The book follows the career of Barney Bubbles….“Five years at art college, 2 years as a typographer, 3 years at Conran... He was amazingly adept and adaptable” .  There are pictures of him at Conran, a mod designer, where he paid his dues designing seed packets and the like.   As a  commercial artist he designed the Strongbow cider logo – not much changed today – and the NME logo is still exactly as he created it. Then the more familiar easy-going hippy begins to emerge. The record sleeves and posters he created for Hawkwind form an incredible body of psychedelic, acid-driven experimental work in themselves.  He worked as art director for Oz and Friends, another underground magazine, while still in his twenties. He even hung with The Grateful Dead…..The more you find out about Bubbles, you realize he moved with ease between some of the most important “scenes” of the time.

When I met Paul Gorman, I realized that this was a very personal project for him and since Bubbles’ work has never been archived and celebrated it was  a laborious task but one he took to with missionary zeal.  “These books can be quite difficult to research but in this case it was always; ‘we love Barney, anything we can do to help….’ Everyone, it seemed,  loved Barney Bubbles.

He was a sensitive soul who, nonetheless, was uncompromising and driven in his work.  Rejection was probably quite heartfelt and his demise and eventual suicide a tragedy which make one even more certain that he has long been overlooked and a book about this unique and important talent is long overdue.  As Peter Saville says in the book’s introductory essay, “The publication of Reasons To Be Cheerful” is, in my view, missionary work, Barney Bubbles should be canonized.”

The versatility of his talent constantly shocks throughout the book. Bubbles considered architecture the greatest art of all and favoured the integrated approach – an approach that sees you involved with every aspect of the design of a building, down to the music played in the lift.  You can see this approach in his record sleeve designs where the original artwork would be pushed to its limits by blowing up the scale, carrying a hint of the design onto the record centre itself, pushing, pushing the idea to its absolute limit.  I had no idea Bubbles was the director of “Ghost Town” by the Specials!  Even in that genre he created something that has stood the test of time as a representation of inner-city hopelessness under Thatcher. His talents seemed endless - he even dabbled in furniture design. The man was a true artist. In comparison to many modern day “artists’ who seem to be creating graphic design, here was someone who hid self-portraits in paper cut-outs and Pollock-style paint splodges on a record sleeve.  Bubbles was somehow always present in the work he produced.  

As Elvis Costello said, Bubbles was like a walking art encyclopedia, referencing Russian Constructivism, Cubism, the Bauhaus… at a time which was quite culturally barren.  As Peter Saville hilariously says; ‘Imagine a time where George Best’s boutique is the pinnacle.”  It’s hard to imagine now, but for the youth of the sixties, seventies and eighties, the record sleeve was such an important part of their culture, lucky for them that someone of the calibre of Bubbles was feeding their obsessions. 

 It’s hard to imagine now; living in a non-digital age. Today, we can type any art movement or artist into Google and have pages of images at our fingertips to reproduce, copy, scan or reference.  Bubbles would stretch images, play with their scale, go to endless lengths for the sake of a great image.  And he held all this knowledge and love of art history in his head ready to bring to a project.

Another important aspect to the talent of the man was the artists he was commissioned with providing an image. You couldn’t have picked  a more raggle-taggle line-up of misfits than those at Jake Riviera’s Stiff record label.  “He kind of went, we’ve got Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, who had been in the business for ten years but never yet had a hit, Ian Dury, thirty five year old polio victim…”  and yet, for these untypical, incredible artists, Bubbles created some of the most iconic artwork that has more than stood  the test of time. The eighties were about pretty boys with good haircuts remember.  Billy Bragg puts it beautifully in the book, “In place of a look, I had an attitude, one that put me at odds with the image-obsessed artists of the day…Barney Bubbles was a godsend….In a world full of distractions, he made me distinctive…(he had an) unerring ability to make unprepossessing blokes look cool.  Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Johnny Moped, me – we were misfits in the pantheon of pop and Barney made us look magnificent.”

What a treat this book is to pore over.  It’s image-heavy rather than wordy because there is such a rich archive to present.  It’s almost as if contributors to the book have held onto the special scraps which represent “such a sensitive and lovely person…people just hung on to all this stuff…” maybe knowing that one day his time would come.

Full of contradictions - born Colin Fulcher, suburban, sweet and unassuming, he rechristened himself Barney Bubbles - “he was kind of like a pop star”, and in photographs could be one of the artists he was commissioned to immortalize.  He moved easily among the movers and shakers of the day who loved the man and couldn’t find a bad word to say about him, yet he was utterly uncompromising in his vision.  He’d offer two alternatives for a record cover, if that.  Genius is an overused word yet… when you look at the body of work and realize that he died at 42, the only wonder is that someone who has was such an important part of the history of pop culture could have been overlooked for so long.  Just wait and see - the Bubbles ripple will be felt, appreciated, paid tribute to and ripped off for years to come.  

There’s no way that publication of these works could fail to have an influence in this postmodern, constantly “referential” (to be polite) climate.   As Gorman says, “it was he, more than any other graphic artist of his era, who consistently delivered at the cutting edge of popular culture.”

PB