A design for punk living: reading Andrew Krivine's punk graphics book didn't change my life

On page 193 of this monster book of punk/post-punk design, Art Chantry (graphic artist from the US grunge scene) describes the life-altering effect of stumbling across a poster for a local punk band taped to a telegraph pole in his native Seattle in 1978:

"Seeing a black-and-white, scratchy, cruddy photocopy made out of garbage for a band called 'Negative Approach' completely dumbfounded me. I carefully peeled it off the telephone pole and carried it home and hung it on the wall. I stared at it for weeks, trying to figure out what it was. It changed the entire direction of my life. I still have it, framed, on my wall."

It's a good anecdote (made out of garbage!). Could it possibly be true? The mere sight of a punk poster changing the direction of Chantry's life? And him preserving this tatty thing for more than 40 years? Are you quite sure about all this, Art? Anyway, completely true or not, it's a handy starting point for my blog about Andrew Krivine's book on punk design, Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die: Punk & Post Punk Graphics 1976-1986, published earlier this year. 

Some product: Andrew Krivine's chunky book

The idea of a piece of throwaway design changing someone's life is quite startling. Kind of fantastic (in both senses). Hyperbole aside, I can accept - and welcome - the idea though. I think life is potentially like this. Exposure to designed artefacts/objects is a constant in our lived experience. It's just that we don't often pay much attention to it. The chair you're sitting in, the fork you're using to eat your greasy breakfast: all designed. All usually taken for granted and ignored. The idea that a cheap poster casually spotted in the street could affect somebody quite so fundamentally is strangely wonderful in its own small way. 

Three bands in blue: Cabaret Voltaire, package tour flyer (Rough Trade Records, 1979)

And the second big thing about the Chantry story: he kept the poster for more than 40 years and even framed it. Blimey. I'm a tiny bit dubious really. How many people would hold onto something like this? Anyway … preserving the unappreciated ephemera of the music world is partly what Krivine's book is all about. TFTLTYTD  apparently features more than 650 scans of the posters, flyers, record sleeves, badges etc in Krivine's own massive collection. (Evidently Krivine has the biggest collection of this stuff in the world: in excess of 3,000 items). Chantry's framing of the Negative Approach flyer is another version of the "cultural collector" impulse, a preservationist desire to stop something disappearing and then to elevate it by placing it within a new "art" context. Yeah, yeah, all very interesting (you're probably thinking), but what's in this bloody book anyway? And did the world really need another book about the sprawling cultural landscape of punk? (Did I need another book about punk? Answer: probably not).

B-movie thrills: The Mumps, fan club flyer (c. 1979), with still from Village Of The Damned

Anyway, perhaps this book does deserve to be infesting the shelves of expensive art/design bookshops because there's a lot in it. All those hundreds of scanned covers and posters (many hardly ever seen), useful little write-ups, the dating and source information that invokes a gallery catalogue (the book appears to have grown out of an exhibition in New York in 2011), and a few mini-essays from academics and/or key punk figures (Chantry, Malcolm Garrett, Sebastian Conran et al). With Conran, I hadn't realised (or had perhaps just forgotten) that he gave the Sex Pistols their first-ever gig booking in November 1975 when he was treasurer of the student's union at the Central School of Art and Design. And before long he was designing Clash sleeves and gig posters, and even their stage clothes. When the Clash starting getting bigger and the music press criticised their association with a "millionaire's son", Conran was cut out - with Mick Jones apparently the main instigator of his removal. Yep, that's punk gratitude for you.

Wardance: Killing Joke, promo poster (Malicious Records, 1980); 

Mike Coles design using photo (c. 1934) of Nazi brownshirts

sieg heiling the German abbot, Alban Schachleiter

So rather than a glorified coffee table publication, this book has a semi-scholarly feel - with a decent index and supporting text that tries to provide some proper context and analysis. It helps, as well, that Krivine's own contributions are well written. He explains how he got into both punk and the collecting of punk stuff during a summer-long stay in London in 1977, helping out alongside his cousin who ran the BOY clothing shop in King's Road in Chelsea. It's not spelt out as such, but Krivine presumably always had decent resources at his disposal. A family that could fly him over to spend time in a major city for his own little sabbatical, a successful clothes-shop businessman for a cousin, and now - decades later -  he apparently works in "commercial banking". Right place, right time, right connections, the right amount of money and (obviously) a desire to collect and amass, collect and amass. Krivine recalls how in 1977 he began to "form" his vast collection, though form is far too casual a word for what he was doing. In addition to gigs (Dingwalls, Marquee etc), he seems to have been scouring the key record shops (Rough Trade etc), going to merch outlets (Better Badges etc), and even turning up at the offices of record companies (Stiff, Virgin etc) begging for posters and other freebies. Also, I can only assume that as this collection of his grew and he himself grew older and maybe more wealthy, Krivine must have started buying things off dealers or private owners. "When I bought it", says Krivine in his description of an ultra-rare Sex Pistols promo poster (September '76 Cardiff gig), "the original owner told me, 'There's probably only a handful of local people who've ever seen this poster'."

Uptown top ranking - Krivine's probably-not-cheap-to-obtain item: Sex Pistols, concert poster for Top Rank, Cardiff (21 Sept 1976)
 reprinted for BBC Wales Something Else TV programme (1980)

Krivine's seeming delicacy over money matters is of course entirely his own affair. I'm just mentioning it because it's surely an important missing element in the story of how anyone builds up a 3,000-strong collection of this sort. Staying with filthy lucre, Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die set me back a cool £21 when I bought it online (fairly impulsively) last week. Was it worth it? Definitely yes, in my case. The book's a very nice primer for people (like me) with only a smattering of art/design knowledge. Basically, beyond having looked up a few John Heartfield designs in relation to Gee Vaucher's Crass work or Linder Sterling's Buzzcocks stuff, I'm still simply an older version of my teenage self: attracted and intrigued by the artwork that comes with music, but unable to properly place or appreciate most of it.         

Such an inviting offer: Crass, The Feeding Of The 5,000 LP poster (Crass Records, 1981 re-issue);

Gee Gaucher design with Dave King Crass logo

(Your humble blogger had this poster on his bedroom wall aged 18,

which, looking back, may perhaps explain why relations with

the parents were sometimes a little strained around this time) 

At least with Too Fast To Live the clues are there: references to De Stijl, Vorticism, Bauhaus, Futurism, expressionism, Dada, pop art. You can learn that Barney Bubbles' cover for Generation X's Your Generation single in 1977 was clearly influenced by the Polish constructivist artist Henryk Berlewi's work Mecano Fracture 1924-61. And lots of other similarly non-Smash Hits-type info. I have one minor complaint about Too Fast To Live. The publishers Pavilion books have pulled off the unlikely trick of putting together a pleasing artefact (strong front and back covers designed by Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville, nice glossy paper, good layouts) which has been showing signs of wear and tear almost from day one. Within about an hour of getting the bloody thing I happened to leave a small semi-sticky label on the book which of course immediately tore off some of the black lettering from the cover (cue me colouring it back in with a Sharpie, my own little bit of remedial design work …).

Make your mind up: Yeah Yeah Noh, Prick Up Your Ears single poster (In-Tape Records, 1984)

Anyway, I ain't gonna complain no more though. Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die is an excellent book (even if it should have been called Too Many Books On Punk Already, Too Much To Read Before I Die). It's impossible to neatly sum up the huge body of work that punk and post-punk design amounts to but the phrase "visual contrariness" (Russ Bestley and Ian Noble's) captures the spirit of some of it. And Art Chantry also talks about how the graphic language of punk was "so off-putting and UGLY" that people outside of the scene would recoil in horror. Be ugly, be contrary!

Too fast to live ...: Eddie And The Hot Rods, Teenage Depression LP promo poster (Island Records, 1976);

Michael Beal art direction and photo, with Glaser Stencil Bold font by Letraset

For me, it wasn't just the ransom note-style lettering of Jamie Reid's covers or the grey dystopias of Gee Vaucher that got me interested (though they did). It was every little bit of design that simply seemed non-conventional - "non-corporate", non-slick. Stuff that was funny, dark, weird, or just vaguely impressive (a band logo with letters shaped a certain way, the use of strange photos, anything really). As young teenagers growing up in the late 70s, any scrap of half-interesting design could become the focus of fascination. These covers (and posters and badges) were a portal into different worlds. I think the music needed to be good to make the design seem worthwhile and "valuable". But it often was so the two reinforced each other. So, I might not have kept the first punk-style flyer I saw taped to a lamppost somewhere, but I think it's true that this stuff sinks down deep. In some form or another it really is with you for life. A design for punk living! Reading Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die this past week didn't change my life. But it did remind me that art and graphic design matter, and that punk has played a big part in making me realise that. 

In the future all Clash designers will be famous for 15 minutes:

The Clash, London Calling LP promo poster (Epic Records, 1979);

Ray Lowry design, Pennie Smith photo