Posts Tagged ‘Peter Saville’
“I traveled far and wide through many different times”*…
Fifty years ago this month Harold D. Craft, Jr., published a remarkable black-on-white plot in his Ph.D. dissertation at Cornell University. A stacked series of jagged lines displayed incoming radio waves from pulsar CP1919, as detected at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Several months later the chart appeared as a full-page visualization in Scientific American, this time with white lines on a field of cyan [above]…
Scientific American
In 1977, the image was included in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy…
… where, two years after that, Factory Records graphic genius Peter Saville discovered it and adapted it as the cover art for Joy Division’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures. He reversed the image from black-on-white to white-on-black, against the band’s stated preference for the original. “I was afraid it might look a little cheap. I was convinced that it was just sexier in black.”
It has, of course, become an icon.
* Joy Division, “Wilderness,” from Unknown Pleasures
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As we tap our toes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1985 that the U.S. Senate held hearings on what they called “porn rock.” The session was convened at the urging of the Parents Music Resource Center, a group founded by Tipper Gore, wife of Senator and later Vice President Al Gore; Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker; Pam Howar, wife of Washington realtor Raymond Howar; and Sally Nevius, wife of former Washington City Council Chairman John Nevius, and devoted to forcing the music industry to affix Parental Advisory stickers– “warning labels”– to albums and CDs deemed to contain morally challenged material (like the “Filthy Fifteen” songs the group condemned).
Three musicians– Frank Zappa, John Denver, and Dee Snyder– testified in opposition to the proposal at the hearing… which was in the end moot, as the industry, afraid of negative publicity, agreed voluntarily to begin the labeling.
It is unclear that the “Tipper sticker” was/is effective in preventing children from being exposed to explicit content. Some, citing the “forbidden-fruit effect,” suggest that the sticker in fact increases record sales, arguing as Philip Bailey of Earth, Wind & Fire has: “for the most part [the sticker] might even sell more records… all you’ve got to do is tell somebody this is a no-no and then that’s what they want to go see.”
A Monument for Mr. Wilson…
Long-time (pre-blog) readers will recall the passing of Anthony H. “Tony” Wilson in 2007. In 1976, Wilson, a recent graduate of Cambridge serving as a feature reporter for Granada TV in the British Midlands, saw the Sex Pistols at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall. It was, he said, “nothing short of an epiphany.”
Wilson booked the Pistols onto his weekly cultural show, So It Goes (their first appearance on TV), and over the next few years turned the program into the leading broadcast outlet for new music in the U.K.
Much of that music was percolating in Manchester; Wilson became it’s catalyst. In 1978, with a couple of friends, he started Factory Records, the seminal label that introduced such bands as Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, The Durutti Column, Happy Mondays, James, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.
But Wilson remained devoted to live performance, anxious that others should share the conversion he had experienced in 1976, He founded the Hacienda, a nightclub/performance space, where Factory acts and other leading bands of the 80s played– and where the rave was born.
Both Factory and the Hacienda faded with the decade. But Wilson remained a fixture in British culture, largely as a political commentator on the BBC and ITV.
Tony Wilson died in August 2007. Just over three years later, a memorial headstone designed collaboratively by Wilson’s long-time associates Peter Saville (the art director for Factory Records) and Ben Kelly (the designer of The Hacienda), was unveiled in The Southern Cemetery in Chorlton-Cum-Hardy, Manchester.
More, at Creative Review.
As we hum “God Save the Queen,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1992 that Jesus did not appear on earth and the Rapture did not occur.
Edgar C. Whisenant, a former NASA engineer and an avid student of the Bible had predicted the Rapture would occur in 1988, between September 11 and 13. Whisenant’s predictions were taken seriously in some parts of the evangelical Christian community. Indeed, as the window approached, regular programming on Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN) was interrupted to provide special instructions on preparing for the Rapture.
When it didn’t materialize, Whisenant revised his estimate to 1989. When that date passed uneventfully, he returned to his sources and returned with an even more confident prediction that it would be on October 28, 1992. Subsequent predictions were for 1993, 1994, and 1997.
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