Design Context: Barney Bubbles

Colin Fulcher aka Barney Bubbles

Eye magazine article.

'It is from this unlikely background that Barney Bubbles came. Now, more than eight years after his suicide in 1983, he is rarely mentioned. Many people who knew his work did not know who designed it, because he almost never put his name to it, preferring to sign himself by his VAT number, any amount of joke names or nothing at all. With only the scantest appearance in the design manuals of his day, even the most assiduous design historian could have remained completely unaware of him.

Yet many of the British designers who made their names in the 1980s – among them Neville Brody and Malcolm Garrett – cite Bubble’s eclectic appropriation of twentieth-century art and suburban kitsch as a vital influence. It also looks as though Bubbles is at last beginning to find his way into the canon. Richard Hollis, author of a history of graphic design to be published by Thames and Hudson in 1993, will include material on Bubbles. Hollis describes him as ‘much the most interesting graphic designer’, saying: ‘He’s a key figure, he can be put on an international level. He had a direct line to creativity. Designers tend to manipulate imagery, not create it; Bubbles was like a real artist.’

On the record

Bubble’s favourite medium was the record sleeve. Trivial, ephemeral, and available to everyone, it suited his lack of preciousness about his work, while giving him almost total creative freedom. Remembered with awe by one generation of rock fans for his foldout album covers for Glastonbury Fayre and Hawkwind in the early 1970s, Bubbles is equally revered for his work for punk and new wave bands on the Stiff, Radar and F-Beat record labels. Superficially, his career might seem to span an unbridgeable gulf from the love-and-peace of the hippies to the hate-and-gob of punk. It is an indication of his intuitive grasp of what was right for the moment, and his seemingly instinctive ability to be in the right place at the right time, that his work is seminal to two such different eras.'

- As Bubbles created his work for the music industry, have album covers always been ephemeral, or are postmodern ones particularly trivial and ephemeral in this way?