Before I arrived on the scene Tony Wilson, who was in
a way the prime motivator behind Factory, had done a poster for a club that
was going to be called The Factory. It was a reproduction of a situationist
piece. He asked me what I thought of it and I had to admit I didn’t
really like it, I didn’t really understand it. My version of the poster
had a symbol at the top that came off one of the workshop doors in the art
college. It was a sign I’d been passing every day thinking that it
looked great. When Tony told me that this new venue in Manchester was going
to be called The Factory I thought that symbol seemed quite appropriate.
Working with Joy Division, 1979-1980
What we had in Manchester in the late 1970s was a group of people who just
came together to do things that they wanted to do. We started The Factory,
the club, because all of the other clubs had been closed down by the authorities.
Punk had unsettled the establishment a little bit the same way that the
rave scene did in the late 1980s. Suddenly there were no venues and so Tony
took it upon himself to try to organise a new one. By default it became
a record company mainly because Joy Division chose to stay with Factory
and release an album rather than sign a deal with a major record company.
Joy Division became a group because they wanted to make music. They didn’t
really want to be in business or to make money, they just wanted to release
the records that they wanted to make. What seems to have distinguished the
work that I actually felt motivated by and interested in is working with
people who are doing something because they want to do it and not because
they think that there’s a business opportunity in it.
Early work for New Order, 1980-1983
When Ian Curtis (Joy Division’s lead singer) killed himself a month
before the second album came out, it led to a kind of notoriety around Joy
Division which seems to have lasted ever since. What was left of Joy Division
after Ian died had to kind of reinvent themselves. It took them a while
to find who they were going to be and to reinvent themselves as New Order.
Releasing the single Blue Monday in 1983 was a defining moment for New Order.
The cover is based on a floppy disk – I’d discovered one for
the first time when I went to visit them in their studio. The single is
an almost entirely sequenced seven minute track and the equipment plays
it better than the group, so it seemed appropriate to wrap it up in a floppy
disk.
By this time an unusual relationship had developed between me and my client
in that they didn’t really ask what I was doing. By virtue of being
a co-founder of Factory, I was in a way a detached director of the company
and nobody really asked what I was doing. Everybody just got on and did
what they did, and really there was no one to answer to. And in the case
of New Order there was no one to answer to. When Ian had been alive he wrote
the songs and I felt a certain responsibility to interact with the person
whose work I was interfacing, whereas with New Order nobody really wrote
songs and there was no obvious hierarchy within the group. There was a kind
of argumentative democracy where they just agreed to disagree, so whenever
we had any kind of design meeting I would ask them, for example, what colour
would they like for something and one would say red, and one would say blue.
As I was left to my own devices I kind of did what I wanted to do and used
the work as a platform for either a) what I was interested in or b) what
I felt was missing.
Doing record covers is a bit like playground art – you get open access
to thousands of young people. Joy Division’s first album Unknown Pleasures
was well received but maybe 50,000 or 60,000 people bought it, but because
Ian had died, Closer sold hundreds of thousands of copies. And Blue Monday
became the biggest selling 12” single of all time. So this kind of
fairly self-indulgent work of mine occasionally went to a lot more people
than I expected when I was doing it. I probably would have been terrified
doing Blue Monday if I’d thought this is going to sell hundreds of
thousands of copies.
Power Corruption And Lies album for New Order, 1983
At the time I was interested in the juxtaposition of historical culture
and modern technological culture, and I was interested in the idea of what
did history look like when it came up on a retrieval system on a computer
screen and I wanted to juxtapose the kind of hieroglyphics of technology
with historical classicism. The colours down the side are a colour alphabet
and I converted the alphabet into a colour code in order to have an abstract
code with which to work. The wheel on the back (of the album sleeve) was
the only indication of the code but New Order fans still managed to work
it out. They even pointed out there was a spelling mistake on the album.
Brotherhood album for New Order, 1986
I knew of Yves Klein from college but I didn’t really get it. And
then in 1986 I did get it. I found an Yves Klein catalogue at a friend’s
house in Paris and it made sense immediately. There was a kind of nothingness
to it, a kind of romance and an excitement of nothingness. There was this
show he did (in 1958) called The Void where the people at the opening were
the show and the gold leaf and the monochrome blues. It was exactly the
mood I was trying to find a way to express myself. By this time I’d
just about grown up enough not to transpose things literally so I tried
to do my own version of Klein. Trevor Key, a photographer who’d become
my best friend, helped me and we bought cheap sheets of metal from a builder’s
yard. It’s reflective and iridescent and goes different colours depending
on how the light falls on it. For me it was 1986 and 1987 and it was my
version of Yves Klein – just nothing. And Trevor said, “What
do we do with the pictures? Are we going to retouch them?” And I said:
“No, nothing. Just leave it. Just take the picture and leave it like
it is.”
Joy Division compilation album, Substance, 1987
All the early Factory product had been on vinyl, but people wanted CDs of
it so Tony Wilson invented a series of albums called Substance which were
like early ‘Best ofs’. He asked me to do the cover and it was
really difficult. What was the cover? This is like ’87 and seven years
had gone by since Joy Division. I didn’t know how to do Joy Division
in 1987 and I didn’t want to just reproduce the old covers. Finally
Lecturis, the Dutch printers, sent me a catalogue they’d done for
a Dutch sculptor called Jan van Munster and I saw this piece called Energy
Peak. It’s a two metre steel cone that freezes up at the top and has
a refrigeration unit inside. I was looking at it and went: “Wow, it’s
so Joy Division.” Luckily nobody gave me any deadlines for this work
back then. If I’d had to do this cover in two weeks I probably wouldn’t
have done it, but given a month or so I finally stumbled over Jan van Munster.
He was happy about his work becoming a cover for Joy Division so Trevor
and I went to Holland, and took a photograph of Energy Peak. While we were
away, Brett Wickens, who had started as my assistant and became my partner
in the studio, figured out the type. We knew that Joy Division were this
sort of tense relationship between the spiritual and the modern and that
the sound is quite timeless with a juxtaposition of emotion and hard machinery,
so Brett put Garamond and Crowel together which was a ridiculous idea but
worked quite wonderfully.
Technique album for New Order, 1989
One day I said to Trevor: “I want a picture of a flower for the lobby
of IBM in the year 2000.” And he was like: “Mmm, like an X ray?”
And I said: “Well maybe like an X ray but not an X ray.” A few
weeks later Trevor proposed a new way of making pictures which became like
silk screening but with light. By 1988, we were really playing around and
experimenting with this technique and at the same time New Order made an
album called Technique. They went off to Ibiza in 1988, discovered ecstasy
in the clubs and came back to England with one of the first rock-dance-ecstacy
tracks, Fine Time. I was looking for something to use this photographic
process that Trevor had developed and I found this cherub in an antique
shop in London. A year ago someone writing a piece about this cover referred
to the cherub as being bacchanalian. At the time, I hadn’t consciously
thought of that but bacchanalian was quite a good reference point for 1988
and 1989.
The Haçienda and the demise of Factory Records, turn of 1990s
When Closer, the second Joy Division album, sold a lot of copies and Factory
had hundreds of thousands of pounds that it didn’t know what to do
with, we built the Hacienda which was in a way a kind of a dream of a club.
But when we built it in 1981 it was a dream for the ten people who were
there each night. It was like Yves Klein’s The Void – a 15,000
square foot industrial entertainment zone with no one there. It was a gift
to the young people of Manchester but in 1981 they didn’t want it.
By 1988 and 1989, when they were looking for somewhere to deal ecstasy,
they found the Hacienda and it became the epicentre of drugs culture in
Manchester. By 1990 the Hacienda on a Monday night was ‘Hallucienda’.
It really was quite an amazing moment, but it was tragic as well. The first
ecstasy death was there in the club – a 16 year-old girl, who was
two years too young to even be in the club. By 1990 there were 1,500 people
in there on a Saturday night and too many of them were carrying guns. It
was very, very scary and no one had any idea how to deal with it. Ultimately
The Hacienda closed and ultimately Factory fell apart as a result of it
all.
Yohji Yamamoto advertising campaigns, early 1990s
In 1991 everything fell apart around me. My wilful kind of attitude towards
work resulted in my studio being completely insolvent and my enthusiasm
for what we’d been doing was kind of bankrupt as well. I felt that
the mission design was on in the 1980s to try and bring something back into
contemporary culture had become decorative by 1990. A cycle of repetitiveness
was beginning and a cycle of marketing and unnecessariness. Design was about
to become the new advertising and I felt kind of tired of it. I was still
in contact with Yohji Yamamoto (the Japanse fashion designer for whom Saville
had worked in the late 1980s), and he felt tired of it as well. He produced
a women’s collection of clothes made out of wood. He quite purposefully
made a collection that you couldn’t wear and he let me do the Game
Over ad. He said: “Do it the way you would do record covers.”
Fashion ads don’t have headlines on them, but that one did, I felt
it was necessary to make the point. It upset the rest of Yohji’s company,
but Yohji liked it. His US company wouldn’t support it. They said
that they wouldn’t pay for advertising that didn’t show the
clothes. I didn’t feel it was necessary to always show the clothes
to communicate the mood of fashion but ten years ago it seemed it was.
Los Angeles and Republic album for New Order, 1992-1994
To escape the recession in Britain and to escape Pentagram (the London design
group) where I’d ended up, I had a kind of Hollywood fantasy. I’d
gone to Los Angeles to do a television identity in 1991 and been fascinated
by the way Hollywood makes the world look. It’s quite interesting
that you feel a bit cheated when you first go to Los Angeles because you
realise that to make television and movies they just go out in the street,
the whole place is just like a 24 hour movie studio and you drive around
Los Angeles and you just keep seeing locations from movies. I came back
to London and there was a New Order album (Republic) to do so I did it as
a parody of the way the media repackages the world, with slightly cheap
titles that look like an HBO movie. It’s what seemed to happen every
year in Malibu. Every autumn there are bush fires and everybody’s
house burns down and it’s OK because everyone just goes to the beach
and builds a new house. It was very strange to us, this was a kind of fantasy.
The images came together because Brett was experimenting with what you could
do with the blend filter in Photoshop. Within a year we were living in LA.
Brett stayed and I didn’t. I couldn’t bear it actually.
Working with Suede and Pulp, mid-1990s
Back in London in the mid 1990s, I found my work being recycled by another
generation. It was initially a very scary time for me because I was like
the last big thing. It’s very scary being popular in one era and then
having to live through the next because you’re the first thing to
get thrown out. There was an exciting new era in London in the 1990s - new
designers, new artists, new fashion, new everything, and I was pretty much
of the previous era. I didn’t quite know how to deal with it, but
one or two things happened to make me feel OK. One was Brett Anderson (lead
singer of Suede) turning up asking me to do Suede, and Jarvis Cocker (lead
singer of Pulp) asking me to do This is Hard Core. I took a different role
to my old one because they knew what they wanted but didn’t know how
to do it and pretty much asked me to help realise what they wanted. For
This is Hard Core (Pulp’s 1998 album), Jarvis had met John Currin,
the New York artist, and they knew what they wanted to do but couldn’t
quite make it happen. So they asked me to make it happen and it was a comfortable
role for me. I was 42 years of age when I did this and you shouldn’t
be doing record covers at 42 years of age. You’re not the audience,
but Jarvis knew his audience for Pulp so I was a kind of facilitator and
that’s the best place to be when you’re in your 40s. And with
We Love Life (Pulp’s 2001 album) Jarvis turned up with some ornamental
letters 19th century and said: “Can we have this?” I liked it
a lot, but getting the letters was very difficult. There’s a man in
London who seems to think he owns them and we had to pay £1,000 per
letter! Anyway, there are two ‘P’s in Pulp but we only bought
one ‘P’.
Corporate Identity
In the late 1990s, the more serious things befitting a 40 year old were
beginning to come up mainly because there was a generation of my contemporaries
who had been influenced through the music work who would then work in other
industries and disciplines. Confronted with these serious real jobs I tend
to be really boring and get very workmanlike about them. I don’t see
a Mandarina Duck or a Givenchy or an EMI as a platform for what I want to
do, I see it as a serious bit of business.
Waste Paintings, late 1990s onwards
In 1998 the boys that I work with in the studio were playing around in Photoshop
and I saw something that they were doing and found it analogous to the time.
By 1998 and 1999, I was getting quite concerned about the speed at which
things were coming and going. People were spending weeks or years working
on a product, designing a new chair, making a new piece, making a film and
it was lasting for as long as the PR cycle - basically three months –
and I found that quite sad. I mean, if you spend five years designing a
new chair and it’s all over in three months it must be a bit disappointing.
With graphic design we’re used to it because there is a disposability.
but I was also aware of the fact that we were part of the disposability,
we’re part of the system, trashing everything really fast. I tried
to find some way to come to terms with that and in the end I took a kind
of Warhol approach of “Gee isn’t it all great?” What I
had observed in one of the filters in Photoshop was that you could actually
recycle stuff, so we started shredding things that we’d been doing
in the daytime and making something new out of them for tomorrow. It became
a new way of working and it was empowering to make your own images. That’s
one of the great things about Photoshop. Another great things about it is
that Photoshop releases you from the tyranny of photographers and illustrators.
I was asked to do a poster for American Pioneers, a music festival at the
Barbican in London, so we shredded the stars and stripes. The composers
were pioneers, innovators, rule breakers and inconoclasts, like John Cage
and Philip Glass. I was trying to find a way into their music and I knew
what the mood of it should be, so we took a stars and stripes and shredded
it in Photoshop. It was fun!
© Grafic Europe/Peter Saville
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