{psychedelia} – Page 66 – { feuilleton }

The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!

25 O’Clock (1985). Andy Partridge’s great cover design.

The DUKES say it’s time…it’s time to visit the planet smile…it’s time the love bomb was dropped…it’s time to eat music…it’s time to kiss the sun…it’s time to drown yourself in SOUNDGASM and it’s time to dance through the mirror. The DUKES declare it’s 25 O’CLOCK.

It was twenty-five years today—April 1st, 1985—that Virgin Records released what was supposed to be a reissue of a lost psychedelic album from the late 1960s, 25 O’Clock by The Dukes of Stratosphear. The catalogue number was WOW 1 and the vinyl label was printed with the old black-and-white Virgin logo by Roger Dean even though Virgin Records wasn’t founded until 1972. No one was supposed to know that the album was really a pastiche project by XTC but I don’t recall anyone actually being fooled by this, all the reviews acknowledged XTC as the originators, and band members Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding were happy to give interviews enthusing about their musical obsessions. As well as being incredibly successful artistically the album was a surprising commercial success which led the bemused record label to ask for a sequel. Psonic Psunspot followed two years later, and the Dukes’ vibe infected XTC’s own work for a while, with their 1988 album, Oranges & Lemons, pitched somewhere between the pastiches and XTC’s more usual sound .

Psonic Psunspot (1987). Design by Dave Dragon and Ken Ansell.

Continue reading “The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!”

Weekend links 8

Another label design of mine for the Adur Brewery. Much as I like Otto Weisert’s Arnold Böcklin typeface it’s something I’ve been reluctant to use in the past due to its lazy deployment by UK shop sign makers. The ribbon motifs and the hops are adapted from one of my Art Nouveau reference books, however, so it seemed appropriate in this case.

• Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs, a forthcoming exhibition at IMT, London, “presenting two unreleased tape experiments by William Burroughs from the mid 1960s alongside responses by 23 artists, musicians, writers, composers and curators.” Related: get a Naked Lunch t-shirt (or another cover design) at Out of Print clothing.

• Ronald Clyne: American folk modernist. Rediscovering the album and book cover designer.

• Better Things: The Life and Choices of Jeffrey Jones. A documentary about the work of artist Jeffrey Jones. Related: Mike Kaluta appears in the trailer and Golden Age Comic Book Stories has pages from Kaluta’s illustrated Metropolis (1988), a novel by Thea von Harbou.

• “I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from earth like a spaceship.” WFMU’s Beware of the Blog explores Cary Grant’s use of LSD. Related: Orange Sunshine – The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, a book by Nicholas Schou.

• Britain’s armed forces have a lesson for the US: “Only 10 years ago, the Army was expelling soldiers for homosexuality. Now gay weddings get the regimental blessing.” A very modern military partnership.

• Cassette tapes and their growing curiosity/fetish value. Related: Michael Stipe and Maison Martin Margiela’s sterling silver microcassette charm.

• Another week, another theremin link: Detergent bottles become theremins.

• “Edinburgh is a city built on the production of books”.

• The National Archives UK’s photostream at Flickr.

• Typographic playing cards.

• A song for Cary Grant: The Trip by Park Avenue Playground, an obscurity from 1967. And These New Puritans have a new video for Attack Music.

Weekend links #7

The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (and sporting my design inside and out) is now in print. The grotesque creatures on the jacket and inside are from a celebrated set of prints by Arent van Bolten.

• More VanderMeeria: my cover for Jeff’s novel Finch continues to garner attention. Artist John Picacio selected it as part of his contribution to this discussion of genre cover designs (thanks John) and io9 followed up by choosing it from SF Signal’s selection.

• Graphic design: the Ballets Russes at BibliOdyssey; Julian Montague’s “books from an invented intellectual history” at A Journey Round My Skull; Women, Snakes and Stalkers, book covers from the PK (Indo-Iranian languages and literatures) section of the University of Chicago’s Regenstein library (also here); I want this book: Arabesque – Graphic Design from the Arab World and Persia.

• Photography: Richard Davies’ documenting of Russia’s wooden churches; Dave Walsh’s fata morgana mirages in the Arctic.

• Illustration: Jacob Escobedo at Sci-Fi-O-Rama; Mahlon Blaine reprinted.

• The gays: Oliver Frey (aka Zack) has originals of his erotic art for sale; 100 is the third book of erotic portraits from photographer Dylan Rosser.

• Silent Porn Star is back. Related: Susie Bright praises sexual expression.

• The Libel Reform Campaign is trying to reform England’s egregious libel laws. Sign their petition here.

• RIP: Victor Arwas, art collector, writer and scholar; Alex Chilton, musician and record producer.

• The record sleeve that’s also the record player.

• Song of the week: Guess I Was Dreaming by The Fairytale (1967).

The art of Jim Leon, 1938–2002

Psychopathia Sexualis (1967).

This, dear friends, is what the art of the fantastic could give us but rarely does, something which combines the metaphysical intensity of the Symbolists with a post-Freudian sensibility to create what Philip José Farmer once called “the pornography of the weird”. Jim Leon was a British artist whose work gained prominence via the underground magazines of the 1960s, especially Oz, although he was never really a psychedelic artist as such. Many of his earliest paintings show the influence of the Pop artists, it was only later in the decade that a distinctly original and surreal imagination came to the fore. Oz was always pretty scurrilous and had no qualms about challenging the authorities with bizarre sexual imagery which other magazines would never dare to print. Leon and other artists were fortunate to have such a public forum for outré work, a few years earlier or later and they might not have found an outlet at all.

Untitled (1979).

His early work blended influences from Francis Bacon, surrealism and the baroque. Lurking there is also the English visionary William Blake, together with the obsessive Romanticism of the pre-Raphaelites. A number of his early paintings and drawings refer to William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (first published in Paris in 1959). These were just some of the ingredients of an amazing, semi-abstract, spatially complex, ritualistic, orgiastic flesh-painting, expressing highly wrought morbidity, eroticism, transcendence and ecstasy; astonishing explorations of the murkier depths of the human mind. (More.)

A Very English Visionary by Simon Wilson.

I first encountered Leon’s work thanks to David Britton’s curating of a portfolio feature in Wordworks magazine which was republished in the Savoy Books anthology, The Savoy Book in 1980. Having seen a Leon painting in a back issue of Oz I was surprised that an artist with such a powerful imagination was so little-known. It turns out that he’d been working all along, albeit far from the public gaze, having moved to Lyons in France where he spent the 1970s and 80s painting many canvases of mystical scenes similar to those produced by the California artists featured in the Visions book. None of his later work explores the darker realms of his earlier Psychopathia Sexualis drawings, and since it’s the early work that I prefer, that’s what’s featured here. These drawings and paintings bear comparison with the art of Raymond Bertrand but where Bertrand has had his work published in lavish book collections, we have to rake through back issues of magazines for Leon’s endeavours. Leon’s later paintings at least have a website which is maintained by his family.

Continue reading “The art of Jim Leon, 1938–2002”

Four today

Good things come in fours: the mighty Kraftwerk performing Numbers on the Minimum-Maximum DVD (2005).

Yes, the day between Darwin Day and St. Valentine’s Day is this blog’s birthday. I continue to be surprised that I’ve kept this going for so long since I never managed to keep a diary. Doing work that chains you to a computer is a help, although the past year was so busy that many entries were little more than picture posts. 2009 saw this site receiving more traffic than ever with the result that the server resources are now regularly overloaded for a couple of hours each day. I’ve been intending to move to a new webhost for a while but doing so is a time-consuming and technically complex business over which the current hectic workload continues to take priority.

The three most popular posts of the last twelve months were the following:

• The gay artists archive. Always a popular page but now it’s the most popular destination by a long margin, helped by continual visits from Stumbleupon users.

• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar. Links on Boing Boing, Trendhunter and elsewhere helped make this year’s calendar a big success. My thanks again to everyone who bought a copy, I’ll be doing a Through the Looking-Glass follow-up in September.

• Alan Moore interview, 1988. Another Stumbleupon hit, this magazine interview was one of my earliest posts and it remains curiously popular, more so than the very long Watchmen round table discussion which followed.

As always, thanks for reading and for all your comments!

John x