Barney Bubbles: Optics and Semantics

“Get Happy!!” poster for Elvis Costello and the Attractions, 1980

Barney Bubbles has a unique place in British graphic design. Even more than Robert Brownjohn, who also died much too soon, Bubbles feels both known and unknown. If only we could interview him now we could finally get some answers. Why refuse to sign your designs when you knew they were so original? Why the repeated desire for anonymity when your work sometimes includes stylized self-portraits, a blatant assertion of your presence on equal terms with your clients, in a way that most of your colleagues in graphic design would never have dared at the time? Bubbles’ suicide in 1983, at the age of 41, ensured that we will probably never get to the bottom of it. Only one hesitant interview with him exists, reluctantly undertaken and published in The Face two years before his death.

Colin Fulcher (aka Barney Bubbles). Photograph by David Wills, 1966

No retrospective article about Bubbles — not that there have been many — neglects to mention his anonymity (he was born Colin Fulcher in 1942) and how this has obscured the full extent of his oeuvre and restricted a proper appreciation of his work. It makes a nice myth, but it has been overplayed. Younger post-punk design colleagues such as Neville Brody, and in particular Malcolm Garrett, have publicly praised him as an innovator who inspired them, and Bubbles’ key designs of the New Wave period, from 1977 to 1982, are well known to anyone familiar with the music scene of the time. But Bubbles had been around longer than that. I first noticed his name as a teenager in 1971 in issue 38 of the wild underground magazine Oz, where “the magnificent Barney Bubbles” is the sole editorial credit (he didn’t do the cover). I must have seen it again in my copy of Hawkwind’s extraordinary folding, hawk-shaped In Search of Space LP, bought the same year, though here, too, it wasn’t clear to the uninitiated exactly what Bubbles did. “Optics/semantics,” it says. Known but unknown.

The design establishment overlooked Bubbles, but this is hardly surprising. After three years working for the Conran Design Group he turned his back on the emerging London design biz and joined the counterculture, swapping Habitat calendars — see the 1966 Design and Art Direction annual, where he’s still Colin Fulcher — for rock concert lightshows (whence the bubbles) and record sleeves. Despite the impact of music graphics as popular culture, as something thrilling you might genuinely love, this branch of design wasn’t taken seriously by the profession. Even if the perennially shy and periodically absent Bubbles had been prepared to talk, which is doubtful, there were few British design magazines to do it in back then, and profiles focusing on individuals were rare. That began to change with the arrival of the monthly Creative Review in 1980 and the significance of music graphics — the place where the most exciting design was clearly happening, if you had half an eye open — could no longer be ignored.

“Existence is Unhappiness” fold-out poster from Oz no. 12, 1968

By 1987, Bubbles had been given equal billing as an influential New Wave designer alongside Brody, Garrett, Peter Saville and Vaughan Oliver in design historian Catherine McDermott’s Street Style: British Design in the 80s, published by the Design Council. When we ran a 16-page profile in Eye in 1992 (now available online), it seemed the case for his significance had been made, at least for British readers, and this was confirmed by his appearance in Richard Hollis’ Graphic Design: A Concise History (1994). There was still a lingering sense, though, that somewhere out there must be some amazing unsigned work that still needed to be tied firmly to the BB oeuvre.

What Bubbles has lacked is international recognition as an important designer. How does he fit into the global narrative — or, more correctly, narratives — of graphic design? Philip Meggs overlooked him in three editions of his history, and the 2006 posthumous update by Alston Purvis didn’t correct that omission, though Oliver was finally given a dutiful mention, and Saville will make a belated appearance in the fifth edition, now in preparation. The key question that needs to be answered, if we think Bubbles merits more than local attention among a nostalgic ageing fanbase, concerns the nature of his achievement as a designer. Are there aspects of his work that makes it of enduring wider significance to design history, beyond his secure position in the history of British rock music, spanning the hippy counterculture and the New Wave?

Bubbles badly needed a monograph and now, finally, he has one, Paul Gorman’s Reasons to be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles. Gorman has pulled off a feat no one else has managed and I wish I liked the book more. Bitten by the Bubbles bug as a teenage music fan, he is a journalist and music writer, with an interest in fashion, and he published an excellent oral history about the music press.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t know enough about the history, culture and practice of graphic design to analyze the visual aspects of Bubbles’ work with any precision or nuance, or to locate him with authoritative detail on the maps of British and international graphic design. The book continually asserts BB’s brilliance without explaining it convincingly. Gorman has structured his text as a chronological narrative heavily based on what Bubbles’ friends such as David Wills and Brian Griffin, and admirers such as Garrett and the singer Billy Bragg, have told him. He threads brief, prosaic descriptions of individual pieces into the biographical story, with no attempt anywhere at deeper thematic or contextual analysis — Bubbles’ interest in concrete poetry, for instance, is noted in passing but not explored. The haphazard placement of images in Reasons to be Cheerful, far from where they are mentioned, is a pain: the book is not well designed. My guess, having spoken to Gorman during his research, is that he sees all this as a strength, a way of connecting with a broader (less demanding, less design-aware) readership. But Bubbles is first of all a graphic designer and it is on an understanding of his designs, rather than on the affection of his fans, that his reputation must rest.

“Lives” exhibition postcard for the Arts Council, 1979

In an attempt to establish Bubbles’ greatness, Reasons to be Cheerful makes a predictable claim for his work’s status as art. “Bubbles broke out of the commercial constraints of his given trade and emerged as a pure artist, one whose silent influence lingers,” claims Gorman. Peter Saville, who contributes a self-involved essay about Bubbles, imagines the work plucked from its context and placed in the white cube of the gallery; there, he suggests, it would get respect. If Bubbles really shared this view — “He wanted to be an artist with a capital A, not a graphic designer,” says Pauline Kennedy, who worked with him — then this is no different from the envy many designers feel about the freedom and acclaim enjoyed by fine artists. In the Face interview, Bubbles is skeptical about record sleeves as art, yet he also declares that “commercial design is the highest art form.” This ambivalence is not unusual among dedicated designers who bruise themselves on the shackles of the trade, convinced of their own talent yet painfully aware that the world doesn’t get it.

Gorman shows a few examples of the paintings Bubbles did for friends in the last years of his life. They use the same motifs found in his earlier designs: bars, rules, dots, zigzags, splatters, squiggles, planes of intersecting color, ragged lines playing against sharp edges. They are good but they are not as original, measured against other paintings, as his record sleeves are, measured against other designs. Bubbles had a finely calibrated graphic sense (it’s present in the paintings, too) just like a drummer has a natural sense of rhythm, but it needed the boundaries of the printed rectangle, the tension of a smaller frame, to concentrate it and make it special. Paintings are big and ponderous. Surrounded by white space in the gallery, endowed with a dignity they might not deserve, they make large claims for their importance. Bubbles — it’s there in his name — is a master manipulator of fleeting, everyday optics and semantics, to be absorbed browsing the sleeves in a record shop, or lazing about at a friend’s house listening to the music. The speed, ephemeral lightness and disposability of the mass-produced image made it the perfect medium for his humor, his love of visual games, puzzles, diagrams and codes, and his delight in marginal devices such as inexplicable symbols, which add a layer of intrigue to sleeves, pages and ads that could have been ordinary in someone else’s hands.

“Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick” 7-inch single sleeve for Ian Dury and the Blockheads, 1978

The intricately reflexive nature of his work made Bubbles a true original in his day. No previous British designer had produced mass-market graphic communications this playful, personal, freighted with allusion, or tricksy. Bubbles was a postmodernist before this new category of graphic design had been identified and defined, and he is as significant an innovator as his American contemporary April Greiman. His designs refer to art history (Mucha, Lissitzky, Van Doesburg, Kandinsky, Picabia, Mondrian, Pollock); to popular culture and kitsch (the wallpaper on Ian Dury’s Do It Yourself, the shagpile rug on the Attractions’ Mad About the Wrong Boy); to graphic processes and the nature of the printed medium (the color bars on Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model, the scuff marks on Get Happy!!); and — never letting us forget his “anonymous” authorship — to the designer himself. Two of these oblique self-portraits, showing Bubbles’ large nose, are well known (Costello’s Armed Forces and Dr Feelgood’s Fast Women & Slow Horses), but there are other graphic faces placed where you wouldn’t expect to find them, such as the image on the copyright page of the “Lives” exhibition catalogue (1979) designed for the Arts Council, and the monumental (block)head in Brian Griffin’s book Power: British Management in Focus (1981), which could be intended as cheeky substitutes for Bubbles’ inevitably absent design credit. When The Face asked to photograph him, he made them a picture out of fragments instead.

Barney Bubbles by Barney Bubbles, 1981

Attempts to hoist Bubbles out of graphic design and claim he was an artist all along do him a disservice by downplaying his achievement as a designer, and denigrate design by implying that anything this good must belong in another category. In reality, Bubbles’ work, like Greiman’s or Saville’s, revealed what can sometimes be possible within applied visual communication, in spite of all the constraints, when a gifted graphic designer finds imaginative client collaborators willing to allow some space to experiment. Compare his work with many classic late 1960s and pre-New Wave 1970s record covers: usually they are composed of a single commanding image with the artist’s name and title. Bubbles’ sleeves are graphic constructions, offering multiple points of interest, dispersing the viewer’s attention. He showed that the visual language of design — type, symbol, pattern, shape, often reassembled in unfamiliar configurations — could be a powerful, exciting and subtle medium for involving a popular audience. Although conditions often conspire against such freedoms now, he is a leading figure within the evolution of intelligently reflexive design. Known but unknown. It’s about time the slower moving design history books caught up with him.

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