M: I wanted to ask how it was working with Vaughan Oliver. I’ve heard about The Breeders cover when he got eels from his fridge and wacked them around his apartment...
C: Yes... if I could go back to you age, I was writing my dissertation in 1983, and I wanted to do it on something that hadn’t been written about before and that I was really interested in, and it was music and record sleeve design. And just at that time 4AD started in 1980 and I was drawn to it and Vaughan had done a couple record sleeves for them. And I thought, ‘I want to write my dissertation about that’. I went to my tutor and she said ‘he’s only made two record sleeves and independent record companies are just a thing, they’re never going to last, you should do something more academic’. So I then changed tutors to a guy who suggested writing about Dadaist graphic design and experimental typography and tie it into The Sex Pistols and Jamie Reid and then look at what’s happened culturally after that with independent music. So I wrote to Vaughan, I wrote to Peter Saville and to Neville Brody- as a 21 year old you sort of had no fear really- and Vaughan wrote back and said he was really excited to hear I wanted to write about him- he was very flattered! This was before the Internet, so you really had to dig and find your way through. That was part of quite an important cultural development in British music... Vaughan invited me to do an interview and I went up, a bit like you’re doing today, and I was nervous, and we did it in the pub, and it was really good...
M: Well that makes it easier
C: Exactly! And I went back home and I wrote it all up and he sent me a postcard saying, ‘it was nice to meet you, come to London again we’ll go to a gig’, and we did that and it just went from there really, I ended up working with him for 20 years. We went through the whole thing of me being a junior...
M: How was the working relationship?
C: Initially it was helping him with artwork and being an assistant, and slowly but surely I got his confidence and then we became partners in v23. He was a genius and taught me a lot, like you don’t have to use the cover from the album to make a poster, spread it out and use different images, and all these things I’ve been talking about: making mistakes, doing a lot of work, editing it down, talking to the client, speaking about colour in sound, understanding the feeling, being sensitive, going to gigs, getting absolutely wasted... all that stuff. I think it comes back to that we were both frustrated musicians really...
M: Did you ever play music?
C: No... if I could come back again I’d speak a language and learn the guitar. I’ve tried so many times, I’m someone who never gives up on things but that one gets me everytime. I don’t know, I’m ‘cut from a different cloth’ as they say... A lot to do with Vaughan and 4AD was, and this sounds a bit lame, about being in the right place at the right time and taking advantage of that, and being able to grow that visual identity. One of the things he said to me is it’s easy to make a really good sleeve but if that sleeve doesn’t relate to the music, then you’re wasting your time, and that’s been my mantra.
M: You described this feature you are showing for CHERRYBOY as like a sketchbook of fragments of your work over time, some that haven’t been seen before – In one of your works it says, ‘the beauty of imperfection’ and it doesn’t look like it’s for any publicity; it looks more like your own artwork.
C: That was for a print actually ... It alludes to the accident, doing stuff without getting too worried about what the end result is going to be.
M: Last week you spoke about wabi-sabi, which is about letting the forces of nature take their own course...
C: Exactly, and within that print is a tree I have always really loved, that had been cut quite severely so it sort of regrew itself at a weird angle and then it was cut again and then it regrew itself, so has a lovely way of surviving. But then again the other morning there were some frosty tire tracks on the pavement, created by none other than functional things, but from an aesthetic point of view they’re beautiful, and you can’t make that, you have to see it, and then re-appropriate it. I think I’m really lucky because a lot of the stuff I do is very personal, I sort of signed up to that really, I didn’t want to get involved in big studios or work for products or items I didn’t believe in or feel connected to. That’s why the music thing... and people come to me now really, but it took a bit of time to build that up.