From Buzzcocks to Bowie - In Conversation with Malcom Garrett and Jonathan Barnbrook - Louder Than Words Festival

I attended a talk in Manchester that was part of the Louder Than Words Festival. This particular talk was a conversation between 2 designers who have designed notable record sleeves and album artwork - Malcom Garrett and Jonathan Barnbrook. Garrett has produced a range of album covers for Buzzcocks in the 70’s, along with work for bands such as Simple Minds and Culture Club. Barnbrook has most notably designed some of the latter David Bowie albums, including his final album ‘Blackstar’. 

The talk was really useful research and food for thought regarding my COP dissertation and practical project. It was intriguing to hear the process and design techniques of both respective designers. Malcom Garrett talked a lot about how in his process for designing album covers, he often considers the format heavily, and the idea that as a physical record sleeve that you pick up in your hand, the design can work any way you rotate it, as evident in his design for ‘Orgasm Addict’ by Buzzcocks. A lot of his designs also work beyond the square front cover image; his record sleeve design for ‘What Do I Get?’ By Buzzcocks has a fluid front and back cover, meaning it doesn’t matter which way round you pick it up, and the cover for the live album ‘Entertaining Friends’ by Buzzcocks has a design which leads out of the dimensions of the cover image so that if you stack multiple copies of the cover in rows, its becomes a larger integrated design, with the lines leading off the cover connecting with the lines of another cover. 

Jonathan Barnbrook had some really interesting approaches to some of the covers he did for Bowie. For the album ‘The Next Day’ there were a lot of themes about looking back on his prior years in the album, he specifically referenced earlier songs and ideas from previous albums so the approach that Barnbrook took was to take the iconic cover for ‘Heroes’ and to cover bowies face with a white square that said the album title on. When stretching this to billboard advertisements, instead of creating a whole design, Barnbrook decided to paste this white square over existing billboards as a way to integrate this ideas of disruption into an attention grabbing ad campaign. Barnbrook talked a lot about how he doesn’t think of doing a project like this as doing an album cover, more so like its a brand identity he’s creating, he’s always taking into account the other formats and collateral he will have to design which I thought was a very astute way to think about it, especially in the age we live in were this album cover and identify for the album needs to stretch from print to advertisements and also to digital. This idea was succinctly captured by his work on ‘Blackstar’ which features an album cover that focuses on a simple black star on a white background. As a minimal graphic image, this can be used on so many different formats, and thinking about the digital consumption of music, the simplicity and boldness of the cover ensures that its still evident what the album is even when its just a small image in the corner of your phone screen. 

In regards to my COP work, some of the most applicable points brought up by the 2 designers was when they were talking about the functionality and appropriateness of designing album covers; for them, this was a big consideration when the jump was made from vinyl to cd, they couldn’t just make the image smaller because the type had to be larger to still be a legible size and also the image needed to work on a smaller scale. These sort of considerations need to be made by me when considering the transition from physical music formats to digital - how can the idea of the album cover be appropriated to a digital format, what needs to be changed so that the design is functional on a digital format, and what can be kept so that the concept of the album cover as we know it is still familiar?

From a professional stand point, when considering my own practise it was interesting to hear about these ideas; Malcom Garrett mentioned how some of his students ask him where design is going, what do they need to do to create appropriate design for the modern age, to which he replies that he doesn’t know because he is from a different era of design. Just like when he was a young designer, and he had to innovate the idea of an album cover to work for CD as opposed to Vinyl, it’s down to young designers now, such as myself, to create innovative ideas that will set the tone for design. This really made me think about how even though I really like designing record sleeves and album covers, maybe I need to be more innovative and consider this new era of digital streaming and what I can personally do in my own practise in response to it.